Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
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Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#2I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#3I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.
I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime.
It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#4I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.
I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime. It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.
Interesting point - maybe they don't need home surveillance in these investigations that often?
The case mentioned in the article as the first one was a white collar crime: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#5I think the time has come for a The Wire reboot. Anyone else?
Edit: Downvotes, why? The Wire was a critically acclaimed series whose major themes included abuse of power, the use of technology to both surveil and evade surveillance, perverse incentives, and failure of institutions, among other things that are as relevant as ever in the post-Snowden era. But instead of pagers and burners we'd get tech circa 2018.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#6If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#7I'm a little surprised google does not use the user's password for encryption. Seems like they are inviting a very bad data breach in the future.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#8My hope is that this is another push toward on-prem data management.
One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and we would build it, them image it, and then use the image to restore it back to what ever it had been built to originally when the kids did something to make it non-functional.
Of course after a still longer period you had upgraded that "previous" gen computer and now you had a left over previous previous gen computer. And typically what I did was put Linux on it and have it for running this that and the other thing. These days a RasPi 3 is about as powerful as that generation -2 computer was.
Like a lot of people as my Internet speeds increased I started leaving computers on all the time as servers that I could access from anywhere. This was made easier (and without paying extra for a fixed IP) with dyndns, although these days it is easier still with IPV6 (no dyndns required if your ISP will give you an IPV6 prefix (so far this has been pretty easy).
So I think a number of services you use "in the cloud" might be implementable as local services where it is harder for the Government to get its hands on your data, (or at least it would have to serve you with a warrant and so you would know they were looking at you, an NSL doesn't work if the person being served is the person being observed :-)
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#9> The company also noted it has never received a National Security Letter. Such NSLs are typically filed by intelligence agencies looking for company data. They also normally come with a gag order preventing businesses from revealing their very existence. That means that if Nest ever removes its disclaimer that it hasn’t received an NSL, it likely has been sent one.
Whenever I read copy like this, I read it as "no dragnet this time, nothing to see here! Keep buying Nest and other great products from Alphabet, Inc!" But is it possible that no NSL was ever sent and Google simply provides a data feed of all relevant info and video to their national security partners? (A generously paid-for feed, of course.)
I guess what I'm asking is, is an NSL required for Google to legally surveil its customers on behalf of the host government? Beyond sheer EULA license legal weasel-wording, I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner.
Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
#10My hope is that this is another push toward on-prem data management. One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and…
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