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

[Noryungi]

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.

Some people within the United States may disagree with you. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot.

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.

Re:And most don't care

[ArmoredDragon]

"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.

Sure, black lives matter, but American blacks really need to clean up their act more than everybody else needs to give them a hand up. By constantly saying it's everybody else's fault, we're reinforcing their ideas about how they themselves deserve the world for free, which is the underlying cause of their problems.

And I can prove to you, without a shadow of a doubt, that the police, or even "the white man" are NOT the cause of it all. First, let's start here:

http://www.ntnews.com.au/news/...

Anybody remember the big media shitstorm crying racism when Anthony Stokes was denied a heart transplant because of his long criminal record? Essentially he was given something so profoundly good, which would NEVER be given to a white person in the same situation: Even though the transplant team knew he wouldn't last long post transplant, he got it anyways because they were forced to feel sorry about black history. Not less than 18 months after his transplant, he dies in a criminal rampage after he shot an elderly lady and ran over a pedestrian.

Now, who do we blame for that one? Well, look at the photos he took of himself. He fancied himself a thug, plain and simple. You can tell that's what he wanted to be when he grew up, because he thought it was cool. That is something he learned from black culture, (think like hip-hop music that always glorifies that) not from the white man, not from police.

Now let's look here: https://maggiemcneill.wordpres...

Most call girls, especially black call girls, refuse to take calls from black men. The black call girls indicate the same reason as the white ones, and that reason is very interesting: Black men have a cultural mindset that they are god's gift of masculinity to the world and can just do whatever the hell they want, and are really rough during sex to the point of it being painful, and they also try to short them on money because they have the attitude that they were so good that they get to pay less.

They do often make exceptions for men who don't sound black on the phone, because they say that usually those ones aren't tainted by "black culture" and will actually behave like gentlemen. That and they'll often accept blacks who are current or ex-military (as I myself can attest, the military will take that shit culture out of anybody) or older blacks who tend to have a better sense of humility.

These are the kind of black men who escaped the disaster that is black culture.

As for why a lot of American blacks tend to behave the same way, look here: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Basically, we as humans are naturally driven to associate with people who look like ourselves. When people tend to stick around one another, they tend to develop similar mannerisms and cultural traits that are different from others. That said, it makes perfect sense why blacks in America would act differently than any other ethnic group in America, and also why they would act different from blacks in other countries (there's a geographical separation.)

That said, very often it occurs that blacks reinforce to themselves that they, as human beings, deserve more than they are given, so they have to take it by whatever means necessary.

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

[pscottdv]

We moved our EU data to EU servers because EU law requires it.

Re:Unintended consequences

[oobayly]

Moving Dropbox data to the Republic of Ireland makes it more legal for the NSA to access the data - they're definitely not accessing US citizen's data - not that I imagine it makes much of a difference.

The difference it does make is that it's harder for the TLAs to get warrants to access the data - they now have to go via a foreign government's legal system, rather than the US rubber stamp system. The Irish government *appears* to have been less than accommodating - as show in the Microsoft email case:

The US government has claimed a US warrant is sufficient to get emails even when stored in another country, while Microsoft has resisted, arguing the US warrant power does not reach that far. The case has made business rivals into temporary allies and forced Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Data Protection to ask the European Commission to formally support Microsoft.

The Faulty Logic at the Heart of Microsoft Ireland Email Dispute

That, and the fact that Dropbox probably have to pay a shitload less tax now.

Re:Why only Android?

[Chrisq]

Why not also the iPhone, or has this already been hacked?

They obviously already have a hack, or more likely an access deal with Apple

Re:Why only Android?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"Spying? There's an app for that!"

But you don't need one . . . we support spying natively!

debian digital signing and the GPG keyring

[lkcl]

this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed. under this scenario there are an extremely limited number of extremely paranoid methods by which debian may be compromised. even the scenario of "cooperation between long-term sleeper agents within debian's ranks" would have a one-shot opportunity to get away with introducing malicious code, following the discovery of which their GPG keys would be revoked, the perpetrators kicked out of debian, their packages pulled immediately pending a review, and the already-effective procedures reviewed to involve multi-person GPG signing that would make it even harder for compromise to occur in the future.

now, if you recall, there was an announcement a couple of years back that the development of Mozilla's B2G was declared to be "open" to all, so i contributed with a thorough security-conscious review of how to do package distribution. it turns out that Mozilla is *NOT* open - at all. several other contributors have learned that the Mozilla Foundation is in direct violation of its charter.

basically, the Mozilla Foundation *completely* ignored the advice that i gave - which was that the use of SSL as a distribution mechanism would be vulnerable to *exactly* the kinds of attacks that we see the NSA attempting to do on google. they went so far as to enact censorship, preventing and prohibiting me from pointing out the severe security flaws inherent in their chosen method of package distribution. i remain deeply unimpressed with many aspects of so-called "open-ness" of well-funded software libre projects.

Re:NSA

[Noryungi]

Nah, just business as usual.

For pure evil, you have to go to Wall Street.

Past Tense?

[ThatsNotPudding]

"NSA Planned..."? Where is the proof they did not go ahead, or are still planning to, via moles or NSL-threatened insiders?

Such a headline gives the impression we safely dodged a bullet, while still in the midst of a massive firefight (and our side only has sparklers and rubber bands).

Spy agency was spying.

[Ryanrule]

in other news, wind is windy.

Headline wrong

[blogagog]

Shouldn't it say "NSA _Plans_ To Hijack Google App Store To Hack Smartphones"? I haven't read anywhere that they cancelled the plan.

OK

[koan]

The project was motivated in part by concerns about the possibility of “another Arab Spring,” which was sparked in Tunisia in December 2010 and later spread to countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Western governments and intelligence agencies were largely blindsided by those events, and the document detailing IRRITANT HORN suggests the spies wanted to be prepared to launch surveillance operations in the event of more unrest.

It appears in some ways that these agencies have become dependent on their digital surveillance, to the point they are missing exactly what they claim to be looking for.
I guess if you want to plan a revolution just use paper...

Re:Can't wait for the NSA bricking app

[koan]

Yes, and soon a cashless society is thrust upon you, and then you can never be without your phone.

Re:Easier ways

[meta-monkey]

At the end of the day the cellular firmware is a closed blob. No idea what's going on there, and with access that low level, you can do anything you want.