The NSA’s guide to the internet | Hacker News Reader

The NSA’s guide to the internet

muckrock.com

131 pointsmorisy27 comments

Some of the quotations here are actually rather profound observations about the Internet.

> Remember those who use the Internet to do harm, to spread fear, and to carry out crimes are like the mythical Minotaur who, as well as being the monster of the Minoan maze, was also it's prisoner.

It's more like a profound case of projection.

You copied the quote wrong, "was also its prisoner"

Good lord, muckrock makes it sound like a 651-page treatise on Rule 34.

In all seriousness and still on the topic of rules, page 305 is the most useful one I've found so far in my brief skim (http://i.imgur.com/r9vw4gj.png). I'm still flipping through it, but I might actually give this whole thing a read if only because it feels like I'll learn something new about OSINT.

This document proves that the NSA hires not only mathematicians, but also English majors.

A not small percentage of mathematicians I've met have been plenty eloquent.

Solomon Golomb, who died this month, is an example of a linguist (in the sense of "speaks multiple languages") who also made fundamental contributions to the theory of digital codes and was recognised for this by NSA (mysteriously "for contributions to a program of national significance" which he never heard anything more about). He was a mathematician, while most linguists (however you interpret the term) aren't.

The state department & intelligence community loves hiring the right kind of liberal arts people as analysts.

Page 22 mentions browser wars, and recommends setting up both IE and firefox. It mentions 'new' features such as tabbed browsing (IE), non-html parsing (RSS feeds), alongside a slew of security improvements.

It would be interesting to see the 2015 section on this (especially considering the mobile v desktop feature divide).

I sometimes wonder if NSA / CIA respond to FOIA requests with documents produced explicitly to answer them. Is there anything that would prevent NSA from giving out a 'fake' document or field guide if the FOIA request was non-specific enough?

Reading the document gives me the impression that someone saw the request and went, "Let's have fun with this one, guys."

I'm curious why NSA's AppLocker paper has been put behind a DoD membership site when it was previously public. It it part of the same movement that prompted the FBI to remove/hide its public guidelines for using strong encryption?

Ironically, it even gives a certificate error now:

https://www.iad.gov/iad/library/ia-guidance/tech-briefs/appl...

You need the DoD Root CA to be trusted for most of these sites to not pop on the alert, and it does not ship with most OSs if any.

What could possibly go wrong with installing DOD's Root CA? Uhmmmmmmm

Very little, since it's primarily for internal DoD use. It was never meant to be a part of the commercial 'web of trust' nonsense, and exists so that DoD doesn't have to trust idiots like Comodo.

Exactly. It's also a logical extension of their COMSEC doctrine which led to things like NSA's EKMS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKMS

OT, but this article consistently crashes my phone's browser before it's done loading. Admittedly, it's an older phone, but to take it out completely is rare... I wonder what the page is doing that it takes exception to?

Embedding a 651 page PDF in an iFrame?

That'll probably do it...or this unnecessary magnification mouseover thing.

That confusing zoom bubble slowed my browsing experience to a crawl, so I didn't get past the first couple of pages. Really annoying.

What browser/OS are you running? The embedded viewer is supposed to just load one page at a time, but we tweaked some things that might be causing issues and would love to know what to test against.

Mobile Safari on iOS 7.1.2

    Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53

...probably not worth testing against something so old. It just seemed strange that it would completely die.

Thanks, that's really odd, because stuff should lazy load until you browse to a particular page fore viewer. Will try and dig up something to test on. Really appreciate the feedback.

speaking of internet memory... in case anyone was confused, this is from 2013 - https://www.wired.com/2013/05/nsa-manual-on-hacking-internet...

So the NSA is basically a bunch of scientologists. So I guess Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible is IRL???

The NSA will not allow something to be unclassified that is valuable. The purpose of declassifying this document is likely connected to deception.

Look at the original publication's header and footer. "Unclassified / For Official Use Only".

It was never classified to begin with.

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