Director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has revealed that US intelligence agencies are using various “smart home” devices in order to spy on citizens. The growing list of smart devices such as thermostats, cameras, and other appliances that are connected to the internet, provide authorities with the ability to spy on its citizens. The Guardian reports: “In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper told a Senate panel as part of his annual “assessment of threats” against the US. Clapper is actually saying something very similar to a major study done at Harvard’s Berkman Center released last week. It concluded that the FBI’s recent claim that they are “going dark” – losing the ability to spy on suspects because of encryption – is largely overblown, mainly because federal agencies have so many more avenues for spying. This echoes comments by many surveillance experts, who have made clear that, rather than “going dark”, we are actually in the “golden age of surveillance”. Privacy advocates have known about the potential for government to exploit the internet of things for [...]