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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!
"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.