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But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual targets where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet
by JunkDNA 13y ago
But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual targets where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet stuff which is rightly worrisome, but the vast majority of the slides are similar to the one about the iPhone and detail targeted exploits: specific phones, specific servers, specific routers. Targeted spying on real threats requires those capabilities. Unfortunately, if deployed at scale they could be used for large scale spying. But there is no evidence here that these methods are used in this way (in contrast to stuff like PRISM). I think that's what makes me uncomfortable here. There is a bit of sloppiness going on where people are trying to conflate techniques for targeted spying with mass surveillance. I think it's important to be careful to make the distinctions.
- mirkules 13y agoTo me it seems that the underlying issue in these talks isn't that these methods exist or that they can be employed on a large scale. The issue is that these powers are complety secretive and unchecked. I do agree that they could have been more clear on this.
- Zigurd 13y agoSome of these items need to be deployed with "black bag jobs" and that has some natural limits. Still, we know that people like Martin Luther King were the targets of dirty tricks campaigns, and that the treatment of people like Jacob Appelbaum indicate such dirty tricks are still in play. There are enough prominent technology and finance people reading this who back controversial and truly disruptive technologies like bitcoin, biotech hacker spaces, open source crypto, etc. that they may have a reasonable concern about being a target.