Welcome to the age of cyberwar. For years now, the US government, along with other leading world governments, have been building super viruses based on flaws that were unknown to the software makers. They can infect almost any system and perform such feats as stealthily “jailbreaking” an iPhone, and turning it into a spy device. Victims have ranged from Iranian nuclear centers to politicians, journalists and human rights activists.
Aside from the obvious potential for abuse, this has created a massive underground supply and demand chain, where skilled programmers have been incentivized to keep flaws they discover secret and sell them for a hefty sum to private buyers—rather than report them to software firms such as Apple and Microsoft.
The US government itself has become complicit in keeping those flaws, known as “zero day vulnerabilities” or “zero days,” secret, leaving millions of unsuspecting users, including its own employees, vulnerable. According to the latest leaks attributed to Edward Snowden, the US government and the UK government both went as far as to tamper with some of the popular antivirus companies in the world, whose work impeded their hacking spree. But for the number one economy in the world, which is heavily dependent on digital technology, this is akin to playing with fire in a wooden house.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/06/23/state-secrets-up-for-grabs-how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-cyberfoot/
This is quite believable. After all, wasn't the US responsible for both the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (in that it had adequate warning of both but did nothing to stop the attacks)?
What was that about "the stupidity of the American people"?
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