Just use a co-workerâs computer.
That is, if you accept anything the NSA says at face value any more.
Or send me your password and I will read the article to you over the phone. We already have your cell number.
Ah, this explains the presence of a large balance scale and a supply of ducks outside the NSAâs sinister black cube during the past week or soâŚ
Itâs probably good for their souls to go work somewhere else. I imagine theyâre competent and the NSA firing them is basically bullshit. They should be able to find a job somewhere else doing something similar, youâd hope.
The NSA is a corrupt bullshit organisation by the sounds of things. Iâll repost this BBC article looking at the (in)effectiveness of MI5 in the UK.
Classic ones including missing the fact that they employed a paedophile who passed six security vetting procedures, who kept a file card index on over 2000 schoolchildren, and who was also a KGB agent, that even the KGB wanted to dump and therefore dined openly with, in the hope that heâd get spotted.
Except I would think when you get a security clearance, they would go over the bit about not sharing your goddam passwords.
so the next step would be blaming Snowden for lost govât jobs? how unpatriotic! (snicker)
âfor official use only.â
Yeah, like a press release.
Except, they are only suspected of this and its been quite some time now.
(The real question, before you think of another one, is why they are being so coy in a âfor official use only.â document.)
âThey change the password every couple of weeks, but I know where they write it downâ
So the real villains here, aside from Snowden, are these two staffers. Who did what they were asked to do by the network admin.
Not, you know, the illegal, unconstitutional agency. Or the guys who authorized making the agency illegal and unconstitutional.
Phew! Glad thatâs cleared up!
UNCLASSIFIED / FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY / LEGALLY YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH THIS DOCUMENT BUT WE PUT THIS ODD TOOTHLESS WARNING HERE TO SHOW YOU WEâRE SERIOUS
(U//FOUO//LYCDWYWWTDBWPTOTWHTSYWS) How do you like the fact that, not only do they put the Warning at the top of the memo, but they put it on each paragraph of the memo? Whatâs next? Putting it before each word of the memo?
(U//FOUO//LYCDWYWWTDBWPTOTWHTSYWS) These people are nuts.
Itâs actually a somewhat interesting disorder: think of your garden-variety âsemantic webâ fetishist, who cherishes (overtly or covertly) the belief that machine intelligence and/or Utopia will be possible if only people would put enough metadata tag soup in their documents.
Now, imagine that same semantic web fetishist raised, without the benefit of web technology, in a world of power, secrecy, and paranoia. They donât use metadata tags, because they still write as though the target is paper rather than parser; but the same instinct goes into devising ever more arcane classification acronyms and splattering them over ever finer chunks of text.
In their ideal world, I assume that everything has a classification, just like in the fine world of Alpha Complex and somehow things donât grind into insanity.
âOfficial Useâ is what separates patriotic press releases from dangerous, treasonous leaks - just ask Valerie Plame.
Why do I have to allow javascript from worldssl.net to access this part of boingboing?
scdn-discourse.r.worldssl.net, more specifically. And, even more specifically:
I read that article and kept saying to myself, Jeeesus Fucking Christ. Without looking up the numbers, I can only guess the CIA, DIA, NSA, etc. ad infinitum spend probably 100 times what MI5 and their ilk spend, all of it like a big turd washed down the bowl. Itâs shocking and sad to think of how much of American productivity, in the form of tax receipts, goes to support such stupidity and wastefulness.
Nice. I am going to steal that, because itâs fantastic.
They do the same thing with every slide and bullet point in their Powerpoint decks. For an agency whose job it is to collect information, they seem to have piss-poor skills at conveying it.
