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NYT: NSA Put 100,000 Radio Pathway "Backdoors" In PCs
retroworks writes "The New York Times has an interesting story on how NSA put transmitters into the USB input devices of PCs, allowing computers unplugged from the Internet to still be monitored, via radio, from up to 8 miles away. The article mainly reports NSA's use of the technology to monitor Chinese military, and minor headline reads 'No Domestic Use Seen.' The source of the data was evidently the leak from Edward J. Snowden."
Ok, so I get the whole whistle blower thing but isn't this what the NSA is supposed to be doing? Spying on Americans is ok to get fussy about but why was this leaked and why doesn't the NYT realize that this actually does set back U.S. intelligence? Are they also going to release a story detailing what the Chinese are doing to spy on US from leaked Chinese intelligence?
Get a web developer
I agree - however, there is the question of "who did they use them on?" and also that they were basically DESIGNED not to be detected.
Most people who they targeted probably were arrested or they never even thought they were a target. In that case they can recover their hardware.
The number of devices compromised is likely to be very small as a percentage of the devices out there. Almost certainly neither you or I have one of these devices in our kit. If we did have, how often have you popped open every keyboard/mouse/usb stick you own to make sure there's not something else in there that wasn't supposed to be?
And if they are in collusion with even a single manufacturer to produce a compromised device, then you may never know about the devices hidden functions until you do a chip-analysis of everything inside the device (probably involving decapping and analysing the whole thing which can take years and decades of expertise).
As such, it's unlikely you will ever see one, even with everyone on the Internet looking. That's also what I would expect if they were doing their job properly (or else these things would be discovered quickly and be useless to them).
Much more importantly - if this is true, and we even if we start to use only trusted hardware, this is just more reason to have more "open" machines.
Who knows what's inside a chip on your particular computer, even if it looks very similar to a mass-market item, if they could have got their hands on it and/or been the ones supplying it to you?