Inspect it for hardware modifications, and, assuming there are none, perform a factory reset and you're good.
The amount of engineering the Feds would have to do to ensure a hack evades those two safeguards is prohibitive.
The amount of engineering the Feds would have to do to ensure a hack evades those two safeguards is prohibitive.
For all we know, this kind of thing is nearly COTS in the FBI/NSA/CIA/TLA world. The question becomes: do they let one of their toys fall directly in to the hands of a security researcher?
They would be stupid to do that. On the other hand, some agencies better than others . . .
If you're insinuating they do this already, then don't you think that would have been the very first bomb dropped by Snowden? Snowden had access to everything. You don't spin up a department like that overnight, it takes years before the department will work well enough to rely on in different situations.
Also, just because they have people that can compromise individual devices in the context of a field operation doesn't mean those people are available for regular law enforcement ops, any more than you could get an NFL coach to head up your son's kiddie league team. The scale of engineering is totally different.
Documents have shown the NSA takes active interest in privacy and security advocacy groups, the EFF sounds right in their ballpark.
Massive-scale, actually: full-spectrum.
There are no aspects of modern technology infrastructure that are off the table in these realms: all systems are targets. Planet-wide.
So, its not just that the NSA will be reprogramming firmware or putting key sniffers in your macbook or writing 0-day exploits. Its that they'll listen to everything, anywhere along the wire, as they see fit.
Fact: NSA/et al. have a complete catalog of devices they can easily implant in any consumer/corporate/civil/military computing device. There is a veritable market within these spook agencies, as customers of each other, such that reaching for a phone-book sized volume of catalogs is where the implant selection process starts ..
There is also much evidence that our CPU's are designed for intrusion in the first place. This is the scarier scenario: it doesn't matter how secret you think you are, if you didn't make your own CPU, there's a back door.
Now, assuredly there's people out there that support field operations that could study the individual device and then exploit it given X number of days. To go from there to assume that USG can undetectably compromise most, or even a large enough subset of devices, is paranoid. The scale of that problem is much larger.
USG focuses on backdooring crypto for this reason. Much easier to compromise a few algorithms than it is to backdoor every device.