Trove of Stolen Data Is Said to Include Top-Secret U.S. Hacking Tools

&gt; &quot;F.B.I. agents on the case, advised by N.S.A. technical experts, do not believe Mr. Martin is fully cooperating, the officials say. He has spoken mainly through his lawyers&quot;<p>As is his right and what every sensible entirely innocent individual in his position should be doing. If the government (at any level from civic to federal to international) arrests you for any crime with serious charges, it is ABSOLUTELY the most prudent thing to communicate solely through your lawyers.<p>There is too great of a risk of being convicted due to doubt and natural human inconsistency otherwise.<p>For anyone that doubts how even the most innocent person can be convicted for not heeding this advice, there is a hilarious and content-dense lecture on the subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZGgKLgVNfAo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZGgKLgVNfAo</a>

Would be cute if a foreign country passed an analogue to JASTA [1] making the United States responsible for damages resulting from its developing, and keeping secret, tools for the exploitation of security vulnerabilities in civilian software.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Justice_Against_Sponsors_of_Terrorism_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Justice_Against_Sponsors_of_Te...</a>

As far as I&#x27;m concerned, the NSA are the enemy - so props to anybody who can poke a stick in their eye. I just hope this guy doesn&#x27;t wind up in Guantanamo for the rest of his life.

&gt; F.B.I. agents on the case, advised by N.S.A. technical experts, do not believe Mr. Martin is fully cooperating, the officials say. He has spoken mainly through his lawyers, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman of the federal public defender’s office in Baltimore.<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re just mad that he didn&#x27;t confess immediately, instead of doing the smart thing of having professional handle everything. Do they really expect someone to cooperate gladly when repercussions could be severe?

It seems like contractors are a massive attack surface for the DoD. I do wonder why they gave a clearance to someone who was apparently a hoarder. If collecting things that interest you in a compulsory manner doesn&#x27;t suggest to you that this person might be abused by foreign powers, but marijuana use does, your secrets will flow like water.

So, basically, it looks like there&#x27;s a reasonable probability that this guy isn&#x27;t the leaker.<p>I know that if I wanted to actually blow the whistle on somebody like the NSA, I would make sure to plant the evidence on somebody else to give them a juicy target to latch onto.

The Shadow Brokers are still active online. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;DarkNetMarkets&#x2F;comments&#x2F;57le5u&#x2F;theshadowbrokers_leaks_bill_clinton_lorretta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;DarkNetMarkets&#x2F;comments&#x2F;57le5u&#x2F;thes...</a><p>However nothing in the message proves that it was written recently.

The advantage gained by welding advanced technologies is driven by exponential sales cycles. If we allow the government to continue their &quot;back room&quot; rationalizations, there will be a point our demand for more faster will come back and haunt us from a cost standpoint. With exponential advances in technology come several orders of magnitude more oversight capacity by a government who continues to make serious errors in calculations when doing things in secret.<p>The government isn&#x27;t currently bad because people in it are bad. It&#x27;s bad because our government has some bad ideas on what it means to govern successfully externally, in an age that is accelerating internal change in individuals. We want it better faster, too.<p>If we&#x27;re going to continue to have government, the government needs to immediately become 90% more transparent and start setting the vision for us to do what we need to do to manage these changes.<p>And then I look at our current election and just shrug my shoulders.

odd things about this story:<p>1) were the tools taken out of a secure environment? Or did he download it from the net when it was published?<p>2) how could he have taken such sensitive tools out?<p>3) why so many leaks of an ongoing investigation?

&gt; He always thought of himself like a James Bond-type person, wanting to save the world from computer evil<p>Maybe the NSA needs less James Bond characters and more engineers.

Question, did NYT break their website for noScript users or did I manage somehow to break the NYT website for myself? (I tested with chromium and no plugins and the website works there, but if I try to access it with FF and noScript, the articles only display a log-in form, even if I grant permissions to everything.)

The fundamental flaw is employing contractors.. Governments should be doing all things they are responsible for in house.<p>Contracting anything out costs in terms of added security risk and in profits a contractor will want.