Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The last show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us. Here's something that I think more people should be talking about. In your house, I can almost guarantee right now your internet is running through a router, an appliance, a device that makes it so you can share your internet with everyone in the house. Great. Nothing to worry about there. But the U.S.
government has just announced a ban on all routers made outside the U.S. Why are they doing this? Is it to protect you? Well, I'm here with Carmi Levy, tech analyst on It's Time for Technology Time, to talk about how these devices are a single point of huge vulnerability in everybody's home that no one talks about. Carmi, welcome to the program.
Good to be with you, David.
Chapter 2: What recent action did the US government take regarding consumer routers?
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean, no question. No one pays attention to routers until... They fail. And then, of course, they just bring it back to their service provider and ask for another one.
No, no, no. They unplug it and plug it back in.
That's what they do. But it's easily the most important piece of technology that you have in your house because literally all traffic gets routed through it. And everything you do depends on this.
When you think of a series of computers that you connect to to go from your house to Google, that router is the first computer you connect to. It is not just like an appliance. It's not a toaster. Even though it looks like a little device, an embedded device, it's a full computer in there that runs an operating system with software. And someone's got to create that software.
And all your internet traffic is running through it. What happens if a bad foreign actor writes software that, I don't know, sends a copy of everything you do to them? or tries to steal your banking information. It's kind of a worry.
Oh, it is. It's a nightmare scenario.
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Chapter 3: Why are foreign-made routers considered a security risk?
And this is the stuff that keeps me up at night because your router is quite literally the choke point for all traffic that goes in and out of your home and all of the devices that connect to your home network. And so imagine the power of a bad actor who would be able to literally stand on your router and watch all of that traffic flow back and forth. Those are the keys to the kingdom.
We talk about mass surveillance, Orwellian visions of mass surveillance in the digital connected age. This is what it looks like. And if you're going to target one device to see inside people's digital lives, it would be the router. And now the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S., has banned any router that isn't made in the US from being sold in the US. So your current router is fine.
If the router that you want to buy has already been approved, you can still buy it. But going forward, as foreign manufacturers introduce new routers to the market, the FCC will not allow them to be sold in the US because they're saying it is a national security concern. They don't want
companies that are based in China to be able to surveil traffic that is flowing in and out of not only our homes, but our businesses and all of our networks. They did the same thing with drones a few months ago. So the FCC is just taking the drone ban and applying it to routers. But I would argue that the router piece is a lot more impactful than the drone one. You can choose to not buy a drone.
Most of us don't have a choice. We have to have a router.
And some internet communication is encrypted. So yes, like even if a copy of it gets sent to some foreign country or some hacker group, they may not be able to peek what's inside. But imagine this, a bank outfits its offices with a router. Yes, the communications are encrypted. So if there's any bad software on those routers, they can't necessarily read it.
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Chapter 4: What vulnerabilities exist in home routers that users should be aware of?
But what if there's just like a kill switch? What if every bank, you know, office had these wireless routers and these hardwired routers in them? And then all of a sudden some foreign country is like, well, we could maybe profit if we took that bank offline for an hour. You know, like it's little things like that.
It's kind of scary that like these devices are so, I mean, in some ways I'm fear mongering. Why would we expect these manufacturers to do anything bad? But on the other hand, it's such a vulnerable piece of infrastructure everywhere. I totally get the ban. I got to say, I'm usually against these blunders. But for this one, I see why they're doing it.
I'm still worried, though, because, you know, for all this and I remember, you know, because the national security concern is trotted out all the time when governments want to impose a change. They used it with the TikTok ban and look how that ended up. It was never about national security at all. And so now, you know, the US government, again, it's all about trust.
Do you trust that the US government will now, as they hold the keys to your technological kingdom, will they not insist on having backdoors in these devices? Will they not use that newfound position to surveil their own population? The risk doesn't always come from China. The risk sometimes comes from within. They would never do that.
Edward Snowden never released anything about the US government doing that. That would never happen.
Would you bet the mortgage on that? I don't know.
I was kind of building up this ban and I still think it might be a good idea, but I'm like, everyone's iPhone is manufactured over
sees like the amount of foreign technology that's critical to the economy running to defense infrastructure running all this the amount of it manufactured out of country is already very high why pick these one devices but on the other hand you got to start somewhere i guess and this is a really critical vulnerable piece of hardware that's everywhere
Yeah. And I think, you know, sort of looking at the router market, what's going to happen is they're going to become harder to find. They're going to become more expensive. And so if you're in the market for one now, you might want to maybe buy it sooner rather than later, because those models that you want are going to disappear from store shelves.
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