The
National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000
computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct
surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for
launching cyberattacks. While
most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer
networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology
that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are
not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer
experts and American officials. The
technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a
covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit
boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In
some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that
intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target. The
radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems
facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers
that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make
impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency
hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an
unwitting user. President Obama is scheduled to announce on Friday what recommendations
he is accepting from an advisory panel on changing N.S.A. practices. The
panel agreed with Silicon Valley executives that some of the techniques
developed by the agency to find flaws in computer systems undermine
global confidence in a range of American-made information products like
laptop computers and cloud services...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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