There’s a warning in the news this week about how much to trust the electronic systems you and people at your company communicate: Not at all.

The warning becomes clear by combining two examples. The first is the story of how an NSA snooping tool code-named AURORAGOLD helped to get Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddaffi killed in a particularly brutal way by compromising the email of geeks behind the scenes of Libya’s mobile phone networks.

The goal of Project AURORAGOLD was to find ways to both compromise mobile-phone network controls and to find ways to listen to voice or text conversations by tapping the email accounts of admins who routinely exchanged technical documents about the inner workings of those networks.

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