Going dark debunked: Boundless surveillance opportunities via the Internet of Things

The government likes to wail that encryption is the devil and is causing its surveillance efforts to go dark, but a new report by Harvard University debunked that notion; at worst encryption might cause some dim spots, but overall surveillance opportunities are brighter than ever and will even grow. In part, that’s thanks to the Internet of Things.

“We’re not going dark,” explained Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard. He added:

As data collection volume and methods proliferate, the number of human and technical weaknesses within the system will increase to the point that it will overwhelmingly likely be a net positive for the intelligence community. Consider all those IoT devices with their sensors and poorly updated firmware. We’re hardly going dark when — fittingly, given the metaphor — our light bulbs have motion detectors and an open port. The label is “going dark” only because the security state is losing something that it fleetingly had access to, not because it is all of a sudden lacking in vectors for useful information.

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