What If China Hacks the NSA's Massive Data Trove? [View all]

[kpete]

What If China Hacks the NSA's Massive Data Trove?
The danger of creating data sets that would permit a foreign government or non-state actor to wreak havoc on Americans.



Bradley Manning proved that massive amounts of the government's most secret data was vulnerable to being dumped on the open Internet. A single individual achieved that unprecedented leak. According to the Washington Post, "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances." And this week, we learned that the FBI, CIA and NSA were unable to protect some of their most closely held secrets from Glenn Greenwald, Richard Engel,
What If China Hacks the NSA's Massive Data Trove?


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In the wrong hands, it could enable blackmail on a massive scale, widespread manipulation of U.S. politics, industrial espionage against American businesses;,and other mischief I can't even imagine. [...]

Even assuming the U.S. government never abuses this data -- and there is no reason to assume that! -- why isn't the burgeoning trove more dangerous to keep than it is to foreswear? Can anyone persuasively argue that it's virtually impossible for a foreign power to ever gain access to it? Can anyone persuasively argue that if they did gain access to years of private phone records, email, private files, and other data on millions of Americans, it wouldn't be hugely damaging?

Think of all the things the ruling class never thought we'd find out about the War on Terrorism that we now know.



http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/what-if-china-hacks-the-nsas-massive-data-trove/276637/