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…
My sysadmin uncle worried me about this when I was coming to China this time stating that all devices that enter the Chinese network have something on the root changed so that it calls home and even reinstalling the OS can’t fix it. I had two thoughts, one if this is possible I bet the NSA would do it does the same thing. Two, this felt like modern redscare to me.
I spoke to my university IT team and they said as long as I practiced internet safety like using a VPN this would be fine.
That said, I do see this as a valid threat. I believe using my own FOSS services over others makes this threat smaller to some degree. Encrypting everything. And when in doubt write it down on paper. The less tech you use the less this threat exists.
In a perfect world I wish I had a Linux portable device where I could manually turn off wifi and data.