Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers | Hacker News Reader

Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

arstechnica.com

116 pointsgk177 comments

The reason it's a big deal is because as more power accumulates in the hands on the "adults in the room", the more likely those adults are to become creepy, overbearing assholes -- There are many examples, the most prominent one in my mind being that the FBI/Hoover tried to convince MLK to kill himself, fully backed by the government.

As the NSA et al get more [unchecked] power it will become more corrupt, isn't this like, the law of nature?

People say "This is exactly what I want the NSA to do -- foreign espionage, just like always" -- Sure, there's past precedent for this being a good idea.

How far are you willing to take this? How much power should one [or small group] employee at the NSA have?

Right now, Right this very minute, I bet if [Employee X] wanted you silenced, it would happen, and no one would bat an eye. Is that the world you want to live in? What road are we taking?

No, we shouldn't stop all foreign espionage [anytime soon].

No, I don't want Employee X doing queries on oil activists for the purposes of muffling them.

My solution? Take them to court, and establish clear oversights. This is what keeps getting said.

EDIT: CIA changed to FBI/Hoover

They have an immense amount of power to crush anyone regardless of whether it is interest of the United States or not. Their methods are so clandestine and underhanded that they are almost to fight against. Given what we know about the discriminatory practices of public servants who operate in the public's eye do we really believe that giving the intelligence communities this amount of power that they wouldn't abuse this power and operate descriptively against ethnic and political minorities? They are essentially robbing the public blind right now and sacrificing our national security so they can have more power domestically.

Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt. The NSA is included in this, of course.

We already know the NSA's power has been extensively abused with "SEXINT" (stealing people's private photos for personal enjoyment and likely blackmail), JTRIG (discrediting people not accused or suspected of any crime), PRISM (monitoring every communication via to/from data and other private data), not to mention others.

None of these things relate to foreign espionage or generalized signals intelligence. Snowden said it himself: the NSA is only about SIGINT in their press releases. Really, their purpose is social control and consolidation of power. Their spying does not stop at members of the public or foreign publics; whistleblower Russ Tice said long before Snowden that the NSA had a tap on Barack Obama as early as 2004.

Nice to see someone else remember what Russ Tice said. He wasn't even a Senator yet when Russ said the papers came across his desk. That means that they are targeting any potential political candidate of any note.

I would just like to remind everyone that surveillance is about control, not security. Some may claim it's security through control, but that's not the social contract I was taught to understand my country worked under.

> Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt.

So if someone, say Europe, became more powerful than the US they would be extremely corrupt. Where does that tautology leave us?

> whistleblower Russ Tice said [...] that the NSA had a tap on Barack Obama as early as 2004.

Source: https://youtu.be/d6m1XbWOfVk?t=2m45s

They went after General Patreus, Justice Alito and Senator Barack Obama [3:25].

Small correction, it was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that tried to get MLK to commit suicide (not the CIA);

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

> My solution? Take them to court, and establish clear oversights. This is what keeps getting said.

I agree, but there's no proof that the Equations Group/TAO were conducting operations without oversight, so I fail to see why this is a big deal. The fact that the oversight that DOES exist consists of rubber-stamping is the fault of either ineffective overseers or unscrupulous intelligence officers. It has no bearing on the people writing the exploits.

Those are absolutely real issues, but they don't apply to this case in any apparent way. I'm all for Intelligence reform but railing against the evils of the NSA when discussing a highly effective portion of its legitimate purpose just muddies the waters of the debate.

This is partly speculation, but from everything I've read, the NSA appears to take its regulatory compliance a lot more seriously than the contractors that serve it do.

I'm not saying contractors are hives of abuse or anything, just that if there is abuse, it seems far more likely to happen there.

I'd also say the more senior the position, government or not, the more likely they are to be able to get away with it.

Most worrisome are the well-connected people who sit at the intersection of state and corporate power. For example, former intelligence officials who frequent the revolving door and take high-level executive positions at major contractors. These are people you wouldn't want to cross.

Others have commented that evidence of Mallory's wrong doings would not be permitted in trial. Assuming this is true, court won't work.

Another thing I've gleaned is that Mallory spends incredible amounts of money to undermine the stability and security of our internet & hardware. We cannot compete with them on that level; we don't have the means to stabilize as quickly as they destabilize.

I actually want to know if anyone has any ideas about what to do in this reality. What do you do when constructive and legal means both fail? Seems like Mallory can get away with anything.

From the article:

"saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project."

Hmmmmmm, you mean like Russia or China?

"malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the "BACKSNARF" artifact isn't conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems infinitesimally small."

Ironic considering this is almost the same scenario people were using in the Sony hack. Saying the code was similar in other attacks used by North Korea while most of the Info Sec community was saying it didn't believe their findings since malware can be reused, shared and distributed - but apparently all that goes out the window in this case?

I'm starting to have NSA fatigue for this stuff.

Kaspersky seems to be the only player actively trying to tie EVERYTHING they find to the NSA. While most of the stuff (flame, stuxnet) have been confirmed by other companies, I'm starting to wonder if Kaspersky has an axe to grind here as well - his ties to the FSB and the Russian government are well documented.

I'm not dismissing this out of hand, but I'm starting to take a lot of their claims with a few grains of salt.

Nothing in your post is in line with reality. You've cherry picked statements out of context to imply that they are not exclusive to the NSA, ignoring the smoking guns that were presented and failing to link them. There is simply no question that this is USG malware, and you'll notice that Kaspersky, who, no, does not have extensive ties to the FSB and Russian government, actually stops short of attribution, unlike pretty much everyone else.

http://eugene.kaspersky.com/2012/07/25/what-wired-is-not-tel...

>>> Nothing in your post is in line with reality.

Except that part about Kaspersky. Or do you not believe the Wired article from 2012?

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

"Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Of course, none of this history is ever mentioned in Cancun."

I'm also glad you actually read my entire post before gang banging your keyboard with your response. I said I don't dismiss this outright, but I've become somewhat skeptical of Kaspersky. He's done a good job exposing NSA activities while seemingly turning a blind eye to Russian state hacking activities. I think its fair to ask why he's catching all these NSA sponsored groups, but was totally silent about a Russian group of hackers who have had access to our critical infrastructure since 2011:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/6/russian-hacke...

Or maybe the JPMorgan Chase hack?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/04/jpmo...

Again, like I said in my post (which you clearly didn't read) I'm getting NSA fatigue. If other Info Sec companies came out and said they had found these, in my eyes, they would have more credibility than Kaspersky. It just seems like the only stuff he finds are NSA tools and I have to consider his background before I jump up and say this is a smoking gun. Similarities? Yes. Like I said in my post, this is the same thing other Info Sec people dismissed about the Sony Hack, why can't I use the same argument here?

You want a smoking gun? Get the president to admit it like he did with Stuxnet:

http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-cyberattacks-us-israeli...

"Administration officials revealed to Sanger that the Stuxnet virus was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Israel's Unit 8200 (i.e. Israel's secretive cyber arm) to "become the attacker from within" Iran's nuclear facilities."

It should be extremely clear: the NSA should be expected - and I don't know of anyone outside of anarchist circles who doesn't expect - to have extremely sophisticated targeting operations for espionage.

While I fully support limiting the mass surveillance, stopping the NSL practice, and indiscriminate data collection being performed (along with other Star Chamber-esque behaviors), it is pure folly to expect targeted spying to be limited technically or not take place. It's simply too valuable to be able to monitor $espionage_target's computations.

Yes, I agree. I mean, that's the point of the NSA, right? That's why they were created, for electronic surveillance.

Simply put, I don't want the NSA to exist at all. Does that ensure that I run in "anarchist circles" in your mind? I don't think my view is far from the mainstream on this matter - many reasonable people are for abolition.

Honestly, yes, I would say that abolishing State espionage departments is right along anarchist thinking. It's been well known for centuries that gentlemen in the government business read each others mail as a matter of course.

Fair enough. In some important ways, I probably am an anarchist. I don't believe in smashing the state, but I do believe that the internet will inevitably provide peaceful replacements for the various components of state, and that this will be a joyous motion.

Is this really a big deal?

They were doing exactly what NSA was supposed to do. We moved from NSA should not spy on everyone to NSA should be toothless ...

It's a big deal because of the resources being applied to this, and the lack of resources applied to keeping data private and secure.

Of course you can't prevent efforts to break into systems. But you can spend enough resources on making it difficult and fruitless that it is reasonably certain that our data can't be accessed by spooks of any nation.

We get what we pay for. Right now we spend vastly more on surveillance than on privacy and security. Guess which one we have more of?

The resources that sabotage unwanted nuclear programs ... are resources well spent. This part of NSA is caring the mandate. Highly targeted, highly efficient, no collateral damage, no dragnets, delivering results.

Yesterday's legit NSA operation and toolkit is tomorrow's cybercrime and hacking toolkits.

So this is yet another NASA-like example of military spending driving research that eventually gets repurposed for civilian use? Great!

Yeah, it's all getting a little ridiculous. Every country has been spying on every other country since the beginning of countries. The leaks from Snowden, Greenwald, et al are becoming less about privacy violations and unjustified data collection and more about legitimate spying efforts, but they're still being met with breathless outrage here and elsewhere.

Also, are we really thinking "Grok" is some sort of identifying name/tag?

The information on the Equations Group/TAO are coming from Kaspersky Labs via Ars Technica. They are unaffiliated with Snowden/Greewald/et al.

The leaks from Snowden that I've read thus far they do not mention anything about what TAO does. They are hinted at as the "big guns" you go talk to when you have actionable intelligence.

There was a large leak that included what was basically an internal catalog of TAO-created devices and modules. That's what they are crossreferencing the codenames against.

Just because something has been done "Since the dawn of time" is not a valid reason to keep doing it whatsoever.

As a foreign citizen of the US (or UK) where this type of activity seems king, I'm threatened and consider these activities hostile and reason enough to not do any sort of business with US based companies or US residents.

There are no legitimate spying efforts, these agencies from day one have used and abused their positions to misdirect the public, start wars, spy on those they had no business spying, hack infrastructure on foreign land (which should be considered an act of war pure and simple), and the list goes on, including torture and murder.

I have no respect for these agencies and the work they do and they have no business existing.

Whatever country you're from is trying to do what the US is doing, they just aren't as good at it, so they likely are resorting to using hard techniques. Think lead pipes.

The scope of these activities, especially when combined with the NSA's (and GCHQ's) indiscriminate "hack everything" attitude. When the NSA attacks so much infrastructure - including standards they are supposed to be supporting - at some point they start creating a reasonable doubt about the true actors behind any network attack.

This could have various consequences, but one obvious one is how it affects a jury. It would probably be a lot easier to conclude there is a reasonable doubt the accused did not commit some type of computer or network crime when the NSA is attacking so much infrastructure. If the NSA was known to be targeting legitimate targets with limited, targeted activities that did not affect everybody else, the doubt that any random computer crime could have been the NSA's responsibility would not be reasonable.

It's unlikely that someone who knows about this would serve on a jury in a computer crime case, or that evidence of NSA activities would be admitted in trial.

Juries don't know about a lot of topics. In an adversarial system, it is the responsibility of the each party to inform the judge and jury what is relevant to the case.

Hence the second half of my comment:

> or that evidence of NSA activities would be admitted in trial.

If the NSA is really that overwhelmingly powerful, it is irrelevant whether a jury can be convinced of some random hacker's guilt. Let him go free if you must. If he is legitimately dangerous, the NSA can shut him down or point him the right way.

Spreading malware is a big deal, and I am sure many people would get quite upset if important US infrastructure was targeted. What would the reactions be if the 911 system got hit by untested malware, or some traffic control systems crash because of spying activities.

What repercussion should the US have received if the Iranian uranium enrichment had exploded and thrown fine radioactive dust into the environment? Would NSA take responsibility for the deaths and environment damage for their spying, or would they hide and put the blame on a third-party?

The answer to your question is that the potential for damage that malware has, and the responsibility we expect from those who make it is extremely disproportional. It is a big deal, and the risk/cost to human lives is why we should be very careful allowing organizations to spread malware.

> or would they hide and put the blame on a third-party?

That's usually the point of this sort of work, yes. Espionage isn't just about acquiring information, it's about spreading false information, and dragging your enemies through the mud.

I don't approve of this shit, but "the them" have been up to it since forever, and the answers to your queries are a straightforward: "None", "No", "Yes" - unless someone else's intelligence agency outwits them, and has a media mouthpiece that can't be drowned out by chaff.

Edit: Your post got me thinking about Chernobyl and Reagan. The CIA had a programme to export defective technology to the USSR - which (apparently) culminated in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

One has to wonder. Yes, I'm aware that the questions as to how Chernobyl are well answered, and all the rest, case closed, etc. - but one still has to wonder. Nothing should be trusted 100%.

I don't know what repercussions there should be for that, but any consideration of repercussions has to consider the alternative to electronic attack, which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them.

People should probably not kid themselves about geopolitics and military competition vanishing if we somehow manage to regulate "electronic warfare".

>which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them.

I know that you didn't mean for your comment to be taken literally but there is literally zero chance of enemy airplanes invading US skies and dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them. It is a silly thing to say and it does nothing to justify the current situation vis a vis the NSA et al. Try not to hyperventilate.

No, I mean literally: if Stuxnet really did target the Iranian nuclear project and really did set Iran back by a year or so, then Stuxnet forestalled an aerial bombardment of Iran by a year or so.

It's an ugly situation, since Iran's geopolitical strategy involves gaining concessions through a game of chicken with the US counter-proliferation regime. At some point, unless it's resolved in a way that ends the Iranian nuclear arms program, it is going to end in explosions, and scores of lost lives.

This is a descriptive observation, not a normative one.

It is also true that if Iran somehow arranged for explosions at US nuclear facilities, the USG's response would be world- historically horrific. Any reasonable observer knows this to be a fact, so we can acknowledge it without getting into philosophy and move on.

Of course there isn't. The US would be the attacker in this scenario. And we most certainly still do bomb people with aircraft.

We recently had a article from Schneier that made a similar observation comparing electronic attack to airplanes dropping munitions from great heights, which is why the conclusion was that electronic attacks should be under the control of the military and not by NSA. We expect the military to strike other nations civil infrastructure (or at least the subject can be debated), but we also expect them to take responsibility for it.

That makes a lot of sense to me, too. Also: this isn't to say that there aren't grave concerns with using self-propagating malware as a vector for attacks. It's just to keep things in perspective.

The chances of a full-blown Iranian nuclear weapons program not eventually bearing an attack by explosive munitions are pretty close to zero; see Osirak. If malware that only really impacts centrifuges forestalls that for a couple years, I see it as a good thing.

Schneier is also the one who said these are the types of things the NSA should be doing[1].

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/more_about_th...

The NSA is subordinate to the Department of Defense - it is part of the military.

This is a false dichotomy of the most offensive kind.

Please explain. I am still on the fence about Stuxnet, but the conventional wisdom is that it did exactly what I suggested that it did: it forestalled a military attack on Iran's nuclear program. And "forestall" is all it did; we're presumably a phone call and double-digit seconds away from that attack today.

> alternative to electronic attack, which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them.

I'd actually like to see the outcome of that. By all means, please go ahead and do this -- in Brussels.

Since the NSA has shown that they really don't care who they spy on all news about more efficient surveillance by them is relevant to both US citizens and non-citizens imo.

As a citizen I'd be pretty alarmed by NSA-level activities of my local agencies because quite frankly it's way too excessive and privacy is a lot more important to me than the supposed security massive and not very transparent surveillance activities alledgedly brings. Most importantly it just shows a worldview that doesn't care about privacy at all and just wants to absorb all data. Which is very alarming.

It's the way of the world. Everything has impact on everything else.

In the past, you had "privacy" speaking with someone in your own home. Even though the vibrations could theoretically be felt through the walls, we didn't have sufficiently sensitive instruments to recover that into speech. Now we do, and that technology is never going to be uninvented - it's only going to get better.

If you can't adapt to changing times, no hard feelings. The same thing happens every generation. The world can move on after you grow old and die.

> They were doing exactly what NSA was supposed to do.

It's fairly unclear what the NSA is supposed to be doing. They appear to be attempting to destabilize the internet in a way that is advantageous to them and them only.

Because a government hacking another government to disable military infrastructure is clearly an act of war. Spying is a pseudo-accepted peace time activity, military sabotage isn't.

To add to your point: computer espionage is the first and often second to last step before computer sabotage. You could build a program protected by cryptography that without the key would be indistinguishable from spyware, but with the key would be very destructive. You can't know the intention of a computer network operation until the attacker pulls the trigger and releases the key and by then it is too late.

In conventional espionage sabotage does not have the same footprint as intelligence collection. They are easier to tell apart. For this reason merely copying the rules and norms of HUMINT and SIGINT into computer network operations is very dangerous.

Governments spy on their own and other countries citizens.

If you want your data secure and private, use and develop systems to allow that (pgp for start)

I found the use of the term "nation-states" to be interesting. They use it in contrast to cybercriminals, but I would imagine that there's a large gap between (relatively) paltry cybercriminal activity and full on nation-states.

Blah blah Hobbes. Blah blah you puny humans would otherwise be "in a state of nature." Accept your illusion of freedom and shut up. Signed, Levi A. Than.

I would have no problem with the NSA creating crazy intrusive hacking tools if public citizens were allowed to do the same.

If a regular person created tools such as what the NSA made they would get in a heap of trouble, even if they did nothing with them.

If the NSA does it; it's ok? This is the kind of logic that leads to abuses of power. Government are just people, and they are just as likely if not more likely than the average person to abuse their power.

It would be interesting to shift the discussion a bit.

What does the government need to protect users and corporations from that sort of hacking ? Is the government's role only to attack or in what levels can it help safeguard our online activities ?

Once the NSA global spying was revealed I was hoping to see more reports of governments finding and shutting down the monitoring probes that surely need to be installed.

Not an astroturfer or an apologist here. I've never had any employment connection with NSA or any other intelligence agency of any government. I'm a United States citizen who has spent six years of my adult life living outside the United States. I'll agree with a previous lower-level comment here that it is possible to publicly protest NSA abuses (as I did, with my whole family, in view of news media cameras and police officers in downtown Minneapolis on the Restore the Fourth protest evening in 2013) while still thinking that the United States must, in an imperfect world, have a national signals intelligence agency with powerful tools. Individual computer users--all over the world--ought to have access to powerful tools to ensure private communications and to prevent black-hat hacking of their data or their computers, but I'm also happy for governments to be informed (within strict legal limits) about what's going on in the rest of the world, because that kind of background knowledge actually builds trust and realistic levels of doubt, and helps prevent hasty decisions to go to war or to promote state-sponsored terrorism. The world system has been more stable and less lethal to the common people of the world with strong national intelligence agencies (especially strong national intelligence agencies operated by democratic governments) than it was with weak intelligence capabilities that let countries surprise their adversaries more often.

Anticipating a comment that comes up in threads like this most of the time on Hacker News, I will mention why I am not overly afraid of NSA controlling the whole country by blackmailing politicians. I don't believe NSA blackmail can or will happen in general, for reasons I have mentioned before here on HN. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail. But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless. Even after they are caught (by old-fashioned journalism, or by a jilted lover or some unrelated criminal investigation) doing something unsavory, they are still willing to run for office, and SOME ARE REELECTED. United States Senator David Vitter was reelected in 2010 even after a scandal involving behavior that I would consider shameful,[1] and the antics of former DC mayor Marion Barry[2] are probably still notorious enough that they don't need further discussion here. In short, I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets. Some politicians have PUBLIC lives full of dirt, and still get elected and influence policy anyway.

The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity. Some politicians, I am quite sure, could have all their secrets revealed only to have voters think "Why is that person such a straight-arrow? Why not have some fun once in a while?" The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians, and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets. If politicians think that NSA is going too far (as evidently several politicians from more than one party do think), then they will receive plenty of support from the general public to rein in the surveillance. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I am a lawyer, who as a judicial clerk for my state's Supreme Court used to review case files on attorney misconduct, and, yes, some of my law school classmates are elected officials, including one member of Congress. I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scanda...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_and_d...

Tailored access isn't one way. People controlling the kind of industrialized automated control over remote systems to make surveillance possible wouldn't need to rely on finding and exposing secrets; they could easily plant evidence.

"I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope."

This seems a very paternalistic view of politics that assumes politicians inherently know better than the public and that the people here are overblowing the dangers of NSA surveillance. I can imagine an alternate universe where there was no one like Snowden to make public the breadth of surveillance and the system was allowed to run unchecked. Isn't it a worrying sign that the system of checks and balances required a whistleblower? Before that, the government was writing laws that were eroding privacy without the knowledge and input of the public. That's not how things are meant to work in a democracy.

We lived in that universe for a long time before the leaks, and many people still live in that universe today, either out of ignorance or apathy. How are they worse off for it?

> I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets.

What if some politicians manage to get an insider peek at the data NSA has ? NSA does not necessarily need to seek power on its own, but it can become a tool of control, usable by people who might want to make use of it.

Information is indeed power. The problem with that surveillance program is that it's a secret warchest of data, it's secret because it's purposed for criminal investigations. Anyone who can manage to bribe or have enough influence towards NSA employees could theoretically make unimaginable use of this data. It's having a monopoly on information. It also create distrust in computers in general, which is not necessarily a good thing.

The problem is not privacy, the problem is the possibility of small groups having privileged access to mandatory, potential sensitive data about anyone. That data is supposed to be secret because it's for investigative purposes. But it's done on everyone, without warrant, it's a recipe for a huge political mess.

This risk is way too high, compared to its advantages. You can't dismiss that risk.

"I don't believe NSA blackmail can or will happen in general, for reasons I have mentioned before here on HN. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail."

First of all, having being part of the action arm of the government (Marine Corps) I can say from experience that I don't trust any of the fuckers in DC, and I think your attitude is naive. Secondly, you are setting up a strawman fallacy by saying that the comments you most frequently see assume that if leaders are being watched they are all afraid. I haven't seen that claim made anywhere, even on conspiracy websites.

No, control is about a toolbag, and some tools work on some people and some tools work on others. Just like if you were trying to recruit a spy to spy on his country for you. Maybe blackmail works on person A, but maybe person B just wants his kids to go to a good US college. Maybe person C just needs some money. Not all the politicians needs to fear surveillance blackmail because there are other methods for those who don't succumb to that particular tactic.

"The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians,..."

More strawmen. What does "probity variance" even mean? Probity means completely honest, so how can there be variance on being completely honest? Not to mention even saying the word probity in a sentence targeted at US politicians falls flat on the face of history.

"and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets"

Nobody is saying there is a universal way to compromise or unduly influence politicians, as per my previous statements. The fact that you are ignoring all the other ways to unduly influence them seems striking, especially given your own claimed position as a judicial clerk for your states supreme court. Either you know about them and are omitting them on purpose, which is dishonest conversation (I'll refrain from lawyer comments), or you don't, in which case you are out of your depth in your commenting. All I see in your statements is a string of logical fallacies with no substantive comment of any note. (your first paragraph excepted)

Also, regarding the idea that there are a handful of straight arrow politicans. I don't disagree entirely, though I may question how straight, but I think you might misunderstand their power position in the beltway. They may be upright, but if they sit back and don't do anything about the egregiously unconstitutional acts occurring around them they are guilty by association.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com