James Bamford

According to the most recent national security revelations leaked by Edward Snowden, an intelligence officer told him that Tailored Access Operations (TAO) -- a division of National Security Agency hackers -- had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war.

The public didn't know that the US government was responsible, and if the NSA were caught, the finger could always be pointed at Israel, as people joked back at TAO's operations center.

Aside from massive surveillance, Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind, a program that would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. When he was working for the defense contractor Booz Allen, analyzing potential cyberattacks from China, Snowden realized the United States had crossed the line.

“We're hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets,” he said. Snowden went on to warn that such cyberattacks can be spoofed. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia,” Snowden explained.