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I think you can make an analogy to actual magic, in that a lot of magic tricks only work because the audience doesn't know the extent to which the magician will
by empath75 9y ago
I think you can make an analogy to actual magic, in that a lot of magic tricks only work because the audience doesn't know the extent to which the magician will go to fool them. They'll use stooges, lie to you, glue magnets to playing cards, eavesdrop on the audience for mentalism tricks, etc.
Similarly, the NSA can accomplish what would seem like magic by doing brute force stuff like tapping an undeground cable with a submarine or getting you to hire moles into your organization, or just plain breaking and entering. 10 billion dollars may not buy you a lot of computers but it buys you more man hours than their targets can ever hope to expend on protecting themselves.
- evan_ 9y ago“Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” –Teller
- Zigurd 9y agoQuite so. You can say "there is no magical technology for bridging air gaps." Unless you include suitcases full of money to compromise the people traversing those air gaps. Beyond being reasonably certain the NSA can't break strong encryption to access data at rest in situations where the key can't be bought, this is some comfort, but not a lot of comfort.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Unless you include suitcases full of money to compromise the people traversing those air gaps. Most of the time it takes significantly less than suitcases full of money. There are plenty of examples out there where hurt feelings, a sense of patriotism, a sense of honor or even simply a need to be recognized were enough.
- strictnein 9y agoI mean, there's quite a few ways to communicate between air gapped systems. The biggest difficulty is getting your code running on the internal air gapped system, so it can talk back to the first system. And transmission methods are typically pretty slow. A recent public example, but there's lots of other techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8CNxYe5dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8CNxYe5dk Paying lots of money to access data at rest would really be more under the CIA, to be honest. The CIA is, theoretically, only supposed to go after data at rest, and leave all the sigint to the NSA.
- BigJono 9y agoHas anyone else noticed a small 'click' when scrubbing to a section of that video where data is being transferred. I'm assuming that's not co-incidental?