I hesitate to believe that even the most jaded NSA spook would be cool with getting data from a botnet service or administrator, but then I’ve got a conscience and a heartbeat so there’s that. In fact, I’m racking my brain to consider reasons the NSA would overlook botnets and their almost certain infiltration of the US government in some way.
Given that most malware opens a door to the compromised system I suppose there could be interest in exploiting those particular holes for intelligence gathering. Of the subset of people the NSA is really interested in (and I hope they are of a particularly nasty strain of homicidal maniac even though I know they’re likely not), I would assume that there is a subset of that population that is similarly bad at computer security as a subset of any other computer-using-human population, statistically speaking. So computer gets infected and put under control by botnet, compromised machine allows for other players to walk in and look around, and NSA finds these machines as easier targets that could be used in tangential attacks to other compromised/uncompromised machines, or they could be put to use for other nefarious purposes (DDOS attacks against foreign C3 systems and that sort of thing). I don’t know as I’m no security expert (except for my own house–walk through my door for malicious purposes and you’ll be getting carried out and leaking a lot of claret while it happens).
As for Snowden, I wish him luck and I hope to hell that he doesn’t develop some sort of savior mentality in the long term. To my own west-centric thought, I see a 5% chance of some western politicians heeding his thought and changing or curbing the global security apparatus, but I seriously doubt Russia, China, or any other large autocratic governmental bodies of coming around to his thinking.
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