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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, if the NSA pwned OpenSSL, shouldn't such a big thing have been in Snowden's docs?

The NSA, according to the Snowden docs, can break SSL. No details though: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/how-does-nsa...

Those documents do not say they can break SSL. They say they focus on SSL, and can break some specific SSL-using services.

Would the specific be the version of openssl being used by the 'target'?

Can't look right now but was this 'bug' introduced at some point in time?

This bug was added 2 years ago, the Snowden documents are from before that, as far as I know.

In Snowden's TED talk he said that the best reporting is yet to come.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_b...

It could be. Only a percentage of the documents have been analysed so far.

"the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Actually, it is (a weak form of bayesian ~).

http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/ar...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...

Interesting. However, your sources are rather obscure, and I'm not sure what you mean by "a weak form."

I'd say a Baysian analysis is a way to evaluate the veracity of an argument from ignorance, not necessarily a replacement of that argument. An argument from ignorance is a strict subset of a baysian analysis in which there is no causal relationship between the missing evidence, and the conclusion. This is such a case. So we can conclude by using a baysian analysis that this is in fact an argument of ignorance.

Unless, of course, you have additional statistical samples that show a non zero relationship between not knowing about NSAs activity and the fact that they are engaged in that activity.

Snowdon might not have known every implementation detail.

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