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A long time ago, I went to my first (and only) Defcon conference. There was a speaker who had worked in the US government talking about state use of hacking tools.

After the talk I went up to him and asked, "What are the countries that are using these tools?" He looked at me with a certain amount of scorn and said, "All of them."

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This obviously just has to be true. I have very strong evidence that it's true, but it's also just the most obvious possible conclusion to reach. Competitive CNE tooling even at the top of the market costs just a fraction of what you'd have to pay in benefits and overhead for the equivalent HUMINT operations.

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