February 08, 2014
US State Department rolled, as NSA slides further off-mission. Shoulda used a BlackPhone :D
In what is either belly laugh-level hilarity, or a serious wakeup call for the American taxpayer, Reuters reports on the recent "Fuck the EU" leaks of phone calls. (h/t to zerohedge.) It turns out the recordings may have been (gasp) lifted off the airwaves:
Some U.S. officials blamed Moscow for leaking the call, noting that the recording, posted anonymously, was first highlighted in a tweet from a Russian official.In Washington, U.S. officials said Nuland and Pyatt apparently used unencrypted cellphones, which are easy to monitor. The officials said smart phones issued to State Department officials had data encryption *but not voice encryption*.
Wtf? Where the hell are you, oh, NSA's security division aka Central Security Service?
The Information Assurance mission confronts the formidable challenge of preventing foreign adversaries from gaining access to sensitive or classified national security information.
How is it that officials of the State Department have zero, zip, nada, nuttin security while blathering on about international negotiations involving an entire strategic country, a major pipeline, and the number one PR circle-jerk for the nation-states?
I had thought that all these things were in the killing zone for the NSA. Ukraine, energy, the Olympic Games, check check check!
But apparently not. The evidence on mission drift is somewhat damning, and becoming deafening.
They have dropped the baby in many ways. They recently downgraded their irrational fear of terrorism, by prioritising the insider threat as a 'national security threat'. Without apparently understanding the bleeding obvious, that insiders such as Snowden and Manning are a threat to them, not to the people who pay their salaries:
“[Snowden and the insider threat] certainly puts us at risk of missing something that we are trying to see, which could lead to [an attack],” said Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Spoken without any cynicism or humility!
If they got back to work, and crafted their mission to deliver return on investment to the taxpayer, instead of stealing from other countries' taxpayers, they wouldn't have time to worry about schoolboy plots like terrorism and rogue sysadms.
Message to the American taxpayer: demand your money back. Buy a blackphone instead.
Maybe they just got confused as to which Olympic Games they were supposed to be covering?
...
Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 1, 2012
WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. ...
Posted by: Anon - Olympic Games at February 9, 2014 09:54 AM