NSA: All Your Androids Are Belong To Us, Too! (Maybe) - Granite Grok

NSA: All Your Androids Are Belong To Us, Too! (Maybe)

Who's watching the Droid watchers? (Bloomberg Image)
Watcher in the Rye?
(Bloomberg Image)
A recent story from Bloomberg news suggests that our Stasi 2.0 government is even making lefties nervous, as it breathlessly reveals that code provided by the NSA is going into Androids, and has been part of Linux for several years! Deeper analysis suggests that, even if you are paranoid, this is not the way that ‘THEY’ are going to get you.

Reading through the article, and especially the comments, we learn that the code is NOT secret, and that a version of it has been around for years in “hardened’ versions of the popular Linux Operating System. It’s not that we doubt the desires of our government to watch all of us all of the time, but rather that the reason Linux has less vulnerabilities to hackers than Windoze, is that it has a global community of millions of passionate programmers, looking to improve the breed and weed out each other’s mistakes.

Turns out that the Android community is also open-source, and like Linux is watched over by millions of interested parties looking to avoid “errors” and improve the user experience. Even the NSA code, known as “Security Enhancements for Android”, is actually on line for the open-source community to view and critique – and you can bet it will get lots of scrutiny after recent revelations!

Will a tinfoil hat for your Mac help? Not so much!   (Image: Zerohedge.com)
Will a tinfoil hat for your Mac help?
Not so much!
(Image: Zerohedge.com)
In spite of the recent sinister revelations about the Regime, and especially the NSA, there is a legitimate interest by the NSA in ensuring that government computing devices, and any computing devices which may access them, are ‘hardened’ against hack-attacks (as opposed to ‘snack-attacks’ which are common amongst programmers!). Thus, in conclusion, don’t worry so much about this code, which is in plain sight, or even the author’s assertion that it is designed to operate “invisibly”(!), but rather about how they might be subverting popular apps, or just tracking your movements and habits via phone carrier metadata, or search companies’ vast databases. I encourage you to read the spirited argument between programmers and tinfoil hatters under the Bloomberg article.

Original H/T, and a different viewpoint: Zerohedge.com

>