[Info-vax] Bradley Manning and OpenVMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <52bb793a$0$17042$c3e8da3$dd9697d2 at news.astraweb.com>,
	JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> On 13-12-25 18:56, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 
>> 1.  According to the documents leaked by Snowden getting companies to agree
>> to backdoors started in 2001.  Where was VMS Engineering then? 
> 
> For VAX-VMS it would have been through a patch because if I remember
> correctly, 7.3 was already out and is the final version.

And knowing what the NSA was looking for and what those machines were likely
doing I doubt they had any interest in the few remaining VAXen.

> 
> You are correct that if told to do so, the engineers would have done so
> and kept their mouth shut.
> 
> Recently, a canadian was recently denied access to the USA. Appears the
> NSA got access to her medical records and saw she was getting treatment
> for depression and flagged her as "mentally ill" or something enough to
> get border guards to deny her entry.

I doubt the NSA had anything to do with it.  More likely she was carrying
the Rx with her and had to show it at Customs.  You do know that bringing
drugs, even prescription drugs, into a country can be a crime.  While the
NSA is sweeping up lots of people's data, they are really not interested
in ordinary people.  This doesn't excuse their actions and they should be
stopped, but paranoia is not the reason.

> 
> Not sure VMS ever had a presence in medical systems in Canada, but it
> did in the USA so I suspect that NSA would have had some "in"  into
> Cerner's software (probably more at application level than at OS level
> since this would make it mroe multi platform).
> 

I'm sure it did as there were a lot more systems than Cerner that ran on
VMS but got no publicity either when they were running or when they moved
off VMS.

> At the time, VMS was probably still processing a lot of SMS messages, so
> NSA would have likely wanted access to that. But whether this would have
> been done at the OS level, application level or even with the carriers
> (who have cooperated so easily with NSA in USA).

Maybe so, but I would guess that "lot of SMS" was still a very small
percentage of all SMS traffic.  And VMS would have been very low on
the NSA radar.  Not because it was somewhow too secure for them to
deal with but because it was uninteresting.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>