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from the Who-knows-what-evil-lurks-in-the-hearts-of-machinery?-The-Shadow-Brokers-do! dept.
Excerpt:
"It's certainly possible that an NSA [National Security Agency] hacker goofed massively and left files in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human error can never be ruled out. Russian cybersleuths carefully watch for possible NSA operations online—just as we look for theirs—and even a single slip-up with Top Secret hacking tools could invite a disastrous compromise.
However, it's far more likely that this information was stolen by an insider. There's something fishy about the official story here. It's far-fetched to think a small group of unknown hackers could infiltrate NSA. Furthermore, explained a former agency scientist, the set-up implied in the account given by The Shadow Brokers makes little sense: "No one puts their exploits on a [command-and-control] server...That's not a thing." In other words, there was no "hack" here at all.
It's much more plausible that NSA has a Kremlin mole (or moles) lurking in its ranks who stole this information and passed it to Russian intelligence for later use. This isn't surprising, since NSA has known since at least 2010 of one or more Russian moles in its ranks and agency counterintelligence has yet to expose them."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @11:38PM
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It is not a surprise to anyone who realized that S in NSA stands for Surveillance. Their budget doubled after the twin tower incident, and while their spending is opaque, it seems that more than half of their budget is dedicated to surveillance now: it has truly became their primary goal. Incidentally, this goal directly conflicts with security, unless we understand by that the security of the state actors from they call the cancer of democracy, which would, if given a chance, work tirelessly to improve the conditions of 99% at the expense of the richest and most powerful 1%.
To stress the last point, the public security is harmed by the NSA-style total surveillance immensely. For one, it is utterly improbable that data products assembled at NSA will not leak to criminals. Most of them already have. It has been fashionable lately to point fingers at the Russian scene, but the source of cracks is irrelevant, as is the culture of security incompetence within NSA. Cases of Manning and Snowden demonstrate the ease of copying humongous quantities of classified data without detection; in both cases the leaks were sourced thanks to the voluntary confessions made by intruders themselves. It would be trivial for a competent, full-fledged insider to let out any amount of data without a risk of being uncovered, and shifting the agency's focus from security to surveillance only compounded this problem by presenting a wider attack surface to the outsiders.
~ Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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