Snowden Used Software Scraper, Say NSA Officials 227
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country's most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to 'scrape' the National Security Agency's networks, and kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials. Using 'web crawler' software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden 'scraped data out of our systems' while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. 'We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,' the official said. The process, he added, was 'quite automated.'"
In Soviet Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Beta scrapes you!
Amused (Score:5, Funny)
"This automated and indiscriminate bulk collection of data is unacceptable!"
Re:Stunning. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god .... could it be .... wget ?
In his defense (Score:5, Funny)
In his defense mr. Snowden explained that his scraper was only gathering metadata and therefore by their own standards the NSA has nothing to worry about.
When asked for comment NSA director James Clapper replied : "Whoa that's deep bro!"
Re:Stunning. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stunning. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stunning. (Score:5, Funny)
the malicious and now banned weapons grade tool is called "wget" by underground unix hackers.
Re:Middle Initial (Score:4, Funny)
Jerry: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck...
Alice: What about them?
Jerry: Serial killers. Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman...
Alice: John Hinckley. He shot Reagan. He only has two names.
Jerry: Yeah, but he only just shot Reagan. Reagan didn't die. If Reagan had died, I'm pretty sure we probably would all know what John Hinckley's middle name was.
Re:Stunning. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stunning. (Score:4, Funny)
And the joke was on them--he was actually stealing wheelbarrows!
Re:Stunning. (Score:4, Funny)