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Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 | WIRED

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Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 | WIRED

More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.

Forget Gen Z. This Is Generation Surveillance. – GEN

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Forget Gen Z. This Is Generation Surveillance. – GEN

It’s time we acknowledge this reality and adopt a new name for Gen Z — let’s call it Gen S for surveillance. They are saved in the cloud, perpetually viewable, the memories of memories posted to the stream long ago, unable to forget or be forgotten. They are a generation living in a paradox: The more they do and the more they come alive, the more they’re watched and the more narrowly they’ll be defined, boxed in and buried under the data they produce.

U.S. in Danger of Chinese-Style Social Credit System

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U.S. in Danger of Chinese-Style Social Credit System

Communist China's massive internet surveillance system is coming to the United States, and conservatives should be worried.

Since 2014, the Communist Chinese government has been perfecting its internet monitoring system, which spies on its citizens' online activity. Using the data, the Chinese can "blacklist" various citizens whose online comments they deem undesirable and lower their credit rating, restricting them from traveling, being barred from better schools, jobs and even from getting a loan.

Beijing is now applying its system to foreign businesses in China in the ongoing trade war with the United States.

Paranoid rhetoric from a far right-wing website? Yeah, probably. But we shouldn't discount that possibility of an arbitrary social score system coming to America, possibly put forward by social media companies or maybe something like a credit rating bureau. Their might be push back from the civil libertarians, but it's hard to stop something like that if it's not put forward by the government and big businesses want it. I could also see it being tied in with the Red Flag Laws or the right to vote -- people who are viewed as too dangerous might have their voter files flagged and their voting records deleted by the government. Sometimes it's impossible to stop the procession of dangerous technology.

To Search Through Millions of License Plates, Police Should Get a Warrant | Electronic Frontier Foundation

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To Search Through Millions of License Plates, Police Should Get a Warrant | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Earlier this week, EFF filed a brief in one of the first cases to consider whether the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology implicates the Fourth Amendment. Our amicus brief, filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Yang, argues that when a U.S. Postal Service inspector used a commercial ALPR database to locate a suspected mail thief, it was a Fourth Amendment search that required a warrant."

"ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems. Some models can photograph up to 1,800 license plates every minute, and every week, law enforcement agencies across the country use these cameras to collect data on millions of license plates. The plate numbers, together with location, date, and time information, are uploaded to a central server, and made instantly available to other agencies. The data include photographs of the vehicle, and sometimes of its drivers and passengers. ALPRs are typically attached to vehicles, such as police cars, or can be mounted on street poles, highway overpasses, or mobile trailers."

In Major Privacy Win, Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Track Your Cellphone

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In Major Privacy Win, Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Track Your Cellphone

"In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that police must obtain a search warrant to access an individual's cellphone location information. The 5-4 decision imposes new limits on law enforcement's ability to get at the increasing amount of data that private companies amass in the modern technological age."

"Cellphone providers routinely keep location information for customers to help improve service. And until now, the prevailing legal theory was that if an individual voluntarily shares his information with a third party — for instance, by signing up for cellphone service — police can get that information without a search warrant."

"Writing for the court majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that cellphone location information is a "near perfect" tool for government surveillance, analogous to an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. The writers of the Constitution, he said, would certainly have understood that an individual has a privacy interest in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour and even minute-to-minute records of his whereabouts — a privacy interest that requires the government to get a search warrant before gaining access to that information."