I am willing to bet that there are teams of spies who have infiltrated Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Spies from US, Russia, China, Britain, Israel, Germany, etc, must have dozens of spies working as engineers are getting access to all that data as we speak.
To think that they aren't would be rather naive, in my opinion. If I were head of the spy agencies in any one of those countries, it would definitely be the first thing I would do.
I.e., it's not.
The lesson of the Snowden leaks is clearly this: if it can be imagined, and it can be useful, and they have the budget, and it's remotely doable, then it's been done.
China almost certainly did this because they could. You only get one chance to do something like this, so you have to do it even if it risks losing the ability to do it in the future: if you never do it, then you never get the benefit, and if you do do it, you get to do it once, and once is better than never.
I think the real trick is a real covert channel that's hard to find both analytically and via stastics/machine learning.
I think the real trick is a real covert channel that's hard to find both analytically and via stastics/machine learning. Which is stil high enough bw.
1) happen to be country that makes all electronics
2) Company with a lot of ties to your country is happen to be top server supplier
3) Companies that use these servers happen to work for DoD, CIA and all major points of interest.
But cpu, baseband, ram etc is certainly more serious consideration... And I don't see how you can get around that. Unless you plan to build a dumb phone around a Motorola 68k or something?
For that matter, many a CS faculty at many a university have actually created their own OS. Nothing too sensational either.
> In 2009, a report presented to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated that the purpose of Kylin is to make Chinese computers impenetrable to competing countries in the cyberwarfare arena. The Washington Post reported that:
> China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make Beijing’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
They all have Linux distros, sponsored nationally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:State-sponsored_Linux...
(I've never actually bothered interviewing with any of the above, maybe it's all entirely normal or you need to write your own self-balancing tree implementation regularly).
- Is a legitimate news organization incompetent when it comes to a deeply technical investigation?
- Why are large publicly traded tech companies refuting the article to the point of potentially defrauding investors.
I don't think the power of international players and the maturity of their strategies plays into it very much. I think you can assume they are incredibly powerful/pervasive and still doubt Bloomberg.