[soora]

What does a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10 even mean? What criteria are they judging damages on?

So far, I do not think the NSA has lost any of the capabilities it previously had. I have not heard of any NSA backdoors being removed from existing software.

[toyg]

They're losing a lot of political capital, which should limit their ability to further expand their reach in the immediate future.

They're also an item of debate now, which could potentially result in loss of capability further on. At the next round of elections, Democratic candidates will likely have to defend an unpopular intervention in Syria, they'd rather not add to that pile a defence of some invented Federal right to unwarranted spying on everyone's communications; and it's a potentially easy target for small-government Republicans.

[jes5199]

Republicans have, so far, not been willing to use the "big government" label to attack anything to do with military, police, or espionage - their "law and order" platform trumps their "small government" one.

In the bizarre logic of American politics, Republicans and Democrats are both pro-NSA, while the Greens and Libertarians are anti-NSA.

[toyg]

That's why I said "potential". Depending on how the wind blows, the small-gov platform could give them an easy angle, and if it doesn't, they're still the party of law and order, so it's a win-win. Dems have a harder job, for them it's a wedge issue.

[ihsw]

The US Government and the NSA have made it painfully clear that there are two options for the US to participate in the global internet: capability to decrypt everything or an American version of China's Great Firewall.

The capability to decrypt everything is largely outside of their control, however they can exert pressure of ISPs, SSL certificate authorities, commercial software vendors, social networking services, and a variety of other organizations.

The rationale being that the US Government pressures those organizations to intentionally implement weaker security measures to facilitate the ongoing capabilities of the government's suspicionless surveillance systems.

Since this system of clandestine supportive relationships is potentially unreliable (since it is directly outside of their control and it relies on reciprocal partnerships) then it stands to reason that the simply revelation of these relationships could jeopardize the US Government's surveillance capabilities.

[mc32]

I think it means that while those weaknesses capabilities have not gone away, the data exposed to such, might evaporate (be moved away) from such exposure. Example, the claim that FSB is moving to typewriters.[1] Or criminals moving to other methods of communication, if they perceive the internet as inherently insecure.

[1]http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130711/kremlin-t...

[contextual]

A writer's job (among other things) is to get and keep your attention. This article did that very well using hyperbole (i.e. 12 on the scale of 10).

I think the rest of the article is hyperbole too, but not much more than that.

[nonchalance]

Read the article:

> Nonetheless, this is truly information that plenty of bad guys probably didn't know, and probably didn't have much of an inkling about. It's likely that many or most of them figured that ordinary commercial crypto provided sufficient protection ...

> Now every bad guy in the world knows for a fact that commercial crypto won't help them, and the ones with even modest smarts will switch to strong crypto techniques that remain unbreakable.

If you accept that most bad guys were using commercial crypto and not strong crypto, NSA may have been tapping communications but now won't be able to

[toyg]

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that this switch will actually weaken opponents. Criminal masterminds are often not uber-hackers who can reliably roll their own encryption scheme, so to speak.

[cmyr]

>>What does a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10 even mean?

Integer overflow!

[ensmotko]

I think the former employee just wanted to stress how this is way worse for the NSA than their worst case scenario. It's just to draw attention, nothing else really...

[ohWhatever]

It very obviously means that this goes beyond even the kind of wattage that Spinal Tap's amps are capable of.

This one doesn't just go to eleven. Twelve is greater than eleven.