Magic Lantern and Cyber-Terrorism

This is apparently old news, but hey it is new to me, maybe someone else was under this particular rock

Rumors on the intertubes are rampant about Magic Lantern (which definitely does exist), a FBI engineered computer virus, created to be a remote keystroke logging program. Reports popped up up in forums and on sites like Slashdot that Norton and McAffe were pressured by the bureau to have their anti-virus software ignore the government worm.

wait...

WHAT?!

Since most of the news on this was pretty old I went looking for fresher updates. I found this article from this November which, while it didn't really give me the feeling of being a highly reputable source had this to say:

"Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed that the FBI no longer feels compelled to obtain judicial oversight or even the consent of cell phone operators when deploying base station-faking technology that it employs for the illegal geolocation of mobile users."

I may do some fact-checking on that later, but would you really be surprised? Add to this the recent malware attack on the US Defense Department, the hacking of both presidential candidate's campaign headquarters and reports that the White House computer network was hacked multiple times by someone in China, suspected to have been funded by the Chinese government.

It is an ugly (cyber) world out there. It makes me nervous that a) the government is apparently pretty ok with violating personal privacy. Ok I mean, the patriot act and all that (by the way what jerkoff decided to name it that?) but I never really thought much beyond the traditional wiretapping etc. and b) in response to the foreign attacks, they are doing that thing they do when they arn't confident: withold all unneccesary information, and try to play down what they do release:

"Oh yeah Mr. President we uh, well the defense department and white house MAY have been... okay yeah they were compromised. Not by anyone important really... Okay it was China and Russia. I mean. No big deal. Just uh... don't... put anything too important on your office computer." (okay I made this dialogue up)

I have a sneaking hunch that sometime soon somebody is going to somehow hurt our infastructure with this. I don't like it. I don't like it that the government isn't being very confident about foreign attacks while being far TOO confident about internal violation of privacy. It doesn't make me feel very safe. C'mon guys, get with it.