Don’t trust your phone, don’t trust your laptop – this is the reality that Snowden has shown us
Back in July 2013, a few weeks after Edward Snowdens revelations about internet and mobile-phone surveillance began, I wrote a column that began: Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world.
The spur for the column was my realisation of the extent and astuteness of Snowdens choice of what to collect and reveal. His was not some opportunistic smash-and-grab data heist, but a considered, informed selection of cases where he thought that the National Security Agency was violating the US constitution and/or circumventing its laws. Snowden was clearly no stereotypical left-wing dissident; he seemed closer to what US constitutional lawyers called an originalist someone who regards the constitution as a sacred, inviolable document that citizens and their governments must continue to respect and adhere to. If Snowden were in the US today, I suspect he would be a supporter of Rand Paul.
What Snowden did was careful and considered: he identified examples of what he regarded were unconstitutional activities on the part of the NSA and then downloaded documentary evidence of these activities that would corroborate his judgment. Given the staggering scale of the activities revealed, I remember thinking that it would take us a long time to realise the full extent of the surveillance mesh in which we are entangled. So it has proved.
But a few recent revelations suggest that we may now be getting down to bedrock. Two concern the consummate hacking capabilities of the NSA and its overseas franchises. The first which came not from Snowden but from Kaspersky, a computer security firm showed that for at least 14 years a unit in the NSA had succeeded in infecting the firmware that controls hard disk drives with malicious software that is able to persist even through reformatting of the disks.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/edward-snowden-trust-phone-laptop-sim-cards
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
bemildred
(90,061 posts)On the street, they drive money around in big trucks, with guards. On the internet you get "security through obscurity", mainly.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)Because the information was already readily available for anyone bothering to pay attention...Of course that piece still doesn't address why Snowden has been eager to blow the cover on legit foreign operations which have jack fuckin' shit to do with the constitution -- Unless there's some amendment I missed that says the Chinese, Afghans, Libyans, etc. have a constitutional right to not be spied on...
Snowden isn't any more of an originalist than Rand Fuckin' Paul pretends to be for the emoprogs...
frazzled
(18,402 posts)Live your life in fear of the government. That's what the Paulites want you to be.
giftedgirl77
(4,713 posts)& my boyfriend is Pakistani, we are officially fucked.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)I thought not....