NSA Planned To Hijack Google App Store To Hack Smartphones

Advocatus Diaboli writes: A newly released top secret document reveals that the NSA planned to hijack Google and Samsung app stores to plant spying software on smartphones. The report on the surveillance project, dubbed "IRRITANT HORN," shows the U.S. and its "Five Eyes" alliance: Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, were looking at ways to hack smartphones and spy on users. According to The Intercept: "The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012."

Comments

And most don't care

[danbuter]

Bad part is, this would be middle of the newspaper, at best. Most people in the USA just don't care how badly our government is abusing everyone.

Re:And most don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it doesn't affect most people. Besides, in relative terms it isn't too bad. Yes, pervasive surveillance infringes people's rights[1], and (speculatively) a small number of people who haven't done anything wrong get hurt by that. But the US (and the rest of the 5 eyes) aren't China, or North Korea, or ISIS. They aren't actively killing or seriously repressing large numbers of their own people. All this stuff just doesn't impact on the life of Joe Ordinary, so he doesn't care.

Re:And most don't care

[hairyfeet]

I have to LMAO when you see those "black lives matter" and screams about "racism" when the #1 cause of death of black males is other black males beating the next four causes of death combined. Sure black lives matter....only when they are killed by white people as that supports the permanent victim class political narrative, but when black men like David Carroll and Tommy Sotomayor point out the biggest threat to the lives of black males is other black males? The black community attacks them as "coons" and "Uncle Toms"....I guess supporting an end to thugs preying on their own neighborhoods means they aren't "keepin it real".

Oh and just a little food for thought......if the plight of the American black was racism, why is it a black man from Africa, fresh off the boat, is something like 300% more likely to become middle class in 1 generation, and something like 3000% more likely to become middle class in 2 generations than an American black, despite the language and culture handicaps from not being a native? I'd say the answer is obvious, its nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and in the USA the black culture has become toxic, glorifying violence, abusing women and not being fathers to their children, while actively condemning education as "acting white".

As for TFA this kind of shit DOES affect Americans heavily even if they do not know it, as it gets them used to living in a police state where laws protecting against the ever watching eye only apply to the wealthy and the rule of law is whatever they say it is this week.

Re:And most don't care

[kilfarsnar]

I have to LMAO when you see those "black lives matter" and screams about "racism" when the #1 cause of death of black males is other black males beating the next four causes of death combined. Sure black lives matter....only when they are killed by white people as that supports the permanent victim class political narrative, but when black men like David Carroll and Tommy Sotomayor point out the biggest threat to the lives of black males is other black males? The black community attacks them as "coons" and "Uncle Toms"....I guess supporting an end to thugs preying on their own neighborhoods means they aren't "keepin it real".

Oh and just a little food for thought......if the plight of the American black was racism, why is it a black man from Africa, fresh off the boat, is something like 300% more likely to become middle class in 1 generation, and something like 3000% more likely to become middle class in 2 generations than an American black, despite the language and culture handicaps from not being a native? I'd say the answer is obvious, its nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and in the USA the black culture has become toxic, glorifying violence, abusing women and not being fathers to their children, while actively condemning education as "acting white".

As for TFA this kind of shit DOES affect Americans heavily even if they do not know it, as it gets them used to living in a police state where laws protecting against the ever watching eye only apply to the wealthy and the rule of law is whatever they say it is this week.

Your last paragraph describes what it is like to be Black in relationship to the System. And you seem to think it's not good. I agree!

"Black Lives Matter" isn't simply about the lives of Black people. It is specifically about how Black people are treated by law enforcement and the System in general. It is different from how White people are treated. I don't think that's really controversial. I'm not sure where your statistic about the fresh-off-the-boat African comes from, but he did not grow up in the same environment as the African American. It is about culture, as you say. But you can't critique that culture divorced from the context within which it formed.

The echoes of slavery, Jim Crow and other hardships for the Black community take their toll. Like any person, if you are treated badly as a child you have a better chance of growing up to be an angry, maladjusted person. It's the same for the Black community. You can't expect them to put up with the hundreds of years of supreme bullshit they have, and come out fresh faced and positive. And that bullshit isn't all in the past; they still put up with some of it.

So you can talk about their culture, but you can't blame it for their predicament. It was born from centuries of abuse at the hands of White people. And that's something White people need to recognize and work to end. We can't fix the past and we in the present are not to blame for it. But we should do what we can to be compassionate and understanding so as to not perpetuate the problem.

Unintended consequences

[ledow]

And, since then, almost every Internet service I use has started bringing their stuff out of the US. Not saying that makes us "hack-proof" (not least from our own intelligence agencies) but businesses can't do business with other governments or even large corporations if this kind of thing is suspected to be going on.

Every week or so, another large company tells me that they've pulled all their EU users and their data to their Ireland datacentre so that only the US people's data can be "collected" by the US authorities and otherwise the NSA are just the same as any other foreign hostile entity trying to get into their systems.

DropBox was the latest one I got an email from. The government and education services already do everything in-EU anyway because of a lovely thing called the Data Protection Act (which the US really needs to start adopting its own version of), and now even people's photo-sharing sites are doing the same because they just don't want this kind of stuff reflecting on them because they happen to do business in the US too.

Tell me, people, if China were doing this everybody would be up in arms. But because it's the US, it's okay?

All they've done is made everybody go from "Maybe the NSA could do this if they wanted" to "We have to assume they are doing this, all day, every day, no matter what the law says", move their data abroad, and massively increase awareness of security and encryption.

Hell, I'm now suspicious of Elliptic Curve, especially if it relies on published curve parameters rather than them being an inherently configurable part of the exchange (like Diffie-Helman - agree on a curve that nobody has used before but has certain properties and then use that as the basis for encryption) - I have a feeling that all the push to move on COULD be a cleverly orchestrated move to something such agencies "approve" of in secret even if they say it causes them problems in public.

When you think the trick is happening, maybe it's already been done...

Re:Unintended consequences

[Ryanrule]

You know how fucking stupid you are right? All the euro countries the nsa was spying on? Turns out THEY were doing the spying for the nsa, in exchange for access to the big intel pie. All the outrage was just for the sheeple. Those in power already knew. So take it somewhere else bro. Brah.

Spy agency was spying.

[Ryanrule]

in other news, wind is windy.