Re:Microsoft fixed critical vulnerabilities in uncredited up...
by mtgx on Sunday April 16, 2017 @04:28AM
(#14124955)
But the U.S. still has the most to suffer from them (as a country). But from NSA's point of view, even if the U.S. still has to suffer from those exploits, it's "worth it" because for every American that is getting harmed by those exploits, they can spy on 10 other foreigners. So it's not really a matter of "defending the country" but of "value of exploit".
Kind of how in the WW2 they used to allow one or two or five of their own ships to be sunk by the enemy just so they don't reveal that they intercepted their communications (which I guess the argument was the intelligence would've been more useful against more of the enemies' ships).
Also, this was a large batch of exploits, and the NSA knew eventually they would get released. So they might as well be the "heroes of the day" and get companies to fix them, especially if they can get the publicity for it. But for every one of these they fix there are probably dozens of others they don't want fixed, like for instance all the vulnerabilities in Chinese routers and smartphones and smart TVs and other electronics.
It's not that hard to verify that this is their logic. Look how they want to push backdoors and how they fight encryption, just to catch a few people, even if that harms everyone else. From their point of view "more security" is a bad thing. And I'm not even sure you can expect much else from a spy agency. When you have a hammer, you want every problem to be a nail. It should be up to everyone else to push back on that logic.
Kind of how in the WW2 they used to allow one or two or five of their own ships to be sunk by the enemy just so they don't reveal that they intercepted their communications (which I guess the argument was the intelligence would've been more useful against more of the enemies' ships).
Also, this was a large batch of exploits, and the NSA knew eventually they would get released. So they might as well be the "heroes of the day" and get companies to fix them, especially if they can get the publicity for it. But for every one of these they fix there are probably dozens of others they don't want fixed, like for instance all the vulnerabilities in Chinese routers and smartphones and smart TVs and other electronics.
It's not that hard to verify that this is their logic. Look how they want to push backdoors and how they fight encryption, just to catch a few people, even if that harms everyone else. From their point of view "more security" is a bad thing. And I'm not even sure you can expect much else from a spy agency. When you have a hammer, you want every problem to be a nail. It should be up to everyone else to push back on that logic.