Four-star general in eye of U.S. cyber storm
reuters.com
reuters.com
I beg to differ, it is like J. Edgar Hover, who could not be removed from his post as FBI director simply because he had files on everyone who might attempt such an ill fated move, including Presidents - especially Presidents. Only imagine if J. Edgar Hover also had every electronic communication ever sent or received...scary stuff.
Whatever the heck they are doing, they are spending a fortune, eroding everyone's privacy forever, and accomplishing nothing.
Can't wait for a few years when they get hacked and a foreign government steals all the data. Of course we will never know because whomever leaks that it happened will end up in gitmo or be Bradley Manning'd.
This country has lost its freaking mind since 9/11
It's not inappropriate to view this as a huge overreach. But neither is it correct to treat them like the FBI.
Exactly, right. They should be banned from operating inside the US by the Posse Comitatus Act and by their founding act The National Security Act of 1947. Why are we so eager to turn them into the KGB?
Dubious.
The NSA could simply throw up leads which are then investigated by the FBI who would collect evidence to be used in indictments using more traditional means.
This would also mean that the legality of NSA data collection isn't tested in courts as submitted evidence.
I'd be surprised to learn that they are collecting all this data and aren't finding crimes to investigate and arrest people over. I can imagine that the NSA send all sorts of tips to the FBI to follow up on, but that only the follow up part ever ends up in court filings or as evidence.
Of course the federal warrant-less wiretaps contained so much information it was revealed the Honorable Spitzer's affinity for lady's of the night spanned his reign as Attorney General and Governor (at least 2004 - 2008), just to give an idea of the expansive record they are building on everyone.
Arrests for what? This information gathering is entirely legal. As I've pointed out elsewhere on HN, your telephone records (not the content of your calls) have been an open book to the government since 1979, by order of the Supreme Court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland
I appreciate (and partly agree) that you feel this sort of large-scale data harvesting should be illegal, but it isn't.
You mean what they say it does.
How many of you would go work for the defense department? What would it take for you to do that?
Because the smartest people I know wouldn't do it for all of the money in the world. They won't even take defense department grants for our hackerspace (to buy tools, etc.)
I really think that the US Justice Department's treatment of "hackers" over the last 20-30 years has completely soiled any possibility that the government has of attracting talent.
Maybe I'm wrong, but at least in my bubble, nobody wants to work for the government, and no reasonable amount of money would change their mind.
I probably would have wound up as a defense contractor too, had the companies I applied to not been strict on their GPA requirements (or if I had taken college more seriously...)
A large reason is because these defense jobs are among the most interesting jobs in the area, and there's always openings. If your bubble is California, Texas, or New York, I'd imagine there's a significantly wider range of interesting non-defense jobs.
Speaking as a programmer, that is.
I attended a small engineering college in the Great Plains. A good number of my classmates ended up at defense contractors after graduation. I did a co-op at a company that does a lot of defense contracting, and I could have accepted a FT position at one, too.
I also have vivid memories of the career fair I attended during the fall of my junior year. I had dyed my hair green at the start of the semester. The only organization who seemed to take me seriously as a candidate was the NSA and I think the haircolor had something to do with that. It was enough to get me to apply for a summer internship there.
You don't have to go too far to see things like Stuxnet which were using techniques so advanced, that it amazed a lot of the best 'open' security researchers around the world.
By this, I mean that jobs like that would be the perfect, ideal job for some people; they would love it every day, and never leave.
Your experience may be more due to your mix of friends, or where you live, rather than your profession.
It only took him one flight to learn to use 40+ apps? Impressive, i've been using some of these apps for ~15 years and still don't know them well.
(BackTrack is nothing more than a Linux distro with a bunch of pentest apps - metasploit, nmap, w3af, etc. preinstalled)
True, but this is a guy who: (...) often scores over 1 million points on the "Bejeweled Blitz" online puzzle game.
so he's obviously quite 1337.
"we need to establish your tech credentials, what are you really good at"
"err, Bejeweled Blitz?"
When reading this line, I genuinely assumed they meant he hacked the app. Isn't that the case?
...but... come on.
Aides say the general often scores over 1 million points on the "Bejeweled Blitz" online puzzle game.
Yes, this came second hand (if it was said at all). No, he did not say it himself, and no, playing games is neither a crime nor a failure of character... but come on, guys that is not the way to promote your boss' image as a highly-educated security expert (which his credentials suggest to at least some extent).
Based on the article, I think a very informative perspective could be that of someone who heard him speak at Defcon. Anyone?
Either reuters got hacked (for the lulz?) or this is the worst non sequitur I've seen in a long time.
> "The great irony is we're the only ones not spying on the American people," he quipped.
M-x spook
His name is Binny: