It intrigues me how , NSA pulls the best of the hackers
To accomplish this task and who is behind the architecture and direction of this ? It's bad, it's terrible in privacy violation perspective and in security perspective , but also remember this is nothing less than magic to bring the resources together effectively and make it scale.
"It intrigues me how , NSA pulls the best of the hackers To accomplish this task and who is behind the architecture and direction of this ?"
They don't need to be the best of the hackers.
The fascist(collusion between private companies and State) laws that were created after 11-9 let them have access to the source code of hardware and software.
With source code, doing this is not that hard. I believe most of them do not need to be stars.
I don't know about the specific NSA, but normally secret agencies have lots of ways of finding who is good at hacking-cracking(the stars). For example who is behind the release of the crack to a software protection.
As simple as "recording the web" for unique documents upload, and analyzing which dark web page was the first to upload the document. Follow all the proxies and who is really behind is not that hard if you have resources.
Once you know who is the target you want to hire you study her with social connections in facebook-twitter-whatsapp- gmail-smartphone, very easy for the NSA.
You study her weaknesses, she probably needs money, you give her(first one's is free, so you give her lots of money for her first easy job so she believes she could be rich easily). She is lonely, you give her a partner. Needs sex? And so on.
The rest is easy, once they take the bait maintaining them hooked requires them much less energy(money, resources or coercion). They can destroy you life with the pinky finger.
Life is good if you do exactly what they ask you. If your vice is thinking for yourself or ethical scruples(and most hackers have those vices) your life could be hell.
If you help them, you are a patriot, if you don't, you are a traitor. You are with me or against me is their favorite motto.
Stars know personally other stars, and they know who is good at it at a glance. So you make one of her jobs to hire other hackers crackers.
Anything is easy if you have unlimited funding. Especially this kind of reverse-engineering job, where the NSA can use their industrial espionage assets to get a copy of the firmware source and board schematics.
