Slashdot Mirror
NSA Hack of N. Korea Convinced Obama NK Was Behind Sony Hack
Mike Lape links to a NYTimes piece which says "The evidence gathered by the 'early warning radar' of software painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea's activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation." From the linked article:
For about a decade, the United States has implanted “beacons,” which can map a computer network, along with surveillance software and occasionally even destructive malware in the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The government spends billions of dollars on the technology, which was crucial to the American and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents previously disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former security agency contractor, demonstrated how widely they have been deployed against China. ... The extensive American penetration of the North Korean system also raises questions about why the United States was not able to alert Sony as the attacks took shape last fall, even though the North had warned, as early as June, that the release of the movie “The Interview,” a crude comedy about a C.I.A. plot to assassinate the North’s leader, would be “an act of war.”
So, the US says North Korea attacked Sony. And the US knows this because it attacked North Korea years ago ...
Thank god people know now that the threat is North Korea hacking a movie company. This way, they can be freedom fighters just by watching a mildly funny movie with Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco, which is both fun and easy.
Otherwise, they would have to assume that the threat to their freedom is more like a court approving a single warrant on the telecomm data of more than a million people. Or the CIA spying on the institution that is supposed to supervise them. Fighting these would be much less fun and easy, maybe even dangerous.
1. This is another "45 minute" claim of the sort that provided pretext for the Iraq war, isn't it? It might be true, or it might be misleading but have an element of truth, or it might be utter fiction. An intelligence agency is an agency of state security, and "state security" means working on behalf of state interests, and state interests tend not to coincide with the people's interests.
2. It might then be in the interests of the state to let the attack happen, so it can be used as an excuse to further state interests.
3. I don't know why people are getting their panties twisted about NK's typically sabre-rattling reaction, which we all know is 1 part "I'm a maniacal dictator" and 1 part "goad the Americans into reacting so we can use their reaction as internal propaganda proving them to be an on-going threat that necessitates our regime". How would the West feel about the release of a popular film in which the assassination of a living head of state is planned? How would your government behave toward you if YOU wrote a book / published a film / performed a play about this?
> There's nothing they could do or say that would convince the Slashdot crowd [...]
Not talking for "the Slashdot crowd" (whatever that might be [1]), but look: the NSA isn't an impartial party here -- and they're whoring for sympathy at the moment. Given its track record, *I* prefer to not trust anything it says.
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[1] To me it looks like a big honkin' strawman, but hey.
So they have a secret capability to spy on North Korea, and they tell us because Sony got hacked? So now North Korea knows about it and probably will do something about it? That sounds an incredibly stupid action to me.
In WWII, when the Brits cracked German encryption, the went to incredible lengths to create believable stories how they found secret German operations that they discovered through decrypted Enigma messages.
This isn't even about convincing the American public to support the NSA. It's about giving politicians talking points to justify the support they intend to continue to give.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I will never believe anything a US government ever says, because they showed in the past that they can not be trusted and that this does not change with whatever party is in charge right now. It is just lies that come out of every official PR persons mouth. Without hard facts to back it up everything they say must be considered not true.