> ... — the agency spent $250 million per year on a program called the SIGINT Enabling Project. Its goal was, basically, to bypass our commercial encryption at any cost.
Now that things have actually started going dark for these overfunded and completely unaccountable entities this is where the biggest danger lies. They have become so desperate for continued access to endless funding that they are actually turning against the people they are sworn to serve. The most dangerous time will come when the governments of the world start the task of trimming down such entities to something proportionate to their worth. That process has not really even begun yet...
Last year the Australian government even went so far as to pass a law allowing them to force companies to sabotage their own products/services in cases where a government agency wants to get access to someone's communications.
For an extra scary thought: Atlassian are Australian. Jira tickets can be forced to be altered or deleted, and codebases hosted on bitbucket shouldn't be assumed as trusted.
You'll never see a Jira ticket about a 0-day the Australian government doesn't want you to fix if they decide to utilize this law.
There is no reason to think that didn't happen long ago. Indeed, MK-ULTRA was directed at the American public, and its perpetrators were never even demoted, never mind prosecuted.
Everybody who believes the CIA had ESP teams, trying to use clairvoyance to extract secrets and kill goats, is evidence of the program's success.
Now that things have actually started going dark for these overfunded and completely unaccountable entities this is where the biggest danger lies. They have become so desperate for continued access to endless funding that they are actually turning against the people they are sworn to serve. The most dangerous time will come when the governments of the world start the task of trimming down such entities to something proportionate to their worth. That process has not really even begun yet...