I was having a conversation about this with my wife and realized that she sees herself as an end user and not anything at all like a technologist like myself which has always been a hobby of mine since I was little like 4 to 5 years old reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science Magazines in the 1950s. My father was an Electrical Contracor so I read about things like this to have something to talk about with my father when he came home from work at the end of the day at dinner time.
This is the best way I can explain what they are actually saying on the news. First, there are computers that have an internet connection and then there are computer that have NO internet connection at all. Then there are computers that though connected to the internet through various cables or through the air WIFI systems are not electronically connected to the Internet at that moment because their browsers are not turned on.
What the NSA is saying is that both computers with connections (cable or wifi) and computers without connecions (no wifi and no cable) are vulnerable now when they are on because of components manufactured in the U.S., China and around the world that steal your information by sending the information out through RF signals which are broadcast on a specific radio (station) frequency so people can steal information off your computer whether it is internet ready or not.
My personal reaction to this is to turn off any computer I own when I'm not using it right then. I think because of this report you will see a marked drop in electrical consumption around the world as people turn off their computers whenever they aren't using them worldwide as a direct result of this article.
The other thing you will see is businesses and individuals putting less and less important information on computers and using more old fashioned ways of writing down information like typewriters and hand ledgers etc. for personal and business accounting worldwide.
Another likely reaction to this will be making the Internet illegal in country after country as whole national economies are destroyed by the misuse of information worldwide.
Note: To make this more simple to understand imagine a hard drive or video card for a computer having a small component secretly installed (that most technologists couldn't even find without disassembling it carefully). Imagine this computer component was manufactured in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea or the U.S. as sent into the U.S. or literally any other country as a type of Trojan Horse so no one would know it was there.
Then imagine when the RF transmitter transmits it functions like a Wifi on a specific radio signal and someone within 1 mile to ten miles away or even if it functions like a cell phone it could send ALL information anywhere on earth of the keystrokes of that computer that any user hits on keys, or it could literally transmit everything on that computer and everything in the history of that computer from the first time it was ever used from the hard drive. This is how this is being done. Also, there are add ons like you see in spy movies and programs where they attach (after market) devices to others' computers to siphon off some or all information on that computer to another computer or computers around the world. This is how this has been and will be done.
These are some the ways all information or some information could be taken from literally any computer on earth. Smartphones are already so completely vulnerable that I'm not addressing them here at all.
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