The price paid is immense.
Norbert Wiener, following WWII, noted that the secure classified treatment of military R&D proved a bigger impediment for the Allies than its enemies. There were multiple independent efforts investigating the same or similar technologies who didn't know of one another and could not share experiences. At the same time, much of the information either leaked out or was available to Axis forces (or Soviets), though development lead-time made this a fairly minor concern.
J. Robert Oppenheimer had similar observations over the Manhattan Project, and there's a famous anecdote by Richard Feynman of travelling to Oak Ridge, where uranium processing and enrichment was occurring, and realising that plant practices were at severe risk of resulting in critical masses of refined material. That wouldn't have vapourised the plant, but could have resulted in deaths, meltdowns, and extensive radioactive contamination. Feynman had to fight to make this information available to plant management and workers, so that the US wouldn't unintentionally sabotage its own efforts.
That day could be quite soon – the Purism Librem 5 is supposed to ship at some point in Q3: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
More about the physical kill-switches: https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the-librem-5-beyond-h...
Also, one of the Snowden disclosures was that apparently the NSA can power on the cameras and mics of Android phones even when the phone is off. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does, probably based off the residual current drawn from the battery and the circuitry that handles the power button. Smartphones are basically never safe, although I've heard iPhones are significantly safer than Android.
I mean, even if you could turn on the mic/camera, I would think you still need to possibly save it to storage for retrieval later which pretty much requires the OS to be running.
Otherwise, maybe, you could somehow transmit the data but that would require the ability to communicate with the device via Bluetooth/WiFi and for the data from the camera to be passed to the wireless interface.
Unless a device was designed with that sort of functionality, I'm not sure how the NSA could just turn that on.
Jumping from one exploit target to another in a chain is pretty much how all modern exploits work. To say that because they would need to find an exploit in the USB driver (or some other hardware or software interface), not only states the obvious, but more importantly misses the point: it's far more plausible than most engineers intuitively believe.
The depth of modern exploit chains is incredible, and while the conceptual difficulty has gone up the pace hasn't seemed to abate, which is clear evidence that our intuition about "too difficult" and about the elasticity of the exploit supply and demand curves is woefully inadequate to accurately gauge risk.
Part of the problem is that the complexity of the systems grows at the same time as improvements in security and correctness. Sometimes it grows faster, sometimes slower, but it's dynamic.
I believe that this has actually been pretty well established in the community, but I don’t have the evidential links immediately at hand.
The tone of incredulity in your comment suggests, as if this practice is extraordinary, when it would be considered SOP ─ tools and crims behind bars make the most unlikely bedfellows.
With SMD parts on a multilayer PCB how do you know that that switch controls the only path to the camera?
Do you have any idea what was being secured on the site? A research lab or something to do with analysing cyber weapons?
It was a military related site, remote, and our people were actually blindfolded from the gate all the way to the equipment needing service, and all you saw was indistinguishable from a small data center.
They had a pretty good system for keeping a tight ship, at least as far as threats from outside equipment.
The rule was NOTHING electronic went in that wasn't accounted for, and NOTHING ever left. We sent people onsite with what were effectively disposable laptops that were single use items and never left the location.
Showing up at the gate with anything extra was said to be a very bad idea. It never happened so I don't know what would happen.
You drove to the site in a car with only what you needed in it. Your license, keys, the equipment you were scheduled to bring. Smartphones weren't ultra common yet, but were absolutely forbidden. The car itself was searched too even though it was in a parking lot far from anything sensitive. You were warned that anything suspicious would not be in the car when you came back (like the extra stuff rule I don't know of anyone that happened to as nobody was foolish enough to drive out with anything but a clean rental car).
I honestly think that is the only security that makes sense. That should be the status quo for some areas the White House too IMO. At least as far as meetings and etc.
Maybe one day we get physical switches that power off cameras and mics, but hard to trust anything until that day....maybe not then.