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Interview With An 'NSA Hacker' Published By The Intercept (theintercept.com)
The Intercept published a 4,000 word article based on a journalist's three-hour interview with an "NSA hacker" who recently left the agency for a career in cybersecurity. Offering a portrait of life within the U.S. intelligence agency, "Lamb" says he worked on "ridiculously cool projects that I'll never forget... Technically challenging things are just inherently interesting to me."
He's the author of some of the memos leaked by Edward Snowden about how the NSA tries to identify Tor users or break into sys-admin accounts. ("One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or "shapes") the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled "I Hunt Sysadmins.") "If you tell me, 'This can't be done,' I'm going to try and find a way to do it."
It's interesting that he ended one memo with "Current mood: devious" and wrote in another that Tor "generally makes for sad analysts". But in his interview, he warns that "There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet. Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with."
He's the author of some of the memos leaked by Edward Snowden about how the NSA tries to identify Tor users or break into sys-admin accounts. ("One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or "shapes") the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled "I Hunt Sysadmins.") "If you tell me, 'This can't be done,' I'm going to try and find a way to do it."
It's interesting that he ended one memo with "Current mood: devious" and wrote in another that Tor "generally makes for sad analysts". But in his interview, he warns that "There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet. Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with."
includes the NSA's lawn.
It means he sold his soul and now he repents. But in reality it's like Satan posing as a humanitarian worker.
His curiosity toward IT was exploited by a rogue agency, no doubt. I just hope he realizes all the damage he's done to the basic and human rights, let alone diluting the values outlined in the US Constitution. There's no amount of "cyber security" he could ever do to make up for that and there's no amount of righteousness he can hide behind to justify his actions. What he did was pure evil.