9 ms·

Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

139 points by germinalphrase 10y ago

jandrese 10y ago
> What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate. I think the term you are looking for is "Cold War".
- linkregister 10y ago
  You don't think the Cold War in the 1950s was overwhelmingly supported by the American public?
  - jandrese 10y ago
    And the public is against hacking the FSB? Or the Russian public against hacking the CIA?
  - macintux 10y ago
    I don't follow. The quoted paragraph says nothing about public support, just public knowledge, and definitely the American public in the 1950s (and other decades) had very limited visibility into the espionage undertaken as part of the Cold War.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Espionage was only a small part of the Cold War conflict. Most of it was diplomatic and economic, and overtly conducted through proxy wars. While you might learn some new facts from newly declassified Cold War-era documents, most of the relevant issues are in the history books. Please don't change the goalposts. I'm responding to this: > What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think the term you are looking for is "Cold War". The Cold War was not secret nor conducted without the consent of the publics of the two powers. Many activities were conducted in secret, but the bulk of the conflict was done overtly.
- cestith 10y ago
  Why need it be Russia? Are we sure the CIA and NSA are not at war with one another?
  - chadcmulligan 10y ago
    There's an old get smart episode where this entire criminal organisation was made up of spies from other countries infiltrating the organisation.
rrggrr 10y ago
The most likely leaker to Wikileaks? The CIA itself. Its tools already compromised, perhaps by Russia or by someone internal, the sensible thing to do is to leak the exploits in such a way that: (a) they can be patched and rendered largely harmless; (b) the oversight focus is primarily on Wikileaks and not the CIA for losing its jewels. Why would Russia (or any state actor) wikileak these compromises instead of using them against unpatched targets globally? No upside & makes no sense.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  They probably have plenty of the same zero-days and using them would be a waste: once someone knows you're using an exploit it'll get patched. It makes perfect sense for an adversarial nation's intelligence agency to undermine the CIA and Americans' trust in their own government. America is too far away from its rivals and enemies for a conventional war to be fought on its own shores. It makes more sense to use fear (9/11) and propaganda (your CIA is spying on you!!) to get Americans at each other's throats and distracted from the real threats to their wellbeing. After all, our political parties have been doing that for my whole life, so the groundwork laid is practically an invitation.
  - ak4g 10y ago
    On one hand, yes, our political divisions no doubt make that kind of information warfare campaign tempting. On the other hand, it's already pissed us off something fierce, and I think the narrative in the mid-term future will ultimately be one where would-be adversaries decide they don't want to be the next poor soul to be made an example of.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    It's been my experience that given the same binary, two researchers will probably find two different vulnerabilities. Given the complexity of these vulnerabilities, I see no reason why any other nation-state hacking service would lose their own, custom-developed exploits. I agree with your comment in general, except for its confidence in U.S. military capability. Though it would be unlikely for a battle to be waged on U.S. soil, other theaters offer plenty of opportunity for a U.S. loss, especially those that diminish traditional U.S. advantages (such as air and information superiority).
jerf 10y ago
I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. I've seen accusations that Snowden had that happen to him with his documents, for instance, by which I don't mean that I do or do not believe that, just that it's not inconceivable. You don't necessarily need a single atomic motive for this to be happening. If so, that raises other interesting questions, such as: "What is the largest, most powerful possible intelligence agency that would not be virtually 100% guaranteed to leak so hard that non-trivial stuff would even get into the open air?" We spend a lot of time on HN worrying about how powerful a police state could become with modern technology, but it's possible that that very power could itself be a quantitative change and that an entity powerful enough to be that strong of a police state might also virtually inevitably tear itself apart with internal struggles. I mean, that would still suck for those not in the middle (though it sucks for them too; one of the reasons I really hate police states is that really nobody is happy, not even the people with power), but it may imply that it is intrinsically less stable of an arrangement than many of us fear. I'm just musing here for other people to bounce their ideas off of, not particularly proposing a concrete idea here. But is it just me, or in the last 10 years have we not been seeing a slowly ramping rate of outright-public leaks like this? What if it's not a fluke, but a fundamental attribute of the current technology landscape and psychological makeup of humans at scale?
- defen 10y ago
  > I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. That would be my guess as well - an application of so-called "Fourth-generation warfare". In the same way that ISIS seeks to encourage self-radicalization, since it is virtually untraceable, Russia (or really, anyone opposed to US interests) would aim to create a climate where NSA/CIA employees "self-radicalize" in the sense that they become convinced that those organizations are engaging in illegal or immoral activities. So, create organizations like Wikileaks, people like Ed Snowden, plant news stories, etc. At a high level the idea is that you create a broad-spectrum propaganda campaign that is designed to encourage insiders to leak secrets for the benefit of their own conscience. If you reach the right people you can gain access to tons of secrets in a way that is 100% deniable. No payments, no meetings or communications with Russian agents that can be tracked, etc.
draw_down 10y ago
I'm going to guess before I read this that Russia comes up a bunch. Update: yep. It's all Russia all the time these days.
- charonn0 10y ago
  They are the most likely suspect, aren't they?
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    Why are they the most likely suspect? Aside from the popular notion that they are. There are billions of people across the world who could have done this.
    - fortenforge 10y ago
      Billions? Really? 1 in 7 people could have hacked the NSA or CIA?
      - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
        There is a plethora of free hacking/social engineering training and tools on the internet. Anyone with internet access and a motive has a shot.
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    The logic for that appears to be circular. Schnier himself says he simply "doesn't think" Iran or North Korea are capable. Based on what, exactly? The skills to find and develop exploits are not particularly rare. This isn't atomic physics during WW2. Primarily what you need is time and money, but not a lot of time and not a lot of money. Both Iran and North Korea have proven capable of building a nuclear programme despite the efforts of the entire world to stop them, so what makes Schnier think they can't do the same for cyberwarfare which is dramatically easier to engage in? Well ... nothing. He just knows it's the Russians.
brilliantcode 10y ago
Putin, in case anyone had trouble with the article's implied message.
mirimir 10y ago
Specifics aside, this may just be more Cold War. In a new realm, for sure, and one where Russia isn't as disadvantaged by resource limitations. Trying to match US physical resources arguably destroyed the Soviet Union. But I also wonder whether the US got too careless about hiring blackhat hackers. And whether some of them left backdoors.
jwtadvice 10y ago
This article reads pretty lazily in my opinion. It fails to mention that the CIA had an internal hunt for the contractors which leaked the "Vault7" arsenal - confirming that indeed it was a contractor and indeed that they had mishandled the arsenal by providing global access to the weapon cache. It also failed to mention the full original story provided by the Shadow Brokers and those that reported on them: that NSA had (similarly) mishandled hacking tools by loading too many of them onto attack staging servers. This story has not changed, nor have the recent publications contradicted it. In fact the Shadow Brokers said exactly what they were going to publish when they first went public and have followed through with what they said they were going to publish exactly. The author speculates and conspires that both of these must be Russia. Mostly it's the standard fare conspiracy theorist "to whose benefit" but it's clear the author doesn't understand whether and how Russia would benefit from these disclosures. Finally, after all the public panic induced over "Russian hacking" during the election, there's been no intelligence summary, statement, or even Congressional statement to the affect that either the Shadow Brokers or the Vault7 leaks are in any way attributed to Russia. Wouldn't that have been fuel for that fire? My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services. My guess is that Vault7 was a CIA and contractor who shared the massive trove too broadly, where it ended up in the hands of the Wikileaks journalism reporting outlet. The author appeals to Occam's Razor only by name. The lack of careful analysis in the article insists, unfortunately, in using unfounded speculation in the place of evidence, and horror, to then appeal to Occam's Razor on behalf of assumptions.
- frabbit 10y ago
  I like this theory: "My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services." But weirdly, why are any of us including Bruce discussing this? It's almost as though we believed that we live in some sort of democracy where we have access to information and a legal system which could act on that information instead of an oligarchy ruled by a small elite with the aid of various armed enforcers... some secret some not. Silly proles.
  - meesles 10y ago
empath75 10y ago
This is Bruce Schneier, btw. So not some random blogger.
- BlackjackCF 10y ago
  Seems like some people on here don't know Bruce Schneier based off the way that they're shitting on the article?
  - ignoramceisblis 10y ago
    Should we not criticize someone's publications, even if we think they deserve criticism? And should we use their name as reason for abstaining from that? Not to imply that you do this, but here's some general advice: don't appeal to authority--at least for the sake of authority. Don't idolize. We should be free to criticize whomever we want, if we think we have good reason to. If we don't have such freedom, we'll quickly find ourselves in a state where a select group of individuals have a disproportionate amount of power over others. Though I speak too late.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      Agreed, especially considering the article is almost purely speculation: >We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.
    - empath75 10y ago
      Well yes but if someone has demonstrated expertise in a field you shouldn't dismiss their opinions in a cursory way as many people here have done.
      - ignoramceisblis 10y ago
        I think I understand what you're trying to get at. But it assumes that the person's expertise is truly "aligned" with the subject matter. I don't want to badger you with all of my thoughts on this, but, at the extreme, even if the author (was such an expert that they) knew who was performing these leaks and why--as opposed to giving speculation, which the author does state--we would also have to trust that they're giving their complete and honest account on the matter. So even in the case that they have perfection information, you must consider how much faith you want to put in their output. Note: I don't like the idea of will-nilly distrusting everything everyone says, but I do think it's worth pointing out possibilities that may exist for many situations.
jorblumesea 10y ago
Highly unpopular opinion, but Wikileaks is seeming more like an anti-western operation funded by Russia. The more they leak the more their bias is showing.
- QuinnyPig 10y ago
  It went from "fascinating" to "dear lord what game are they playing at" to "I can't even articulate what they are anymore" in a surprisingly short span of years. They're not even a real wiki!
- draw_down 10y ago
  Mmm, you might be surprised how popular that opinion is, particularly among American Democrats.
  - jorblumesea 10y ago
    The bias is so obvious it's hard not to draw conclusions from their actions.
    - 1001101 10y ago
      Julian said this to Forbes in 2010: "It's not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I've learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I'm a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free. WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical." So, core principles: open information, ethical capitalism. His influences and associations with people like Noam Chomsky (ethical political economy), Gavin MacFayden (open information) and others, seem to reinforce this. I'm not sure that Russian oligarchy, and restrictions on press freedoms/speech etc. would really jive with Julian's worldview. He does seem to have a particular bone to pick with US imperialism, so I wouldn't rule out accepting help from the enemy of his enemy.
      - 10y ago
Johnny555 10y ago
I want to know why we are allowing government agencies to accumulate a vast trove of data (of dubious intelligence value) about everyone when they've shown that they are unable to secure their own secrets.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Maybe a naive question, but why do CIA and NSA hire so many contractors for such sensitive work? Perhaps they should restrict these sensitive positions to full timers who have committed to the Agency -- i.e. they know that the organization will be watching them pretty much for the rest of their lives. Ex-agency people I've met said they have to notify the Agency whenever they travel abroad -- if they don't hear back, it's fine, but the Agency reserves the right to stop them. The amount of damage (some might prefer to say, whistle blowing) done by contractors in recent years suggests that it's time to reexamine who gets such sensitive access.
- daddyo 10y ago
  Capitalism at work. Commercial businesses need profit to survive and so, in general, deliver better innovative products. There is no way for CIA and NSA to compete with Google on search and web crawling, so why bother competing with them with their own subpar products? I don't think the contractors leaked themselves. I think foreign intelligence agencies target most of them, and having multiple attack points yields more leaks than having just a single well-guarded agency. Trade-off between clamming up and remaining State-of-the-art.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Judging by your comment, you don't know very much about contracting in the IC. I'd rather you be less authoritative and leave it at "I think X" instead of "It's definitely X".
    - daddyo 10y ago
      Please be more courteous with your dismissal. What shows that I don't know anything about contracting in the IC, and what really happens instead? I also thought my answer was very careful in its assertions. What have I stated as a definite fact and why was this wrong?
      - linkregister 10y ago
mmaunder 10y ago
Final paragraph: "What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate." Correct. For over 75 years now. Article is just a summary of recent events in IC leaks. I clicked because I thought the author was going to speculate they're planned leaks as part of a counter-intel operation. That would have been interesting.
- cat199 10y ago
  > Correct. For over 75 years now. Have a look at Lenin's train and try 100. Or, the dawn of time, depending.
SFJulie 10y ago
It was a fun read, but I can outsmart him in a non fact based analysis that might be closer to the truth. In its blog circa 1813 at St Hélène Napoleon posted on YikYak never credit to malice what can be simply explained by incompetence, and while trying to dominate the world with a huge army, I discovered that my machiavelic plans were anyway countered by having huge organization that tend have incompetence at critical points. Well, Napoléon may have been right. The estimate headcount of all the US agencies are 3 000 000 workers, a huge amount of the population if you want to keep stuffs secret. If not enough, you have at least 5 big agencies and a lot of small one. You also have a tendency to have the patriots like Snowden attracted to secret services and army. Some of them whose opinions may diverge as much with their agencies heading as their sense of duty is strong. Plus without uncovering any big secrets, since 1986 commercial war with Europa and the WTO agreement on stopping to subsidize companies with public money, NASA, DARPA and secret services have been used as a way to discrelty fund part of the economy (namely IT, aeronautic and military industry). And let's no lie to ourselves one of the biggest part of the agencies' job is economical intelligence to favor the interest of some companies. So, well, these subsidies are a resource increasingly taken by the services :) and some companies want this money. Subsidies used to go in road infrastructures where mafia was happy to have its share. Urbanism used to favor real eastate.... There are a lot of enemies inside the USA against the services and their power over this huge budget of theirs. My take on the issue is that maybe russian ... mob ... constituted of USA citizens could totally be involved, but as much as any other economical agents in the USA. The problem of having too much money is that you'd better live in the shadow to not become the target of jealousy. It may be knowing how much CIA and NSA have been involved with IT companies (as both suppliers and recipient of subsidize and probably economical intelligence) that other sectors of the economy like .... real estate, agriculture, energy, distribution want to have their place under the sun back again. So, going back to Napoléon, I do think that the leak in secret service employing that much persons not all trusted requires so much duplication of information and internal leaks to simply get the work done on a day to day basis, that leaks are just a simple expression of a probable incompetence that did not scale up very well. Yes, the russians may have opportunistically played with it. But clearly the biggest problem first is to have huge mammothean bureaucratic agencies. Voilà, me too I made my own I don't know nothing I will tell you everything analysis based on wind. :P
stefantalpalaru 10y ago
Schneier reminds me of this article where a smart man analyses his own ability to convince himself that the disappeared MH370 airplane was hidden somewhere in Baikonur: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370... Intelligent people are very good at constructing internally consistent theories, but quite bad at questioning their own assumptions when beliefs are at stake. Schneier believes the big bad bear had something to do with it, so he looks for elements that fit this scenario. He has his own little thought experiment with rational agents that obey game theory mechanisms and he plays it out using logic. What can possibly go wrong? Only the connection between the simulation and reality.

139 points by germinalphrase 10y ago

> What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate. I think the term you are looking for is "Cold War".

linkregister 10y ago
You don't think the Cold War in the 1950s was overwhelmingly supported by the American public?
- jandrese 10y ago
  And the public is against hacking the FSB? Or the Russian public against hacking the CIA?
- macintux 10y ago
  I don't follow. The quoted paragraph says nothing about public support, just public knowledge, and definitely the American public in the 1950s (and other decades) had very limited visibility into the espionage undertaken as part of the Cold War.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Espionage was only a small part of the Cold War conflict. Most of it was diplomatic and economic, and overtly conducted through proxy wars. While you might learn some new facts from newly declassified Cold War-era documents, most of the relevant issues are in the history books. Please don't change the goalposts. I'm responding to this: > What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think the term you are looking for is "Cold War". The Cold War was not secret nor conducted without the consent of the publics of the two powers. Many activities were conducted in secret, but the bulk of the conflict was done overtly.
cestith 10y ago
Why need it be Russia? Are we sure the CIA and NSA are not at war with one another?
- chadcmulligan 10y ago
  There's an old get smart episode where this entire criminal organisation was made up of spies from other countries infiltrating the organisation.

rrggrr 10y ago

The most likely leaker to Wikileaks? The CIA itself. Its tools already compromised, perhaps by Russia or by someone internal, the sensible thing to do is to leak the exploits in such a way that: (a) they can be patched and rendered largely harmless; (b) the oversight focus is primarily on Wikileaks and not the CIA for losing its jewels. Why would Russia (or any state actor) wikileak these compromises instead of using them against unpatched targets globally? No upside & makes no sense.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
They probably have plenty of the same zero-days and using them would be a waste: once someone knows you're using an exploit it'll get patched. It makes perfect sense for an adversarial nation's intelligence agency to undermine the CIA and Americans' trust in their own government. America is too far away from its rivals and enemies for a conventional war to be fought on its own shores. It makes more sense to use fear (9/11) and propaganda (your CIA is spying on you!!) to get Americans at each other's throats and distracted from the real threats to their wellbeing. After all, our political parties have been doing that for my whole life, so the groundwork laid is practically an invitation.
- ak4g 10y ago
  On one hand, yes, our political divisions no doubt make that kind of information warfare campaign tempting. On the other hand, it's already pissed us off something fierce, and I think the narrative in the mid-term future will ultimately be one where would-be adversaries decide they don't want to be the next poor soul to be made an example of.
- linkregister 10y ago
  It's been my experience that given the same binary, two researchers will probably find two different vulnerabilities. Given the complexity of these vulnerabilities, I see no reason why any other nation-state hacking service would lose their own, custom-developed exploits. I agree with your comment in general, except for its confidence in U.S. military capability. Though it would be unlikely for a battle to be waged on U.S. soil, other theaters offer plenty of opportunity for a U.S. loss, especially those that diminish traditional U.S. advantages (such as air and information superiority).

jerf 10y ago

I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. I've seen accusations that Snowden had that happen to him with his documents, for instance, by which I don't mean that I do or do not believe that, just that it's not inconceivable. You don't necessarily need a single atomic motive for this to be happening. If so, that raises other interesting questions, such as: "What is the largest, most powerful possible intelligence agency that would not be virtually 100% guaranteed to leak so hard that non-trivial stuff would even get into the open air?" We spend a lot of time on HN worrying about how powerful a police state could become with modern technology, but it's possible that that very power could itself be a quantitative change and that an entity powerful enough to be that strong of a police state might also virtually inevitably tear itself apart with internal struggles. I mean, that would still suck for those not in the middle (though it sucks for them too; one of the reasons I really hate police states is that really nobody is happy, not even the people with power), but it may imply that it is intrinsically less stable of an arrangement than many of us fear. I'm just musing here for other people to bounce their ideas off of, not particularly proposing a concrete idea here. But is it just me, or in the last 10 years have we not been seeing a slowly ramping rate of outright-public leaks like this? What if it's not a fluke, but a fundamental attribute of the current technology landscape and psychological makeup of humans at scale?

defen 10y ago
> I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. That would be my guess as well - an application of so-called "Fourth-generation warfare". In the same way that ISIS seeks to encourage self-radicalization, since it is virtually untraceable, Russia (or really, anyone opposed to US interests) would aim to create a climate where NSA/CIA employees "self-radicalize" in the sense that they become convinced that those organizations are engaging in illegal or immoral activities. So, create organizations like Wikileaks, people like Ed Snowden, plant news stories, etc. At a high level the idea is that you create a broad-spectrum propaganda campaign that is designed to encourage insiders to leak secrets for the benefit of their own conscience. If you reach the right people you can gain access to tons of secrets in a way that is 100% deniable. No payments, no meetings or communications with Russian agents that can be tracked, etc.

draw_down 10y ago

I'm going to guess before I read this that Russia comes up a bunch. Update: yep. It's all Russia all the time these days.

charonn0 10y ago
They are the most likely suspect, aren't they?
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  Why are they the most likely suspect? Aside from the popular notion that they are. There are billions of people across the world who could have done this.
  - fortenforge 10y ago
    Billions? Really? 1 in 7 people could have hacked the NSA or CIA?
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      There is a plethora of free hacking/social engineering training and tools on the internet. Anyone with internet access and a motive has a shot.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  The logic for that appears to be circular. Schnier himself says he simply "doesn't think" Iran or North Korea are capable. Based on what, exactly? The skills to find and develop exploits are not particularly rare. This isn't atomic physics during WW2. Primarily what you need is time and money, but not a lot of time and not a lot of money. Both Iran and North Korea have proven capable of building a nuclear programme despite the efforts of the entire world to stop them, so what makes Schnier think they can't do the same for cyberwarfare which is dramatically easier to engage in? Well ... nothing. He just knows it's the Russians.

brilliantcode 10y ago

Putin, in case anyone had trouble with the article's implied message.

mirimir 10y ago

Specifics aside, this may just be more Cold War. In a new realm, for sure, and one where Russia isn't as disadvantaged by resource limitations. Trying to match US physical resources arguably destroyed the Soviet Union. But I also wonder whether the US got too careless about hiring blackhat hackers. And whether some of them left backdoors.

jwtadvice 10y ago

This article reads pretty lazily in my opinion. It fails to mention that the CIA had an internal hunt for the contractors which leaked the "Vault7" arsenal - confirming that indeed it was a contractor and indeed that they had mishandled the arsenal by providing global access to the weapon cache. It also failed to mention the full original story provided by the Shadow Brokers and those that reported on them: that NSA had (similarly) mishandled hacking tools by loading too many of them onto attack staging servers. This story has not changed, nor have the recent publications contradicted it. In fact the Shadow Brokers said exactly what they were going to publish when they first went public and have followed through with what they said they were going to publish exactly. The author speculates and conspires that both of these must be Russia. Mostly it's the standard fare conspiracy theorist "to whose benefit" but it's clear the author doesn't understand whether and how Russia would benefit from these disclosures. Finally, after all the public panic induced over "Russian hacking" during the election, there's been no intelligence summary, statement, or even Congressional statement to the affect that either the Shadow Brokers or the Vault7 leaks are in any way attributed to Russia. Wouldn't that have been fuel for that fire? My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services. My guess is that Vault7 was a CIA and contractor who shared the massive trove too broadly, where it ended up in the hands of the Wikileaks journalism reporting outlet. The author appeals to Occam's Razor only by name. The lack of careful analysis in the article insists, unfortunately, in using unfounded speculation in the place of evidence, and horror, to then appeal to Occam's Razor on behalf of assumptions.

frabbit 10y ago
I like this theory: "My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services." But weirdly, why are any of us including Bruce discussing this? It's almost as though we believed that we live in some sort of democracy where we have access to information and a legal system which could act on that information instead of an oligarchy ruled by a small elite with the aid of various armed enforcers... some secret some not. Silly proles.
- meesles 10y ago

empath75 10y ago

This is Bruce Schneier, btw. So not some random blogger.

BlackjackCF 10y ago
Seems like some people on here don't know Bruce Schneier based off the way that they're shitting on the article?
- ignoramceisblis 10y ago
  Should we not criticize someone's publications, even if we think they deserve criticism? And should we use their name as reason for abstaining from that? Not to imply that you do this, but here's some general advice: don't appeal to authority--at least for the sake of authority. Don't idolize. We should be free to criticize whomever we want, if we think we have good reason to. If we don't have such freedom, we'll quickly find ourselves in a state where a select group of individuals have a disproportionate amount of power over others. Though I speak too late.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    Agreed, especially considering the article is almost purely speculation: >We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.
  - empath75 10y ago
    Well yes but if someone has demonstrated expertise in a field you shouldn't dismiss their opinions in a cursory way as many people here have done.
    - ignoramceisblis 10y ago
      I think I understand what you're trying to get at. But it assumes that the person's expertise is truly "aligned" with the subject matter. I don't want to badger you with all of my thoughts on this, but, at the extreme, even if the author (was such an expert that they) knew who was performing these leaks and why--as opposed to giving speculation, which the author does state--we would also have to trust that they're giving their complete and honest account on the matter. So even in the case that they have perfection information, you must consider how much faith you want to put in their output. Note: I don't like the idea of will-nilly distrusting everything everyone says, but I do think it's worth pointing out possibilities that may exist for many situations.

jorblumesea 10y ago

Highly unpopular opinion, but Wikileaks is seeming more like an anti-western operation funded by Russia. The more they leak the more their bias is showing.

QuinnyPig 10y ago
It went from "fascinating" to "dear lord what game are they playing at" to "I can't even articulate what they are anymore" in a surprisingly short span of years. They're not even a real wiki!
draw_down 10y ago
Mmm, you might be surprised how popular that opinion is, particularly among American Democrats.
- jorblumesea 10y ago
  The bias is so obvious it's hard not to draw conclusions from their actions.
  - 1001101 10y ago
    Julian said this to Forbes in 2010: "It's not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I've learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I'm a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free. WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical." So, core principles: open information, ethical capitalism. His influences and associations with people like Noam Chomsky (ethical political economy), Gavin MacFayden (open information) and others, seem to reinforce this. I'm not sure that Russian oligarchy, and restrictions on press freedoms/speech etc. would really jive with Julian's worldview. He does seem to have a particular bone to pick with US imperialism, so I wouldn't rule out accepting help from the enemy of his enemy.
    - 10y ago

Johnny555 10y ago

I want to know why we are allowing government agencies to accumulate a vast trove of data (of dubious intelligence value) about everyone when they've shown that they are unable to secure their own secrets.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Maybe a naive question, but why do CIA and NSA hire so many contractors for such sensitive work? Perhaps they should restrict these sensitive positions to full timers who have committed to the Agency -- i.e. they know that the organization will be watching them pretty much for the rest of their lives. Ex-agency people I've met said they have to notify the Agency whenever they travel abroad -- if they don't hear back, it's fine, but the Agency reserves the right to stop them. The amount of damage (some might prefer to say, whistle blowing) done by contractors in recent years suggests that it's time to reexamine who gets such sensitive access.

daddyo 10y ago
Capitalism at work. Commercial businesses need profit to survive and so, in general, deliver better innovative products. There is no way for CIA and NSA to compete with Google on search and web crawling, so why bother competing with them with their own subpar products? I don't think the contractors leaked themselves. I think foreign intelligence agencies target most of them, and having multiple attack points yields more leaks than having just a single well-guarded agency. Trade-off between clamming up and remaining State-of-the-art.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Judging by your comment, you don't know very much about contracting in the IC. I'd rather you be less authoritative and leave it at "I think X" instead of "It's definitely X".
  - daddyo 10y ago
    Please be more courteous with your dismissal. What shows that I don't know anything about contracting in the IC, and what really happens instead? I also thought my answer was very careful in its assertions. What have I stated as a definite fact and why was this wrong?
    - linkregister 10y ago

mmaunder 10y ago

Final paragraph: "What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate." Correct. For over 75 years now. Article is just a summary of recent events in IC leaks. I clicked because I thought the author was going to speculate they're planned leaks as part of a counter-intel operation. That would have been interesting.

cat199 10y ago
> Correct. For over 75 years now. Have a look at Lenin's train and try 100. Or, the dawn of time, depending.

SFJulie 10y ago

It was a fun read, but I can outsmart him in a non fact based analysis that might be closer to the truth. In its blog circa 1813 at St Hélène Napoleon posted on YikYak never credit to malice what can be simply explained by incompetence, and while trying to dominate the world with a huge army, I discovered that my machiavelic plans were anyway countered by having huge organization that tend have incompetence at critical points. Well, Napoléon may have been right. The estimate headcount of all the US agencies are 3 000 000 workers, a huge amount of the population if you want to keep stuffs secret. If not enough, you have at least 5 big agencies and a lot of small one. You also have a tendency to have the patriots like Snowden attracted to secret services and army. Some of them whose opinions may diverge as much with their agencies heading as their sense of duty is strong. Plus without uncovering any big secrets, since 1986 commercial war with Europa and the WTO agreement on stopping to subsidize companies with public money, NASA, DARPA and secret services have been used as a way to discrelty fund part of the economy (namely IT, aeronautic and military industry). And let's no lie to ourselves one of the biggest part of the agencies' job is economical intelligence to favor the interest of some companies. So, well, these subsidies are a resource increasingly taken by the services :) and some companies want this money. Subsidies used to go in road infrastructures where mafia was happy to have its share. Urbanism used to favor real eastate.... There are a lot of enemies inside the USA against the services and their power over this huge budget of theirs. My take on the issue is that maybe russian ... mob ... constituted of USA citizens could totally be involved, but as much as any other economical agents in the USA. The problem of having too much money is that you'd better live in the shadow to not become the target of jealousy. It may be knowing how much CIA and NSA have been involved with IT companies (as both suppliers and recipient of subsidize and probably economical intelligence) that other sectors of the economy like .... real estate, agriculture, energy, distribution want to have their place under the sun back again. So, going back to Napoléon, I do think that the leak in secret service employing that much persons not all trusted requires so much duplication of information and internal leaks to simply get the work done on a day to day basis, that leaks are just a simple expression of a probable incompetence that did not scale up very well. Yes, the russians may have opportunistically played with it. But clearly the biggest problem first is to have huge mammothean bureaucratic agencies. Voilà, me too I made my own I don't know nothing I will tell you everything analysis based on wind. :P

stefantalpalaru 10y ago

Schneier reminds me of this article where a smart man analyses his own ability to convince himself that the disappeared MH370 airplane was hidden somewhere in Baikonur: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370... Intelligent people are very good at constructing internally consistent theories, but quite bad at questioning their own assumptions when beliefs are at stake. Schneier believes the big bad bear had something to do with it, so he looks for elements that fit this scenario. He has his own little thought experiment with rational agents that obey game theory mechanisms and he plays it out using logic. What can possibly go wrong? Only the connection between the simulation and reality.