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Comment by progressive_dad | Hacker News Reader

Hitler gassed the jews, Saddam gassed the kurds, and one time Snowden farted in church. SAME THING tombert. SAME THING.

Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how you feel about Edward Snowden. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12337485 and marked it off-topic.

Edit: you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive, inflammatory comments about political topics. That's not what this site is for, so please stop.

No, it really isn't

You have nothing to add to this discussion. Please take this rhetoric elsewhere.

This article falsely equates selling NSA tools on the black market with government whistleblowing.

Let's not get on a high horse about rhetoric in the comments?

It's the delivery, not the message. You tried to use sarcasm in a forum where it can't be too subtle to work (also, Poe's law is alive and well here). I imagine you would have received multiple upvotes instead of downvotes if you had taken a different approach.

Point well taken. Imagining Edward Snowden as my playful pathetic little brachiocephalic puppy dog stinking up his pew and being swatted on the nose with NEWSPAPER just made me giggle. I'll keep my GAS-lighting jokes to myself. Especially when it comes to LEAKING sensitive material...

Reductio ad absurdum.

I mean, selling NSA tools on the black market in broken english is about as far from government whistleblowing as I can stretch my imagination.

Absurdum is right.

If you don't think the sentence structure and word choice was extremely deliberate you are absurd.

They probably spent a lot of time on the message. Coded words or phrases. Embedded keys. Resistance to identification analysis.

That's steganography not cryptography and generally considered to be the red-headed bastard step child of actual intelligence work. Don't be ridiculous.

Its some 4chan racist idiot's idea of a red herring.

Making sure a message doesn't contain identifying words/phrases/idioms/slang and making sure it cannot identify you through statistical analysis are not steganography and both are things I would expect any security expert (you know, like the people working for the NSA) to do if they want any hope of remaining anonymous.

Without any science behind it or having first hand access to the source for the tools used to identify such words/phrases/idioms you're just amateurishly putting lipstick on a pig.

Its a racist idiot's idea of a joke.

There's definitely science behind it, it's called stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

Here's an example of an open-source project designed to counter stylometric analysis: https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

With how much caution they are taking against a nation-state adversary, I think it a bit short-sighted to think that this is just "a racist idiot's idea of a joke".

There is a large body of science behind author identification, with lots of academic papers, talks at hacker conventions, etc. I'm surprised you missed it. If the NSA did use authorship identification software, would it be unreasonable to believe that a privileged leaker would have access to such a tool? I believe that it is more likely than not a joke, but it has the same effect as a right handed person signing their name with their left hand... unless they have a habit of making "In Soviet Russia..." jokes - then they're screwed.

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