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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.
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.