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Comment by sgc | Hacker News Reader

It seems like with the wholesale compromise of US Government personnel from virtually every branch of government at this point, it is relative child's play for the new owner(s) of this information to massively influence US policy and action, almost to the point of control. It might take a few years to filter through the data and find the weak links, but the damage is basically inevitable.

Am I missing something here? A statistically relevant subset of people have important secrets, and a statistically relevant subset of those (perhaps most) are relatively easy to control when you know them. If the US has similar information on other governments' personnel, we might even fall into the caricature of the US guiding their actions while they guide those of the US, since those controlling and those being controlled will (largely) not be the same members of their respective governments.

The entire situation seems quite messy.

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If you're a state actor (Russia, China etc.) that has a sufficient funding / motivation to take a dataset like this and systematically blackmail people in it for information, it seems naïve to think that those states haven't had this sort of information for decades already through traditional espionage methods.

Bulk collection and bulk processing make today's version very different.

nation-states had the power of bulk collection and bulk processing 30 years ago, the difference is now you don't need a human to copy the data to a disk and walk off with it.

I hypothesize this is not so much about influencing US policy and action directly, or even about spying on assets, but more about mutually assured destruction for when a cyber war breaks out.

The state actors responsible for this want the US to know that they have these records. That they can attack/disturb/flood the personal computers, social networks, and family of these soldiers / military assets.

Also note the apparent warning in the Shadow Brokers auction:

> You see what cryptolockers and stuxnet can do. You see free files we give for free. You see attacks on banks and SWIFT in news. Maybe there is Equation Group version of cryptolocker+stuxnet for banks and financial systems? If Equation Group lose control of cyber weapons, who else lose or find cyber weapons? If electronic data go bye bye where leave Wealthy Elites? Maybe with dumb cattle?

I don't think that MAD doctrine applies here - with nuclear weapons, you know when someone is using them right away. With this data thoough, usage is covert, so each side will be thinking that tge other has already started using it.

You can't hand a nuclear weapon to Assange and have him fire it for you and then deny knowing anything about it :)

'Sovereign Invidual'[0] makes a good case of how all the hacks and leaks across the board will eventually drive the adoption of encryption, which in turn will lead to the gradual transition of power away from nation states (mostly in the economic sense).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi...

What a relevant book that is. It also predicted cryptocurrencies (in the mid 90s) and national independence movements gaining ground.

You have just described the spy-vs-spy-vs-countrer-spy-vs-??? intelligence and counterintelligence dance that has been happening for at least 100 years. The situation is the same, just the modus operandi has changed.

I think there's a fair argument to say that the level of scale possible here makes this is a different situation

our government doesn't give a shit because we "hack" foreign nationals/governments so regularly that 130k accts doesn't register as an issue.

it really is child's play

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