Golden Nugget

The Golden Nugget, a casino in Las Vegas, became the nom de plume of the NSA's hack into cell phones using Angry Birds and other such diversions to do the deed. Click here to see the full report from the NY Times. 

The eavesdroppers’ pursuit of mobile networks has been outlined in earlier reports, but the secret documents, shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica, offer far more details of their ambitions for smartphones and the apps that run on them. The efforts were part of an initiative called “the mobile surge,” according to a 2011 British document, an analogy to the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. An N.S.A. analyst’s enthusiasm was evident in the breathless title — “Golden Nugget!” — given to a slide for a top-secret talk in 2010 that described iPhones and Android phones as rich resources, another document noted.

Seen below is the real Golden Nugget. 

Interestingly enough, an open letter to government from leading cryptographic and information security experts, dated 1/24/2014, states, in no uncertain terms, the inherent dangers posed by unregulated surveillance to democracy and society, a situation that must be properly dealt with before it's too late.

Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features. As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed.

Indiscriminate collection, storage, and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal information chill free speech and invite many types of abuse, ranging from mission creep to identity theft. These are not hypothetical problems; they have occurred many times in the past. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” 
― George Orwell, 1984