Why Snowden and supporters are wrong to think China and Russia
haven't already hacked his computers, as he sat with them in his hotel rooms and/or dragged them around the airport.
This article was written before Snowden ever popped up. It's about how business and government travelers to Russia and China routinely take strong precautions against hacking -- and why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-security-a-worry-in-an-age-of-digital-espionage.html
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.
“If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,” said Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.
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The chamber did not learn that it — and its member organizations — were the victims of a cybertheft that had lasted for months until the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the group that servers in China were stealing information from four of its Asia policy experts, who frequent China. By the time the chamber secured its network, hackers had pilfered at least six weeks worth of e-mails with its member organizations, which include most of the nation’s largest corporations. Later still, the chamber discovered that its office printer and even a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments were still communicating with an Internet address in China.
The chamber did not disclose how hackers had infiltrated its systems, but its first step after the attack was to bar employees from taking devices with them “to certain countries,” notably China, a spokesman said.
The implication, said Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Consulting, was that devices brought into China were hacked. “Everybody knows that if you are doing business in China, in the 21st century, you don’t bring anything with you. That’s ‘Business 101’ — at least it should be.”
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