Wow. My old friend Steve Blank, a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a longstanding interest in the government's high tech spying, has described yet another way the NSA may be intercepting virtually everything we do with our digital devices.
As he details in Your Computer May Already Be Hacked — NSA Inside?, the agency may be exploiting the ability of microchips to install bugfix "microcode updates" when they start up, to open a secret "back door" into your PC or other device that gives them access to everything you do before you even get a chance to try to protect it with encryption.
As he notes, "Given the technical sophistication of the other parts of their surveillance net, the surprise would be if they haven't implemented a microcode backdoor."
And this nullification of your privacy can easily be disguised in something as innocent-seeming as a typical Windows Update. He continues:
The downside is that 1) backdoors can be hijacked by others with even worse intent. So if NSA has a microcode backdoor - who else is using it? and 2) What other pieces of our infrastructure, (routers, smartphones, military computers, satellites, etc) use processors with uploadable microcode?
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And that may be why the Russian president is now using a typewriter rather than a personal computer.
Note that deciphering encrypted messages takes some time and work. But a backdoor would give the spooks access to everything you do, effortlessly.