AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Eavesdropping on our smart devices and encryption and more

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we talked a little bit more about encryption and eavesdropping by our smart devices. Well, it is that time so, here we go with Mr. Polito.

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Is someone eavesdropping on your Smart Speaker?

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Good Morning Everyone! Busy times here. I've been doing the daily Facebook Lives and thanks for joining me on those and YouTube lives now too. I've added this week, man busy, busy, busy times. And we're talking this week of course about mobile security, which is a little bit different event last week where we were talking about VPN and next week, I'm probably not going to do too many of them will, maybe I will, we'll see because I'm going to be out at a conference. Then Friday, of course, you'll get an email out today. I'll probably send out this afternoon about my special master class and I'm holding on Friday this week. So keep an eye out for that. Make sure you attend. Alright, so here we go with Mr. Polito talk a little bit more about encryption and eavesdropping by our smart devices.

The man, the myth, the legend, genius, super genius. I'm talking about our tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Good morning. Are you sure it's not Monday, you know, with Danny's 
bones and no, cuz I've been doing it too.

I don't know what it is. That's worse. You know what we shouldn't be allowed around such high technology. Frankly, we should just refer to you. And that's why we defer to you every Tuesday at this time because you bring us up to speed. You lay it out for us. So we've got two topics we really want to cover today. First of all, that lying thieving little Alexa, she may be working for the bad guy she may have. She may have a little Stockholm Syndrome and she's working for the bad guys. Now we'll get to her. But encryption, encryption, you say that there are big news and encryption and that's the thing that's supposed to keep all of our transmissions and materials safe as we traverse the World Wide Web.

It's interesting too with this whole al Baghdadi thing, and how we tracked him down through, of course, you've been following this closely as we know that it was human intelligence, right. It was like the wife of one of the couriers. That kind of tipped us off in that case. And we can rewind time back to Saddam Hussein's days. And you might remember back then, we had shocking on and we went in there, we knew where he was. We knew where his sons were because we were able to track their encrypted phones. Yeah. Now they were using some encryption technology out of the United Kingdom. And they were using something that had a chip in it called a Jupyter chip. And this was a chip that was designed by an encryption conglomerate, if you will, that consisted of private companies and government and the government. The UK government, in this case, hadn't built in a backdoor. So we were able to hear all the communications between Saddam Hussein and his sons, as well as other encrypted communications. Now, fast forward a little bit, we had Bill Clinton who his administration was pushing something called the Clipper chip, which was the ultimate in encryption, and it was going to keep all of our conversations safe. And then it turned out his administration came up with an encryption chip with a built-in back door. Now back doors can be problematic because what it means is that the government or some other third party has access to all of the encrypted communications that are going on. So let's fast forward a little bit again here we had James Baker, who was the former FBI General Counsel Who said we have to be able to get into the encrypted channels. And there are complaints been going on right now with Facebook because Facebook is encrypting or they're going to encrypt more stuff. They already are encrypting some things. And the FBI director is coming out right now saying, Hey, this is a real problem because Facebook is currently the lead reefer of child exploitation accorded the FBI. So, yeah, exactly. This is FBI Director, Christopher Ray. And so they're saying now and along with the trade journal, Bob Barr, that we need to not have encryption. Well, the former general counsel, Jim Bakker has changed his mind. Now he says, no, no.

Craig. He didn't change his mind. He evolved. We don't say change. He evolved. That's a Clinton administration. Obama administration is evolved.

And they seem to do that over time don't say we're at a point right now where Facebook is saying, Hey, I want to have encryption and just the WhatsApp app has and some of the others like a signal which is one of the best. And on the other side, we're looking at terrorists and child exploitation people who are using this as cover. So we have the ability now with our smartphones to have incredibly high encryption in place. And the question is, should we, and with the new technologies that are coming out, Google just announced quantum supremacy and you know, it really happened. There's a lot of discussion about that. But basically with one of these new computers that are Developed right now. Any all but one type of encryption we think can be broken in a matter of minutes. So real? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, they the with supremacy that quantum supremacy that Google announced, basically they can perform 100,000 years of computer computation hundred thousand years of computation in a matter of minutes. Right.

I read the article. Yeah.

In reality, they didn't really achieve it, but that's okay. You mentally is an expert opinion. Well, they really didn't achieve it. But they're close.

Yeah, exactly. So this is a real problem. We've got new encryption standards, who got better encryption than we've ever had. We found out less than five years ago today that the National Security Agency, the NSA, pleasing the standards of encryption that are out there, so they could basically have a backdoor, they could easily break a lot of encryption schemes that were being used. So if this is something we need to discuss and just plain isn't being discussed, and I don't where I come down, I think we should have our privacy. If law enforcement wants access to our records, they need to get a warrant. And maybe they need to install some sort of software on our devices so that they can do men in the middle attacks. And you know, the old fashioned way, a little bit of gumshoe, President Clinton destroyed much of our spy network worldwide because he had what he said was the technology advantage now, where we can just spy on people by listening to their digital communications, we no longer have that benefit. So as we've seen with Al Baghdadi, Baghdadi and others, in reality, it's the people on the ground. It despises the old fashioned way that gets us the result. Because encryption, man, it's just too hard to break. And these guys are getting smart. We're talking
with Craig Peterson. And at the end of this segment, we're going to explain to you how you can get a lot of this information from him on a weekly basis. And it's one of the things I look forward to in terms of getting this information. All right. So let's go to our dear friend, Alexa. She may be the Mata Hari of, of smart speakers, her and a bunch of the other ones because the bad guys are kind of dropping her into our house as what a Manchurian candidate to do. They're bad Vinny, why don't you tell us about that?

Yeah, well, these smart speakers have basically apps that you can run on them. Google has its Google Home electro Of course from Amazon. With the echo and others, there's there is a number of them that are out there. And they call them different things. So basically, it's an app that you can use. And some of them are really cool special weather stop as Steve uses his for the weather, right? There's still the special apps you can download. They're called skills in the Alexa world. But what we're finding now is some kind of concerning stuff. You know how I've said that Alexa doesn't sit there and actually listen to everything that's going on. It's not absorbing it. It's not pushing it up to the internet. It's waiting for one of its wake work for you to wake it up. And then it records for up to 30 seconds and sends it on up. Well, with Google, that's not the case with Google Home. And with Google Home, they found that some of these apps will continue to listen and stream everything. So here's how the Google work as long as a Google Home keeps hearing somebody talking every 30 seconds It keeps streaming up to the internet. And so they have found now that some of the apps are actually doing that. And they're sending it all up there listening in. So our fingers are confirmed. And then you mentioned Alexa because some of the apps some of these Alexa skills now have some kind of nastiness in them. And they will ask you on the Alexa for your password, your username, various other things don't ever give to your Alexa or your google home or anything else. Unfortunately, Google has been really bad about keeping the Google Play Store clean from malware. Apple's been quite good but not perfect. So I just don't trust the Google Home stuff in the eavesdropping. It's been doing but don't give your credit card don't talk to, you know to lecture says what's your password and don't give it to it. Come Use the app that you have from the at the I did the Google Play Store for Alexa or the Apple App Store for iOS, use those apps to configure to download skill to get everything going. Because it turns out now and this is according to FR Labs, that they were able to collect personal data, including user passwords, are able to eavesdrop on users, because we're just not paying attention. We're just trusting these things a little too much, maybe.

Wow. Good sage advice. Now, in order to follow up on that advice in order to get more information, it's very simple. You just text My name Jim to this number

855 385 5553 for just text and Jim to 855-385-5553 standard data and 10 tax rates apply.

Craig will not steal your information. He won't try to sell you crazy stuff. He'll just give you great information and updates when there's some kind of an emergency. Craig, excellent segment. Great to talk with you.

Hey, thanks, Jim. You know, maybe next week we can talk about this whole. Are they listening? Why when I talk about Fox, all of a sudden I start seeing shocked and we'll talk about that next week.

Maybe if people aren't aware of Steve's not happy about that. He's going to give he'd like to give the smart speaker the Italian toss if you know what I mean.

All right. Thank you very much, Craig. Good to see you next week. All right, a final word. When we return. You're listening to the

Hey, I can hear you asking right now. Craig. Okay, great. Facebook Lives, YouTube lives. How do I find them? Well just go to Craig peterson.com slash Facebook and you'll see all of my Facebook posts. You'll see all of the Lives I've been doing their or Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube, which is much more comprehensive ultimately, because it's got all of my videos up there, including what I did for our weekly shows. I've been posting those last couple of weeks to hope to keep that up. Anyhow Craig peterson.com slash Facebook and Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye

 

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