Don’t trust your phone, don’t trust your laptop – this is the reality that Snowden has shown us

Back in July 2013, a few weeks after Edward Snowden’s revelations about internet and mobile-phone surveillance began, I wrote a column that began: “Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world.”

The spur for the column was my realisation of the extent and astuteness of Snowden’s choice of what to collect and reveal. His was not some opportunistic smash-and-grab data heist, but a considered, informed selection of cases where he thought that the National Security Agency was violating the US constitution and/or circumventing its laws. Snowden was clearly no stereotypical left-wing dissident; he seemed closer to what US constitutional lawyers called an “originalist” – someone who regards the constitution as a sacred, inviolable document that citizens – and their governments – must continue to respect and adhere to. If Snowden were in the US today, I suspect he would be a supporter of Rand Paul.

What Snowden did was careful and considered: he identified examples of what he regarded were unconstitutional activities on the part of the NSA and then downloaded documentary evidence of these activities that would corroborate his judgment. Given the staggering scale of the activities revealed, I remember thinking that it would take us a long time to realise the full extent of the surveillance mesh in which we are entangled. So it has proved.

But a few recent revelations suggest that we may now be getting down to bedrock. Two concern the consummate hacking capabilities of the NSA and its overseas franchises. The first – which came not from Snowden but from Kaspersky, a computer security firm – showed that for at least 14 years a unit in the NSA had succeeded in infecting the firmware that controls hard disk drives with malicious software that is able to persist even through reformatting of the disks.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/edward-snowden-trust-phone-laptop-sim-cards