He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia
This would make for much more boring Le Carre novels.
Add this to the list of things I do not yet need to worry about in the places I research. Though I suspect Uganda and (more likely) Ethiopia may be only a few years away from something like this on a more limited scale.
3 Responses
yeah….nothing to worry about unless you yourself is guilty of wrongdoing. Now, if you just a random person waking up in the morning to check your email and suddenly your hardrive explodes taking out your favorite finger(yes THAT one) because of the “pre-installed” key logging software, then u have a right for concern. And lets ALL be honest. Espionage is a necessary evil that was, is and will be an important component in the world ran by politics and profits. Diplomats, in general, make me laugh…THEY ARE NEVER SINCERE!!!! We have a saying in Russia: “diplomacy, is an art of being able to tell someone to go to hell in such a way, that a person is actually looking forward to the trip”…ha ha. Just saying
I am not entirely sure you needn’t worry about sub-Saharan Africa.
All of this technology is available for any government to purchase at just the place you might imagine… that’s right, Arms Fairs. From submarine cable monitoring to full-on remote surveillance via PC or phone. Some of it is very inexpensive. For example, IMSI catchers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher) are very simple, very difficult to detect, and perfect for hoovering up every phone number at a demonstration. Worse, they are not actually illegal in the sense that doing this does not constitute an invasion of privacy in most countries. Electronic surveillance is much more point and click than it used to be. Something crying out for proactive public policy before George Orwell spins in his grave.
Paranoia may be counterproductive, eg if your opponent is in a position to do key logging they can trivially log the copy paste buffer as well (you need one time passwords), and if they could bug the mike of a switched off phone they can as well hide a second battery therein.