MI5 Helped With CIA Hacking Tools
First question. Is anyone questioning the authenticity of this leak? Not really. Is anyone surprised? Not really. For decades, our…
First question. Is anyone questioning the authenticity of this leak? Not really. Is anyone surprised? Not really. For decades, our intelligence services have been making use of all available technology to further their aims. This is primarily not a story. If the spooks can hack old fashioned dog and bones, and steam open letters, what harm can there be in hacking a few widescreen televisions? Not a lot. We should really have expected it.
Or is there another reading of this? If and when we are at war, whatever that means these days, are the rules more supple? Are we actually at war now anyway and if we are, who with? Russia? Lots of questions. Nobody who follows closely the comings and goings in Russia would think that the Cold War, the official one, ever ended. Of course it did not. China have been in the game for a while now and other countries and agencies are as active as they ever were, if not more so.
Is spying getting easier? On the innocent public, yes. But trained operatives will shun publicly available smartphones and use altogether more exotic hardware to evade detection. Are the Islamic State boys highly trained? Some of them, yes, but not many. They probably don’t even use PGP for most of their Snapchat arrangements.
None of this is to reduce the amazing news today that intelligence agencies have been methodically creating apps to hack our phones and other tech gadgets. It will shock many. But until it is shown that harm has been done, is there anything that wrong? Google, Amazon and the rest openly spy on us to figure out what we want to spend our money on. Is it any different to Facebook knowing just about every intimate detail of our private life? Not really.
If you dislike Facebook doing it, you will dislike the secret services doing it. But if you don’t mind one, you cannot really object to the other.
