I recently started reading a book describing the surveillance dragnet constructed in a very large East-Asian country. I thought the book would focus specifically on that dragnet, but was surprised to find that the dragnet was largely constructed to shutdown dissent among minorities in the western portions of that country, no doubt a trial-run for more widespread application. One day you’re going about your business, the next day, government agents are installing cameras in your living room.
It’s pretty horrifying stuff what went on there, and it hasn’t hit the American news cycle in ages. And yet, we largely take our freedoms for granted, thinking, “Naw, that would never happen here. We have rights!” at the same time that we install cameras and microphones all over our homes.
You and I might think we are smart for never connecting our TVs to the internet, for example, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t connecting themselves. Now, I’m not saying this is happening, but there’s very little stopping TV manufacturers from, say, installing wifi brute-forcing programs in their firmware, which ping home and send data, but simply never show the wifi as being connected, unless the user specifically connects it. Most software is openly hostile to user privacy, and it would not at all surprise me if something like this starts happening, if it isn’t already. And how would you even know? Most home routers do not offer the sorts of capabilities you might see in enterprise monitoring and response devices, and when was the last time you monitored connections across all your devices, anyway? Establishing a connection over the internet only requires a few lines of code, even in more granular programming languages like C.
Substitute “TV” with pretty much anything – “smart” kitchen appliances, monitors, you name it.
(Fun fact: I once ran Wireshark on my wifi connection, only to notice a huge number of ARP requests coming from another device on the network. I immediately wondered if malware had gotten on the device and some program was sniffing out the network. Long story short, it was just my roommate’s media server, and it was only scanning a very narrow range of IP addresses. It still does it when it’s turned on, but it doesn’t do any port scanning. I still scratch my head when I see it. But how many people understand everything I just said?)
“But Risky, they can’t install and execute brute-forcing programs on their firmware! That’s illegal!” Since when did legality ever stop our corporations? They only ever get a slap on the wrist, so getting caught is nothing more than an operational risk, which can be adjusted for in the books. I don’t trust those fuckers. Moreover, going through corporations is a favorite tactic of police forces, precisely because its so easy to circumvent restrictions placed on their operations in this way.
Most nights, I play video games with friends online using my Nintendo Switch, and those of us who use a Switch have been talking about the Switch 2. However…the Switch 2 uses a built-in microphone, and that gives me the absolute creeps. Very recently, I started noticing that things I talked about with these friends (using my headset, on the Switch) will start cropping up in ads and recommendations on YouTube, and while there are a number of mechanisms by which this can happen, the easiest explanation is that the game studio itself records conversations on its platform, and sells this data to advertisers. It is truly creepy, as I just want to be able to talk with my friends while I’m playing. I am not 100% sure this is how the connection was made, but if I wanted to dig deeper, it would be the first thing I investigate. Moreover, Google knows that people are becoming increasingly aware of their spying and ad networks, and so are sometimes being far more stealthy about it. It might take a day or two, and it could simply be one recommendation out of 100 that touches on the same subject and was recently posted, but which there would be absolutely no reason to recommend otherwise. So…to think of having an always-on microphone right in my living room, with special “features” to improve voice clarity and eliminate white-noise…yeah, I don’t know about that. If opening the console and removing the microphone bricks the device, you can almost be certain it’s spying on you and they want to make sure it’s in place to do its job. I wonder how much security research has been done on it so far.
And look, I know we can’t all go down the path of full-paranoia, we have to live our lives. But how have we become so complacent about these technologies? Do people seriously still use things like Alexa? These things can and are being abused all over the world, and all it takes is one law or executive order to wipe your “rights” out. That we have these rights is great – I’m very pro-America when it comes to that – but rights are an artificial construction, and nothing guarantees them except an equitable upholding of the law. When push comes to shove, Johnny Law finds a way.
In authoritarian countries, the police bust down the door. In democracies, they’ve learned to be far more stealthy, and if you give even 2 shits about your privacy, you’re labeled as paranoid. I don’t know, man, I don’t think we are nearly paranoid enough.