Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills | Hacker News Reader

Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills

nytimes.com

43 pointsscholia14 comments

Breaking news: Systems administrator took course to learn how to secure systems he was in charge of administrating.

We need the onion to get working on a retort article with that exact title asap.

The media is writing for people of all ages. Many of which are middle aged and words like "hacker" still send some chills down their spine.

My propaganda filter is pretty accurate. After a quick skim I detected this as propaganda targeted at middle agers who are not quite up on internet culture.

Just like I saw on Fox today, they were alluding to the "next cyber 9/11" -- FFS.

Sad.

You're right. But what bothers me is that it's poorly written, using "certified ethical hacker" in quotes like it's some underground term to be sampled with punctuation, rather than Certified Ethical Hacker with capital letters to indicate the fact that CEH is a recognized cert for technology professionals.

Of course, drawing attention to CEH could turn it into a brake rather than a throttle for people who list it among their qualifications.

Also, "next cyber 9/11"? Ugh, disgusting. I don't think accurately describing how that makes me feel is within my ability.

This seems like a stretch for no other reason than to connect the word "hacker" to Snowden. He was admin. He didn't have to 'hack' anything.

And they don't even have his resume... The whole story consists of "Someone we talked to said they saw his resume this one time and the word 'hacker' was on it, maybe."

Fuck you, NYTimes.

Not a Snowden fan in the least but ignoring the fact that CEH certification is "highly valued" for quite a few DoD jobs (http://www.eccouncil.org/Support/dod-8570), this reeks of attempting to write off terrible access controls and oversight on whatever network he had access to by pinning it on those terrible "hackers".

I am sure these hackers are going to need to be dealt with using new invasive legislation, right? So frustrating.

Another "hackers are witches" article that sounds like it's out of the 80s. This journalist should be fired, or at least not allowed to write about this topic.

He took a security certification course, and not even an especially good one. Not a story.

> But the certification, listed on a résumé that Mr. Snowden later prepared, would also have given him some of the skills he needed to rummage undetected through N.S.A. computer systems and gather the highly classified surveillance documents that he leaked last month

Oh, really? Are you sure? Dunno, such sensationalism, probably. He had access, I doubt he needed these ninja-hacker skills to do what he did.

Why are we covering Edward Snowden, AGAIN?

NSA is still collecting to your emails, facebook, and other communications... I'm sure Edward Snowden would be happy to answer everything about him when the NSA stops doing all of that.

Define 'hacker'

Lover of wisdom.

I hope you get the point here. There are about a couple million too many Socrates-types around, and this planet has way more than enough hemlock (along with various other death-remedies) to spare.

Not "welcome to this hacker space." "Welcome to your new barracks."

I thought teaching Python to my friends was cool, and y'know "giving back" to my community; little did I know that makes me a "hacker" and thus an enemy of the State.

I'm sorry I use vim. Does that make me an enemy of the State as well? Now I' Neo, out to spy on my friends and pillage their digital whore-stores.

Wouldn't it be interesting if one of Snowden's projects for the NSA was to be on a 'red team' testing its security... and what he discovered both enabled and motivated his later actions?

He should apply to YC

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