You don't see the difference between a random bug and one that a state agency discovered, stockpiled, then misplaced, and in any case held secret?
I think you are just missing the entire discussion that this article is about.
I think you are just missing the entire discussion that this article is about.
No, that's the entire point of my example. The military's primary job is to defend us. It's a major failure when their weapons are used against US citizens.
If you accept the premise of the article, that these were "broken arrow" military weapons, sure, I see how you can get yourself into a tizzy over it. But you should not accept the article's premise, because that premise seems self-evidently broken.
Then political goals of their superiors.
Sometimes those two are reversed.
Then comes us.
Taking a minor look into history and we can easily find what happens with larger stockpiles of weapons if they don't get destroyed after wars (or cold wars). They get stolen or sold. They get used for new purposes which originally they never was intended for.
I find it a fair case to argue that countries who do not destroy their large stockpiles once the war end are to a degree responsible when the weapons are reused in later conflicts outside their border by people we would classify as bad actors.
A reasonable complaint about NSA is that the IAD (defensive) mission doesn't belong in the same agency as SIGINT or TAO or whatever they're calling it now. But that doesn't have much to do with this story; the SIGINT mission of any major government is going to (1) collect exploits and (2) almost never publish them, because that's how SIGINT is done.
NSA collecting exploits doesn't prevent anyone else from discovering and reporting the same vulnerabilities. So maybe your complaint is that we're not funding enough defensive vulnerability research?
My point is the NSA and foreign counterparts do a disservice to their citizens. I would see the value in publishing vulnerabilities, I don’t see value for taxpayers in what they are doing now.