Ferals spying on ferals
The question is who is behind the hack. The most likely culprit is one of the feral spookhauses.
"might give some federal IT workers a heart attack' - would anyone notice?
A bunch of US government departments and agencies – from the military to NASA – are being grilled over their use of backdoored Juniper firewalls. The House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform fired off letters to top officials over the weekend, demanding to know if any of the dodgy NetScreen …
Most likely candidate seems to be GCHQ at the behest of the NSA but given the NSA own Cisco it is fair to assume it's the NSA.
The thing about back-dooring things and not telling anybody is people buy the gear, if the US govt has been pwned because of it they've only added to the hilarity.
they are the ones trying to push legislation and international treaties to make these backdoors mandatory and when they actually discover that they themselves were already using them for years they are upset about having backdoors?
Talk about not wanting to eat your own dogfood...but you keep feeding it to others.
The left hand seems not to know what the right hand is doing.. and in this case the left hand was snatching some food out of the pile dished out by the right hand.
/facepalm
Clearly you don't understand; back doors on US Government systems are terrible security holes, and the product of Islamic Fundamentalism and/or communists, like the EU.
Back doors put in by the US Government are for legitimate law enforcement, like the FBI, DEA, NSA, CIA, ATF, State Police, City Police, Sheriff's Department, Dog Catcher etc. There's no chance that the back door mechanism will ever be exposed for use by harckerz or other unwanted ne'er-do-wells (see previous list).
Remember: Our back doors = Good, other back doors = Bad. And there's a law that says the bad guys (if we can ever define these clearly) won't use the good back doors (I'm sure they promised not to, and didn't cross their fingers when they did so) so no problem.
"what is the difference between "Our back doors" and "other back doors" from a binary or boolean point of view?"
Clearly you're using "logic" (a perverted relative of "science") to misrepresent "True Knowledge" (as defined by the Family Union for Correct Knowledge and the Youth Organisation for Understanding).