evilweasel posted:

and when you post a criticism with any merit beyond your feelings and whining that i am not giving your feelings sufficient respect, perhaps i will bother to respond to them in kind

until then don't whine that your posting receives precisely the effort back you put in


True, the CIA did not exactly slather itself with glory during the cold war and a lot of the James Bond poo poo was stupid and counter-productive. The NSA's mission though just doesn't really lend itself to that sort of freelancing because they're not doing the whole human intelligence angle, they're just trying to read everyone's mail. They're not covert ops guys, that's more of a CIA concern. The NSA's job is to read everyone's mail and be able to hack systems, they don't really leave the country.

And nobody's come up with any better way to respond to cyberwarfare attacks than measured retaliation in kind, so i'm certainly not upset that the US government has been developing that capability. The issue with Russia's interference wasn't so much they collected the information but that they used it offensively. China has been repeatedly hacking personnel databases but there's been no real mutters we should retaliate because everyone collects information and vulnerabilities, it's using the information that crosses the line.