NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
theverge.com
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
theverge.com
It would have been better if they also reported a case of abuses of these capabilities.
Or is it just ok when it happens to the "bad guys"?
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 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.
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
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?
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.
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.