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Comment by whatnotests | Hacker News Reader

Do you want insecure systems, massive fallout from leaked pwning tools and thieves taking the world prisoner? Because the NSA's strategy so far is how you get insecure systems, massive fallout from leaked pwning tools and thieves taking the world prisoner.

I wonder how the dialectic will play out in a worst-case scenario if we get to that point.

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It would be worth months of serious global computer outages, to bring NSA under control of elected officials. I fear we'll get the former without the latter...

Elected officials in charge of the NSA isn't a desirable result. They will just replace the leaders with people loyal to them and we're in the same situation.

If elected officials aren't already in charge of the NSA, who is?

Does the NSA literally report to no one?

Technically the military is in charge, who report to the elected officials. But a battle between politicians and an intelligence//counterintelligence agency seems one sided.

The idea that NSA are under military control is also pretty fanciful. That almost plays against the spooks in the current situation, however. It inspires some skeptics to notice the puppeteer's hand the spooks have run up the media's ass, constantly searching for any narrative that could bring the current officeholder under their thumb.

Don't kid yourself, he is already under their thumb. Look at his proposed budget, three things had a budget increase and two of them contain intelligence organizations. These groups aren't unified.

Haha yeah that's tough. It's kind of a bleak view, that all of the big tribulations of our world are nothing but the dog being wagged while different factions of the intelligence complex play petty meaningless games of king of the mountain.

This logic doesn't quite hold up. The NSA discovered the flaw. No one knew about it before them.

If the NSA didn't discover it, the world would be equally insecure. The fact that they weaponized it and then lost control of it is a secondary effect at best.

> No one knew about it before them.

That we know of, it's entirely possible that other governments have been using the same exploit and that this could have been prevented with NSA disclosure.

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