NSA Official Warned About Threat 17 Years Before Snowden | Hacker News Reader

NSA Official Warned About Threat 17 Years Before Snowden

bloomberg.com

55 pointsT-A14 comments

Oh Gawd...

It's not "NSA Official Warned About ... the threat to freedom that is the NSA"

It's "NSA Official Warned ... that a low level employee might warn the world about the threat to freedom that is the NSA"

That was predictable given the site. The business world fundamentally seeks predictability over everything else, and only cares about individuals' rights if they effect short-term efficiency.

It's still an interesting point he makes. One sysadmin in any powerful organization can likely gain access to that organization's deepest, darkest secrets, and abuse that access for anything they like, whether good or bad.

Unless you have good processes involving mandatory access controls (like the NSA added to Linux), multiple eyes on everything, and audit. Crazy overkill for most situations, but more or less what I'd expected from the NSA. Key management is comparatively easy inside a military style hierarchy.

This article is silly. The title suggests that if they had only listened to some guy stating the obvious 17 years ago all this could have been prevented as if "don't let your sys admin steal all your sensitive files" is some deep insight. The problem is more likely that their IT staff is woefully inept and either weren't bothering to look or didn't notice what was going on right under their noses.

Not even that. If the problem didn't eventuate for 17 years, then it was hardly an insipient problem. A lot changed for the internal structure of these organizations over 17 years, particularly due to 9/11.

Agreed.

It was the same thing with 9/11. There was a senator (Alan J. Dixon) in 1986 who wrote an article in Playboy called, "The Terror Next Time. The cochairman of the senate antiterrorism caucus argues that a major attack in the U.S. is inevitable."

Although he points out the lack of information sharing between intelligence agencies, he was sure it would be a US based group like the KKK or Aryan Nation then some terrorist group from the Middle East. It's an interesting article either way as hindsight is always 20/20, right?

He was right about domestic terrorists in a way.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing

[1] http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/crime/terrorists/timothy-m...

If the problem didn't eventuate for 17 years

That we know of.

Snowden took the data public. Anyone who did otherwise wouldn't have appeared to the public eye.

That's another key risk of surveillance data: we know at at least one guy walked off with it. We don't know who else could have.

Sometimes laziness beneficial for the world. Maybe not for the agency.

Features will always be prioritized over security.

For an agency with "Security" in their name, they really prioritized security very low.

I loved the part about printers. They have printers?!

in other news: Some random official warned about threat decades before Fukushima, Chernobyl.

Government agencies, by their very nature, might have never entered the realm of common sense and proper risk management. There are a lot of good hypotheses for reasons for that.

One better realized the fact and dealt with it instead of crying "I/He told you so".

i'm with you, nsa. very sad indeed.

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