Hacking has become the US National Security Agency's "growth area."
That's the word from The New York Times, which pulled from thousands of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to publish on Saturday a lengthy article it described as "a rich sampling of the agency's global operations and culture."
The Times was joined by the UK's Guardian newspaper, which published its own versionof the piece.
Discussing how an agency with 35,000 employees and an official annual budget of $10.8 billion has "an almost unlimited agenda," the Times reports that the NSA "spies routinely on friends as well as foes" not only to fight terrorism but also to "achieve 'diplomatic advantage' over such allies as France and Germany and 'economic advantage' over Japan and Brazil, among other countries."
(The Guardian adds several items to the agenda, with "support for US military in the field; gathering information about military technology; anticipating state instability; monitoring regional tensions; countering drug trafficking;...[and] ensuring a reliable energy supply for the US," and it cites a quote from the NSA itself in noting that the agency can scoop up info from "virtually every country.")
Both pieces also offer a selection of specific examples of the agency's spying prowess, from real-time eavesdropping of terrorist communications during an attack on a hotel to the pinpointing of a sniper who was targeting American personnel inside the US "Green Zone" in Baghdad.
Both, too, note that despite such seemingly impressive accomplishments, the agency has its problems, from failing, as the Times puts it, "to produce a clear victory over a low-tech enemy" -- the Taliban in Afghanistan -- to the much-reported shortcomings in regard to ensuring the privacy of Americans' communications.
The 'digital battlefield'
Not surprisingly -- given an agency that, as the Guardian reports, describes our new world of high-tech activities as the "digital battlefield" -- both articles discuss the NSA's technological chops.
Not surprisingly -- given an agency that, as the Guardian reports, describes our new world of high-tech activities as the "digital battlefield" -- both articles discuss the NSA's technological chops.
The "growth area" remark about hacking comes in a section of the Times piece that discusses NSA divisions known as Tailored Access Operations and the Transgression Branch.
TAO, the Times reports, is the NSA unit "that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind. TAO is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not encoded."
As for the Transgression Branch, it apparently lets other hackers do the work and goes along for the ride:
0 comments:
Post a Comment