Government Surveillance via NAS (and Hard Drive)
I've been running a home built NAS for years1. It's been great. You just have to be willing to research parts and tinker around to get things set up.
I've outgrown the current machine. I'm decided what to do for a new one. My inclination is to go off-the-shelf this time. As much as I like to tinker, I've got other things I want to spend my time on.
Next Up
Synology2 has my eye. I know folks with them. They all sing praises.
Going with a home-built machine is significantly cheaper. That's great, but it's not the most important thing to me. Keeping my data private is.
Synology has all kinds of features that let you access your files from the internet. I don't want those. It opens a door for hackers. I'm not too worried about that though3.
What's giving me pause is the growing scope of government surveillance4. It's not hard to imagine a time when a government goes to Synology and forces them to add surveillance tools to there machines.
Just Cause Your Paranoid...
I have no idea how likely a move like that is. I just know that slurping up as much data as possible is a standard approach. Throw in some "AI" looking for undesirables along with a government that disappears people and things get scary.
I hope I'm wrong. But, it's one of those things that's almost certainly "when not if".
-a
Endnotes
Yes. Government mandated surveillance will start on computer/phone operating systems first. I just hadn't thought about the NAS angle until now.
Synology already has "AI" integrated in their cameras. A first step along the data surveillance route will be when they start integrating "AI" services into their NAS offerings.
Footnotes
NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. It's basically a way to put a bunch of hard drives together so they look like one big one. One of the big benefits is they can be set up with redundancy so that if one hard drive fails the others still have your data on them.
This post is one of my earlier NAS machines.
Good looking machines. I'm probably gonna get one. I hope it doesn't end up spying on me.
First off, you can turn most of that stuff off. That's great, as long as there aren't security issues that open up access accidentally. I'd rather it not even be a feature so that category of danger just didn't exist.
For example...