I particularly liked the bit in the article about hiding data in packets intended for other hosts and harvesting them through passive relays. Is there a way to detect this sort of thing?
Is everything really compromised?
Given the documents and budgets which have leaked so far - it seems more sensible to assume that all hardware & software is compromised until proven otherwise. From the limited information provided so far we can see that if you use any Intel CPU, any Seagate/Hitachi/Fujitsu/Samsung hard drive, any version of windows, most commercially available routers, notepad++, or VLC - the NSA has access. Their scope is ridiculous.
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v733-fix-cia-hacking-npp-...
My bad, that one was the CIA.
Rather, the NSA has the capability to subvert these things. Sometimes before they reach you, sometimes remotely. But you’d be “lucky” to come across one where they’ve actually done it.
but NSA has access to the emails, internal bug trackers and source code repos of the entire dev teams at all of those vendors. think how easy it would be to hack all firmware on an indistrial scale when you can cheat and read the blueprints?
NSA is the biggest cheater. i no longer consider them as being gods of cyberwar. rather, they merely tricked us all to believe NSA was not mass surveilling everyone, then we were blinded to the scale of what was really possible behind the curtain.
if we had the source code to the firmware of every hard drive, we could do exactly the same thing NSA did.
also, yes, do not ever trust a computer. remember the photo of David Miranda's macbook motherboard after his laptop was siezed when he was connecting to a flight in London and acting as the courier between Laura Poitras in Berlin and Greenwald in Brazil? the photo showed GCHQ melted like a dozen chip on his motherboards. when that photo came out, it was puzzling, because the Snowden leaks about NSA hacking firmwares had not yet leaked. in hindsight, now we know. NSA and FVEYs physically destroyed every chip that they could implant, out of fear that someone else could BADBIOS attack David's macbook and steal the Snowden cache.