I just though about Steve Huffman’s comment editing shenanigan, and started wondering…
I mean…
Your devices might have backdoors, and even if not, there might be zero day exploits just waiting to be found, or perhaps the government already have them.
The US government could just…
Create a “Antifa PDF”, filled with instructions on how to commit terrorism, and all of its contents which are written by the CIA, and the contents are made to be worded to be as violent as possible, then infect every registered Democrat (whose phone numbers are in the voter registration btw) with Pegasus, then inject that PDF into the files.
Then just call tell the FBI to go arrest them. They arrest the people and just “finds” those PDF document. Now they have “proof” of terrorist activities.
And they might even use Pegasus to just fabricate entire phone conversations.
Like, they can:
Create a fake conversation between Democrat A anf Democrat B and fabricate a convincing exchange about them “plotting a terrorist act”, use the most violent words possible. Voila, more of those “evidence”.
They could just arrest Democrats en masse in swing states.
I mean at this point, they probably could justify Martial Law and there would be zero objections from the military because this would all just “seems legit”.
Like, you wanna criticize trump? Boom, random “terrorist looking” PDF document is in your files (done by the CIA).
Like…
Have anyone though about this?
Am I just being over paranoid? Perhaps I watch too much movies…
There’s proof it’s been done pretty much upto the limit of declassified FBI/CIA documents.
I see no reason to believe the government would have stopped — and if they did — I see many reasons Trump is likely to start it up again.
Stay Vigilant — but remember most of us are fine — they won’t waste risky and time consuming tactics like that on minor targets.
I have a hell of a time manipulating files on my mobile devices from my other devices myself. If they have some easy trick to do it I’d love to hear about it.
Possible? Yes. Going to happen? No.
If your authoritarian government wants you gone they don’t need to pull off Hollywood Hacker shit. They can get you for “drugs” (that they planted) or even just outright “disappear” you. They can get rid of you quietly, anonymously, and only your equally powerless kith and kin will care.
This kind of evidence planting is only for REALLY FAMOUS PEOPLE, when they want to put them through courts and convince the peasantry that, actually, this guy deserved it, and don’t be like him, before putting them in an electric chair.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Swamy
It has happened before. It can happen anywhere.
The Washington Post reported in December 2022 that hackers had planted evidence on Swamy’s computer.
Jailed without trial under terrorism laws with “evidence” never presented. But surely such draconian laws only exist in India.
The concept of framing someone implies that there is an honest court to fool into convicting an innocent person.
The government already controls the courts, why make it complicated?
Because they also want to win the “court of public opinion”
Edit: Like just imagine they come up with something worse than “Terrorisr Plot”. They could’ve just put CSAM in Luigi Mangione’s phone/computer and then be like “Ooh this guy is a pedophile”, and fox news are gonna go wild with it.
If the government scrubs my devices for evidence they’re going to find a hell of a lot more than some fabricated antifa PDF. Lol
It’s all perfectly legal to have but still. They would have absolutely no problem framing me with terrorism. Lol
If they try that shit on me, then I no longer have anything to lose do I. They might fuck around and find out. Now if they did that to everyone not a Republican, they literally call the rest of us terrorists? Then maybe we become the terror they so fear.
Soon or later this is all going come crashing down. Either we turn full fascism and it becomes 1984, or a bloody revolution to take our country back. Time going tell. Just saying we are almost to the point we’re voting won’t matter.
I mean, planted evidence is rampant with police, I’m sure digital evidence is just as easy to plant.
Pretty likely if you’re important enough to be on their radar? They already use their own router backdoors to patch routers to keep chinese/russian/etc botnets out
They already use their own router backdoors to patch routers to keep chinese/russian/etc botnets out
Lol, those back doors were probably how they got in, in the first place.
They have back doors to prevent backdoors? Is it possible they are just too nearsighted to realize any backdoor could be exploited by anyone?
In my experience about half of IT workers are clueless drones, another quarter are just slackers, and the remaining quarter get everything done. Those two quarters trade people on the regular thanks to burnout cycles, but yeah, there are still plenty of IT staff out there making terrible, boneheaded decisions daily.
Its important to ride the line between slacking and getting shit done, as well as keeping up skills and not being bored.
A lot higher now than it was before
My sysadmin uncle worried me about this when I was coming to China this time stating that all devices that enter the Chinese network have something on the root changed so that it calls home and even reinstalling the OS can’t fix it. I had two thoughts, one if this is possible I bet the NSA would do it does the same thing. Two, this felt like modern redscare to me.
I spoke to my university IT team and they said as long as I practiced internet safety like using a VPN this would be fine.
That said, I do see this as a valid threat. I believe using my own FOSS services over others makes this threat smaller to some degree. Encrypting everything. And when in doubt write it down on paper. The less tech you use the less this threat exists.
In a perfect world I wish I had a Linux portable device where I could manually turn off wifi and data.
stating that all devices that enter the Chinese network have something on the root changed so that it calls home and even reinstalling the OS can’t fix it.
Can someone with more expertise explain how this could be possible? Are you actually saying any device manufactured in China and sold within China have something changed? I don’t see how this could be true if your bringing your own device from outside into China.
I’m going to guess that this is very much not true. For that to happen, every individual device would have to have an exploit that only China is aware of that gives them zero touch kernel level access where they invisibly install a rootkit that can’t be flashed off. Now, if you connect to a network and it says you have to install something first in order to connect, then all bets are off. I’ve heard of some exploits where this could be possible for specific devices running specific versions of firmware or software, but they are exceptions that generally can’t be replicated consistently in the wild.
I would say that if connected to a Chinese network, all of your traffic can be monitored, so a VPN would be heavily recommended.
It’s not detailed enough to really know what they meant, but for example and if I recall correctly, Android on a phone can get rootkitted in such a way that resetting the phone will not remove what was installed. This is because Android has a “System” partition and a “User” partition. When you “reset” a phone, it only wipes the user partition in most cases, so any malware installed to the system side would be untouched.
This is why you have to be real careful if you should purchase an Android phone second hand from a private seller.
Im saying any device that is used within Chinese internet or data can have its root changed account to my uncle. As I said in my original comment I wonder if that’s possible and if it was why wouldn’t the NSA do it too. Or is it just redscare? He’s the head sysadmin for a large multi branch company BUT his field isn’t China, he got that from a colleague. So idk what to do with that info. My university has teams in China and they don’t worry about this. I decided to not worry about it.
Tin foil hat on it sounds possible and I’m sure it could be done in the US too but I am not an expert at all.
They’re probably referring to rootkits that compromise the firmware of devices.
Could they? Yes. Would they? Almost definitely not for most cases. There’s plenty of crimes they can hit you with if you happen to get on the government’s shit list. A month of active surveillance would give them evidence for a laundry list of felonies. Taking covert action to plant fake evidence is a level of risk that isn’t worth it for the average person. If you happen to be a state level threat that calculus can change.
At this point, if you happen to be a state level threat, they don’t need to plant evidence. They can just make it up out of whole cloth.
This can and may very well have been done. You might be able to catch it with forensics but odds are you can’t afford an expert and a good lawyer if you’re some rando that got targeted
Steve Huffman? The language guy?
lol I really don’t know 0_o
Have anyone though about this?
Yes.
Am I just being over paranoid? Perhaps I watch too much movies…
Yes.
Most people’s thoughts are absolutely boring and unimportant to the governments of the world.
