When Snowden’s videotaped statement of responsibility first aired, media responses were largely negative even the positive ones were tinged with incredulity: he was too articulate, too modest or just too good to be true. Some, like Julian Assange, make that easy others, like Daniel Ellsberg, make it harder. The task is further complicated by the tendency to conflate the significance of the action with the character of the actor. Once the whistle blows, however, the media resonance machine goes into overdrive, making it hard to hear history’s verdict above the din. According to documents on the X-Keyscore program published by The Guardian, the system can also be used to find computers that are vulnerable to attack, allowing the NSA’s Tailored Access Office to exploit them.Ī training slide on the capabilities of X-Keyscore provided to The Guardian by Edward Snowden entitled “TAO” (for Tailored Access Operations, the organization within the NSA that hacks the networks of foreign governments and organizations) states that vulnerability profiles used by TAO to find targeted systems can be used to “show me all the exploitable machines in country X.” The “fingerprints” for vulnerabilities are added as a filtering criteria for X-Keyscore’s filtering application “engines”-a worldwide distributed cluster of Linux servers attached to the NSA’s Internet backbone tap points.Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.

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