The "Internet of Things" keeps me awake at night. I may not have the skills, but I have read a ton of fiction and non-fiction, and I have a curious mind. Want to raid a house for warrants/drugs/national security? Packet sniff the building and build a pattern of comings and goings. If they have a baby monitor, break into the most likely UNENCRYPTED feed and listen inside the house from the station or anywhere in the world if needed. Monitor the fridge to see when they are likely to go to the store and pick them up outside the house/building. Monitor the wifi and keep tabs on the meta data of where they go online, what devices connect to the inside wifi building a database of phones, laptops and mobile devices. Do they have an Amazon Echo? That thing records voices in order to be able to issue voice commands. This is even before we get into the XBox blatantly spying on occupants of the room it sits in, or smart TV's reporting your viewing history back to the manufacturer live and unencrypted. You think the NSA is intrusive now? Wait until the local PD gets tech savvy and starts to do some of this crazy stuff; the judges are old and don't understand the tech and the prosecutors all see this as ways to increase confessions. "OK, we got the evidence to convict you, but we'd rather get a confession out of you. Here is a list of all the food you ordered through your refrigerator and your web browsing history."
Speaking as a former acoustical consultant: We used to get calls every now and then from folx with grow houses. The DEA would usually put on the warrant "we heard the exhaust fans from a quarter mile away." They would then ask us to testify, as expert witnesses, that there was no f'n way that they heard exhaust fans from a quarter mile away. We never took those cases, but there was no f'n way they heard exhaust fans. They got their information illegally and they tarted it up so it might stick. Law enforcement, in my experience, is a lazy, corner-cutting world. Not to say they won't sniff the fuck out of every packet coming across the wire... but until a gag order gets imposed upon law enforcement internet requests, law enforcement isn't likely to do any hacking. You're right - unencrypted shit for sure. And they'll never tell anyone. They'll say they heard the exhaust fans from a quarter mile away. I've heard for fifteen years about the booze on the loyalty card records used to discredit the plaintiff suing for slip'n'fall. To the best of my knowledge, it remains a myth. It won't take too many nasty cases before everyone starts insisting on their shit being encrypted. But it'll take a few.
The FBI has been going all out with pedophile forums on Tor for years. The Freedom Hosting one got a lot of attention, but after it became clear they weren't exploiting Tor itself they don't make too much noise. No one likes the FBI distributing malware and running phishing scams, but they seem to be just going after pedophiles and it's hard to care that much about the FBI pwning pedos.until a gag order gets imposed upon law enforcement internet requests, law enforcement isn't likely to do any hacking
That doesn't surprise me at all - and I'll bet they've got all the warrants they need. I'd argue that there's a big difference between the FBI targeting people on Tor and your local Boss Hoggs wardriving for wide-open webcams.