Kaspersky Lab has stated that a group heavely implied to be US intelligence has been able to install viruses in to HD firmwear where they are near impossible to find and remove, and hijacks the entire boot process rewriting the OS processes.
>>3723 What makes me scratch my head is wondering how Esquimaux and lord knows who else seem to get away with shooting up and bombing places regardless of this alleged technology.
Also I'm thinking about leaving my HDD in my cupboard and sticking with SSDs until more becomes clear for the time being.
>>3724 Most terrorists who shoot up places in the west are usually young men who are economic and social losers, who identify with other eskimos getting bombed or whatever, and then decide to get a gun and shoot places. This technology doesn't do much in stopping that kind of behaviour.
They're smart enough to not trust technology. They use old-fashioned techniques to foil surveillance - meet in noisy places that are hard to bug, speak in generalities and innuendo wherever possible, pass paper notes to each other that are immediately destroyed.
This sort of surveillance is about nation-on-nation espionage; The threat of muslamic extremism or noncery is nothing more than a fiction to justify their operations.
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. The drives aren't being shipped backdoored, the firmware is backdoored as part of a targetted NSA compromise of your computer.
>>3724 >>3729 Unless the NSA have literally infected every hard drive on Earth (and I don't know how easy it would be for them to have done this), I don't see why you lads are worried. They're not after you plebs, they're not interested in your porn browsing habits. They're after governments and infrastructure and Muslamics.
>>3736 >They're not after you plebs, they're not interested in your porn browsing habits.
That's just the same old 'nothing to hide' bollocks all over again.
agreed as long as your political views match up with the status quo, and you do nothing in your life that is of any impact or importance to the world around you, no one will ever give a shit about you.
If you are capable of any influence at all this is a problem.
>>3737 No it's not! I'm not saying 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'. I'm saying 'nothing to hide, no-one will care'.
>>3741 has the right of it. If you're a political activist and start making noise about the establishment, in whatever form that may take; or you hold a position with power or status in an important institution, you will get noticed and possibly spied on. But if you're just an ordinary person living their life, then the powers that be won't give two shits about you.
Are you suspecting me of being GCHQlad? Does he say the same thing?
>>3742 >If you're a political activist and start making noise about the establishment, in whatever form that may take
That's called being an ordinary person with an opinion. So we're fine as long as we don't start having opinions?
Anyone who does any government grant sponsored R&D at any university in the world is a legitimate target. Anyone who does development or sysadmin work at any telco, ISP, or software company with a large enough userbase is a legitimate target. Likewise petroleum, medical research, chemical supply.
Anyone who'd paid any attention at all to the Snowden docs would have realised very early on that the whole "terrorism" thing is a nice cover for what is essentially espionage. I mean come on - the Belgacom hack has been all over the news for months and none of those chaps had anything to do with politics or terror.
Not him but I can easily see the lives of 'ordinary people' around me being seen as worthy of spying be them lawyers, journalists, civil servants, bankers there is the possibly that something will turn up in their lives that suddenly makes them relevant enough for spying on them to be a means to an end.
>>3745 >>3746 Where did I deny that these people aren't worthy of spying on? How many people in the country do you think own computers, and what percentage of those people do you think would do or have any information that would be useful to the intelligence agencies?
They don't know until they check, and theses don't seem the sort to err on the side of not being nosey. If you recall the Snowden data they were monitoring several million machines globally.
Government and diplomatic institutions
Telecoms
Aerospace
Energy
Nuclear research
Oil and gas
Military
Nanotechnology
Islamic activists and scholars
Mass media
Transportation
Financial institutions
Companies developing encryption technologies
Pretty sure that covers a lot of people, especially when you factor in the "two degrees of separation" rule of thumb used by TAO.
>>3749 Well like I said I don't know how easy it is for the NSA to have literally infected every hard drive on Earth, or at least several million. All I know is that I don't do anything that would be of interest to them. Maybe the lads in this thread who want to stick their HDDs in the freezer do?
>>3752 >All I know is that I don't do anything that would be of interest to them.
No, lad. You don't even know that, which is why you should be worried.
>>3754 It's supposed to be an indication of just how naïve you are to be thinking that just because 'dolescum' isn't on the list that nobody is interested in you.
>>3759 >Stating that it's nothing to worry about is condoning it.
It isn't. I don't condone the Eskimos cutting off people's heads in Libya but I'm not awake at night fucking worrying about it. Life is too short to worry about every fucking thing.
I'm not him and your stupid fucking rhetorical half arseisms are getting on my tits, you tedious cunt.
>>3760 >I don't condone the Eskimos cutting off people's heads in Libya but I'm not awake at night fucking worrying about it.
Sorry, I wasn't aware that only Eskimos in Libya have hard drives. Obviously this supposed scandal is a thing far away from home and isn't going to affect anyone in this country.
>>3758 It isn't a loaded question. I genuinely want to know why someone would want to be spied on and have their civil liberties eroded. Why can't you answer?
>They're not after you plebs, they're not interested in your porn browsing habits. They're after governments and infrastructure and Muslamics.
I don't give a fuck if they're after me or not, what I care about is that they can and possibly have done so when they should not be able to do so. I do not want them to have the possibility to break into my property and rummage around at will. Not even if it stops another 7/7.
>>3762 I can't answer that because I've never said that I want to be spied on and have my civil liberties eroded.
As >>3763 says, it is a problem "that they can and possibly have done so when they should not be able to do so". I'm just not personally worried about it, because I'm not of interest.
>>3763 This. As always, the problem isn't whether or not you are of interest (not least because an awful lot of people who think they aren't actually are), but that it's possible and can be deployed indiscriminately, just as we now know for a fact that those agencies deliberately haven't been particularly selective about what they're picking up.
>>3764 >because I'm not of interest
What makes you think so? The Snowden files made it clear that the number of people in the UK who are "not of interest" is zero.
>>3766 I'll admit I didn't pay close attention to what Snowden leaked (because it was easier to follow the story of his attempts to hide from the US) - can you enlighten me?
>>3767 Amongst other things, those charming folk in Cheltenham were tapping almost all traffic coming in and out of the country. You may also recall the "emergency" where apparently the country was going to grind to a halt if we didn't force telcos to log any and all communications, without discrimination.
>We submitted numerous questions to GCHQ, including: (1) Does GCHQ in fact engage in “false flag operations” where material is posted to the Internet and falsely attributed to someone else?; (2) Does GCHQ engage in efforts to influence or manipulate political discourse online?; and (3) Does GCHQ’s mandate include targeting common criminals (such as boiler room operators), or only foreign threats?
This shit always makes me chuckle. Because they're going to answer, aren't they. They're our intentionally shady behind the scenes secret agent lot, they probably read the e-mail that morning inbetween waterboarding sessions on Syrian captives, of course they're going to just answer your questions like it's an interview on This Morning.
Reading that sort of article, though, you have to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. Who is to say that the information war being waged against our national security agencies isn't part of another nation's plan to influence the population's opinion? Turning us against our own government from within, sounds like a classic Soviet kind of game. Fuck knows how the rest of the global media ties into it all, what's truth and what is lies?
According to Are Curtis, the MI5/6 etc. were rife with commie infiltrators during the cold war. I mean I'm sure there were plenty of moles in the KGB too, but still. "Competent" isn't a word I've heard used much to describe out security services post-WW2.
Anyway. my point is that how do we know who we can trust in terms of where our information comes from. If the premise is that GCHQ uses misinformation, propaganda, and discrediting tactics to poison the well, how do we know that the whistle blowers we take every word from are truthful. What if Snowden has been a kind of double-bluff mindfuck plant the whole time, the government is in fact up to far shadier shit than just snooping on texts, or is trying to create an image of itself as far more powerful than it actually is. Think about it- Misinformation is the entire premise.
We only have a chance of putting up resistance if we know just what they are actually doing. I think it's pretty clear, though, that they will do what they "need" to do regardless. Are you naive enough to think that our government only does things that are deemed legal?
Either way I think you need a few tokes and some aluminium headgear, you don't seem to be in the right frame of mind to be posting on this board.
You know it's very tiresome when you just start calling people names for no apparent reason. I'm not the chap you seem to think you're talking to. I'm not even trying to "win", I'm trying to have a conversation, you daft prick.
>We only have a chance of putting up resistance if we know just what they are actually doing.
No lad. We just have to hang everyone who is old enough to be part of the state from lamp posts.
If you work in tech infrastructure, you are a target for intelligence agencies. Your email, Facebook, and computers are fair game, as are those of your families and others near you.
