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 or 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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