{"id":58787,"date":"2021-07-27T19:20:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-28T00:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58787"},"modified":"2021-07-27T19:20:05","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T00:20:05","slug":"the-insecurity-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58787","title":{"rendered":"The Insecurity Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Insecurity Industry<\/a><\/h3>\n

The greatest danger to national security has become the companies that claim to protect it<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

1.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don\u2019t do this\u00a0to satisfy a tinkerer\u2019s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because\u00a0it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY\u00a0security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
The microphones inside my actual phone, prepped for surgery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Prior to this week\u2019s\u00a0Pegasus Project<\/a><\/strong>, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the\u00a0NSO Group<\/a>\u2014the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry\u2014most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world\u00a0press collectively\u00a0rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat.<\/p>\n

Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group\u2019s for-profit hacking of phones\u00a0in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders<\/a>; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with\u00a0catastrophic security flaws<\/a>\u00a0(a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that\u00a0even when everything works as intended<\/em>, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian\u00a0hellscape of end-user monitoring<\/a>\u00a0and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that\u00a0feels<\/em>\u00a0good may not\u00a0in fact\u00a0be\u00a0<\/em>good…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Insecurity Industry The greatest danger to national security has become the companies that claim to protect it 1. The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don\u2019t do this\u00a0to satisfy a tinkerer\u2019s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because\u00a0it is unsafe to operate. Fixing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9336,249,5570,1455,712],"class_list":["post-58787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-big-tech","tag-edward-snowden","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-national-security","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58788,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58787\/revisions\/58788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}