Last August, an unknown group called the Shadow Brokers released a bunch of NSA tools to the public. The common guesses were that the tools were discovered on an external staging server, and that the hack and release was the work of the Russians (back then, that wasn't controversial). This was me:
Okay, so let's think about the game theory here. Some group stole all of this data in 2013 and kept it secret for three years. Now they want the world to know it was stolen. Which governments might behave this way? The obvious list is short: China and Russia. Were I betting, I would bet Russia, and that it's a signal to the Obama Administration: "Before you even think of sanctioning us for the DNC hack, know where we've been and what we can do to you."
They published a second, encrypted, file. My speculation:
They claim to be auctioning off the rest of the data to the highest bidder. I think that's PR nonsense. More likely, that second file is random nonsense, and this is all we're going to get. It's a lot, though.
I was wrong. On November 1, the Shadow Brokers released some more documents, and two days ago they released the key to that original encrypted archive:
EQGRP-Auction-Files is CrDj"(;Va.*NdlnzB9M?@K2)#>deB7mN
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:25PM
Ok, thanks for clarification. I am well aware of the domestic spying and am a frequent critic. For example where I wrote:
Back when the Snowden revelations broke, there were people who thought building a massive domestic spying apparatus was just fine. The problem is that even if you trust the person in power (which I don't and didn't), imagine if one day that apparatus falls into the hands of an insane madman -- and I don't mean kim jong un. Building a massive domestic spying apparatus is not in our national interest.
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