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Comment by ranman | Hacker News Reader

Agreed; people overestimate the technological expertise of the U.S. Govt. -- in my anecdotal experience they're laughably behind.

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Isn't that what we thought before Snowden showed us the NSA reprogramming firmware? I know that I said it was being blown out of proportion when the Snowden leaks started, and boy was I wrong.

Snowden showed us that the 5-eyes countries are actively producing and marketing - in their own secret organizations with secret, anti-democratic agreements - massive-scale spy and intrusion technologies. Anti-democratic, freedom-defeating agreements for the purpose of total information control over human civilization.

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.

Even the things Snowden revealed required various industries to cooperate with the NSA. They weren't doing it on their own. Most portions of it were even designed and maintained by contractors! The people that work for these agencies are not savants... The people who work for the contractors however... They're terrifying. The NSA, FBI, etc. are red herrings -- look at MITRE, Booze Allen (consulting), etc.

I would assume it all depends on who in the government touched it. "The government" is a lot of people that don't share much expertise. Some of them have shown a lot of expertise however, and a will to use it maliciously.

"Behind" would assume there's someone else out there that's ahead. The state of the art of device security just isn't there yet for these kinds of compromises to be available to just any cop or agency.

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.

Actually being ignorant of the reality - which is that the upper echelon of "the US Gov't/MilComplex" has had capabilities far, far in advance of modern civil technology, for long enough now that it is a principle governor of the scene - is also one way that the condition persists.

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.

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