The Nightman Cometh wrote:Christie said he wants state pension reform again in his SOTU. Further solidifying him as an asshole.

2012: We can afford to cut taxes on the wealthy.
2014: We have no money to pay pensions.

While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.
The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
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The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.

Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”

The United States has targeted Unit 61398, the Shanghai-based Chinese Army unit believed to be responsible for many of the biggest cyberattacks on the United States, in an effort to see attacks being prepared. With Australia’s help, one N.S.A. document suggests, the United States has also focused on another specific Chinese Army unit.

Documents obtained by Mr. Snowden indicate that the United States has set up two data centers in China — perhaps through front companies — from which it can insert malware into computers. When the Chinese place surveillance software on American computer systems — and they have, on systems like those at the Pentagon and at The Times — the United States usually regards it as a potentially hostile act, a possible prelude to an attack. Mr. Obama laid out America’s complaints about those practices to President Xi Jinping of China in a long session at a summit meeting in California last June.

At that session, Mr. Obama tried to differentiate between conducting surveillance for national security — which the United States argues is legitimate — and conducting it to steal intellectual property.

But the Iranians and others discovered some of those techniques years ago. The hardware in the N.S.A.'s catalog was crucial in the cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, code-named Olympic Games, that began around 2008 and proceeded through the summer of 2010, when a technical error revealed the attack software, later called Stuxnet. That was the first major test of the technology.
Leave A Comment One feature of the Stuxnet attack was that the technology the United States slipped into Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz was able to map how it operated, then “phone home” the details. Later, that equipment was used to insert malware that blew up nearly 1,000 centrifuges, and temporarily set back Iran’s program.
But the Stuxnet strike does not appear to be the last time the technology was used in Iran. In 2012, a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps moved a rock near the country’s underground Fordo nuclear enrichment plant. The rock exploded and spewed broken circuit boards that the Iranian news media described as “the remains of a device capable of intercepting data from computers at the plant.” The origins of that device have never been determined.

jerseyhoya wrote:

The Nightman Cometh wrote:Christie said he wants state pension reform again in his SOTU. Further solidifying him as an asshole.

2012: We can afford to cut taxes on the wealthy.
2014: We have no money to pay pensions.

The state has a long way to go to balance out the relationship between taxpayers and state employees. Gotta keep pushing.

jerseyhoya wrote:

The Nightman Cometh wrote:Christie said he wants state pension reform again in his SOTU. Further solidifying him as an asshole.

2012: We can afford to cut taxes on the wealthy.
2014: We have no money to pay pensions.

The state has a long way to go to balance out the relationship between taxpayers and state employees. Gotta keep pushing.

Bucky wrote:that's what I've always understood about public vs. private sector. With public sector, the pay is lower, but the pension plan was much better and had a much shorter vesting cycle (i.e. you could retire earlier if you had enough years of service). So what I'm saying is isn't that the norm?

Luzinski's Gut wrote:Spot on Pacino.

TomatoPie wrote:Maybe you've seen this - WasteBook 2013, how the government paid non-essential workers for not working, and the full encyclopedia of bipartisan boondoggles:

http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//in ... bb6c29d4b6

jerseyhoya wrote:I will not stand idly by while Tom Coburn's reputation as a deficit hawk is besmirched in this thread.

I don't agree with all of his stuff, but he's got more credibility on targeting wasteful spending and cutting the deficit than basically anyone else in the country.

drsmooth wrote:oh, and Coburn just made some kind of announcement he'll leave his seat 2 years before his term's up. Has prostate cancer.

swishnicholson wrote:

drsmooth wrote:oh, and Coburn just made some kind of announcement he'll leave his seat 2 years before his term's up. Has prostate cancer.

Surprised jersey didn't note that. Clearly slipping.

swishnicholson wrote:

drsmooth wrote:oh, and Coburn just made some kind of announcement he'll leave his seat 2 years before his term's up. Has prostate cancer.

Surprised jersey didn't note that. Clearly slipping.