From Germany’s Der Spiegel this morning:

One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years — the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO.
This is the NSA’s top operative unit — something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.

(Illustration: MC Escher’s ‘Eye‘  found here).

The entire piece is a mind-blower — just when you think nothing can beat the last NSA shit, along most-quickly comes another bigger, dumb-ass turd. A nefarious, life-as-anything-goes, technological image of the NSA as a much-armed octopus grabbing at everything, and anybody is most-appropriate and fitting.
Reads like a science-fiction primer for some futuristic society, but it ain’t.
Some snips:

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies.
TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage.
The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.
The unit is “akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community,” says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA.
“Getting the ungettable” is the NSA’s own description of its duties.
“It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important,” one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document.
The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed “some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.”
The unit, it goes on, has “access to our very hardest targets.”
…
This TAO unit is born of the Internet — created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world’s population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.
From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency.
Their task was clear from the beginning — to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.

And this kind of really pissed me off, and then upon reflection, it should have been expected:

One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft’s Windows.
Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program.
These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers.

It’s been years since I dashed off any freakin’ report, assholes!
The whole article is way-well-worth the read. Yet, at the end, in lieu of the UPS/FedEx delivery debacle during Christmas:

Sometimes it appears that the world’s most modern spies are just as reliant on conventional methods of reconnaissance as their predecessors.
Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries.
If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops.
The NSA calls this method interdiction.
At these so-called “load stations,” agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies.
All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.
These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the “most productive operations” conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms.
This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks “around the world.”
Even in the Internet Age, some traditional spying methods continue to live on.

Shittingly bizarre.

And won’t help that all-important bottom line, either. Also reported this morning, the tech-biggies IBM and Cisco have encountered a sales slump by more than $1.7 billion since Eddie Snowden instigated the NSA shit-storm into full-burner mode — about six months.

IBM, one of the world’s largest information technology suppliers, saw sales in its Asia-Pacific region drop 15 percent from mid-August to mid-October, compared with the same period in 2012.
That was twice as severe as the decline in “pre-Snowden” quarters.
Revenue declines at Cisco, the San Francisco-based communications manufacturer, were even more pronounced, with sales down 8.75 per cent in the quarter after the Snowden allegations, compared with just 2.84 per cent in the three months before.

Just a couple of weeks ago, US firm Boeing lost a $4 billion contract to Brazil for F-18 fighter jets, and all based upon the NSA’s Tao of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, and the giant oil company, Petrobras — the contract went to Swedish Saab and its Gripen NG fighter jet.
And earlier this month, it was noted US IT companies — Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — could lose between $35 billion and $180 billion in the next two years because of what the NSA actually does, not just from the Snowden, or whatever.
Via Time: Silicon Valley executives frequently tout their belief in idealistic principles like free speech, transparency and privacy. But it would be naive to think that they also aren’t deeply concerned about the impact of the NSA revelations on the bottom line.

Remember, it’s the “NSA revelations,” which is a shitload of difference between messenger, and message.