Posted on 01/18/2015 5:03:16 AM PST by LibWhacker
The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.
Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things."
Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). More precisely, it's operated by the NSA's digital snipers with Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the department responsible for breaking into computers.
Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to "remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware." Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to "remotely brick network cards." With programs like Berserkr they would implant "persistent backdoors" and "parasitic drivers". Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would "erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments."
An intern's tasks might also include remotely destroying the functionality of hard drives. Ultimately, the goal of the internship program was "developing an attacker's mindset."
The internship listing is eight years old, but the attacker's mindset has since become a kind of doctrine for the NSA's data spies. And the intelligence service isn't just trying to achieve mass surveillance of Internet communication, either. The digital spies of the Five Eyes alliance -- comprised of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- want more.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
I just love that term “NSA’s Digital Snipers....”
However, this digital arms race and Future battle stuff really gives me an uneasy feeling because our administration, federal agency hierarchy and their support elements are more concentrated in sniping at and waging a war of privacy against its own citizens more than terrorists whom they refuse to call “terrorists.”
Prediction:
You will hear these words come from the mouth of The Taqiyyan Lying One soon:
“NSA will be able to do a much better job protecting American citizens if we just pass Net Neutrality”
...when in reality it’s already been set in place and The One is ready to push the Execute Y/N? button. Sorta like the scene in Terminator 3 right before SkyNet unleashes all hell on earth and starts killing every human in its path just because a simple button was pushed...
Agree with your “uneasy feeling” as I sense the gradual slipping away of the Internet as an effective tool of the First Amendment in the US. If you’ve read any of Travis McGee’s trilogy, it’s easy to draw conclusions on the end results of today’s policies. The war on privacy is certainly one of the vehicles on primrose path to hell.
“Could be Muzzies. Could be Obama.”
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One and the same!
If the premise of the piece is to be believed, that is, that “surveillance is only Phase 0” and was designed to discern vulnerability in potential enemy systems, then Edward Snowden is unambiguously a traitor for disclosing it.
The ability of processors to write to their own flash memory has been a severe security flaw since it was first conceived.
It lets an attacker turn hardware into useless junk.
In critical equipment the ability to write to flash should require something like setting a physical jumper.
The lure of easy remote updating of equipment in the field has left us all insecure.
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