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Massive camera hack exposes the growing reach and intimacy of American surveillance

Washington Post – A breach of the camera start-up Verkada ‘should be a wake-up call to the dangers of self-surveillance,’ one expert said: “‘Our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat.”  In one video, a woman in a hospital room watches over someone sleeping in an intensive-care-unit bed. In another, a man and three young children celebrate one Sunday afternoon over a completed puzzle in a carpeted playroom. The private moments would have, in some other time, been constrained to memory. But something else had been watching: An Internet-connected camera managed by the security start-up Verkada, which sells cameras and software that customers can use to watch live video from anywhere across the Web. With a single breach, those scenes — and glimpses from more than 149,000 security cameras — were suddenly revealed to hackers, who had used high-level log-in credentials to access and plunder Verkada’s vast camera network. A hacker shared some of the materials with The Washington Post to spotlight the security threat of widespread surveillance technologies that subject the public to near-constant watch…”

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