Monday, February 24, 2014

Mainstream media admits smart meters are spying devices

Mainstream media admits smart meters are spying devices | Intellihub News
Mainstream media finally recognizes the smart meter dangers that “conspiracy theorists” have warned of for years
(INTELLIHUB) — For years researchers and activists have been warning about the health and privacy dangers involved with smart meters.  As usual, the mainstream media ridiculed these warnings and insisted that smart meters were harmless.  However, now it is becoming common knowledge that these smart meters can be used to spy on innocent people, and even the mainstream media is starting to catching on.
Shockingly, news organizations like NBC are even picking this story up, in a recent article for NBC News, Matt Liebowitz writes:
Researchers examining the privacy implications of smart-meter technology found that one German provider’s devices contained vulnerabilities that allowed them to snoop on unencrypted data to determine whether or not the homeowners were home.
After signing up with the German smart-meter firm Discovergy, the researchers detected that the company’s devices transmitted unencrypted data from the home devices back to the company’s servers over an insecure link. The researchers, Dario Carluccio and Stephan Brinkhaus, intercepted the supposedly confidential and sensitive information, and, based on the fingerprint of power usage, were able to tell not only whether or not the homeowners were home, away or even sleeping, but also what movie they were watching on TV.
Smart meters are just one piece of the national surveillance puzzle that has been growing in recent decades.
“Over the last several years, traffic-centric surveillance applications were the most prolific,” said Eric Ackermann, sales manager for enterprise solutions and services at Siemens Industry in California’s Orange County. “In the last two years, a vast majority of the demand has come from city water/utility, parks/recreation, police and public works.”

No comments: