[FRIAM] patriot hackers, again

[Steve Smith]

> My limited experience with the type of people that join the NSA (that the NSA wants) [⛧] is that they would fail in the same way the DC cops failed, biased thinking a bunch of fat, bearded, white dudes aren't really a threat.

The one and only time I have been inside the belly of the NSA beast, the
folks I met with exhibited both extremes...  overall they were like too
many civil-service tech people with secure careers... I was there to
demo the network-security viz system we'd developed for LANL which
caste  traffic through the LANL (open) firewall into a space-defense
metaphor.   We'd had very limited success (among DOE/NNSA folks) with it
at least *demonstrating* intuitive identification of various attack
styles already recognizeable to practiced network techs (by statistical
signatures) and slightly more success in *discovering* new variants that
were washed out in the statistics which they then codified in
statistical analysis once recognized.

<TR;dbtttR "old man stories" alert>

NSA's security was "yet tighter" than LANL in a certain way... the only
way we could demo was to bring in write-once optical media (CD or DVD,
can't remember) which they inserted into a sacrificial laptop that was
destined for the shredder after we left (so they claimed?0.  Their
machines for this purpose were pretty generic but included the Linux
install we needed to run at all... without a decent graphics card, our
demo ran pretty weak, but got the point across.   I can't talk about
what they showed us, except to say that it was rather clever and
inspired even though they claimed they had to "detune" it for us since
we didn't have code-word clearance...   it was clear that they were
acting as a diode and even then they seemed to be aware of what Glen
references as the "holographic model" where they clearly believed that
their very superficial interactions with us were at risk of exposing
something deep.   I even got the feeling that there were "hidden
observers" in the room behind a one-way mirror (or camera) watching our
demos in such a was as to not give away any confirm or deny in their
body language or questions.  Maybe/probably not.

Because of the level/style of security involved, they did not have any
normal "vending machines" but did have coffee and sodas from their break
room and a DIY "grappling claw" machine that you could put 4 quarters in
and drive, waldo-style the claw over a grid of ice-cream treats in a
plexiglass covered freezer, reach down and pick one up to be dropped
into a delivery chute.   Supposedly one of the staff there "invented" it
and maintained it (mechanically and refilling it) but when we went to
get our treats it was obvious something was amiss...  there were a
handful of "treats" strewn on top of the stacks such that some were
blocked by them so you had to pick from the ones that had been
apparently dropped askew or from those not blocked.   There was also a
stack of quarters on the honor system for anyone who "dropped" a
treat.   We enjoyed using our guest-status to use some of the quarters
to retrieve some of the scattered treats.     I guess this anecdote is
to reinforce that in some ways these people were "geeks like us" but DID
have an overlay from hyper-security AND civil-service careerism (LANL
isn't civil-service but Marcus can surely attest it shares some of the
worst qualities) that might obviate the real obsessive cleverness that I
think emerges/erupts among startup (and some grad-school) environments.

To reinforce the stereotype (with myself as the butt), while at a
meeting (outside my LANL employment) at USC school of Journalism
(Anneburg) not long after 9-11, one of the other participants (involved
in the Wayback Machine) offered me a USB stick loaded with what he
claimed to be *all of the unredacted pager traffic* in Manhattan during
the incident.   I did have my own private laptop by then and loaded it
up (tabular text file), but ultimately did not have the toolset I was
used to using available to it and never did more than a cursory analysis
to convince myself that it *might be* what the guy claimed it to be.  
It was either Rick Prelinger <https://archive.org/details/prelinger> or
Trevor Paglen <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Paglen> who had the
source material first, but we all three left with it.  The rest of the
group were self-declared "English Majors".  Neither Rick or Trevor 
seemed prepared/capable of their own analysis (it seemed more like a
fetish item to them) and as it evolved, my own paranoia (bred of working
in a high security) environment, had me uncomfortable digging very
deep...   and eventually let it slide away during a hard-drive
upgrade... it *was* huge.  I've never found (nor looked hard in a long
while) any evidence of such a trove "in the wild"...  I crossed paths
with Paglen a decade ago in Santa Fe at a "Mapping Science" workshop and
he played me with a blank response that he never had nor saw nor knew of
any such data set.   I think he was serious (about denying) but he might
have just been jerking my chain... he never struck as anything but
(overly) serious... so I don't know?

</TLaR;dbtttR>

I get the impression that the FBI is much less monolithic, and this is
more directly in their domain than the NSA.  If they have one copy, they
may have many, independently obtained and studied.  The NSA might (more)
well have logs of all *encrypted* traffic amongst Parler (and other
sites) members.   I wonder how many bad actors there are in the world
generating arbitrarily large streams of encrypted (random?) data for
folks like the NSA to try to wade through/store...  security through
obscurity?  And use as a vehicle for steganographic transmissions.

Giger IS disturbing!  I think maybe Jon could be commissioned to do his
"Mushroom of Kells" trick on some Giger Art with a
biomorphic-closely-packed holes source so you can enjoy in your
trypophobic way how some of the rest of us experience Giger's work in
the raw!  (actually I'm mostly immune to Giger's style of creepiness and
am fascinated in a synaesthetic way with trypophobic imagery, and I'm
not telling where my synaesthetic weak spots are, the CIA/KGB/Mossad
will have to dig them out from under the fingernails of the chalkboard
of my psyche on their own <cackle!> ).

- Steve

>  So, while Parler might be on their radar, I think changes are less than random they'd have archived it. The FBI, on the other hand, is much more likely to have done so.
>
>
> [⛧] Full disclosure, I took a few steps in applying just before graduating. My roommate did accept a job offer. That roommate *hated* my H.R. Giger prints. 8^D
>
> On 1/12/21 11:13 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Question to those who do this for a living:  With what confidence can we conclude that NSA already has the whole trove, and won’t even need to ask donk_enby to send them a copy?
>>
>> It doesn’t _follow_ from the fact that an individual could do it that they already did, but if she did it because it wasn’t hard, it seems very unlikely that they didn’t.
>>
>> On the other hand, having a public copy is great.
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