One of the benefits of having some idea of the extent of government surveillance is that your paranoia protects you. I’ve had the microphone on my browsing system unplugged, and the camera lens taped over forever now. Think I’m paranoid? A reader sent me this link, with the message WTF?
Google has downloaded a stealth listening program on all computers running chrome.
WTF indeed. And nobody knows whether it saves local sound for export later if requested, activates if it hears keywords other than “OK Google,” (ie Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, Fiat Currency, etc), or can be remotely turned on.
The thing with the new government surveillance state is these things can happen even without any company leadership knowing. I’ll bet NSA has no less than 100 agents on the Google coding staff. They get a full GS-whatever salary, on top of their google salary. Every so often they smuggle out their work product, and then get flash drives with special programs that they need to incorporate into the next iteration of whatever they are working on. Maybe they even get cover stories to tell management about why they need this black-box microphone-activator, and how much better this will render their user’s experience.
And it isn’t just at Google. Anywhere there is a door they may want to pass through some day, they have taken measures to see somebody infiltrated to get a key. If you knew the degree to which government has infiltrated everything, using the same techniques they’d use as spies against hostile targets overseas, your mind would be blown.
