Tag eavesdropping

There goes your airgap.

This latest leak details how the NSA accessed targets by inserting tiny circuit boards or USB cards into computers and using radio waves to transmit data without the need for the machine to be connected to a wider network. It is a significant revelation in that it undermines what was seen to be one of the simplest but most effective methods of making a system secure: isolating it from the internet.
In other words: the NSA planted tranmitters (or tranceivers) and effectively turned air-gapped machines into machines transmitting to (/receiving from) their systems. Somewhat different from actually snooping on 'offline' machines, ala Tempest, as what many 'news' organizations hinted at by using inaccurate titles (the BBC, quoted above from this article, included). Unless all your offices are room-sized Faraday cages, with physical security and extensive background checks of the machine operators, the NSA just invalidated your airgap policy. But then again, your security was probably flawed anyway, especially against an adversary that competent/determined/resourceful.

The return of the DPI

Ross Anderson writes about how the newly elected 'coalition' government in the UK plans to proceed with a controversial plan to mandate the installation of Deep Packet Inspection kits at ISPs in that country. I've written about DPI in the past, how it affects our liberty and provides little, to no, advantages for safeguarding national security. A few years ago Hellas was one of the best countries to live in, in terms of privacy; that was more due to the fact that the country has practically little to no governance where it comes to security than due to liberty and privacy respecting government agencies. DPI has been proposed under the pretext of national security and economic purposes (piracy fighting, bandwidth optimisation) and the technology has --- for a several years now --- allowed relatively cheap devices to be installed to practically all medium-sized or larger ISPs. I'd like to hope that sanity will prevail, but in a post 9/11 world civil liberties are not exactly a priority.