I'm wondering when citizen vigilante groups will start buying location data from these brokers to solve crimes.
New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
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Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#22I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…
People would rather point at other countries and virtue signal about how bad they are rather than care about what's happening in their own country.
Couple that with brain dead nationalism about how the US is the best despite the fact that we're very much behind in many areas and it's not surprising that so many Americans blindly allow their own government to do so many outrageous things.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.
The difference is surveillance states have historically leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It’s wildly different knowing your friends, family, even children are being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may not have happened at which point you just disappear like many people you never heard from again. It’s actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don’t evoke.
People with a bag of weed in their pocket in middle america probably feel the same way
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#24I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…
To answer your question you only need to investigate under which conditions coercion succeeds in changing behaviour.
I believe that we can dismantle the current world order by providing a more persuasive alternative. Legitimacy is not absolute, but rather relative, and currently the things built on coercion are more legitimate, that is not a law of physics (thankfully it seems to be the other way around actually).
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#25We need to demand more options on technology platforms! We cannot impose effective consumer pressure when we are forced to choose between two locked down App Stores which make it impossible to categorically prevent these kinds of malicious actions.
How long do you think it would take for a "Little Snitch"-like application to pop up that firewalls location API access if the platforms were more open?
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#26When it came out that government was looking at all of the data on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https. Everyone got involved. Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous? Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?
A large portion of the market for anonymous phones are for illegal purposes. For any company doing this at scale, they are inevitably confronted with this fact and can get in a lot of trouble if they are proven to be knowingly supporting crime groups/individuals.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#27It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of life without any PII.
I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is important for stability.
All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a network of data providers & downstream businesses.
Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#28When it came out that government was looking at all of the data on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https. Everyone got involved. Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous? Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?
In order for info to get from here to there:
The phone network requires a geophysical route/medium across which to shluff a packet. Said packet is destined for an endpoint. Said endpoint is associated with a payer. Said payer, in order to pay, is virtually guaranteed to have had to do KYC at some point.
Ergo, if you can call, you can be tracked with only knowledge of the endpoint, and the topology of the networking medium.
Nature of the beast I'm afraid. Your forebearers wanted this. Are you not pleased? Does this mot make you feel safe? They worked very hard on it... For your safety, you see!
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#29Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report:
> "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date."
The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20 years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins).
Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that.
https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley
It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#30I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…
> I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things?
There are many reasons for this. It's partly due to the illusion that the current internet culture has created that expressing one's voice on a social media platform is an effective form of protest. It is not. How many change.org petitions are people going to sign until they realize that it means absolutely nothing?
I think this one of the biggest and least-discussed erosions of public discourse and assembly. By fostering an online conversation at the expense of an in-person one, we wind up shouting into the abyss instead of at the people who deserve to feel the pressure.