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Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

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Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#71

Post by avs733 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #3
maxxxxx wrote: post #2

If that's true we are moving into a scary world pretty much like 1984 where everything you do is monitored all the time. Add voice, face recognition, surveillance drones, cheap data storage and AI to the mix it seems pretty soon everything you do in a public place will be recorded and analyzed. And all this can be done fully automated. I hope people will recognize that some laws need to change. Surveillance makes sen…

If that's true we are moving into a scary world pretty much like 1984 where everything you do is monitored all the time. Well, not everything. Plant a GPS tracker on a police car or a bug in the restroom at FBI headquarters and you'll soon discover some troubling asymmetries in the modern post-privacy paradigm.

Theres no need to plant a GPS tracker, the radio protocol almost all police/fire/EMS use is called P-25[0]. Even when both parties remember to enable encryption, the protocol still has a long list of security of security vulnerabilities including the ability to jam it (both broad range and single user jamming) with the radio embedded in a childrens' toy because of poor implementation [1,2]. The protocol is so bad in fact that it could easily be used as active location tracking silently. Here is a talk about the complete list of fail [3]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25

[1] https://hackaday.com/2010/10/09/pulling-data-from-the-im-me-...

[2] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec08102...

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7or-_gT8TWU

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#72

Post by jfoutz »

rayiner wrote: post #35
jfoutz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing. If no warrant is required then anybody can record whatever they want, right? edit I can't figure out how this could possibly be legal. It seems to me the rule for recording conversations is 1 party consent. [1] There is no way the FBI is participating in those conversations it's recording. I have no problem with law enforcement having special powers, but, isn't that special power a warr…

Whether a warrant is required is a federal Constitutional question. Requiring consent to record a conversation is a statutory creation (and state law at that). State law doesn't define what does or does not violate the Constitution.

It's also federal. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#73

Post by bigiain »

acchow wrote: post #10
mike_hock wrote: post #4

> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. > That was the original intention of the 4th amendment. Wat. The intention of the 4th amendment was to enable criminal activity, but confine it to private property? Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? The intent was to prevent the executive branch from indiscriminately "searching" (and…

> Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? > The fact that you can "conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home" is a side effect, not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of letting a few criminals slip through the cracks. You can't really separate the two ideas. If you look hard enough, every single person is a criminal. That's…

This is a much deeper problem - there are so many laws, and so little public knowledge of many of them, that it's pretty close to being true that anyone the government wants to coerce into doing something against their own interest can probably be threatened with being charged with something (with at least reasonable chance of success in convicting).

When the best unpaid legal advice you can find says "Don't talk to police" already* - think how much worse that situation is going to get if the FBI gets away with saying "recording every conversation you ever have in a public place just in case we want to take it out of context and use it as evidence against you is entirely legal, moral, and ethical, and no warrant or any form of external oversight is required for us to do it".

When "every single person is a criminal", there's a deeply disturbing imbalance in power between law enforcement and the populace. It won't just be the dissidents, it'll be everybody that stands in the way of career-climbing LEO or profit seeking civil-asset-forfiture-funded LEO organisations (in fact in my worst dystopian imaginings, not prosecuting selected dissidents will be how the LEO community controls the political class...)

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#74

Post by awqrre »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
awqrre wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Because it will make hit and runs easier to get away with. It won't make liability insurance worse, but it will make coverage that pays for damages in those cases much more expensive.

and let me guess, it will make terrorists harder to catch. most newer cars already broadcast their locations to the car manufacturer (http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1)

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#76

Post by jondubois »

Ok, so these facts are true:

#1. The government is monitoring us.

#2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other.

Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2. The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like tech companies are manipulating the media to turn people against the government and divert attention away from themselves.

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#79

Post by awqrre »

jondubois wrote: post #76

Ok, so these facts are true: #1. The government is monitoring us. #2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other. Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2. The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like tech companies are manipulating the media to turn…

#3. Other countries are spying on us and are sharing the data with our government...
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