The end of privacy in the United States

Michael Ledeen has been reading up on hackers.

To be sure, I’m amazed so many people seem not to understand how thorough and irresistible is the end of privacy in the U.S. And it isn’t only the increasingly intrusive and manipulative State. Hackers abound, and they can find out most anything they desire about you and your activities. Did you know that a skilled snooper can use your computer or your “smart” phone to listen to you and — through the camera in one of those boxes — even watch you any time? It doesn’t matter if your machine is on or off, by the way, or even if you remove the battery.

I’ve been doing research on hackers of late, and it’s an amazing world. There’s a group of (apparently) Russian cybercriminals that will design a special cyberbomb just for you to use against a target of your choice, like a company or a government agency. They will rent the bomb to you for a fee, for a limited period of time, and when time’s up it self-destructs, kinda like the old fashioned audio tapes in the Mission Impossible television series. Scary, very scary…but that’s our world. So we must all assume that we don’t have any secrets from “them” and “they” are not easily defined, politically, ideologically, nationally, or religiously.

Get used to it.