Lawmakers: “The government has left the American people vulnerable and in the dark.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, today called on a federal watchdog agency to investigate whether the federal government and consumer electronics manufacturers have adequate defenses against so-called “side-channel” attacks, a surveillance technique that exploits the signals that leak from computers and other electronics.
The U.S. government has failed to warn the American public about the risks from this vulnerability.
According to a declassified National Security Agency history of this technique, published online by the agency in 2007, this technique was first discovered over 80 years ago. However, as a Congressional Research Service report, published along with the letter, notes, much about the topic remains classified. In recent years, academic researchers have published research on this technique and demonstrated how, for example, it is possible to remotely reconstruct the images displayed on a computer monitor.
Prior review from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on this issue dates back nearly 40 years, but that investigation did not examine how effective the government’s efforts were to stop this threat. More specifically, the U.S. government has neglected to ensure that manufacturers of consumer electronics, such as smartphones and computers, build defenses into their products.
In their letter to GAO Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, Wyden and Rep. Brown underscored that the surveillance techniques “do not just pose a counterintelligence threat to the U.S. government, but these methods can also be exploited by adversaries against the American public, including to steal strategically-important technologies from U.S. companies.”
Wyden and Brown’s letter notes that these surveillance methods can be exploited by not only foreign intelligence agencies but also a broad range of American adversaries that include criminals, surveillance mercenaries, and private investigators.
Wyden and Brown called on GAO to investigate:
- The scale of the threat to the U.S. government, to the private sector, and to the public.
- The effectiveness of the U.S. government’s efforts to mitigate this threat, to classified and unclassified information held by the government.
- Whether there is additional information that can be released by the U.S. government, consistent with the protection of sources and methods, that could assist the public and the private sector in addressing this threat.
- The feasibility and cost of device manufacturers adding surveillance countermeasures to consumer electronics, such as smartphones, computers, and computer accessories.
- Potential policy options to mitigate this threat against the public, including mandating device manufacturers add countermeasures to their products.
Wyden has long been a champion for the privacy rights of Americans and opposed to unnecessary government surveillance. In July 2025, Wyden reintroduced legislation to protect Americans from warrantless government surveillance using cell-site simulators, such as Stingrays. In November 2023, Wyden introduced legislation to reform foreign and domestic surveillance laws and create strong privacy protections for law-abiding Americans. In November 2021, Wyden introduced legislation to end warrantless searches of Americans’ data from automobiles.
The text of the letter is here.
A web version of this release is here.
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