81–90 of 293 posts
When will people say enough is enough?
I've become increasingly convinced that western society will accept anything so long as it's fed, housed, and safe. If that's true, as a society we have a lot of rights that we're not willing to fight for but which the government is highly intent on restricting - an equation for inevitably losing them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't have an expectation of privacy in public places. Facial recognition can be beat by a hat + sunglasses (which is the hugest plot hole in Person of Interest, the characters never even attempt to disguise themselves).
I don't want to live in a world where I have to wear a hat + sunglasses.
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…
You can't have an expectation of privacy in public places. Facial recognition can be beat by a hat + sunglasses (which is the hugest plot hole in Person of Interest, the characters never even attempt to disguise themselves).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it is too late? We're still at the phase where people say, "This doesn't impact me", or "I have nothing to hide".
Or David Brin's view that transparency solves everything.
[1] Transparent Society, by David Brin
This _particular_ public spying was reported at least since 2012.
http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/eavesdropping-in-the...
"In July 1956, the Pennsylvania Bar Association Endowment (PBAE) commissioned a comprehensive study of "wiretapping practices, laws, devices, and techniques" in the United States. [..] The man appointed to direct the study was Samuel Dash, a prominent Philadelphia prosecutor [..] The result of Dash's efforts was The Eavesdroppers, a 483-page report [..] The book uncovered a wide range of privacy infringements on the part of state authorities and private citizens [..]
While law enforcement agencies were tapping lines in flagrant violation of state and federal statutes, phone companies were deliberately underreporting wiretap statistics to maintain public confidence in their services. While American businesses were stockpiling equipment to spy on employees and gather competitive intelligence, private investigators were using frightening new tools to listen in on wayward lovers and loose-lipped politicians."
http://www.infowars.com/spy-grid-can-now-record-your-convers... (2013)
"The Washington Post recently published a feature length article on gunshot detectors, known as ShotSpotter, which detailed how in Washington DC there are now, “at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city,” microphones wrapped in a weather-proof shell that can detect the location of a sound down to a few yards and analyze the audio using a computer program.
𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 “𝐠𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬,” 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐘𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟐, 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟕𝟎 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. "
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This quote from the 1959 report sums up everything nicely:
"As Dash told members of Congress on the eve of the book's release, the American public's longstanding disregard for threats to communications privacy had only served to exacerbate these developments. [..]
'Each generation seems to forget the problems of the past and considers this their own unique problem.' - Samuel Dash"
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…
OK now let's talk about the government. Remember when China PR put microphones in taxis for the Olympics? Do we aspire to become that?
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…
Total surveillance is sold under guise of preventing terrorism, but the main effect is simple: it allows the status quo to become entrenched and permanent. You are rendered economically exploitable and politically neutered. There is a reason the state and intelligencies, from the Pinkertons to the FBI, have had a historical obsession with extensive spying on political movements and economic assembly. Both have real p…
Take the ongoing incident with Hillary Clinton's email server, for example. Clinton was quick to support scrapping 4th amendment rights (Patriot Act) in the name of security, but when it came to state secrets, she played it fast and loose (at best). It took 15 years and a scandal before the Secretary of State's emails were finally secured. We started a mass surveillance program practically the day after 9/11.
We are starting to forget we are supposed to have things like civil liberties, and that the exceptions made for wartime only work if war is not permanent. The war on terror has no end. Before terror, it was drugs and communism. The government will never stop coming up with reasons it needs more power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A RaspberryPi(or similar) with a $12 TV tuner software defined radio, and a small database of the various frequencies and bands particular flavours of your local LEO and/or federal TLA use.
I know our local highway patrol, for example, use at least: P25, police issued cell phones, iPads with cellular data, HF radio (at least on rural/country cars), and whatever they use for the data connection for their in-car computers.
Most/all of that would be encrypted, but hey - metadata's a free-for-all according to them, right? I bet if you knew what to look for, you could quite reasonable detect the presence of a highway patrol car when you saw some digital P25, a cellular connection on the bands used by the contracted cellular provider, and I'd bet good money that patterns of encrypted data that things like ALPR systems send would be quite distinctive...
That's all staying pretty solidly at the whitehat end of the wide grey space of "what's allowed". If you were much closer to the blackhat end of that spectrum, I'd also bet pretty good money that sophisticated criminals are already exploiting GSM and 3/4G weaknesses to individually identify cellular radios by cracking the encryption to see the IMSI data. And that'd all be passive and undetectable, if you were firmly in the blackhat camp, active attacks against their P25 radios can (as pointed out) be done for effectively zero dollars.
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.
> 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…
And why pretend that the privacy of your home is so special? The only thing keeping laser microphones from being aimed at all of our windows is a 5-4 decision in Kylio v. US, and Scalia is dead, and Clinton is going to be appointing the next Supreme Court justice. Clinton (DLC) Democrats love surveillance even more than Bushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._Unit…