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The NSA et al. know everything. It's just a matter of whether they can figure it out again using legal investigative techniques. I imagine it like the solutions
by logn 13y ago
The NSA et al. know everything. It's just a matter of whether they can figure it out again using legal investigative techniques. I imagine it like the solutions in the back of a math textbook. I'm given the answer but I won't get credit for answering them correctly unless I can actually list every step in deriving the solution. See the recent news stories on NSA-DEA parallel reconstruction.
Specifically to your question, I'd guess they run a large number of Tor exit nodes and from there it was fairly simple to see exactly who was doing what.
Also it's come out recently in the Guardian, the NSA can backdoor machines through special servers running man-in-the-middle attacks.
Basically, the Internet (and planet Earth too) is not secure, so trying to pull off a large-scale crime is kind of foolish.
- krapp 13y ago>The NSA et al. know everything. Parallel construction doesn't actually imply that the NSA is omniscient and that the entire rest of the American justice system is a charade meant to mask its power from the muggles. The NSA doesn't know everything. They don't see everything. They don't whisper words of power into the ears of every prosecutor, and a dark man smoking a cigarette doesn't appear from out of the shadows with fabricated evidence for the Department of Justice and a dossier from ten minutes into the future every time a hacker opens their browser. It gets mentioned every time a post comes up involving court case or arrest, and it's quite honestly as useless a form of speculation as suggesting divine intervention as a first cause in science. Assuming too much power on the part of the NSA (and by extension, that no other methods used by any other bureau or department are effective except as a smokescreen) is as dangerous as dismissing them entirely.
- logn 13y agoMy 'know everything' comment was a slight exaggeration for effect. I didn't say they fabricate evidence (you said that) or that they divulge their secrets to every prosecutor (those are your words, portrayed as mine). You have a good point though that maybe my comment is not constructive. I don't wish for this to become a cliche response on HN that it 'must have been the NSA' but we must acknowledge that they posses powers of surveillance the world has never before seen (except if you believe in God... however, we actually have architecture diagrams and proof of the NSA technology... not just 'The Book of Edward'). But yeah, it's dangerous to dismiss the NSA entirely and dangerous to make it a given they're more powerful than they are. However, given their secrecy, that's all a fairly expected situation for us.
- krapp 13y agoFair enough, I admit I was extrapolating from a number of comments i've seen, and I shouldn't have implied things in your comment that, you're right, weren't there.
- adventured 13y agoIf this were true, that the NSA knows all, 50% of all murders wouldn't go unsolved in Detroit.
- alan_cx 13y agoLow value victims and criminals? Its awful to say, but do you think a murder in Detroit gets the same attention this guy or Snowden does/did?