Posted on 12/29/2013 5:36:47 PM PST by Nachum
While the world may have become habituated to (and perhaps revels in, thank you social media exhibitionist culture) the fact that the NSA is watching anyone and everyone, intercepting, recording, and hacking every electronic exchange regardless if it involves foreign "terrorists" or US housewives, the discoveries from the Snowden whistleblowing campaign continue. The latest revelation from the biggest wholesale spying scandal since Nixon, exposed by Germany's Spiegel which continues the strategy of revealing Snowden leaks on a staggered, delayed basis, involves a back door access-focused NSA division called ANT, (which supposedly stands for Access Network Technology), described by Spiegel as "master carpenters" for the NSA's TAO (Tailored Access Operations, read more about TAO here). The ANT people have "burrowed into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry -- including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell." More importantly, thanks to Spiegel (and Snowden of course), the NSA's 50-page catalog of "backdoor penetration" techniques has been revealed.
The details of how the NSA can surmount any "erected" walls, via Spiegel:
These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives -- from computing centers to individual computers, from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA's specialists seem already to have gotten past them.
This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets' data. The catalog even lists the prices for
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
Reggie too.
Back door penetration? I thought this was a family-friendly site.
It will take a President that really cares about America and its people to clean the stain called Obama.
That’s just icky.
Poor Nachum.
When will all the you-know-whos at NPR and the other networks come out?
They're just watching out for all of us to make us safe.
These guys are seriously overpaying for this stuff!
I made a few 4gb thumb drives that had an extra 4gb of hidden storage and used a cheap crystal oscillator in the VHF region to transmit data. These cost less than 20 dollars each.(this was just an academic exercise) Adding receiver function would have cost an extra 20 or so. A tiny custom SDR (software defined radio) IC would be the proper way to do this and is certainly what NSA does. You can buy a small SDR board for 10 dollars but it's too big to shoehorn into many items, a custom IC would be better.
The real advantage NSA has is they get to use the huge NRO satellites in geo orbit to pick up the weak signals from such devices. Less well-heeled operators need to set up shop close to their targets, and that's a pain.
You must keep in mind that if an incredibly weak rf signal has a slow data rate then it can be reliably read even if it's signal is well below the noise floor...even amateur radio operators can do this now using a PC with the proper software and their radio gear.
I have been warning people for years about firmware tampering on hard drives and other devices. Some drives can update the firmware by simply placing a properly named file in the root directory. i.e. something like updatefw.dat some require access to connections on the HD's controller board and still others need you to run an updating program from the PC.
Name a computer peripheral and there is usually a way to tamper with its firmware code. USB thumb drives, SD cards, drive controllers, external HD's, wifi dongles..etc all of these have a controller on board (tiny computer on-a-chip) that has it's own program running (called its firmware) and all these can be altered.
That’s downright creepy.
Apparently we’ve got some pretty smart techies @ the NSA but,
when you consider the combined youth populations of China and India I have heard by numbers alone there will be over 20 times as many gifted kids there as here.
The concern may not be what the NSA can do today but what others will do in the future
I also trust our response to the perceived evils of the NSA will be to bridle ourselves so the competition can catch up
Ping for later.
That was 0vomit’s favorite technique!
And that is why we have to limit the government's authority and tools. An unpatriotic leader will certainly use them against the people.
LOL! What a horribly written title.
M4L when L really means L
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