As constantly increasing computing power is continually squeezed into ever smaller storage devices, the category of consumer products containing licensed software will continue to grow. In a world in which so many devices, not just smartphones, will be connected to the Internet of Things, the government’s theory that a licensing agreement allows it to compel the manufacturers of such products to help it surveil the products’ users will result in a virtually limitless expansion of the government’s legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy.

no place to hide

Finally, the ever-growing Internet of Things presents a whole swath of new spying possibilities, the authors of the report suggest. “Networked sensors and the Internet of Things are projected to grow substantially, and this has the potential to drastically change surveillance,” the report says. “The still images, video, and audio captured by these devices may enable real-time intercept and recording with after-the-fact access.”

Gartner, a technology consulting firm, estimates that there will be about 6.4 billion objects connected to the internet in the world this year — including light bulbs, watches, security systems, cameras, bracelets, digital ice cubes, digital socks, digital diapers, and more.

And unless everyone is encrypting everything all the time, investigators might be able to spy on you from the person sitting next to you on the metro, or in the office next door. “Thus an inability to monitor an encrypted channel could be mitigated by the ability to monitor from afar a person through a different channel,” the report says.

At the Black Hat hacker conference in two weeks, security researchers Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger plan to present the results of a year of work hacking a pair of $13,000 TrackingPoint self-aiming rifles. The married hacker couple have developed a set of techniques that could allow an attacker to compromise the rifle via its Wi-Fi connection and exploit vulnerabilities in its software. Their tricks can change variables in the scope’s calculations that make the rifle inexplicably miss its target, permanently disable the scope’s computer, or even prevent the gun from firing.