Digital Spies in Your Home (Not Mine)

The Internet of Things is a buzz phrase for digital monitoring.

I am a fan of the IoT with respect to commercial enterprises such as airplane maintenance. But I will not let IoT consumer products into my home.

The problem should be obvious. If I can monitor what my appliances are doing, so can the government. If I can tell them what to do, the government can hear my voice.

This is not a fantasy. It’s here. The details are here. There is more evidence than you have time to read. Read some of it, especially this: CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher.

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More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.

“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,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

I have no doubt that government agencies are going to use any access that citizens give them to invade their homes. This is free information as far as the government is concerned. They can collect it almost free of charge. They can store it on a permanent basis. They never know when they will use it, but if they want to use it, they will be able to.

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