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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

In terms of your experts being wrong, reality is, you likely didn't want your experts to tell you about this stuff at all. If you added state actors to a threat model even after Snowden, there were corporate managers in random companies who would shut down the conversation, end the conference call, or leave the room and you'd find out indirectly that someone somewhere had found problem with your contract and it was being ended.

If you knew, what would you really do? There are insiders and outsiders, and if you talk about this stuff, you are an outsider. Life strategy-wise, which one are you going to be? It sounds jaded, but really, having been one of those experts playing in this invisible sandbox, I used the tools I had and worked with integrity. That I didn't defeat a multi-trillion dollar conspiracy of hundreds of thousands of people doesn't bother me much, and where I scored a few points on them, I feel pretty good about it.

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i have seen this. in interviews for infosec dev roles, i would mention that i have read the entirety of the Snowden leaks, every page, as well as the TAO EQGRP source code leaked by the Shadowbrokers. I had thought mentioning this would demonstrate i am really interested in the subject of exploitation and defense and what is really going on in the invisible world of cyberwar.

but what i found out is most people conducting interviews don't want to know and they don't want to hire nor work with anyone who does want to know the big T Truth. I have been able to tell the interview conversation tone just shut down after I mention Snowden or the Shadowbrokers. All of the interviewers were ex-DoD and/or ex-Intelligence. I could tell they would not be proceeding to hire me because they got very quiet and quickly transitioned to the "let's wrap this up" phase of the conversation.

it greatly puzzled me for a long time why would the class of civillian infosec workers be affraid of the knowledge of how NSA had ran circles around them in the dark and why would these workers on the front lines of security want to NOT know how to defend themselves and their customers?

maybe ex-DoD folks are scared of Snowden, because they were always forbidden from reading Snowden leaks, since they would be violating their classification authority by learning about top secrets for which they were not cleared to know. i find that funny and scary in an Emperor's New Clothes sense, that us unwashed civillians on the streets can know more about cyberwar than DoD's own cyberwarriors, because we can study public information, while DoD indoctrinated workers have to pretend the Snowden leaks and Shadowbrokers never happened. there is probably also a factor of shame and face saving that makes DoD infosec types choose to be willingly ignorant. Snowden and the Shadowbrokers were the biggest embarassments to NSA.

imagine you are NSA. you are untouchable, you have as good as an infinite black budget and you are above all laws. you have pulled off the biggest victory in intelligence history--for 12 years after the Patriot Act, you have been hacking everyone and spying on everyone and nobody has figured it out and nobody can prove a thing. then along comes Snowden and the Shadowbrokers and your whole cover is blown. that's gotta make anyone who drink the Pentagon's kool-aid pretty personally mad. so anyone else who comes along and is blabbing about things they read in Snowden leaks will be treated like an outcast and shunned for adding insult to injury.

If you walk into any of these things in real life: tread very carefully.

> I just sometimes ask myself if people in previous centuries thought and lived as superficially as today. Or if, piece by piece, as times fade, their bad aspects retreat to the background and their goodness shines especially bright? At any rate I think that the individual, regardless of outcome, has to be vigilant, and especially when it is made hard for them. You also believe that this can never be levelled upwards, as desirable as that seems. When there is levelling, it always happens downwards. But here, too, there is a brilliant opportunity offered by fate to prove ourselves. Maybe one should not underestimate that, either.

-- Sophie Scholl

Great quote and great person. And how her life ended is a good indicator that what I wrote isn't nonsense. But I actually meant it in a more present day technical and less all-out fascism way. Still, the principles remain the same.

She was arguably a bit careless in the moment that lead to them getting caught, and since pushing that stack of fliers wasn't really useful for their greater aims, that kinda proves your point as well. The idea of the White Rose not getting caught, so rather shortly before the end of the Nazi regime, and Sophie Scholl writing more letters, or even books, is fit to make me cry with homesickness. It's an unspeakable loss.

But otherwise, if you read the interrogation transcripts, I don't think she regretted anything. She knew what she was doing and why she did it, and she knew she did well. IMO her life ended so much better than that of people who just give in to pressure against their conscience. It's not like those are immortal, and then they have to spend the rest of their time with who they became, too. Some find a way back, most don't. As Shakespeare wrote, the coward dies a thousand deaths -- Sophie Scholl died but one, and it was rather majestic, if you squint just right.

I still wish she would never had a chance to prove her greatness in this particular manner and had survived instead, so don't take this as me negating your point.

All fair. And I feel much the same way. Pick your battles, know when to expose and when to stay anonymous. Evaluate everything in a situation like that from a risk perspective and make sure that you indeed engage those risks that will allow you to look back and say you don't regret any of it.

This can be very hard.

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