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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.'"
Who'd have thought? Experienced IT guy didn't manually download each file!?
"Inexpensive and widely available" - I hope they don't mean some evil subversive communist open-source tool.
You mean to tell me that an NSA tech contractor used wget or something, rather than loading up IE6 and clicking until his fingers fell off?
Knock me over with a feather, spooks. You fucking hired people to build what is probably the largest collection of signals intelligence scraping systems on the planet, targeted at a wide variety of differently structured systems. Why would you even consider, except as a last resort, the notion that you are dealing with a bunch of noobs?
(Oh, incidentally, maybe you should spend a bit less time reading everybody's email and work on that 'hilarious leaked diplomatic calls' problem, I'm told that sort of thing used to be your job at some point in the past...)
If the network can't identify that something accessing the network sporadically and in repeated succession is a bot and should be stopped maybe the NSA shouldn't have access to this much data to start with....
What if a legitimate foreign hacker was able to get in and do the exact same thing? Obviously, they have very shitty standards when it comes to network security - you'd expect thousands of honey pots, ability to intercept attempted attacks, flat out network filtering of these kinds of requests. But alas, that would make sense!
You use proper tools.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now the question is, how many other NSA contractors / staff / moles / spies have been doing the same thing, without Snowden's intention to disclose their behavior?
I'm sure the NSA assumes they have moles, and none of the data Snowden released is a surprise to the Russians or Chinese.
The NSA was just not prepared for the truth to leak to their real enemy - the general public.
"Agency officials insist that if Mr. Snowden had been working from N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade .. he almost certainly would have been caught. But because he worked at an agency outpost that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures, his copying .. raised few alarms."
This is retrospective ass-covering cyberbullshit. It is precisely at the edge that the security attacks would come from. What they were doing putting such material on Web servers and Wikis beggers credulity. Didn't senior management not realize that as keepers of the nations secrets they would be subject to attacks both internally and externally. Given the state of non-security at the NSA I would suspect that Snowden wasn't the only hostile with access to the “the keys to the kingdom”.
There's absolutely zero reason to believe anything the NSA says about how Snowden got the documents, or indeed, about anything. They believe they are entitled to lie to congress, so the public isn't even a question.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The idea of military specialists of whatever type being employed against the society they belong to, is treasonous and fucking retarded no matter what legal acrobatics are employed in their defense.
You may have some sort of mystic devotion to the law, but I believe laws are made by (generally corrupt) men for their own interests, and I am familiar enough with the world outside the borders and political influence of the United States to know there is an enormous difference between legality and rightousness. The U.S.A. may not be the kind of country where you are expected to bribe every public official however minor -- we generally reserve that for higher office. It takes a special kind of idiocy to use military forces against their homeland, though.
Government at its core is the body to which we have delegated our inherent right to violence -- a right being defined in this case as something which cannot be taken from you. We delegate this right to others, specialized in its use, with the express understanding that [a] as applied to civilian life, the exercise of violence by police will be applied fairly and equally as men can manage, and [b] that the unrestricted expression of this (as embodied by military force) be only employed against our enemies. War is hell, and we do not bring hell home.
Snowden is a patriot, and the NSA is treasonous -- whether or not the law can be made to serve whichever purpose. Beyond all other argument, potentially felonious violation of the law is so common with the continual proliferation of laws that lawfulness cannot be the only measure of either justice or rightousness. May all those who support the NSA have a fair trial.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
... to their real enemy - the general public.
That is such a load of crap.
Why? I'm quite sure that most governments at the very least had a general idea of what the NSA was up to before Snowden's leak, it's only members of the general public that would get painted as conspiracy theorists and ignored whenever the they tried to draw attention to this sort of thing.
As others have said: "How so?"
It's a logical conclusion based on the available evidence: No safeguards were in place to defend against an analyst stealing data and giving it to someone else, despite this being an obvious threat the NSA could not possibly have been unaware of.
No such measures were taking until someone (i.e. Snowden) leaked this information to the public. Add this to the extremely negative way in which the NSA and the entire administration talks about journalists reporting on this, and the response to other whistleblowers and this really is the most likely explaination.