”The NSA is acting like a spambot,” said...

"The NSA is acting like a spambot,” said Center for Democracy & Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger, responding in a statement to a report on The Intercept that details the National Security Agency’s (NSA) expansion of a program to covertly hack into computers using malware “on a mass scale,” (http://bit.ly/PsPfFL). Geiger said, “The use of malware implants should be targeted against specific threats in tightly controlled situations, but this kind of mass automated surveillance would put countless Internet users at risk.” The report -- by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher and based on documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden -- said the NSA has posed as a fake Facebook server and sent out spam emails with malware to infiltrate computers, take snapshots, make audio records and exfiltrate files from hard drives. “By deploying malware on systems broadly, especially in such an automated fashion, the NSA could potentially introduce new vulnerabilities and make the systems even more susceptible to attacks by third parties and other governments, a problem the agency itself acknowledges is occurring,” Geiger said.