Re:NSA Coworker Remembers Edward Snowden: "A Genius Among Ge...
by simoncion on Monday December 16, 2013 @03:03PM
(#6917416)
(Moved to another post, as editing posts after an hour seems kinda tacky.)
The media has been banging the "Snowden was the SMARTEST HACKER! NOONE ELSE COULD EVER HAVE DONE THIS BECAUSE HE WAS SO SMART AND STRANGE!!" drum really, really hard. I'm mentioning the human factors because human and internal policy fuck-ups are simply a far more likely explanation.
The Government would love for everyone to believe that this was a one-off event by an exceedingly clever adversary. "We were outsmarted by a super-smart guy who hates America" sounds so much better than "We failed to properly plan for an internal threat, and have failed to do so for years".
I really wonder how many times this sort of thing has been pulled off, undetected, by hostile actors. Just how much of the NSA's massive trove of data has been siphoned off by state-level actors?
The media has been banging the "Snowden was the SMARTEST HACKER! NOONE ELSE COULD EVER HAVE DONE THIS BECAUSE HE WAS SO SMART AND STRANGE!!" drum really, really hard. I'm mentioning the human factors because human and internal policy fuck-ups are simply a far more likely explanation.
The Government would love for everyone to believe that this was a one-off event by an exceedingly clever adversary. "We were outsmarted by a super-smart guy who hates America" sounds so much better than "We failed to properly plan for an internal threat, and have failed to do so for years".
I really wonder how many times this sort of thing has been pulled off, undetected, by hostile actors. Just how much of the NSA's massive trove of data has been siphoned off by state-level actors?