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The actual ELI5: > ELI5 version - you are having a private text exchange with a friend, but someone slipped in to the convo and is reading your texts, and even

• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  This feels like it missed some of the interesting parts, how about: Someone spent a couple of years working as a volunteer in a post office research facitility, making helpful fixes to a machine that sorts the mail into neat bundles. Someone using the prototype machine noticed the machine was using slightly more energy than expected and when they opened the case discovered a highly sophisticated mechanism that could intercept and replace and redirect mail undetected. The changes were hard to spot partly because the volunteer had also made changes to the machine that boxed up the device for shipping out. Up until that point the visible modifications didn't do anything bad, but a final addition activated the full system just as it was being sent out for use. If the person hadn't noticed the energy use, the modified machine would have been sent out to nearly every post office in the world in the next year or so. This mechanism was so sophisticated and well hidden enough, and done with such skill and patience, that the volunteer worker is now assumed to be a spy, but no one knows who they are or who they were working for yet.