Long Article on NSA and the Shadow Brokers
The New York Times just published a long article on the Shadow Brokers and their effects on NSA operations. Summary: it’s been an operational disaster, the NSA still doesn’t know who did it or how, and NSA morale has suffered considerably.
This is me on the Shadow Brokers from last May.
Clive Robinson • November 14, 2017 7:16 AM
@ Bruce,
Now why does reading that make me feel more cheerful B-)
On a side note, I’ve said for a very long time now that For all their resources the NSA was in many ways not that much ahead of the academic or Open communities. And certainly behind the curve of the open community in some asspects.
Longterm readers of this blog will find that things discussed on this blog “eventually” end up being used by various Government entities, that get outed thus the state of the technology they actively use gets “benchmarked”.
Thus the question arises of “How far up their knowlege curve, is the technology they actively use?”
There are a couple of ways you can look at this, the first is in some areas it’s near parity because the knowledge has a very short life cycle. The other end is that they hold as much back in reserve as they can, and effectively only use “low hanging fruit” knowledge and techniques.
Some years prior to the Ed Snowden revelations I posted on this blog that the NSA’s three main target areas were probably,
1, Protocols,
2, Standards,
3, Plaintext.
So far all the revelations have shown this to be broadly true, but also that “leaps ahead” of the open communities are quite rare when you consider the industrial rather than targeted approach they use.
As I’ve said a number of times they are constrained by the laws of nature and mathmatics just as much as everybody else is. They may be able to cheat the laws of the land but not those of nature. Which leaves the laws of mathmatics, which I would still expect them to have a lead in certain research areas. However the SigInt agencies offer bright minds neither Fame or Fortune just a moderatly comfortable life style if you toe the line all the way to retirment and beyond. Thus their previous monopoly on bright minds has gone, and in fact they are more likely to recruit only timmid minds these days. Which is what we are seeing by the paucity of government recruitment in other areas.
So although the summery has made me smile, it’s not an unexpected smile.