As you may or may not have heard, the CIA has recently had a major document trove released about the works of CCI in Langley. There are lots of analyses of the technical aspects (including on the leak homepage).

Politics aside, I’m mainly enjoying seeing the internals of a different developer/company/government culture — some of them are hilarious, some of them are laughably relatable (who doesn’t have notes scrawled somewhere about handling git submodules so they don’t have to hit StackOverflow), and some of them are reminders that software devs gonna software dev, no matter who signs the paycheck!

In no particular order, these are some of my personal favorites:

• The CIA is agile (!!!)
• Developers come up with nicknames for each other
• They had a championship in 2015 of (what appears to be?) ridiculous or funny things said by or about fellow developers (and mocking each other’s romantic failings was a hot contender)
• They use the default password “NDBadm1n4Life”
• They like anime
• They read Hacker News, /r/netsec, Slashdot, and follow SwiftForensics and play LoL and Hearthstone (and love kittehs)
• They teach noobs to write good unit tests…
• …and eventually the noobs play CTF (with flags named things like “WhereIKeepMyNukes.pdf”)

  

  • They have personal wiki/homepages.

    

    • User #54198274 (Mr. South Jersey) has a list of project name ideas for a fellow team member, complete with themes, including (but not limited to):

      • “Beer”
        • “Cattywumpus”
        • “PublicPaleAle”
        • “PennQuarterPorter”
        • “Oblysium”
      • “Roommate”
        • “RowdyRoommate” (which might have gotten used? “RowdyRoommate: Audio Implant (iTime)”
        • “CrazyCohabitant”
      • “Cafe Deluxe”
        • “BlondeZilla”
        • “GodzillasQuarrel”
      • “Philly”
        • “WhizWith”
        • “WhizWithOut”
        • “PhillyPhanatic”
        • “KillerTomato”
        • “TractorThief”, “CombineStealer”, “DeereRobber”, and “BalerBurgler” (I’m sensing a theme)
        • “Snooki’s Revenge”

    • They have secret projects called McNugget (iOS exploit), Philosoraptor (which they don’t document well), Fight Club, and best, RickyBobby and its P/Cython support framework Cal

      

      • They have an emoji reference for hard-to-type Kaomoji
      • They use an Atlassian management stack (Confluence, Jira [Sprint], Bamboo, Stash)
      • They discuss Maslow’s Hierarchy of Code Review (authored by Uber engineering manager Charls-Axel Dein)
      • They analyzed where The Equation Group (NSA) went wrong
      • They suggest you pick up duty free Scotch on your way back from undercover postings in Europe (and have a record for least amount of petty cash on their person when they leave — 0.52 € is the number to beat)
      • They use gifs to express frustration about end users and painful bugs
      • They cracked classic games like LBreakout2 and 2048
      • They use memes when listing their default passwords
      • They keep track of their 100 push up challenge scores
      • They use kids’ drawings for profile pictures

        

      Agree or disagree with any or all of what WikiLeaks and/or the CIA are doing, a developer is a developer the world around.