There has been lots of press recently about the NSA hacking into everything.
There are cameras in everything now; laptops; Chromebooks; netbooks; tablets; phones ... I'm surprised the NEST learning thermostat doesn't have a camera (but it does have a motion detector).
Anyway ... with consumers (that's you and me) buying this stuff and distributing it around our homes, the NSA's job is half done. The other half is getting to information out. For phones with GSM/LTE the phone itself will do the job. For the rest of these devices, Wi-Fi is required.
Comcast is here to help! All new routers from Comcast come with WiFi you can't turn off. The idea, from Comcast's point of view, is that they are doing a sort of "crowd sourcing" of WiFi hotspots. Supposedly (I haven't tried it), you can connect to anyone's Comcast router with your Comcast account and use it as a free hotspot.
Comcast, as you probably know, has a back-channel IP address for every home router. They use this for maintenance, and generally, the back channel addresses are IP6, which is cool. But since we know the NSA co-opts consumer gear for their own purposes I think we can be pretty confident that the NSA can take control of one of these routers if they want.
... so ... to summarize ... as consumers, we've bought everything the NSA needs to bug our homes. Talk about crowd sourcing ...
(Note: It's possible to do small amounts of configuration to your Comcast WiFi connection - so I renamed mine from HOME_<some hex digits> to NSA_LISTENING_POST. So if you're driving by and see that, you'll know where you stand.)
[Edit: My question for many years as been - how do you know you're connecting to a trustworthy Comcast hotspot and not some random router?]
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