Headline reframed, MSM running cover for how US is ALREADY monitoring the web and now using the truth exposure event to leak their global monitoring programs.<p>The gov learned a lot with the Snowden leaks - stop relying on hidden spy programs, flip the US media to be a propaganda tool and prime people into believing this is for their own good.
Sounds like this will start another push in the US to eliminate E2E Encryption or at the very least force the use of back-doors.<p>Seems this will never end. I heard about a push 1 year or 2 ago, but I have not heard much since. So, here we go again.
The solution is to isolate systems with SIPRNet access and not permit writable media to be attached to them nor access to printers. This has been possible for decades. The problem is that the military doesn't take security seriously. They should have learned their lesson with Manning and clearly didn't.
I don't know what they do in the USG but discord is so popular for this sort of stuff, it's my go to (and slack or github) for exfiltrating data (legitimate pentest or adversary simulation). It's very easy to get a webhook URL for a chatroom and just upload data to it or generate a url to download arbitrary attachments.<p>Now, I would imagine anyone worth their salt would use dedicated rooms or servers for anythint nerarious. But in the corporate world there are sooo many security vendors that specialize in "dark web monitoring" which includes popular criminal forums but anywhere at all including discord, 4chan, reddit, telegram (very very popular now) and other places that attract anyone that will trade information. They monitor keywords that are related to your company and alert you, even pretend to be one if them and get the data to see what is being sold.<p>Now I have seen USG entities do a lot more than this against targeted individuals. My guess is they just don't have enough people to do dragnet monitoring at their very large scale (even to look at keyword matches or tune rules). They'll probably just outsource this to google (owns mandiant now who have nation state level intel collection capacity) or crowdstrike.
Honestly why not just make a database like GIFCT [0], for classified documents? You could make it possible to both preserve the current status quo (e.g. most social medias already run a check against some databases to prevent you from uploading terrorist content and CSAM) and stem the flow of classified documents. No need to ban E2E encryption, no need to have a watchful eye over everyone on the internet, no need for back doors to scan data on private devices or monitor private chat rooms.<p>However, somehow I doubt that we want to make a database like that given that, even if the hashes are irreversible, the database itself could be used to glean information.<p>Of course, a better solution could still be the one suggested in the article: stop over-classifying, and reduce access to classified materials overall.<p>[0]: <a href="https://gifct.org/hsdb/" rel="nofollow">https://gifct.org/hsdb/</a>
I remember a few years ago, when the big internet was talking about censoring the fringe (and calling it not censorship) that there were people talking about how the discussion follows the fringe and you can't silence the fringe, you can only push them elsewhere. And now, the government, still mostly monitoring the big internet, predictably misses the very impactful information exchange happening where it was driven to.<p>Will they learn their lesson? Well, that requires a genuine desire for self reflection and improvement, so I doubt it.
Strikes me as a low signal-to-noise endeavor. How many "government leaks" are someone trolling the internet with a forged document? Aliens, Kennedy assassination, political out-group targeting, etc.
I wish the selfish kid who leaked this information realized that beyond exposing secrets, this event will no doubt be used to bang the drums for more surveillance. Given the recent legislation proposal (RESTRICT Act) on that topic, this event is going to be a narrative to push it through or make it even worse.