Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

https://www.lawfareblog.com/who-publishing-nsa-and-cia-secrets-and-why

139 126 9 years ago

jandrese2• 9 years ago

What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.

I think the term you are looking for is "Cold War".

linkregister20• 9 years ago

You don't think the Cold War in the 1950s was overwhelmingly supported by the American public?

jandrese2• 9 years ago

And the public is against hacking the FSB? Or the Russian public against hacking the CIA?

macintux• 9 years ago

I don't follow.

The quoted paragraph says nothing about public support, just public knowledge, and definitely the American public in the 1950s (and other decades) had very limited visibility into the espionage undertaken as part of the Cold War.

cestith• 9 years ago

Why need it be Russia? Are we sure the CIA and NSA are not at war with one another?

chadcmulligan• 9 years ago

There's an old get smart episode where this entire criminal organisation was made up of spies from other countries infiltrating the organisation.

rrggrr• 9 years ago

The most likely leaker to Wikileaks? The CIA itself. Its tools already compromised, perhaps by Russia or by someone internal, the sensible thing to do is to leak the exploits in such a way that: (a) they can be patched and rendered largely harmless; (b) the oversight focus is primarily on Wikileaks and not the CIA for losing its jewels. Why would Russia (or any state actor) wikileak these compromises instead of using them against unpatched targets globally? No upside & makes no sense.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

They probably have plenty of the same zero-days and using them would be a waste: once someone knows you're using an exploit it'll get patched.

It makes perfect sense for an adversarial nation's intelligence agency to undermine the CIA and Americans' trust in their own government.

America is too far away from its rivals and enemies for a conventional war to be fought on its own shores. It makes more sense to use fear (9/11) and propaganda (your CIA is spying on you!!) to get Americans at each other's throats and distracted from the real threats to their wellbeing.

After all, our political parties have been doing that for my whole life, so the groundwork laid is practically an invitation.

ak4g• 9 years ago

On one hand, yes, our political divisions no doubt make that kind of information warfare campaign tempting.

On the other hand, it's already pissed us off something fierce, and I think the narrative in the mid-term future will ultimately be one where would-be adversaries decide they don't want to be the next poor soul to be made an example of.

linkregister20• 9 years ago

It's been my experience that given the same binary, two researchers will probably find two different vulnerabilities. Given the complexity of these vulnerabilities, I see no reason why any other nation-state hacking service would lose their own, custom-developed exploits.

I agree with your comment in general, except for its confidence in U.S. military capability. Though it would be unlikely for a battle to be waged on U.S. soil, other theaters offer plenty of opportunity for a U.S. loss, especially those that diminish traditional U.S. advantages (such as air and information superiority).

bowmessage• 9 years ago

Wow, this is a seriously interesting perspective. Thanks for your comment. I have often caught myself thinking that Snowden was US-sponsored, but I couldn't put my finger on why the US would do that.

AdamN• 9 years ago

Cool Tom Clancy premise but the CIA and NSA are looking pretty tarnished with their core data processes leaking publicly. This costs them a ton of political capital. They have channels to give the vendors the exploits in a controlled way - which they would do if they wanted to (and surely have if they think the exploit is too broadly known).

tptacek4• 9 years ago

I agree. I say this somewhat regularly, so sorry to repeat it, but --- and I'm not especially well-informed here --- I think the best way to evaluate NSA and CIA motives, at least with respect to infosec, is that their #1 objective isn't geopolitical, but simply headcount. Whatever secures the most budget is going to be at the top of their stack of objectives.

Massive turnover, which is what events like this create, works directly against the goal of securing more headcount: it means they're spending a big chunk of their recruiting energy just retaining the headcount numbers they already have.

sigmar• 9 years ago

Why would Russia (or any state actor) wikileak these compromises instead of using them against unpatched targets globally? No upside & makes no sense.

Huge flaw in this reasoning- the fuzzbunch stuff was patched before it was leaked. Russia leaking recently-burned tools makes a lot of sense.

a3n2• 9 years ago

I can't imagine anyone in the CIA authorizing leaking their own tools. It's too outlandish, too career limiting. It would seem to be treason by definition.

"Nobody got fired and jailed for leaking CIA tools." Except, probably, anyone who ever did.

wu-ikkyu5• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

repples• 9 years ago

It's most probable that Russia (or perhaps other adversarial state actors) would have given all the most sensationalist, newsworthy, and reputation-damaging material to Wikileaks, but kept the really juicy zero day exploits to itself.

If this is true, I expect the CIA and/or other agencies will have gone into defense mode and tipped off the relevant vendors, giving details of vulnerabilities they either know to be leaked or have observed to be used in active attacks.

In doing that, I can't really see the CIA revealing any more than is strictly necessary, and to a very limited set of people. Certainly not dumping a whole load of compromising material to Wikileaks.

wu-ikkyu5• 9 years ago

Were there really any groundbreaking revelations out of the leak? I didn't think so.

Couldn't it be to their advantage to purposefully leak a bunch of outdated and not-so-special tools (i.e. Notepad++ dll hijack) to misdirect their adversaries as to their real capabilities?

jerf2• 9 years ago

I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. I've seen accusations that Snowden had that happen to him with his documents, for instance, by which I don't mean that I do or do not believe that, just that it's not inconceivable. You don't necessarily need a single atomic motive for this to be happening.

If so, that raises other interesting questions, such as: "What is the largest, most powerful possible intelligence agency that would not be virtually 100% guaranteed to leak so hard that non-trivial stuff would even get into the open air?" We spend a lot of time on HN worrying about how powerful a police state could become with modern technology, but it's possible that that very power could itself be a quantitative change and that an entity powerful enough to be that strong of a police state might also virtually inevitably tear itself apart with internal struggles. I mean, that would still suck for those not in the middle (though it sucks for them too; one of the reasons I really hate police states is that really nobody is happy, not even the people with power), but it may imply that it is intrinsically less stable of an arrangement than many of us fear.

I'm just musing here for other people to bounce their ideas off of, not particularly proposing a concrete idea here. But is it just me, or in the last 10 years have we not been seeing a slowly ramping rate of outright-public leaks like this? What if it's not a fluke, but a fundamental attribute of the current technology landscape and psychological makeup of humans at scale?

defen2• 9 years ago

I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations.

That would be my guess as well - an application of so-called "Fourth-generation warfare". In the same way that ISIS seeks to encourage self-radicalization, since it is virtually untraceable, Russia (or really, anyone opposed to US interests) would aim to create a climate where NSA/CIA employees "self-radicalize" in the sense that they become convinced that those organizations are engaging in illegal or immoral activities.

So, create organizations like Wikileaks, people like Ed Snowden, plant news stories, etc. At a high level the idea is that you create a broad-spectrum propaganda campaign that is designed to encourage insiders to leak secrets for the benefit of their own conscience. If you reach the right people you can gain access to tons of secrets in a way that is 100% deniable. No payments, no meetings or communications with Russian agents that can be tracked, etc.

cpr2• 9 years ago

Why would Russia (or other anti-US entities) need to create such a climate?

Isn't it prima facie clear that the three-letter agencies are essentially rogue governments (the "deep state"), a law unto themselves, and thus completely antithetical to the whole idea of a democratic republic?

So internal people at those agencies, if they have half a brain and a conscience, and are patriotic in the original sense of loving one's patria (fatherland), though hating the bad aspects of one's government, should already be willing to spill the so-called secrets by which these agencies operate their illegal and immoral agendas.

draw_down3• 9 years ago

I'm going to guess before I read this that Russia comes up a bunch.

Update: yep. It's all Russia all the time these days.

charonn0• 9 years ago

They are the most likely suspect, aren't they?

wu-ikkyu5• 9 years ago

Why are they the most likely suspect? Aside from the popular notion that they are. There are billions of people across the world who could have done this.

zigzigzag3• 9 years ago

The logic for that appears to be circular. Schnier himself says he simply "doesn't think" Iran or North Korea are capable. Based on what, exactly? The skills to find and develop exploits are not particularly rare. This isn't atomic physics during WW2. Primarily what you need is time and money, but not a lot of time and not a lot of money. Both Iran and North Korea have proven capable of building a nuclear programme despite the efforts of the entire world to stop them, so what makes Schnier think they can't do the same for cyberwarfare which is dramatically easier to engage in?

Well ... nothing. He just knows it's the Russians.

brilliantcode• 9 years ago

Putin, in case anyone had trouble with the article's implied message.

mirimir2• 9 years ago

Specifics aside, this may just be more Cold War. In a new realm, for sure, and one where Russia isn't as disadvantaged by resource limitations. Trying to match US physical resources arguably destroyed the Soviet Union.

But I also wonder whether the US got too careless about hiring blackhat hackers. And whether some of them left backdoors.

jwtadvice10• 9 years ago

This article reads pretty lazily in my opinion.

It fails to mention that the CIA had an internal hunt for the contractors which leaked the "Vault7" arsenal - confirming that indeed it was a contractor and indeed that they had mishandled the arsenal by providing global access to the weapon cache.

It also failed to mention the full original story provided by the Shadow Brokers and those that reported on them: that NSA had (similarly) mishandled hacking tools by loading too many of them onto attack staging servers. This story has not changed, nor have the recent publications contradicted it. In fact the Shadow Brokers said exactly what they were going to publish when they first went public and have followed through with what they said they were going to publish exactly.

The author speculates and conspires that both of these must be Russia. Mostly it's the standard fare conspiracy theorist "to whose benefit" but it's clear the author doesn't understand whether and how Russia would benefit from these disclosures.

Finally, after all the public panic induced over "Russian hacking" during the election, there's been no intelligence summary, statement, or even Congressional statement to the affect that either the Shadow Brokers or the Vault7 leaks are in any way attributed to Russia. Wouldn't that have been fuel for that fire?

My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services. My guess is that Vault7 was a CIA and contractor who shared the massive trove too broadly, where it ended up in the hands of the Wikileaks journalism reporting outlet.

The author appeals to Occam's Razor only by name. The lack of careful analysis in the article insists, unfortunately, in using unfounded speculation in the place of evidence, and horror, to then appeal to Occam's Razor on behalf of assumptions.

frabbit2• 9 years ago

I like this theory: "My guess is that the Shadow Brokers are a criminal organization with informal relationships with state intelligence services."

But weirdly, why are any of us including Bruce discussing this? It's almost as though we believed that we live in some sort of democracy where we have access to information and a legal system which could act on that information instead of an oligarchy ruled by a small elite with the aid of various armed enforcers... some secret some not.

Silly proles.

meesles• 9 years ago

Unfortunately that attitude does little to help or try to discover what has happened. Cynicism is a double-edged sword. Once you give up the will to question and criticize, that's when democracy truly fails.

walshemj• 9 years ago

That's a "brave" assertion to make about Bruce Schneier

jwtadvice10• 9 years ago

I've been following Bruce Schneier's blog for a long time. He is a decent cryptographer, and a notable personality and technical expert.

He's very new to "geopolitics".

In fact, he's published a number of corrections on his blog about fundamentally incorrect predictions he's made about Shadow Brokers in particular (he predicted that their encrypted file they published was just random garbage and didn't actually contain any cyberweapons).

Here Bruce is speaking about things beyond his expertise. It's not particularly brave to point out the flaws in his analysis.

thraway20162• 9 years ago

It's not just Schneier. Seems that nearly everybody in infosec is convinced of Russia's complicity in everything from the DNC leaks, to Vault7, to ShadowBrokers, and now allegedly the Macron campaign.

Listening to the RiskyBusiness podcast, for instance, it's incredibly obvious that the community is fully in the tank for the Russian attribution hypothesis, and habitually carries the water for FiveEyes IC.

Meanwhile, we mere plebs have very little evidence to judge the community's beliefs by, other than blind faith in, say, CrowdStrike.

If the infosec community would like to actually state their case to the plebs, I would love to hear it. But all I've ever been able to find is "the phishing email is a little similar to something produced by APT28, and there was an IP once used by FancyBear like 5 years ago, so it's 99.9999% certainly Russia".

And nobody seems to care enough about those outside the community to even try to state the case.

jameskegel• 9 years ago

I have the utmost respect for him in respect to crypto, but 'geopolitical pundit' would not be something I'd list under his strengths. Again, I have the highest respect for him in regards to his main work, and I'm not trying to detract from his opinion, here.

kobeya• 9 years ago

Not everyone holds Bruce Schneier in high regard.

hackuser9• 9 years ago

The following comment might seem off-topic, but it's not. There are well-known techniques to propaganda, and it is important that we recognize them by now or we will continue to be victimized by it. Also, we cannot wait until we have certain evidence of propaganda to point it out: It's very rarely certain that something is propaganda - that would be poor execution indeed, violating its basic purpose - so we cannot give propaganda the benefit of the doubt, wait for certainty to call it what it is, and therefore empower it. That benefit of the doubt is normal, healthy good faith, but propaganda is a parasite on good faith; good faith is a tool of manipulation for propaganda, used to take advantage of others.

Here are some techniques I know; I'd be interested in more or where I can find useful research and expertise about it:

* Create uncertainty. The strategy is not to persuade people, but to create enough uncertainty to disable them and disable debate. One way to do this is to question every possible flaw in the evidence; in reality, nothing is so clear-cut that there aren't questions (and that especially applies to intelligence operations).

* Make many baseless claims in order to force others onto defense and occupy all their resources. A baseless allegation takes seconds to make but hours or days to defend. Also, many people remember only the first headline, the baseless allegation, and don't see the followup story. Again, it's a way of disabling debate.

By design, it's tough to deal with propaganda - it's tough to continue intelligent, valuable discussion in the face of it. I'm not sure of the answer, but comments matching those techniques, such as the parent, seem to appear when Russia is discussed, for example.

One thing I do is to look for whether the comment adds substantive knowledge to the debate, or whether it just increases uncertainty about others and includes baseless information (unsubstantiated claims and rumors). Do I know more about the subject after reading the comment, or less?

EDIT: Clarified my purpose in the first paragraph.

jwtadvice10• 9 years ago

Hi! I'm the parent user you've implied may be a propagandist for Russia.

Your comment does the following:

* Create uncertainty.

* Make many baseless claims in order to force others onto defense and occupy all their resources.

And we can seriously ask the question "Do I know more about the subject after reading (your) comment, or less?" (I think the answer is less - there's a great many things we could discuss about propaganda techniques that look nothing like the sophomoric list you've supplied).

Are you a propagandist, by your own criteria? I don't think so. Can you see how your criteria for finding propagandists isn't even useful?

I'm not one either. In fact, if you think I am the appropriate avenue is to alert the moderators.

In any case my comment is extremely informative and adds substantive knowledge to the debate, and people know more about the subject after reading my comment.

Figure I need to get in here to reply before this whole thread turns into a witch-hunting exercise.

empath754• 9 years ago

I think something that makes propaganda difficult to deal with is that you are fundamentally dealing with someone who is not operating in good faith.

Usually when reporters work or people argue, they're generally trying to arrive at the truth, even if it's in a flawed way.

For the propagandist, truth is merely another tool in the toolkit, and they'll use it when it advances their purpose and discard it when it doesn't. The same goes with logic and reason. The propogandist will in fact use the truth and reason and logic as much as possible for the simple reason that it's so effective.

This is why Wikileaks was so devastating. As far as I know, there was nothing fabricated in any of it, but it produced an inaccurate impression of the candidates because one side had all their dirty laundry aired in public and he other side operated in secrecy. You'd be a fool to think that a similar release of RNC and Trump emails wouldn't have produced just as much damaging material.

So now the counter-propagandist is put in the difficult position of arguing against the publishing of the truth, not a particular nice place to be, rhetorically.

I think the only way to effectively fight it is our own countermeasures, fighting the truth with more truth. Unfortunately, the executive branch of the us and the U.K. is thoroughly compromised, so the west is going to have to rely on France and Germany to step up their games.

neuronexmachina• 9 years ago

The RAND think-tank published a pretty good white paper last year on the Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" propaganda model, which seems in line with what you're describing.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

empath754• 9 years ago

This is Bruce Schneier, btw. So not some random blogger.

BlackjackCF• 9 years ago

Seems like some people on here don't know Bruce Schneier based off the way that they're shitting on the article?

ignoramceisblis2• 9 years ago

Should we not criticize someone's publications, even if we think they deserve criticism? And should we use their name as reason for abstaining from that?

Not to imply that you do this, but here's some general advice: don't appeal to authority--at least for the sake of authority. Don't idolize. We should be free to criticize whomever we want, if we think we have good reason to. If we don't have such freedom, we'll quickly find ourselves in a state where a select group of individuals have a disproportionate amount of power over others. Though I speak too late.

linkregister20• 9 years ago

It makes even more sense to criticize the article in that case. Schneier's studies and body of work is in the cryptography field. Not international relations.

He's no more credible than Ben Carson as HUD director or Bill Nye as a climate scientist.

jorblumesea2• 9 years ago

Highly unpopular opinion, but Wikileaks is seeming more like an anti-western operation funded by Russia. The more they leak the more their bias is showing.

draw_down3• 9 years ago

Mmm, you might be surprised how popular that opinion is, particularly among American Democrats.

jorblumesea2• 9 years ago

The bias is so obvious it's hard not to draw conclusions from their actions.

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

Not shocking, considering Wikileaks being anti-leaks when they affected Trump. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/817322050297745408

drzaiusapelord• 9 years ago

Why wouldn't it be? Its a completely rational take on this.

bounded• 9 years ago

Wikileaks got started around 2006, are you suggesting they were funded from the start or more recently? Any sources to back this up?

daddyo4• 9 years ago

They were "fleecing" intelligence agencies from a very early stage. Here is old mailing list communication where Assange says as much (besides admitting they pull a lot of leaks when mob and intelligence agencies extract over Tor).

Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2007 07:21:34 -0800 To: From: John Young The CIA would be the most likely $5M funder. Soros is suspected of being a conduit for black money to dissident groups racketeering for such payola. Now it may be that that is the intention of WL because its behavior so far fits the pattern. If fleecing the CIA is the purpose, I urge setting a much higher funding goal, in the $100M range and up. The US intel agencies are awash in funds they cannot spend fast enough to keep the Congressional spigot wide open. Academics, dissidents, companies, spy contractors, other nation’s spy agencies, whole countries, are falling over themselves to tap into this bountiful flood. But competition is fierce, and accusations of deception are raging even as the fleecers work in concert. Chinese dissidents — a brand name among many — are already reaping huge benefits from covert funding from the US and from the PRC, along with others in the former Soviets, in Africa and South America, inside the US, UK and Europe, in the Middle East and the Koreas, who know how to double-cross ditzy-rich Dads and Moms. In solidarity to fuck em all.

To: John Young <jya[a t]pipeline.com> From: Wikileaks <wikileaks[a t]wikileaks.org> Subject: martha stuart pgp Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 12:20:25 -0500 —–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—– Version: None J. We are going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly, but not entirely a feint. Invention abounds. Lies, twists and distorts everywhere needed for protection. Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inxhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We’re going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new. If fleecing the CIA will assist us, then fleece we will. We have pullbacks from NED, CFR, Freedomhouse and other CIA teats. We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and fulan dafa associations and… russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We’re drowing. We don’t even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1Tb.

QuinnyPig• 9 years ago

It went from "fascinating" to "dear lord what game are they playing at" to "I can't even articulate what they are anymore" in a surprisingly short span of years.

They're not even a real wiki!

SFJulie2• 9 years ago

Well 2ble highly unpopular opinion: russians are a tad baked in a very passeist ideology that may make them do a good things while they have ill intentions.

The data so far have been pretty checked, and pretty alarming on the actual state of democracy. To be honest it looks like NSA/CIA are now copying the worst of the KGB bad practices that made USSR being tagged dictature.

Russians thinks democracy cannot reform themselves and it will lead to chaos as the truth about USSR made USSR crumble down by losing their allies in the western world.

Is it sure?

Let Russia spend money thinking they undermine democracies while actually helping them being stronger.

Hell may be paved with good intentions and bad intentions may also results in good deeds.

Anyway, when you have lived during cold war it is fun to see Russia and USA swap their place.

Johnny555• 9 years ago

I want to know why we are allowing government agencies to accumulate a vast trove of data (of dubious intelligence value) about everyone when they've shown that they are unable to secure their own secrets.

blisterpeanuts• 9 years ago

Maybe a naive question, but why do CIA and NSA hire so many contractors for such sensitive work?

Perhaps they should restrict these sensitive positions to full timers who have committed to the Agency -- i.e. they know that the organization will be watching them pretty much for the rest of their lives. Ex-agency people I've met said they have to notify the Agency whenever they travel abroad -- if they don't hear back, it's fine, but the Agency reserves the right to stop them.

The amount of damage (some might prefer to say, whistle blowing) done by contractors in recent years suggests that it's time to reexamine who gets such sensitive access.

daddyo4• 9 years ago

Capitalism at work. Commercial businesses need profit to survive and so, in general, deliver better innovative products. There is no way for CIA and NSA to compete with Google on search and web crawling, so why bother competing with them with their own subpar products?

I don't think the contractors leaked themselves. I think foreign intelligence agencies target most of them, and having multiple attack points yields more leaks than having just a single well-guarded agency. Trade-off between clamming up and remaining State-of-the-art.

linkregister20• 9 years ago

Judging by your comment, you don't know very much about contracting in the IC. I'd rather you be less authoritative and leave it at "I think X" instead of "It's definitely X".

empath754• 9 years ago

Political bullshit has made it so hard to hire and fire government employees at realistic wages that the government couldn't function without them.

willstrafach• 9 years ago

Contractors must go through the same security clearance adjudication process as gov employees. They must work in NSA accredited SCIFs at the facility or may even work at an Agency building. Additionally, the executives at a contractor need to go through a security review process as well (I do not know much about the extent of this).

Your concern absolutely makes sense when thinking of "contractors" in the private sector (in the sense that one may think security may be more lax or that they may cut corners to save money, but in the IC it is usually very close to being an Agency employee, just that contracts are used for specific needs for budgeting / forecasting purposes.

mmaunder• 9 years ago

Final paragraph: "What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate."

Correct. For over 75 years now. Article is just a summary of recent events in IC leaks. I clicked because I thought the author was going to speculate they're planned leaks as part of a counter-intel operation. That would have been interesting.

cat199• 9 years ago

Correct. For over 75 years now.

Have a look at Lenin's train and try 100.

Or, the dawn of time, depending.

SFJulie2• 9 years ago

It was a fun read, but I can outsmart him in a non fact based analysis that might be closer to the truth.

In its blog circa 1813 at St Hélène Napoleon posted on YikYak never credit to malice what can be simply explained by incompetence, and while trying to dominate the world with a huge army, I discovered that my machiavelic plans were anyway countered by having huge organization that tend have incompetence at critical points.

Well, Napoléon may have been right. The estimate headcount of all the US agencies are 3 000 000 workers, a huge amount of the population if you want to keep stuffs secret.

If not enough, you have at least 5 big agencies and a lot of small one.

You also have a tendency to have the patriots like Snowden attracted to secret services and army.

Some of them whose opinions may diverge as much with their agencies heading as their sense of duty is strong.

Plus without uncovering any big secrets, since 1986 commercial war with Europa and the WTO agreement on stopping to subsidize companies with public money, NASA, DARPA and secret services have been used as a way to discrelty fund part of the economy (namely IT, aeronautic and military industry). And let's no lie to ourselves one of the biggest part of the agencies' job is economical intelligence to favor the interest of some companies.

So, well, these subsidies are a resource increasingly taken by the services :) and some companies want this money.

Subsidies used to go in road infrastructures where mafia was happy to have its share. Urbanism used to favor real eastate....

There are a lot of enemies inside the USA against the services and their power over this huge budget of theirs.

My take on the issue is that maybe russian ... mob ... constituted of USA citizens could totally be involved, but as much as any other economical agents in the USA.

The problem of having too much money is that you'd better live in the shadow to not become the target of jealousy.

It may be knowing how much CIA and NSA have been involved with IT companies (as both suppliers and recipient of subsidize and probably economical intelligence) that other sectors of the economy like .... real estate, agriculture, energy, distribution want to have their place under the sun back again.

So, going back to Napoléon, I do think that the leak in secret service employing that much persons not all trusted requires so much duplication of information and internal leaks to simply get the work done on a day to day basis, that leaks are just a simple expression of a probable incompetence that did not scale up very well.

Yes, the russians may have opportunistically played with it. But clearly the biggest problem first is to have huge mammothean bureaucratic agencies.

Voilà, me too I made my own I don't know nothing I will tell you everything analysis based on wind.

Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

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