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Inside NSA's Efforts To Hunt Sysadmins
An anonymous reader writes "The Snowden revelations continue, with The Intercept releasing an NSA document titled 'I hunt sys admins' (PDF on Cryptome). The document details NSA plans to break into systems administrators' computers in order to gain access to the networks they control. The Intercept has a detailed analysis of the leaked document. Quoting: 'The classified posts reveal how the NSA official aspired to create a database that would function as an international hit list of sys admins to potentially target. Yet the document makes clear that the admins are not suspected of any criminal activity – they are targeted only because they control access to networks the agency wants to infiltrate. "Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?" one of the posts says.'"
People need to be arrested for this. The people who ordered it done, wrote the reports, signed off on it, and anyone who did it. Ship some of them to various other countries for trials too, let everyone get into the action and let it be known to governments that this is not to be accepted.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
As bad as such revelations are, what drives me nuts is all the apologists who crawl out of the woodwork every time one of these stories breaks. They have no end of justification for whatever the NSA or CIA does, anything from "I have nothing to hide" to "privacy is dead, stop bitching because the Good Guys are working t protect you".
I predict the kind of practice in TFA is going to keep mushrooming until someone uses it as a political weapon and then gets caught. Only then will the jock-sniffing Congress do something substantive about this mess.
If I were advising Hillary Clinton, I'd tell her to never touch another computer until her political career is over.