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."

Comments

Where are they?

[RMH101]

Genuine question - where are these devices? Has any physical evidence of them been detected? Has anyone found one? I'm not sceptical that they did it, I think it's entirely possible. I'm just curious if there's any physical evidence that's been found yet...?

Re:Where are they?

[SuricouRaven]

" mainly because a simple frequency scanner would allow one to detect the presence of transmissions by the device"

Burst transmission. Buffer data for days, then send it all in a burst of under a minute. Nothing to detect unless the counterintelligence people are monitoring continually or get very lucky. It's old tech, dating back to the pre-IC days. Bugs back then did it by recording onto a magnetic tape. When the tape reached the end it turned on the transmitter and re-wound at high speed. The listeners then just had to play it back slowed-down and backwards to recover the original audio.

Here's what I don't understand

[langelgjm]

The NSA claims that it doesn't steal trade secrets from foreign companies in order to give US businesses a competitive edge. I suspect they are lying, given that it seems like they lie about everything, and that we already have reason to suspect they are lying about this in particular.

However, the implication is that it would be wrong or immoral for them to do so (unlike the French or Chinese who have no such qualms). E.g., in the article, we read:

At that session, Mr. Obama tried to differentiate between conducting surveillance for national security — which the United States argues is legitimate — and conducting it to steal intellectual property.

It goes on to quote Peter Singer saying that for the Chinese, economic advantage is part of national security.

Maybe the Chinese are right. And here's the thing - the U.S. already behaves as if securing economic advantages for our domestic industry is a critical interest. In trade negotiations, we ram our IP laws down the throats of every other country while dangling our domestic market in front of them, all the while never actually liberalizing agriculture at home. I don't understand why it's acceptable for us to promote our domestic businesses through trade diplomacy, but somehow it becomes unacceptable to do so through spying.

In my mind, we are trying to accomplish the same thing as the Chinese, just via a different means (or probably, via both means). Yet we criticize them as if we are somehow morally superior in the way we do it.