Prolific YouTube video blogger Styxhexenhammer666 (“Styx”) since 2007 just released a nearly 14-minute video upon “The Equation Group” hack of the National Security Agency (NSA). In this long rant, Styx shows off his knowledge of the NSA spying situation and crushes all justifications for the NSA’s massive spying program. He also points out harms and dangers of the program. Here are some of the key points. Styx explains these in good detail during the video.
- NSA has not stopped terrorist attacks.
- NSA costs too much money.
- NSA routinely misuses its power.
- NSA violates the Constitution.
- NSA is incapable of storing data securely.
- After this hack, NSA has to take down and rebuild its systems.
- NSA storage creates “another layer of vulnerability” making data less secure.
Here are some excerpts from this video report. After multiple courts ordered the government to stop spying:
What Congress ended up doing is simply moving the data storage from government property, government servers, to the private companies responsible for the transference of that in formation — which is to say they did nothing at all…
The surveillance is still being conducted on a massive scale. The only difference now is that when they issue their rubber-stamped FISA court rulings, which a FISA court in its form shouldn’t even be considered a proper court of law able to issue a warrant, especially not a blanket warrant which itself violates the Fourth Amendment — all it does is it forces them to get that material from an easily-accessed non-government server instead of their own server, so they’re just not the one storing the information to begin with. This solves nothing.
So because the NSA has stopped zero terrorist attacks despite having billions and billions of dollars in assets, despite the fact that the NSA routinely misuses its power and allows its agents to apparently spy on loved ones or relatives or enemies or whatever, despite the fact that it costs too much for too little even if it were effective, despite the fact that it violates the Constitution, they’re all claiming, ‘oh well great coup, horrible thing that we would be hacked and this material would be released.’ I don’t see it as horrible at all. I don’t care.
The only concern that I would have is that all of that data that’s been stored and is accessible through these NSA programs would now become accessible by people from foreign shores — but you think our government cares if our private data is stolen? They don’t care at all. The only thing they worry about at the end of the day is that some hacker group will gain access to the actual financial structure of the United States and wreak havoc… thus causing a fiscal Armageddon …
Now, there’s a simple solution for this, of course on the end as far as money is concerned, why don’t you stop storing it as data? … Have a back-up system in place that doesn’t rely upon these things… Problem solved…
If a hacker collective managed to grab all of their programs and now wants payment to release the second bigger, better batch … If they’re able to get a hold of this material, it means two things.
First, the NSA is incapable of storing things just like Hillary Clinton was incapable of storing things or the state department or anybody else in government really without it getting fucked-up somehow by some foreign group…
[Second,] If these R&D NSA programs that can now be literally accessed by anybody who happens to know how to properly install these things and potentially replicate them or whatever, then every foreign state in the world can now just use the NSA systems. Oh, sorry, the NSA has to take them all down, rebuild them in a new form, and then redeploy them which will take them quite some time. That’s the second main problem.
The third problem is of course most of these programs explicitly violate the Fourth Amendment and shouldn’t even exist to begin with. The problem with domestic surveillance and big data gathering is that we the people have to rely upon the concept that has been proven wrong year after year forever that the government is capable of properly storing our digital information … everything under the sun … we have to trust them to be able to store this and protect it in such storage … from other actors from potentially accessing it. Well, I don’t trust them to do that. I also don’t trust the companies that they now entrust to do the same thing because they’re just as hackable.
If the NSA can be compromised by a group of black hat hackers, then how much more will they be able to compromise presumably less-well protected systems at some telecom company? Now, I think it would be considerably less. Now, I might be wrong here. Maybe the NSA’s just really, really inept and it was just really, really easy to access those systems…
Styx is probably right.
Yeah, your text messages and stuff are probably floating around on Russian servers too, and there’s not a damn thing Uncle Sam can do about it other than to shut these programs down. They’re not doing any good. They cost too much. They’re woefully ineffective. They’re poorly protected. Why bother?
Domestic surveillance doesn’t serve a purpose. It never did. It doesn’t catch any terrorists…
We’re paying a huge amount of money and we’re not getting anything in return other than screwed — and having our data compromised…
Why then do we want another layer of vulnerability which is really what it is, which is the government is going to redundantly store everything you’re already storing and provide another attack point that potentially gets infiltrated by people who clearly are able to hack a government bureau with apparently relatively little problem.
Apparently, this stuff dates back to 2013. It dates back to before Snowden’s own revelations. They had already hacked this material back then and were just sitting on it for several years. Now, ask yourself why they would do that. I think they’re releasing it now just to cause more chaos and mayhem. Well, I don’t even care. We’ve already seen the DNC’s been hacked. The D-triple-C’s been hacked [DCCC]. The Clinton campaign’s been hacked. George Soros Foundation was hacked… The State Department was hacked. Everything’s been hacked. Why are we storing all this bull crap on computer systems to begin with?
If the government wants to conduct surveillance on someone get an honest-to-goodness warrant and do it on paper… It’s gonna be more effective anyway… If you have probable cause and you can convince a public court, a real court of law, that you do have probable cause then by all means, under the Constitution yeah, the government has that power. But using blanket warrants rubber-stamped by a FISA court and then improperly storing every bit of data under the sun seems like a bad idea to me. So I’m not surprised they got hacked. I’m not surprised that it happened apparently several years ago. I’m not surprised that now probably every fucking hostile state on Earth has access to these programs.
Near the end, Styx mentions that the Democratic party has become the party of war and the Republican party has become the populist party. Not so fast, Styx. Despite the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican party is still very much connected to the “PNAC agenda” of perpetual war. See this report and keep watching after the election.