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Pentagon contractor leaves social media spy archive wide open on AWS
- tryingagainbro 9y agoStrong as the weakest link...NSA with virtually unlimited budget brought to its knees: "Inside the agency’s Maryland headquarters and its campuses around the country, N.S.A. employees have been subjected to polygraphs and suspended from their jobs in a hunt for turncoats allied with the Shadow Brokers. Much of the agency’s arsenal is still being replaced, curtailing operations. Morale has plunged, and experienced specialists are leaving the agency for better-paying jobs — including with firms defending computer networks from intrusions that use the N.S.A.’s leaked tools. “It’s a disaster on multiple levels,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s embarrassing that the people responsible for this have not been brought to justice.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.htm...
- joering2 9y agoRevolving door. Gee, wonder if eventually someone will come to conclusion that the whole thing was not needed in the first place. Unless, you know - there is some proven intel that this agency actually stopped mass-terror attack on a US soil; something that supposed to be their main task. But hey! So long as military industrial complex find just another good-enough-for-public reason to spend more of tax-payers money, then there is nothing to see here...
- nielsbot 9y agoSurely this is wishful thinking. Can we build enough public outrage to make a difference?
- joering2 9y agoNothing changed after Snowden revelations, so the answer is absolutely no.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoI was going to say something, but then I realized this already conformed to my world views It is surprising that the Shadow Broker leaks are seemingly being so effective at the NSA questioning itself. There is so much cognitive dissonance about the NSA's acumen. People view software engineers hired at Google and Facebook with so much regard, and the schools they come from with so much regard, while simultaneously putting the theoretical NSA engineers above even those guys without realizing the NSA hires from state schools in the Maryland, DC, VA area. My main point here is that software engineering programs aren't better or worse at Ivy League vs Tier 3 universities, and isn't much of an indication of the prowess of the engineer. The NSA's unlimited budget, loss leading tasks of finding exploits, and immunity to execute these exploits is the only thing that sets it apart.
- tbtowzhtow 9y agoIndeed, technologically enabled sociopathic behaviors emanate from Silicon Valley. Only the best and brightest would be capable of being part of such a machine. It’s not an understatement to say that the big tech companies have a soul, with the same principles of survival perpetuated against its very users who give them life in the first place. SV sees government as competition — another threat — particularly the NSA, data collection being the common basis of their value propositions. Culturally engrained rebellion, disconnect from nationalistic pride — our culture in America is quite the mashup.
- Iv 9y agoSecrecy + PR is a good way to make a project look good.
- Retric 9y agoSchool 'Tier' has close to zero relationship to engineering talent at the high end.* Effectively sifting though large numbers of applicants, training them, and most importantly retaining them is far more important. NSA is very good at retention and training while still attracting vast numbers of applicants resulting in a world class work force. Google/Facebook/etc suffer as people want them on their resume more than they want to work for them which hurts retention. The upside is this forces them to pay very well, but the downside is the average team is surprisingly poor. *AKA a randomly selected Stanford/etc. grad is likely better than a randomly selected Virginia Tech/etc. grad, but the best at each institution is a toss up. If you want a large talented workforce you can't be selective in terms of schools as their simply are not enough of them.
- Iv 9y agoWhat we need is an agency patching zero days as it finds them. We need that agency to have a double of the budget than the agency that weaponizes them.
- ryacko 9y agoIn theory it could be both. Most companies take a long time to patch bugs.
- nielsbot 9y agoQuick, someone make a copy.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoThis is what happens when you force the military to outsource core functions to fleece taxpayer money for your buddies. For a long time, there's been a push to not let the military develop capabilities in-house, despite repeated contractor fuckups and huge overspends. Can we just admit privatization is a failure? It's literally destroying national security.
- wolf550e 9y agoThe military cannot pay the salaries that are required to keep qualified people of certain professions/specialties. Surgeons and hackers, but also some other things too. so they must outsource to the private sector. But they certainly can require the contractor to use military provided/mandated security oversight. Mandate and verify good security practices, not tick checkboxes.
- walshemj 9y agoWhy can they not pay the going rate at least in the NSA ?
- wolf550e 9y agoGovernment job, government rules.
- walshemj 9y agoSo change the rules
- andrewflnr 9y agoThey're working on it. But those rules are there specifically to prevent overspending, are they not? If someone then ends up, or appears to end up, overpaid, you're going to have a different angry mob at the door. You have to be careful tearing that kind of thing out, to say the least.
- teapot01 9y agoGiven the quote "influence high risk youth" and the fact that they were critical of ISIS I'd guess these posts are copies of posts created by the company to influence online communities.
- mirimir 9y agoThat's one aspect, I'm sure. But they probably archived entire threads. For context, at least. This is just too funny :)
- hank_pank 9y agoI'm grateful to Hacker News for teaching me not to trust the platforms I use. DAE not believe that comments are only ever made "dead", and not deleted fully? Perhaps this thread isn't actually a good example of that, but I consider the proportion of grey posts here suspiciously large. It seems to always be the security/politics-related posts that this happens to.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Eliezer 9y agoThe alleged-foolish focus of the NSA on offense is perhaps a bureaucratic corollary of successful attacks getting lots of attention and funding and promotions within the org; and successful defenses fading quietly into the void, except when they fail and collect blame.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago> raising questions about the collection of data from people located in the US Isn't this the big item here. If this is evidence the govt is spying on US citizens this should create significant legal ground for civil rights/constitution protection groups.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoThis isn't intrusive spying. Collecting publicly available data is fair game and legal. Commercial data aggregators have prevented us from having any data privacy laws. The government may as well take advantage of a good deal too.
- ikeboy 9y agoIs the government freely allowed to break Facebook TOS in the way that got others in trouble (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur...)?
- Gaelan 9y agoDo we know if anything here was private? "Scraped" suggests it's already public content, in which case I don't see much of a problem.
- btgeekboy 9y agoAssuming the content was already public, the leak is the knowledge of what was scraped.