CIA Leaks Unsurprisingly Show The Internet Of Broken Things Is A Spy’s Best Friend

So if you’ve spent any amount of time around here, you probably already know that the security and privacy standards surrounding the internet of (broken) things sit somewhere between high comedy and dogshit. Whether it’s your refrigerator leaking your gmail credentials or your children’s toys leaking kids’ conversations, putting a microphone and camera on everything that isn’t nailed down — then connecting those devices to the internet without thinking about security and privacy — hasn’t been quite the revolution we were promised.

Obviously for the NSA and CIA, the internet of broken things is a field day, and the fact that the intelligence community would exploit this paper-mache grade security should surprise nobody. In fact, James Clapper made it abundantly clear last year that the internet of not-so-smart things was a massive target for surveillance:

“In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper said.”