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Snowden Used Software Scraper, Say NSA Officials
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country's most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to 'scrape' the National Security Agency's networks, and kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials. Using 'web crawler' software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden 'scraped data out of our systems' while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. 'We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,' the official said. The process, he added, was 'quite automated.'"
Beta scrapes you!
"This automated and indiscriminate bulk collection of data is unacceptable!"
Oh my god .... could it be .... wget ?
In his defense mr. Snowden explained that his scraper was only gathering metadata and therefore by their own standards the NSA has nothing to worry about.
When asked for comment NSA director James Clapper replied : "Whoa that's deep bro!"
I'd have thought he went in each day with wheelbarrow full of 1.44" floppies and just copied until he got it all... That's some mighty fine detective work, Lou.
But you don't understand. Terrorists use wget for drug dealing with paedophiles who use slashdot beta. Wget must be banned!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
the malicious and now banned weapons grade tool is called "wget" by underground unix hackers.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Jerry: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck...
Alice: What about them?
Jerry: Serial killers. Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman...
Alice: John Hinckley. He shot Reagan. He only has two names.
Jerry: Yeah, but he only just shot Reagan. Reagan didn't die. If Reagan had died, I'm pretty sure we probably would all know what John Hinckley's middle name was.
-- My Weblog.
Slightly more powerful than wget to me is a wrapper around wget. Perl and Bash scripts are way beyond the average users. To politicians scripts can be used to claim "voodoo" or "saintly" depending on who writes the scripts. The NSAs scripts are obviously saintly, while anybody else is probably voodoo.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And the joke was on them--he was actually stealing wheelbarrows!
Well, technically all Perl scripts are 'voodoo' by default.