Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. to Its Core

NYT ^ | November 12, 2017 | SCOTT SHANE, NICOLE PERLROTH and DAVID E. SANGER

[maggief]

WASHINGTON — Jake Williams awoke last April in an Orlando, Fla., hotel where he was leading a training session. Checking Twitter, the cybersecurity expert was dismayed to discover that he had been thrust into the middle of one of the worst security debacles ever to befall American intelligence.

Mr. Williams had written on his company blog about the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that had somehow obtained many of the hacking tools the United States used to spy on other countries. Now the group had replied in an angry screed on Twitter. It identified him — correctly — as a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking group, Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., a job he had not publicly disclosed. Then the Shadow Brokers astonished him by dropping technical details that made clear they knew about highly classified hacking operations that he had conducted.

America’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency had been deeply infiltrated.

(snip)

Fifteen months into a wide-ranging investigation by the agency’s counterintelligence arm, known as Q Group, and the F.B.I., officials still do not know whether the N.S.A. is the victim of a brilliantly executed hack, with Russia as the most likely perpetrator, an insider’s leak, or both. Three employees have been arrested since 2015 for taking classified files, but there is fear that one or more leakers may still be in place. And there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013.

[Thud]

This is hilarious. The best private computer security operators have been better than the NSA for years. Now everyone who wants to knows about it.

[zeugma]

In the days when we had the CIA for external intelligence activities, and the FBI for internal intelligence activities, to include the background investigation of every applicant to the U.S. military, why was the “NSA’ formed? Who ordered it’s birth? What was “the need” for ANOTHER intelligence office, since the U.S. Army; Navy; Air Force, had offices already established, and worked in conjunction with BOTH the FBI and CIA???

They wanted a secret organization that could do anything it wanted, since there was No Such Agency.