Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”
The people holding up the internet
anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are.Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced.Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time…”
Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “As U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran early this year, a poultry farmer in northern Israel decided to check on his chickens. When he launched the app on his phone for the webcam outside his coop, he was alarmed to see that its language had been switched to Arabic. He contacted Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, which found that hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera. They weren’t interested in chickens. The camera’s orientation on the coop offered it a line of sight to the movements of Israeli security forces along the nearby border with Lebanon. The cyber directorate said it helped the farmer harden the camera’s security and adjust its viewing angle to stop capturing military operations. The farmer’s webcam was one of an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras worldwide, according to cybersecurity consultants S-RM.
The devices have become a background fixture of daily life in the form of security systems, doorbells, traffic controls and even baby monitors—and potentially any of them are vulnerable to snooping, say cybersecurity experts and hackers. “We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with intelligence agencies, cybersecurity experts, military officials and hackers to scope out the extent and impact of the invasive surveillance. The Journal also reviewed dozens of hours of footage and hundreds of images, much of it made public by hackers, and independently verified their authenticity, by geolocating their locations and checking for any signs of digital manipulations. Intelligence agencies scour the internet for vulnerable cameras and robotically tap in to them by testing millions of passwords.
Now, AI has made it even easier to hack into them and analyze their data at scale, transforming cameras that were designed to boost safety into tools for combatants to track, surveil and attack the enemy—often surpassing the abilities of human intelligence analysts. Algorithms digest endless reams of footage to find hidden gems and patterns for agents to monitor. “AI changed everything,” said Kristopher Kortright, leader of Team OneFist, an international hacker group supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia…”
