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Luca Bertolli, 123RF.com
Your privacy is threatened left, right and center. And it is not only online criminals snooping on your data, but also meddling government agencies and unscrupulous companies. Either way, there are still things you can do to fight back.
Apple has been required by the Drug Enforcement Administration to unlock an encrypted iPhone 5 in a high-profile case being slogged out in court these days. The reasoning goes that, as long as Apple leases the software (i.e., the user is not the owner), the company is the one that should do the unlocking, even without the phone owner's consent or even knowledge. Although Apple resisted the order this time around, it has had few qualms in unlocking users' devices in the past.
According to Ed Snowden, Intel intentionally broke the random number generator on their chips at the behest of the NSA. Random numbers are used extensively in cryptography. The seemingly random, but actually predictable, stream of numbers generated by many Intel chips makes it easy for the security agency to de-encrypt messages that travel through the net.
Calls from Western governments to include backdoors in every and all applications "to fight cyberterrorism" will usher in a new age of defective-by-design software and 1984-esque snooping on civilians throughout the world. On a side note, you can always tell when this stuff comes from some clueless politician – just look for the "cyber" prefix they seem to tag on to everything.
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