Edit: Changed “the government” to “governments”
I mean, people say use end to end encryption, VPN, Tor, Open Source Operating System, but I think one thing missed is the hardware is not really open source, and theres no practical open source alternative for hardware. There’s Intel ME, AMD PSP, so there’s probably one in phones. How can people be so confident these encryption is gonna stop intelligence agencies?
I doubt that’s the case. We already had a good amount of government-sponsored hacking, worms like Stuxnet. The Israelis can make every pager (edit: they’d like to, and fit with explosives) explode. It has been debated if there’s surveillance in some networking equipment. I think it’d be quite affordable to put a few more lines of code into Intel ME and AMD’s equivalent. The hardware is already there.
If you honestly think that the exploding pagers where just standard pagers, and somehow made to explode by hacking them, your grasp of physics and technology could do with some improvement.
The pagers where packed with a small amount of explosive and remote detonation system and then fed into the Hamas group through a supply chain attack.
Sure, that basic physics knowledge was kind of implied in my comment. But yeah, my phrasing is misleading. They can’t make “every” pager explode. But they can make you end up with one with explosives inside. Most of these things are supply chain attacks. Could be targeted at someone and happen after manufacuring. Or you’d make the regular manufacturer include a backdoor. Or you’d do it like with the pagers and set up a whole fake manufacturer and sell them with a bomb inside. I suppose in that case it would be possible to detect it. But I’m not an expert on explosives.