One evening over drinks in Ethiopia, during his tour as a CIA officer back in the 1960s, John Stockwell expressed reservations about covert operations to a senior fellow officer named Larry Devlin. Stockwell worried that the CIA was infiltrating governments and corrupting leaders to no useful end. Devlin, well-known in spy circles for his work in the Congo, berated Stockwell[i]:
“You’re trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what’s going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.”
It’s a compelling argument: trust me, I know secrets. In fact it’s the same sort of argument that a federal informant named Hector Xavier Monsegur used to convince an activist named Jeremy Hammond to break into a whole slew of servers belonging to foreign governments[ii]. Monsegur assured Hammond: “Trust me, everything I do serves a purpose.” Hammond didn’t realize that he was actually part of an elaborate intelligence campaign being run by the FBI. Pimped out to other American three-letter agencies as it were...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/01/the-cia-returns-to-black-hat/
Showing posts with label Black Hat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Hat. Show all posts
20140803
20140722
Black Hat Cancels Presentation on Cracking Tor
A presentation at the Black Hat conference about weaknesses within the Tor network has been canceled.
Alexander Volynkin, a researcher with CERT/Carnegie Mellon, was scheduled to give a talk titled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" at the hacker conference, which kicks off Aug. 2.
But conference organizers this week announced that the presentation has been pulled form the lineup after the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Carnegie Mellon University informed them that "the materials that [Volynkin] would be speaking about have not yet [been] approved by CMU/SEI for public release..."
Alexander Volynkin, a researcher with CERT/Carnegie Mellon, was scheduled to give a talk titled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" at the hacker conference, which kicks off Aug. 2.
But conference organizers this week announced that the presentation has been pulled form the lineup after the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Carnegie Mellon University informed them that "the materials that [Volynkin] would be speaking about have not yet [been] approved by CMU/SEI for public release..."
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