New revelations eminating from the documents leaked to journalists by Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA has a far more developed and sinister approach to cyberwarfare than previously known.
“From a military perspective, surveillance of the Internet is merely ‘Phase 0’ in the US digital war strategy.”
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Based on new and separate reporting from the New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, the National Security Agency is engaged in what amounts to “guerilla warfare” in which its clandestine hacking operations are designed to be undetectable, untraceable, and therefore, totally unaccountable.
As the team of journalists reporting for Der Spiegel describe it, “the US government is currently undertaking a massive effort to digitally arm itself for network warfare.” And, they report, the NSA—along with its intelligence partners around the world—”have adopted ‘plausible deniability’ as their guiding principle for Internet operations.”
In North Korea, before there was ‘The Interview’—the recent film that had its destiny changed from a Hollywood flop to an international incident—there was the NSA.
According to new reporting by the New York Times, the incidents surrounding the alleged hacking by the North Korean government on Sony Pictures Entertainment last year must be seen through the context of earlier attempts, dating back to 2010, when the U.S. National Security Agency made complex efforts to digitally-infiltrate North Korea.
The Times reports:
And as Der Speigel reported on Sunday, the NSA has been building and expanding its offensive cyberwarfare capabilities for years:
Later in the report, Der Spiegel describes how a new document from the Snowden archive reveals that NSA operatives saw internet surveillance to be only a first step in their desire to “control it all”—a phrase used to describe near total digital awareness of global communication networks. According to their review of the document:
The Der Spiegel journalists described the NSA’s tactics as a kind of digital “guerilla warfare” in which “little differentiation is made between soldiers and civilians.”
“It’s a stunning approach,” they write, “with which the digital spies deliberately undermine the very foundations of the rule of law around the globe. This approach threatens to transform the Internet into a lawless zone in which superpowers and their secret services operate according to their own whims with very few ways to hold them accountable for their actions.”