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Comment by killin_dan | Hacker News Reader

This is literally exactly what they want you to think. The CIA is smarter than you, and they have a lot to gain by misleading you otherwise.

Some of the most talented software engineers in the world work intelligence, and they can write better than you, exploit faster than you, debug more thoroughly than you, etc.

State intelligence is especially dangerous and devious. The average security researcher doesn't stand a chance, much less the average basement hacker.

Understanding what the CIA does and why they do it is designed to be more or less impossible from the outside. It's the nature of intelligence really, to be incomprehensible from outside the sphere.

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Lol. I'm sure that there are people at the CIA / NSA that are much better at software than me, but I highly doubt it's pervasive.

I read the Snowden leaks. I know what type of tools they're using. I know the type of holes that their public facing infrastructure has. I know the type of holes that their government officials that they're supposed to be protecting have. I know how fucked the security environment is right now. The CIA doesn't even use HSTS or CSP headers for fucks sakes (lol, they get an F on observatory.mozilla.org) so we are not dealing with an organization of godlike power.

These people work in a bureaucracy. Some of them are geniuses that write stuxnet or break HTTPS ciphers, most are not. Most are dll or SQL injection kiddies. Or they use grep to filter emails.

Do you think they let contractors like snowden just cat whatever they want? I'm not saying he didn't go digging, but I'm sure it's just the top of their iceberg.

I didn't mean to insult your prowess or whatever, but people gotta understand the level that they operate at. It's insane

The CIA is just a collection of people. People that make mistakes. People that have emotions and whims. People that have families and children. People that want to go home at night, take sick days, and go on vacation. There is a natural limit to what the CIA can do simply because they need humans to do it.

I don't think there's much more to the CIA than what's in these leaks. To do anything more, you'd need tens of thousands of people and huge server farms. You can't hide that stuff.

>Some of the most talented software engineers in the world work intelligence

I truly doubt this for a multitude of reasons, but pay alone suggests otherwise.

Some of the most talented work intelligence but not necessarily for intelligence agency. AFAIK those guys come up with 0 days and put them for sale on the open market where all kind of bad guys buy them, not only the intelligence agencies (who are bad guys themselves).

Somebody needs to go to the library and rent Legacy of Ashes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html

> 2017

> new cuck times

Hell no.

I'm very familiar with business intelligence, and I'm somewhat familiar with govt intelligence though I've never actually filled a contract or anything, I've spoken with plenty who have, and have worked with a few as well.

The intelligence universe is completely parallel to the rest of the world. People just don't get it.

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