SoylentNews

fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Last year it was reported the NSA spends millions to purchase 0-day exploits [washingtonpost.com]. But what do they do with the exploits they've purchased [zdnet.com]? On Tuesday, NSA chief nominee US Navy vice admiral Michael S. Rogers

...gave a vague outline of rules the spy agency has for handling such flaws, which includes an internal 'adjudication process' for determining whether to let the vendor of an affected product know about it; or just keep it under wraps for spying.

Now there's word that documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show they're using automated systems to infect computers that reduce the level of human oversight in the process: [firstlook.org]

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system — codenamed TURBINE — is designed to 'allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.'

Sounds like the wicked offspring of Skynet and George Orwell.

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