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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

If there's any truth at all to the allegations, a much more likely scenario is the Russians and Chinese have either turned other NSA contractors, or have entered NSA computers via contractors' computer networks (see RSA SecurID breach).

Anyway, which idiot put the names of field agents on a computer which is accessible to contractors?

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Or maybe the Chinese/Russians got the information from the latest data breach [1] but it's more convenient pointing fingers at Snowden.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/13/standard_form_86_dat...

If I were a betting man, this is what I would go with. I imagine the Chinese/Russians are rigorously reviewing all the foreign contacts listed on the SF86 and checking that with whatever database their governments maintain for suspicious persons. I'd think they would be building a web of who's who that has contacts with clearance-holding Americans.

if i were playing the black hat, i would have targeted the reporters who have the document dump. they are least likely to have the technical know how to keep it secure. i think i recall that snowden gave them some instructions around how to access/keep safe, but i suspect when you have government agencies specifically targeting you, it becomes quite difficult even under the best conditions

But that dump is now 2 years out of date. Turning a current NSA contractor, or (even safer) just attacking an insecure network from afar gives them the up to date information.

While I absolutely agree with you, I'd like to point out that in the real world of armies and politics, 2 years is not fresh but definitely not out-of-date.

Military and diplomatic careers last 20 years (especially among people that matter). And things reportedly in the OPM breaches, such as medical and psychological issues usually stay relevant for even longer than that.

If I remember correctly, Snowden himself said in Citizen Four that intelligence agencies use aliases for assets and not targets. Which would mean that if any agents had actually been named in the docs, their masters saw them not as assets but as potential targets, which is damning unto itself.

"computer which is accessible to contractors"

Most of this stuff is built and/or ran by contractors.

Why is it "much more likely"? There are plenty of very plausible scenarios in which Snowden docs could be the source.

He could have done a worse job encrypting them than he thought he did.

He could have purposely handed it over:

for revenge because the US is trying to hunt him down;

because Russia threatened to hand him back to the US;

because Russia tortured him for the keys;

etc.

Occam's razor. We know that someone recently stole the exact information they are complaining about being exposed. This is probably how the agents were compromised.

A lying anonymous government source (from one of the governments that has anonymously lied to us so many times in the past) is far more plausible than some bizarre 2 year delay and subsequent cryptographic breakthrough by the "Chinese and Russians" (who are now allied?).

Occam's razor isn't an excuse to just presume your biases.

Presuming bias isn't an excuse to not mention logical flaws.

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