Anonymous releases NSA documents | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous releases NSA documents

pastebin.com

166 pointsnikcub19 comments

What a waste of my eyes!

As someone who spent years working in government-ese, there is nothing new here at all. None of the documents are actually classified. They are standard policy propositions layered with heavy technical/government jargon. The intelligence community and DOD is meticulous about properly classifying even the most mundane information that could be connected to anything of consequence for national security. Hence, it has been the standard for decades that every single classified document must have a header and footer with its classification level clearly posted. I was put on the spot once in a brief for not having a footer with the brief's classification on one slide in a PowerPoint. None of these documents have the required headers or footers. Logical conclusion, none of them require it because none of them are classified.

The real government is far more boring than the one that appears in popular conspiracy theories and movies. Trust me, the real government is a boring employer...great health insurance though!

If you don't want to download all the docs to view, there is a mirror on Google Docs with web based viewers:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bx25s45t4-d_eE0xbklZ...

I skimmed those docs and my eyes started to glaze over at all the government-ese in them. Most of those documents seem to be high level proposals for things like PRISM and some of the other programs that we more or less already know exist in some form or another, but it's unclear whether they're just proposing the creation of such networks, or whether they're documenting what already exists. There's also a lot of "System A must conform to Standard B Sub-Section C unless interaction with System D Sub-Section F (See Req E)" type gibberish all over the documents so it's really hard to understand exactly what any particular piece of it is describing.

Aside from that the only other thing I see is a list of what appear to be boilerplate redaction requests for a list of NSA spies posted on cryptome, with ironically most of the information redacted. Mildly interesting in that they'd be so transparent as to use near identical wording on what should be apparently unrelated requests, but otherwise not particularly notable.

Can someone with a higher pain threshold for bureaucracy please try to go more in depth on some of these and let us know if there's any meat to any of these documents, or is this all sound and fury signifying nothing.

The more government-ese, the higher the chance that it goes over-budget or never gets completed / never does what it was supposed to / is working but not usable in real world. I like that kind of text in things that should be never completed. I hope they also contract out each piece of it to a different country and lowest bidder.

There's something quite funny about putting these documents up on Google Docs.

recursion :)

I wonder if they have a termination case. You never know, maybe this will break the system.

Did you mean: recursion

I would love for someone to go through these and let us know if there is anything worth while looking at.

This looks, on the surface, like run-of-the-mill process related docs for the various aspects of the defense department.

At the very least, the documents lay out in uncertain terms the stated goals for GIG and NetOps.

That's good information to have. As this story develops and more information comes to light, it is handy to be able to compare what we know, with what we know they want to achieve.

Anonymous are crowdsourcing the jargon trawling. I can't blame them

Most, if not all of these documents were constructed/finalized in 2005-2009. The latest I saw was a 2012 document.

Don't mean to point out the obvious, but the GIG (Global Information Grid) is more than underway.

Bull*.

Here you can find links to sources of all those "top-secret" documents: http://blog.pawelk.pl/post/52419889998/anonymous-lie-and-try...

Almost all are publicly available on USA government sites.

Nothing of interest to see, was hoping for a season three insight into Persons of Interest, that would of been more worthwhile a read.

Suggest save time and avoid unless you are in need of a cure for insomnia.

BTS Mirror: R54FPPPVT3I7B3RC72GYBFK3NMXGAJLJ5

Deleted comment

No they don't. They don't need to bully families of politicians. Or the politicians.

Couldn't agree more.

WTF did the families do?

Nope, just the politician's jobs.

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