[asveikau]

Even this vague comment is more specific than what Snowden is offering. I'd imagine it also involves a non-zero amount of hurdles (physical access? kernel mode privileges so you can flash BIOS?) which can be mitigated against.

That's the weird thing about Snowden's claim. It makes them sound all-powerful. If it were really something concrete, there'd be more knowledge of scope, mitigations, etc. It's also hard to believe they are doing this on everyone, by default.

[jrochkind1]

So this was just a pre-interview not originally meant for publication; I assume we will be getting evidence and details on these things with documents yet to be released. This is just like a summary preview.

But I didn't see any implication in this interview that they were doing it on everyone, universally, by default. Rather, Snowden specifically says this is what happens to a targetted person, he some of the ways you become targetted are "because of a Facebook profile or because of your emails", presumably certain keywords or profile or whatever. Then he says the 'monitoring' which completely takes over your computer is done to 'targetted' people.

I too am very curious to learn: How many such targetted people with malware-monitored computers there are, how often this is done; is it done to computers in the US and/or to US citizens; what sorts of suspicion lead to this targetting; what warrants or court orders or other judicial oversight there are on individual monitoring cases; among other things.

I am now eagerly awaiting release of documentation or evidence on these issues.