(Illustration found here).

A kind of shaker coming in the wake of the NSA/Internet/surveillance weirdness is the news today of someone pulling off a “sophisticated” hack late last year of CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computer devices, and the attack didn’t appear random.
Via the Washington Post:

In a statement Friday, CBS did not identify a culprit.
It said Attkisson’s computer “was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012.”
It added: “Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts.
While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and [removal] of data.
This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.”
…
She (Attkisson) said in an interview Friday that she was “outraged” by the breach, which did not appear to be aimed at extracting personal financial information.
“This wasn’t any ordinary malware of a phishing attempt,” that is, an effort to gain personal information, she said.
“I assume someone wanted to see what I was working on.
“The privacy and security of every American citizen in his own home, not to mention the work of a journalist, is sacrosanct.
The idea that an unknown party could come into your home electronically is upsetting and disturbing. . . . People should be disturbed that a reporter would be spied on and intimidated this way.
I do feel that this was an attempt to make me feel intimidated.”

According to the Post, the hacking occurred while Attkisson was working on the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi, yes, that Benghazi. Give it up, please.
The hack, though, is most-likely just the beginning. I don’t understand this computer shit all that much — on/off, click and write — and can’t grasp the technical aspects of how these machines accomplish their jobs, or how a “forensic analysis” could actually show an “intruder” had gotten into Attkisson’s laptop, despite them using “…sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.”
If all ‘possible indications‘ were removed, and “confusion“  was sowed, how did that analysis discover somebody had ransacked the laptop? Too-much freaky shit, there.

One freaky item noted by Edward Snowden during the course of his coming-out party this past week, was his quick spiel about the technical abilities of average-joe IT guys: “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector. Anywhere. I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”
Pretty heavy image that represents, especially paired with all those computer-driven machines, and especially since it could represent near-about half of the world’s population — 3.146 billion e-mail accounts worldwide in 2011 (source).

Of course, the power that be re-fruited young Mr. Snowden’s remarks.
Testifying last week at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, NSA head honcho Gen. Keith Alexander waved off all the scary surveillance shit as near-silly:

Under questioning from Democrats and Republicans, Alexander downplayed any privacy infringement risk from the NSA archive of so-called telephony metadata — detailed records of each domestic call made or received, but not their contents.
The NSA won’t search the data “unless we have some reasonable, articulable suspicion about a terrorist organization,” he said.
“Once we have that, we can see who this guy was talking to in the United States.
But if you didn’t collect that, how would you know who he was talking to?”

Huh? And WTF is articulable suspicion?
And about Snowden?

Alexander was asked how a relatively junior contract employee could access so many national security secrets.
The NSA outsourced its information technology infrastructure about 14 years ago, he replied.
“This individual was a system administrator with access to key parts of the network,” he said.
“This is something we have to fix.”

No shit, shit-bird.
And what about all that ‘sitting at my desk‘ wire tapping anyone, anytime?

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked whether it was true that the NSA had the ability to tap into Americans’ phone calls and electronic communications.
“False. I know of no way to do that,” Alexander responded.

These ‘intelligence‘ guys can speak with way-forked tongues — via Wired this week:

Without documents to prove their claims, the agency simply dismissed them as falsehoods and much of the mainstream press simply accepted that.
“We don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” Alexander said in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute last summer, by which time he had been serving as the head of the NSA for six years.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made similar claims.
At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee last March, he was asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
To which Clapper responded, “No, sir.”
The documents released by Snowden, pointing to the nationwide collection of telephone data records and not denied by government officials, prove the responses untrue.

So the rub.