The government is already spying on us through spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters (update), television, doll, and in many other ways.
Spying in the U.S. is worse than under Nazi Germany, the Stasi, J. Edgar Hoover … or Orwell’s 1984.
Yesterday, U.S. Intelligence Boss James Clapper said that the government will spy on Americans through the internet of things (“IoT”):
In the future, intelligence services might use the [IoT] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.
Yves Smith has the definitive comment on Clapper’s statement:
Oh, come on. The whole point of the IoT is spying. The officialdom is just trying to persuade you that it really is a big consumer benefit to be able to tell your oven to start heating up before you get home.
Personally, I’m a tech geek, and love the latest gadgets and toys. But I don’t want my dishwasher or refrigerator sending messages to me … let alone the intelligence agencies. Despite all of the hype about IoT, I don’t know anyone who does.
We’ve previously noted that the CIA wants to spy on you through your dishwasher and other “smart” appliances. As Slate notes:
Watch out: the CIA may soon be spying on you—through your beloved, intelligent household appliances, according to Wired.
In early March, at a meeting for the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, CIA Director David Petraeus reportedly noted that “smart appliances” connected to the Internet could someday be used by the CIA to track individuals. If your grocery-list-generating refrigerator knows when you’re home, the CIA could, too, by using geo-location data from your wired appliances, according to SmartPlanet.
“The current ‘Internet of PCs’ will move, of course, toward an ‘Internet of Things’—of devices of all types—50 to 100 billion of which will be connected to the Internet by 2020,”Petraeus said in his speech. He continued:
Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters—all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low cost, and high-power computing—the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.
And see these comments by John Whitehead and Michael Snyder.
