Comment by yborg
8 years ago
So this is the "extraordinary law enforcement effort" Rosenstein referred to. Check printer logs, send FBI to leaker's house.
This will certainly make anybody thinking of leaking to the Intercept think twice.
8 years ago
So this is the "extraordinary law enforcement effort" Rosenstein referred to. Check printer logs, send FBI to leaker's house.
This will certainly make anybody thinking of leaking to the Intercept think twice.
I'm not sure how to say this, but I've been in a position to see what the US government considers some of its most valuable technical resources. More than a decade ago, a very specific breach of security happened in a specific place, operated by "a company". That organization sent in a team of people from D.C. for five days that specifically were "extraordinarily good" at their jobs in order to analyze the machines where this breach happened. All three of these folks were stumped for three days by deleted browser cookies on a Windows machine, no kidding. I was originally one of a handful of suspects, but hearing about their ineptitude was so fucking infuriating that I wouldn't keep quiet. Eventually, one of the people in power in that place (who was on my side) convinced the "crack forensics team" to hear me out. So I met with them and discussed the plan, and then I walked them through installing a stupid FOSS utility for recovering deleted browser cache and cookies, and they were able to extract a URL, account name, and timestamp from the cookies on the machine which then let them pull up the right footage from the security camera, and catch the criminal responsible. The person in charge of the whole thing offered me a job (which I did not take). Ever since that day, whenever I hear something like "extraordinary law enforcement effort" I think about those stupid contractors and how I could have somehow suffered legal problems because of them. I absolutely do not trust the US government's claims about its own technical capabilities. I mean obviously not everyone working for the government is an ID-10-T, but here is supposedly one of the best technical teams this organization has to offer, and they can't even get this really basic shit right. And not just "can't get it right" but consider the ramifications of their being wrong! Amazing, and eye-opening, and frightening.
Quite. The US government employs contractors more or less on the Charlie Sheen principle: it pays them to go away. There are some really sharp people employed by contractors, and some others that are just billed as if they were.
I'd like to second this. The "crack team" was the company that won the contract. I've seen first hand of companies hiring just about anyone as a contractor before a contract was even granted. Promises of a high potential salary usually lures these people.
There is a perception in the intelligence community that The Intercept has ties to Wikileaks and the kremlin (based on people with ties to the IC on twitter), so I assume they wanted to make a point.
I think we might also assume that other NSA leaks to MSM might have been done with some level of institutional approval.
If you're getting your news from IC twitter, you're going to have a bad time.
IC twitter takes Louise Mensch's insane conspiracy theories seriously, and legitimately believes that every malicious packet on the Internet is attributable Fancy Bear.