On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Philip Neustrom <[email protected]>wrote:
> The latest Snowden docs have some great screenshots of the NSA-internal > MediaWiki installation Snowden is alleged to have obtained a lot of his > material from: > > > https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/ > > Looks like a static HTML dump, as a few of the external extension images > haven't loaded. > > The last details on their technical infrastructure indicated that Snowden > used "web crawler" (love the quotes) software to obtain information from > their internal wiki: > > > http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/us/snowden-used-low-cost-tool-to-best-nsa.html?hp > > What's not mentioned in the NYT piece is that their MediaWiki instance > likely didn't have any read-only ACLs set up, or if they did they were > buggy (are any of the third-party ACL extensions good?) -- which was > perhaps one reason why Snowden was able to access the entire site once he > had any access at all? > > "If you actually need fancy read restrictions to keep some of your own > people from reading each others' writing, MediaWiki is not the right > software for you." -brion. > > ..like, if you're a nation-state's intelligence agency, or something :P > > I think it's fascinating that this technical decision[1] by the MediaWiki > team long ago may have had such an impact on the world! And much more > fascinating that the NSA folks may not have read the docs. > There's a good article about this on the Washington Post web site (< http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/10/how-the-911-commission-helped-edward-snowden/>). The author argues that the choice of software that facilitates discovery and collaboration was deliberate, motivated by the 9/11 Commission Report, which attributed intelligence failures to lack of effective knowledge-sharing in the intelligence community. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
