16 March 2014

Tailored Access Operations

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html


If the NSA is interested in monitoring you more closely we now have information that they will actually intervene in the retail process and physically get a hold of purchased hardware in order to insure their spyware is installed.

It's fascinating but also interesting when you consider the fact that they would be willing to go to all this trouble. Why?

Are they worried that there are still loopholes and work-arounds? They've been hacking proxy and anonymous networks but they must still be afraid that some will escape their dragnet.

Or is this because journalists and others have figured out how to function both on and off the grid? The UK's Guardian journalists have been purchasing 'clean' computers, setting up shop in hidden locations and doing their work on these new computers which have never been hooked up to the Internet. They use 'burner' phones for critical communications and make sure flash drives aren't re-inserted into the clean computers once they've uploaded data to a network.

There were those news reports from a couple of years ago dealing with China's computers and Americans started getting nervous that Chinese hardware was arriving with spyware already installed that would allow Chinese Hackers to steal your information.

Was this an attempt by the Intel Community to get Americans to purchase domestic hardware? Direct shipping from China might have proved too difficult in some cases to intercept. I used to work at a UPS distribution center and unless they had specific information it would be pretty tough to intervene. The boxes are moving through at an incredible rate. The intervention would have to occur at the ports and that would be a daunting task.

If Americans started purchasing domestically the TAO operatives could set up interdiction protocols and systems.

It turns out that it wasn't the Chinese. It was our own government.

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