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…
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.