Security, Spoken

If you’ve been feeling a little paranoid lately—like even your standing mixer may be spying on you—rest assured that Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway shares your struggle. On Sunday, apparently reacting to last week’s CIA WikiLeaks data dump, Conway told the Bergen Record that at this point, US citizens should consider all appliances compromised. Even their microwaves.

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This week's WikiLeaks revelations, which showed that the CIA can compromise a huge range of devices, shouldn't send you into paroxysms of fear over your smartphone. It should, though, be a solid reminder that one of the best ways to keep yourself safe from hackers is also one of the simplest: Update your gear. What allows hackers access to your devices, after all, are breakdowns and vulnerabilities in the firmware (read: operating system) that runs them.

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Of all the revelations to come out of the 9,000-page data dump of CIA hacking tools, one of the most explosive is the possibility that the spy agency can compromise Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted chat apps. If you use those apps, let's be perfectly clear: Nothing in the WikiLeaks docs says the CIA can do that. A close reading of the descriptions of mobile hacking outlined in the documents released by WikiLeaks shows that the CIA has not yet cracked those invaluable encryption tools.

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US intelligence agencies face a difficult task. They are supposed to provide meaningful analysis that enables officials to manage serious national security problems such as terrorism, weapons proliferation, network attacks on government infrastructure, and counterintelligence efforts. Today these are diffuse and complex threats. There are newly powerful political actors on the international stage. Organizations that are not governments and have no physical territory can inflict great harm.

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It started, like so many eruptions these days, with a tweet. Early Saturday morning, President Trump fired off a series of tweets accusing, without evidence, former PresidentBarack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in the month before the election. Trump compared the alleged snooping to “Nixon/Watergate,” and intimated legal action. What makes the broader allegation so extraordinary isn’t that it is new. Quite the contrary.

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It was a week of could have beens and still coulds in security. We took a long look at a plan to stop rogue drones that might work great, if it’s ever legal. We looked at how Trump should spend that extra $54 billion on defense, if he insists. And we looked at Google’s end-to-end encryption hopes for Gmail, which appear to have faded over the last three years. Oh, also, some rogue stuffed bears made a great case against the Internet of Toys.

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As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence conducted state business usinghis personal email account. An AOL account. Soof course someone hacked it. Witha phishing scam. This story offers no end of rolling punchlines, the kicker being thevitriol the vice president showed during the campaigntoward Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

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In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump said he’s preparing “a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the Defense sequester, and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” The day before the speech, White House officials said the administration planned to propose a “historic” $54 billion increase in the defense budget.

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Hacked medical devices have made scary headlines for years now. Dick Cheney ordered changes to his pacemaker to better protect it from hackers. Johnson & Johnson warned customers about a security bug in one of its insulin pumps last fall. And St. Jude has spent months dealing with the fallout of vulnerabilities in some of the company’s defibrillators, pacemakers, and other medical electronics. You’d think by now medical device companies would have learned something about security reform.

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Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a mini­fridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Eight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau. The two men are longtime veterans: 30 years for Miller, 28 for Gayman.

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