A few weeks after I sent my reply [stderr][stderr], affirming my citizenship on pain of perjury, I got a response from the CIA. It’s some of the most beautiful bureaucrat-bafflegab I’ve ever tried to parse.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
The origin of the expression “walking back the cat” is lost in the early cold war, but it refers to the process of decompiling and recompiling intelligence after a breach, usually caused by a mole.
Code Obfuscation’s really neat stuff. Or, it can be.
Between Wikileaks, the Shadow Brokers, the FBI’s use of confidential informants like Sabu [stderr] we learn the breadth and depth of the US Government’s hypocrisy about “cyberwar” and espionage.
Continuation at a tangent to [stderr]
Tools like Palantir are the tip of an iceberg: a gigantic iceberg of data. In case you don’t know, when organizations like the NSA are talking “big data” they are talking “yottabytes.” i.e.:
The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) [wired]
I’m usually surprised by the coverage regarding NSA/CIA/FBI spying: there’s some stuff we definitely should be scared of, and there’s other stuff that I file under “so, what?”
For example, the fact that the US government has consistently ignored its own laws regarding wiretapping: nobody who has observed any government in action should be surprised by that.
I suspect that there is an optimal and a peak conspiracy size, beyond which it becomes nearly impossible to keep a secret.
Serial fraudster Uri Geller is back; I guess he needs more money.
Wafting into the info-sphere from multiple points comes the meme that Geller was tested for psychic powers by … The CIA!
It’s unsure whether the Trump administration was or was not thinking about expanding black sites and rendition, so I was doing a bit of research about them – mostly out of my own interest. What is known about these sites?