In an email, I am asked:
Assuming that the current administration is completely unaccountable to law, is it *technically* possible for them to data mine the electronic communications of their political opponents?
When I was a kid my parents used to set me loose on the streets of Paris, with coin for admission to various museums, and a croissant and some hot chocolate. And I almost always wound up spending at least a day at Les Invalides, the military museum.
I noticed a few interesting changes in the Pittsburgh area last weekend.
Ok, play nice, yall. Don’t dump the really obvious ones.
… Is we talk about books.
Today, for no reason other than curiousity, I submitted a pair of FOIA requests.
The US Constitution is not a special document. It’s traditional for Americans to say something flattering about the great political geniuses who devised the US political system, but I don’t think they were so hot: after all, the country they built didn’t last 100 years before it fell apart in a vicious civil war. The democracy of the republic is a multi-levelled sham, first because something like 70% of the population (women and slaves) were disenfranchised, secondly because the franchise was mooted by the superimposed electoral college.
In a past thread, someone commented about topologists not knowing the difference between a donut and a coffee cup.
I forwarded that to a friend of mine who’s a recovering topologist, who said “of course we can tell the difference: coffee stays in a cup and leaves a donut.”
There’s another nice example of attribution, in a recent piece by Brian Krebs [krebsonsecurity] “Who is Anna-Senpai the Mirai Worm Author?” I’m not going to walk through it in detail, because Krebs has already done that very well.
It’s a good example of how to do attribution of an attack; the $30+billion/year US intelligence community should be able to do as good a job as a blogger like Krebs, don’t you think?
