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"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards" A goo
by infruset 12y ago
"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards"
A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.
- Swizec 12y agoI think they're called "interns" in real life.
- TrainedMonkey 12y agoI do not think pages were numbered 1-6000. I think there were multiple documents, so you would need to do something like: 1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc... 2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document. [0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoToday we'd run them through a portable scanner, upload the individual PDFs to a crowd source site, and have the proper order in under a day.
- wlesieutre 12y agoNot if they stick you in a room and say "none of these documents can leave," which is what it sounds like happened here.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoTethering/Hotspot + EyeFi Wifi-Enabled SD card. It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.
- napoleond 12y agoIn this scenario, leaving with or otherwise distributing a copy of the document would be equivalent to walking out the door with the original. Do you really think the NSA wouldn't be able to prevent that from happening?
- toomuchtodo 12y agoI didn't think the NSA would be hopelessly humiliated by a lone syadmin currently residing in Russia to protect himself from a lack of due process, but here we are.
- pkinsky 12y agoSnowden was considered an insider. Here a person considered an outsider would be in a controlled environment with the specific purpose of restricting the flow of information.
- jrochkind1 12y agoBack then it wasn't likely. Today? If the NSA has secure rooms for viewing confidential documents that can not leave the room? It seems pretty darn likely it is a faraday cage. You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in their budget?
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in their budget? Budget? Yes. I don't dispute that. Know what they're doing? Clearly they don't.
- jrochkind1 12y agoso we got nothing to worry about?
- 12y ago
- myself248 12y agoAnd whoever read page 556 would be tweeting about who kills Dumbledore before the last pages were even scanned.
- jewel 12y agoI think I'd use a most-significant-digit radix sort in real life. Radix sort doesn't require comparisons, instead you examine the first digit and drop into one of 10 buckets. You then recurse on each bucket. I think that'd be less frustrating than trying to do quicksort on such a large pile.
- cjg 12y agoYou could use pigeonhole sort with O(n) instead.
- spacefight 12y agoGreat citation in any case. Remember that 4pt font size last year someone didn't like?