Code Obfuscation’s really neat stuff. Or, it can be.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
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]
The NSA’s data-pile represents a retro-scope that can be used to investigate anyone backward in time. In an earlier posting, I described how it can be useful in political hit-jobs against anyone with even a ghost of a skeleton in their closet. Guess what?
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.
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?
The contractor who allegedly took home data from NSA systems, apparently collected over 50 terabytes. But that’s not the kicker…
After the Yahoo! disclosure, there was some general falling all over oneself from some of the other large providers, “we didn’t!” “no, not us!” etc.
Methinks they doth protest too much.