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Ars Technica reports that Kaspersky Labs have released further details tying the NSA to a group of expert hackers dubbed "Equation Group".
The Kaspersky researchers once again stopped short of saying the hacking collective they dubbed Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. Still, they heaped new findings on top of a mountain of existing evidence that already strongly implicated the spy agency. The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string "BACKSNARF_AB25" discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed "EquationDrug." "BACKSNARF," according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation [PDF], was the name of a project tied to the NSA's Tailored Access Operations.
Similarities have been noted in the procedures and capabilities of Equation Group and those detailed in Edward Snowden's disclosures concerning the NSA, most notably the the ability to interdict hardware and software during shipping to be replaced with duplicates infected with highly sophisticated malware. The article also points to timestamp analysis that indicates the authors of the captured malware worked regular office hours: 8-5, Monday-Friday in the UTC-3 and UTC-4 time-zones. The Kaspersky report discounted intentional manipulation of these timestamps and suggests that Equation Group are located in the eastern United States.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @03:03AM
> Re: Japan. Maybe they surrender. Maybe they require many many American deaths in an invasion.
You are pretty cavalier with that coulda-woulda-shoulda crap.
Here's some expert opinions:
Admiral Nimitz:
"The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan..."
Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet:
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."
Rear Admiral L. Lewis Strauss, special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy from 1944 to 1945 (and later chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission):
"[the atomic bomb] was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion..."
Ernest J King commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations:
"...had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission..."
Admiral Leahy, President's chief of staff, Also the top official presiding over the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff:
"The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . ."
And that's just people from the Navy. There were lots of top officers in the Army and Air Force who also thought it was completely unnecessary and a terrible decision to nuke Japan. For example according to diaries and letters, General MacArthur privately told many people that he was appalled by the bombing of Hiroshima. Even Eisenhower publicly said "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @03:56AM
Hindsight, I'd suggest. But since you brought up some evidence, let me cite Wikipedia:
Wikipedia: The United States strategic bombing of Japan took place between 1942 and 1945. In the last seven months of the campaign, a change to firebombing resulted in great destruction of 67 Japanese cities, as many as 500,000 Japanese deaths and some 5 million more made homeless.
"The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 touched off the wave of firebombing that destroyed 64 Japanese cities and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been deeply engraved on the consciousness of humanity and commemorated in monuments, museums, films, novels and textbooks, the firebombing and napalming of civilians of many other Japanese and Asian cities has largely disappeared from consciousness, except for the victims. ------The bombing of March 9-10 took the lives of 100,000 Tokyoites and leveled sixteen square miles of the city in the most devastating raid in human history to that time ."
Wikipedia: In August 1945, during the final stage of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.
Conventional: 500,000
Nuclear: 129,000
Perhaps America only needed a month more of conventional bombing before Japan stood down. I'm not entirely sure that would have meant less death.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @04:12AM
> Perhaps America only needed a month more of conventional bombing before Japan stood down.
"..had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission..."
Wait, not fire bomb, just wait.
> Hindsight, I'd suggest.
No. not hindsight, current knowledge at the time.
Brigadier Gen. Carter W. Clarke, the officer in charge of preparing MAGIC intercepted cable summaries in 1945:
"we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs. "
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy regarding Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall's opinion at the time:
"General Marshall was right when he said you must not ask me to declare that a surprise nuclear attack on Japan is a military necessity. It is not a military problem."
(Score: 2) by TLA on Friday March 13 2015, @04:52PM
bear in mind the conventional firebombing involved thousands of aircraft dropping thousands of bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved maybe a dozen aircraft and precisely two payloads.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander