NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
theverge.comNSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware If there was the shared use of all this intelligence that everyone believes there is then the War On some Drugs would be over and done with overnight. But then maybe that's still in the staging phase. I don't like these types of disclosures. I don't think that they further the debate. It is perfectly ok for a security agency to have this kinds of targeted capabilities. It would have been better if they also reported a case of abuses of these capabilities. So you'd be ok, hypothetically, with having your laptop "interdicted" en route to you, and keyloggers or whatever installed on it? Or is it just ok when it happens to the "bad guys"? I don't use laptops. Always have self assembled my rigs. I think there are subtle differences between "NSA has the ability to rig someone's laptop when he is a legitimate target with proven national interest" and "NSA is intercepting and rigging laptops en masse" or "NSA laptop intercepting program is yielding a lot of false positives". The problem is that NSA is abusing its powers, taken its mission too far etc ... But yeah - I am totally ok with NSA intercepting specific shipment after having credible HUMINT about some highly probable treat to national security. I am not ok with NSA subverting the whole infrastructure of the world just so they can snoop on their loved ones. The problem with "national security" is that it is too easy to use that term for the sake of industrial espionage as well. The Petrobras hacking is one prime example. Is oil a national security interest? Yes. The opinions of many people in the US government justify these actions on national security grounds. Is hacking every single oil company in the world justifiable because its done in the name of national security? They like to claim acts like those don't constitute industrial espionage, but that couldn't be farther from reality. Just because there are tenuous national securities justifications doesn't mean those acts cease to be economic espionage as well. Is hacking the Saab Group and Dassault fair game because those companies produce fighter jets? What about hacking Airbus and Embraer? Rolls Royce? We like to think that there is a line where it's still a legitimate national security issue and where it starts to become plain vanilla industrial espionage, but that's just a fantasy. It's often both. Hostile sovereign states are not made overnight. Countries like Germany, France and Brazil are not inclined to be hostile to the US. For the last 40 years or so, pretty much every enemy this country has had has been the fault of our failed foreign policy. We should only start hacking sovereign states once this start on the part to hostility towards us. While they are still allies, we should trust them and use diplomacy. But there are a whole lot of useful bothersome people [0] that make this country as great as it is. They don't self assemble their rigs and don't have the time and technical ability to protect themselves against a politicized aggressor like like the NSA. The most important Americans are not the 44 presidents we've had but the millions of Americans who have dissented in the 229 years since the founding of the United States. Those have participated in the civil rights, women's rights, antiwar, gay rights, labor movement, black power, antiglobalization, tea party, occupy wall street, animal rights, anti-tax movement (since 1765), American revolution, abolition movement, state's rights supporters, environmental movements, transparency movements, anti-NSA spying movement, etc., etc., etc., are the American's that matter. They matter more than all the presidents combined since they are the one's that led this nation to be a leader in the free world. What is being done now is potent enough to prevent future movements from helping us move further into being a more just nation. [0] http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html Sorry, but your opinion is just plain wrong: It is not okay for a security agency to have this unchecked access to the worlds industrial resources. This sort of capability, unchecked, is more than enough justification for a declaration of war on the USA by, pretty much, any other major power out there. (It won't happen, but its definitely worthy of the act.) The reason is: this activity completely undermines the sovereignty of every single nation. It invalidates and makes irrelevant any peaceful trade agreements made between different state actors. It completely violates human rights. LOOK at the situation, don't just think about it. If you were Germany, would you be happy knowing that every Macbook in your country was reporting back to the NSA? Every Dell? Every HP? I am looking. The main problem is unchecked. But also the article said they have the ability to do it per shipment. And if the backdoors mention into the article about the software are zero days exploits they are totally fair game. If they are real backdoors - this is a whole other case. But there hasn't been leaked that kind of info except the RNG. And in some perverted way if my PC has to report to someone I prefer it to be to NSA than to my own country. So instead of every single Macbook Pro, it's just those used by key people in your government and key people in industries that compete with industries the US government considers national security assets. That's still enough to constitute an act of war. We are not at war with Germany. We are allied with them. What we are doing bugging our allies instead of using diplomacy shows that we are simply untrustworthy. seems a little far fetched... but i'll stick to building my own machine from now on thanks :/ Just use hard drive that is not manufactured by Maxtor, Seagate, Toshiba or Western Digital. Oh wait ... That is, until they intercept the motherboard you ordered and flash a custom BIOS onto it...