[Cryptography] [cryptography] Equation Group Multiple Malware Program, NSA Implicated

[Henry Baker]

At 11:45 AM 2/20/2015, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html
>with the "money quote" buried in the 5th paragraph:
># a vastly more expansive effort,
># the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
># computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
># processed in the United States -- about 160 billion pieces last year. It
># is not known how long the government saves the images
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html
>is also informative:
># The Postal Service also uses a program called Mail Imaging, in which its
># computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail sent in
># the United States. The program's primary purpose is to process the mail,
># but in some cases it is also used as a surveillance system that allows
># law enforcement agencies to request stored images of mail sent to and
># received by people they are investigating.

The Stasi regularly opened physical mail "at scale":

http://www.military-history.us/2012/12/stasi-museum-leipzig-germany/

"Machine used by the Stasi to steam open personal letters so their contents could be read in the search for dissidents."

"Machine used to seal envelopes that had been opened.  The goal was to make it so that people did not know, or at least were not sure, that their mail had been opened."

Stasi-envier J Edgar Hoover never allowed the Constitution to interfere with his self-appointed task of subverting subversion, and presided over a large amount of illegal physical mail reading.  This hallowed tradition continues today, with the FBI aiding & abetting sub-80IQ people in manufacturing "terrorist plots" out of whole cloth, and the use of "parallel construction" to convert illegal surveillance into testa-lying under oath.

Just as FBI informants made up a material percentage of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1950's, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that FBI informants make up a material percentage of hacking groups like Anonymous; you have to wonder how many FBI informants used their work on the Sony hacks to "graduate" to their next higher level of street cred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140723/10520627977/like-federal-like-local-dc-cops-invent-crime-scenarios-to-sting-out-future-criminals-arrest.shtml

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info.shtml