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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Intercept reveals [firstlook.org] that, while Western countries demonize hackers, they secretly use them for intel purposes

The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.
...

By looking out for hacking conducted “both by state-sponsored and freelance hackers” and riding on the coattails of hackers, Western intelligence agencies have gathered what they regard as valuable content. [...] The hackers targeted a wide range of diplomatic corps, human rights and democracy activists and even journalists:

INTOLERANT traffic is very organized. Each event is labeled to identify and categorize victims. Cyber attacks commonly apply descriptors to each victim – it helps herd victims and track which attacks succeed and which fail. Victim categories make INTOLERANT interesting:

• A = Indian Diplomatic & Indian Navy
• B = Central Asian diplomatic
• C = Chinese Human Rights Defenders
• D = Tibetan Pro-Democracy Personalities
• E = Uighur Activists
• F = European Special Rep to Afghanistan and Indian photo-journalism
• G = Tibetan Government in Exile

...

GCHQ created a program called LOVELY HORSE to monitor and index public discussion by hackers on Twitter and other social media...

Among others, GCHQ monitored the tweets of reverse-engineer and Google employee, Thomas Dullien. Fellow Googler Tavis Ormandy, from Google’s vulnerability research team Project Zero, is featured on the list, along with other well known offensive security researchers, including Metasploit’s HD Moore and James Lee (aka Egypt) together with Dino Dai Zovi and Alexander Sotirov, who at the time both worked for New York-based offensive security company, Trail of Bits (Dai Zovi has since taken up a position at payment company, Square). The list also includes notable anti-forensics and operational security expert “The Grugq.”

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