The NSA Actually Intercepted Packages to Put Backdoors in Electronics The NSA revelations keep on coming, and if you're feeling desensitized to the whole thing it's time to refocus and get your game face on for 2014. Because shit continues to get real. SPIEGEL published two pieces this morning about the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, aka premier hacking ninja squad. According to Snowden documents, TAO has a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA backdoors. And it's a who's who of a list. Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. TAO actually intercepts online orders of these and other electronics to bug them. SPIEGEL notes that the documents do not provide any evidence that the manufacturers mentioned had any idea about this NSA activity. Every company spokesperson contacted by Spiegel reporters denied having any knowledge of the situation, though Dell officials said instead that the company "respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates." TAO uses software hacking in things like Windows bug reports to get the information and device control they need, of course. But if that's not enough, they even have a special group of hardware hackers who create modified equipment for TAO specialists to try and plant. A monitor cable that allows "TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor," costs $30. An "active GSM base station" for monitoring cellphone calls costs $40,000, and converted flashdrives that plant bugs and can also transmit and receive data with hidden radio signals come in 50-packs for more than $1 million. The NSA octopus spreads its tentacles even further. [SPIEGEL, SPIEGEL] Image courtesy of Peter Gudella/Shutterstock http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-to-put-backdoors-1491169592
Un fucking real...... we have now officially become Soviet Russia minus Stalin killing millions. In Soviet Russia package intercept you.....
This BTW is Obama's Katrina. There is no chance in hell that his presidency survives intact at this point. He'll be in a fetal curl just like Bush was by this time next year.
It's created an enormous backlash in the civil liberties community. The reason Bush wound up screwed in the end was because he talked about limited government but then spent like a drunken sailor on things he believed in. When we got a look at limited government post-Katrina almost nobody liked what they saw. He was caught between his core positions and the things that he had done that broke those positions. So Bush wound up with his loyalists and almost nobody else happy with him. That's where a 33% approval rating comes from. Obama came into office promising to be a progressive president who expanded the reach of government. The Affordable Health Care Act was a perfect example of what his loyalists were looking for. However many people can't stand the legislation and almost nobody thinks it was done right. Now we have an example of gross government over-reach with the NSA spying programs. So people are looking at Obama's big government ideology in a different light. Even if you believe in big government the odds are pretty good you don't support the NSA snooping on you using legislation that was written to spy on terrorists. There really is no place for Obama to go here. The only people who will be supporting him in a year are his diehard loyalists, just as the only people supporting Bush in 2007 were his diehard loyalists. His best chance is to grapple with the beast and publicly impose much greater controls and restrictions on the programs and the people who use them. However he's probably not going to do that at this point. He's just going to play the hand he dealt himself and hope something will bail him out. Long shot there.
No one cares. That's the sad part. A social media website will make a minor change in it's layout and people, young and old, will be up in arms, create some bogus "petition" that will draw droves of people, which is meaningless. The government is spying on virtually everything and it's barely raises a pulse. That's even scarier than the spying - that we are all allowing it to happen.
It raises a big pulse. People just don't know how to vent on it in a constructive fashion at this point. The judicial decisions are slowly accumulating on this. It's going to be like the torture thing. In 5 years the NSA will be half the size it is and bound by an effective ruleset instead of existing in a black haze. Secret courts will be gone by then also. What we're seeing today is the accumulated debris of a generation of bad decision-making in the name of state security.
I just don't understand why the FISC has jurisdiction to rule over domestic telephone meta data. That reeks of a process gone wrong.
Obamacare didn't piss Liberals who were not specifically Obama fans off. The NSA thing did. All the small government talk by Bush accompanied by big spending splurges didn't piss Conservatives who were not specifically Bush fans off. Watching the government fumble Katrina after spending all that money doing other things is what outraged those guys as well as all the fence-sitters in the middle. In the end you have to have your whole base behind you and a significant portion of the fence-sitters. Once you start pissing off parts of your base you are toast because the things that are pissing them off are knocking people off the fence in larger numbers too.
Look at the polling breakdowns not the gross numbers. Liberals are more likely to not like Obamacare (if they're in the no column) because it didn't go far enough as opposed to went too far. Look at the states where the exchanges were never setup by the state governments. Horrible negatives there because there's no alternative to a newly crappy private sector. It's just not as simple as it seems. I think the Democrats screwed up big time with The Affordable Care Act. I think they should have gone single-payer all the way. All the negative things that have happened for them since then would have happened either way. The worst thing that could have happened for them by going single-payer is that the legislation failed to pass, a likely prospect, but they'd have set the terms of the debate moving forward and the next time they won a big election, boom, single-payer.
