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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...)
Beta scrapes you!
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!
"because he worked at an agency outpost that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures."
"when he was questioned, Mr. Snowden provided what were later described to investigators as legitimate-sounding explanations for his activities"
Speechless.
"This automated and indiscriminate bulk collection of data is unacceptable!"
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?
Gently reply
"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”.
When you are anyone trying to do anything efficiently (such as the legally questionable automated gathering and storage of records of millions of phone calls and text messages?), you use proper tools.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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!"
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.
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.
Also, I don't care what think your motive is, you don't turn over classified documents to the enemy.
And there it is ... the free press is nurb432's enemy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.