Frederick Forsyth Claims NSA Wrecked Wife’s Computer by Remote
August 22nd, 2010I’d like to know more about what happened to her computer.
Via: BBC:
Frederick Forsyth, bestselling author of thrillers like The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War, was in the West African state of Guinea-Bissau last year when the president was assassinated.
His presence there, he now believes, led suspicious US intelligence forces to launch a cyber-attack on his wife’s computer.
…
Forsyth still writes a column for the Daily Express and says he thought he had better tell them what was going on in Guinea-Bissau. He does not use computers or mobile phones but borrowed a phone and dictated 1,000 words of copy.
“Unfortunately, the American intelligence services listened to it and wasted my wife’s computer screen and totalled all her lunch dates,” he claims.
Friends in ‘low places’
Mr Forsyth has no proof for this claim.
He suspected foul play as soon as he got back home to his farm in Berkshire and discovered that his wife’s computer had ceased to function.
He claims his suspicions were confirmed to him by his sources – the mysterious people who inform his thriller writing, whom he likes to describe as his “friends in low places”.
“Everything up there in the ether is intercepted, probably by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland, and I think my report ended up somewhere on a desk at Fort Meade,” he says.
I find this assertion highly implausible:
If the NSA/GCHQ were interested in this fellows communications, which they might well be, why on earth would they fry the machine? It would make much more sense for them to just break into the computer and install a monitoring agent to observe everything that happened on it. Just killing the machine outright would be an act of petty vandalism, with no upside for them.
It’s possible that the machine was accidentally fried in a botched attempt to attack the machine and install such an agent, but I would wager that the intelligence agencies have a fairly well oiled procedures for such activities.