ARE WE FREE YET?!!1! FBI I can turn on your laptop camera without activating the indicator light

[elehhhhna]

http://gizmodo.com/fbi-can-secretly-activate-laptop-cameras-without-the-in-1478371370/@MaxRivlinNadler

[hobbit709]

1. Not if you uninstall the driver and disable the device.

[Holly_Hobby]

2. That's what I did...

I do not want or need a camera on my laptop, so I have always deleted the drivers and disabled it.

When my husband heard about this latest FBI intrusion, he used a Sharpie permanent marker on the lense of his laptop camera, I don't know if that would work or not.

[LiberalEsto]

3. A small piece of that blue painters' tape might help.

Honestly, it feels like they want to spy on every last sneeze.

[Thor_MN]

10. You are seriously scaring me....

I have, specifically, a little piece of blue painter's tape over the lens of my laptop camera.

And I sneezed twice when I opened this thread, before reading your post.

[LiberalEsto]

11. I know.

I counted.

[canoeist52]

4. Nothing a little band-aide can't fix.

[Agnosticsherbet]

5. Somewhere George Orwell's ghost is wagging his finger and saying.

I told you so.

[intaglio]

6. So what's new?

Black Hat hackers have been able to do that for some time (4 or 5 years); and anyway no-one particularly wants the the video because the microphone is a good audio bug and can give passwords by key tap logging even without a key logger installed on your machine.

If you are really worried about being watched have you disabled the camera on your cellphone, smart phone or pad?

I'm not saying any of this is good but your worry is about a horse that long ago bolted the stable.

[hobbit709]

7. My laptop doesn't have a builtin microphone. And I like it that way.

[intaglio]

9. Do you have a cellphone?

Smart or dumb? Hard luck, you're bugged.

A cordless land line? Hard luck, you're bugged.

Have you enclosed your laptop in a Faraday cage to stop screen snatches and keyboard logging?

Are your windows triple glazed with helium in the inner void and white noise generators fitted to the outer pane to stop laser bugging?

TBH stop worrying; if you were worth the effort you are already compromised.

[Silent3]

8. Notice the article simply says "a computer's camera" -- nothing about particular makes, models, etc.

I'd be willing to believe that this is possible, and has been done, for some cameras on some computers, but it's incredibly unlikely to be all of them. There would have to be a wide range of different hacks for different OS/computer model/camera combinations, not one single magic solution.

The very fact that they article doesn't mention this leads me to suspect that a very limited hack or set of hacks is, by the power of stupid, shallow reporting, being blown up into a mythic, unquestioned general and universal capability.

It would be trivially easy to wire a camera's LED directly to the very power line that powers the camera, making such a hack impossible. That would in fact be the cheapest, easiest way to hook up the LED, so I'd expect that many camera's are not susceptible to such hacking -- regardless of how much the paranoid mind thinks that the Powers That Be and mad computer geniuses can hack anything.

If you're going to get paranoid, why not assume they can hack some special, secret camera mode that can see through any tape you stick over the camera lens too?