Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House cyber policy director

Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by sandworm101 on Sunday April 21, 2024 @01:45PM (#40107618)

The US government isn't in need of a thousand high-skilled hackers. They are in need of a million normal employees with some basic security awareness. Anyone with a modicum of skill can find thousands of areas to improve. The issue is that almost nobody is in a position to get anything changed. Even basic software choices are a multi-year epic.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by whatshisface on Sunday April 21, 2024 @01:52PM (#40107687)

The NSA isn't actually supposed to be a massive Statsi-like bureaucracy, it's meant to crack codes used in wartime so that our troops know what the enemy will do next.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by sandworm101 on Sunday April 21, 2024 @03:21PM (#40108418)

And provide the standards to be used within US systems ... Which is basically a definition for bureaucracy.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by eikenberry on Sunday April 21, 2024 @02:06PM (#40107823)

You're thinking of the CIA. The NSA's job is to spy on citizens.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by hollerith on Sunday April 21, 2024 @02:15PM (#40107894)

>The NSA's job is to spy on [US] citizens

They're not supposed to (according to for example the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978).

If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by rokkitmensch on Sunday April 21, 2024 @02:55PM (#40108209)

What the spook box says and what's inside are two completely different things, by design.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by WarOnPrivacy on Monday April 22, 2024 @12:41PM (#40116054)

> If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.

Semi-autonomous collections systems generally aren't capable of determining citizenship.

Once the data is at rest, much of it is made available to a surprisingly large number of federal and state agencies - and even local agencies via fusion centers, etc.

The system is built for dissemination. Within that, some checks on citizenship could be possible for some data. But even then, once a foreign person is part of the data/comms transaction, all the related data is available - citizenship of the other participants is no barrier.

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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by qaq on Sunday April 21, 2024 @06:09PM (#40109663)

Well I obviously have no clue what the numbers are on the offensive side doubt they are smaller than a thousand. But there are def thousands of cyber security professionals working for government through myriad of contractors purely because of caps.

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