Just google for "????? ??????" and you will find black market for accessing any kind of information, including SMS, phone location, etc and associated services for hacking accounts (VK, Gmail, etc). You don't need to be a government, it is open for everyone.
No need to hack, if you have the right connections and enough money you can buy anything from the US gov, the US gov has access to all data and non US citizens have no rights.
Dont get lulled into a false sense of privacy, the governments can and will hack anything connected to the Internet, sometimes illegally for trivial or whimsical reasons.
They are the local government and they just get access. They don't need to hack anything, they can just tell the local telco operators to give them access and that is the end of that.
> Imagine what governments could do with all those email/password combinations. Cross reference email addresses with a target internal database and an agency could (is) within minutes begin to systematically download an enormous amount of emails and other private data.
Sadly, governments don't need a hack like this to get at email.
NSA, US government, tyrants everywhere, watch Google carefully for how it's done. For a fickle crowd like Hacker News, you can seize their liberty and human rights easily - just distract them with shiny new things.
For shiny new toys, some people will rationalize anything ;-)
The U.S. government actually provides a lot of really awesome free security resources and I believe they implement a lot of security measures. One of my favorite security resource provided by the govt. is STIG[1]. If you take your time to implement the measures outlined in STIG in your network it would be EXTREMELY difficult (in my opinion) to break into your network/devices without a zero-day or other undiscovered exploit.
I have not worked for the govt, so I do not have a first-party understanding. And I doubt any entity is impervious to simple/well-known attack vectors (such as EternalBlue) but my experience with STIG as a security engineer has always left me really impressed with the level of research and suggestions the government provides to the public -- for free.
You don't need a government's resources. You need a programmable firewire device, like an embedded Linux device. You also need ten seconds of physical access to their FireWire port. That's a lot easier than hacking a battery and convincing the target to use the battery.
"The government" is not a single entity. I'd prefer to secure it from "The government", except the very high end of the agency. There is alot of difference between being a target like DPR of Silkroad, and having your electronics confiscated by a local police department (the former likely won't happen without you knowing it, at which point you will have to change your threat model. But there is a non trivial chance over your lifetime that the latter will happen just-because.)
You don't need to trust the government - just secure your devices and they won't be able to get in. It's not like they are requiring that you supply them passwords - they are hacking into your devices the same way anyone else in the world can.
wait. so if you are hacked, then the government has a free pass to hack you as well? Why do all the reasons that come to mind right now fit in the 'bad idea' bucket...?
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