Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.
But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear
national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that
is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to
crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons...... But documents
released by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make it clear that
two years before Heartbleed became known, the N.S.A. was looking at ways to
accomplish exactly what the flaw did by accident. A program code-named Bullrun,
apparently named for the site of two Civil War battles just outside Washington,
was part of a decade-long effort to crack or circumvent encryption on the web.
The documents do not make clear how well it succeeded, but it may well have
been more effective than exploiting Heartbleed would be at enabling access to
secret data....To Read More.....
My Take – It’s amazing. Yesterday not one
person at NSA or the administration knew anything about taking advantage of
Heartbleed, or any of this kind of thing, yet today it would seem clear they
not only knew about it, they seemingly took advantage of it, and then tried to
duplicate it. Does sound like someone
was ....well..... lying? Nah, that can’t
be true. Just because they’ve been
caught lying on every scandal that’s come out over the last few years doesn’t
mean they were deliberately lying. It
was an accident – they made a mistake – they didn’t know it was going on – their
understanding was wrong - rogue employees are responsible - George Bush did it too!
Oh, thank goodness. Now we have clarity. It's all Bush's fault!
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