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Dude, did you read my point? I said it was still bad.
"Still bad" strongly underestimates the problem. Metadata often is more important than the data as demonstrated in the above examples.
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> I wonder if this is a case of American intelligence outsourcing the surveillance of American citizens to foreign intelligence. If that is indeed the case, I’d expect a quid pro quo. Yet it is the US government who revealed it: "In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse,…
> Yet it is the US government who revealed it Less "the government" and more "a member of government", the same member who has revealed and demanded accountability when discovering domestic government overreach. We should choose our congress critters carefully.
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It would indicate that they're lonely and looking for a partner. If you were looking to turn them into an intelligence asset, you could have an officer approach and seduce them. If it's Grindr instead of Tinder, or if they're married, you have a blackmailing angle. In a lot of countries it would be very effective.
There's no need for notification snooping when these apps are spamming requests to unique subdomains on analytics services and their own APIs. DNS snooping is a much easier method of getting that metadata. Although I suppose one advantage of push notifications compared to DNS is that they're delivered even when the app isn't open, and more generally they can also serve as a liveness check (successful delivery means y…
Pardon my ignorance but would block all push notifications stop this specific act of surveillance? I usually don't need any notifications' content on the screen apart from "you have a new message on , go check it". Or is that what's being discussed here?
The article says that Google and Apple know about the push notifications being shown on the phone and governments can make these companies turn over customer data. I'm not sure if it only covers (for example) the unified notification service on Android or whether Apple and Google know of notifications that don't make use of that API. It's not clear from the article.
This, to me, is the more disturbing part of the article: > In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. What is the point of transparency reports if they don't include major vectors of government surveillance? IMO such gag orders sh…
Hey other states, can you elect a few more Ron Wydens? He's been doing a ton of the heavy lifting lately. Every time we hear about the intelligence community egregiously violating civil liberties, it's always Wyden.
I'm an Oregonian and my biggest complaint about Ron Wyden is that he's usually ahead of me on technical issues. There are worse problems to have...
Metadata in this case apparently means Apple and Google are helping find “this real user connected to that real user at this time”. So governments may or may not be able to decrypt a push message payload, or data delivered because of that payload.
An interesting point in Glenn Greenwald’s book is that metadata is often more informative than the “real” data. Consider: 1. A phone call in which Mrs. Smith talks to a receptionist to set an appointment with a doctor for 9:30 next Wednesday. Vs. 2. Knowing that Mrs. Smith called an abortion clinic. #2 seems like a bigger violation of privacy. Metadata is the real data.
you'd still have to look up who the doctor they called is from the metadata; it's still info but absolutely not more informative than the real data
so this line of thought makes no sense, and glenn greenwald should be looked at very skeptically in general, he sounds smart but when you look at his logic closer it breaks down
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Yeah he's awesome. /s In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states…
If you require all your allies to be perfect people... ... you won't be left with many allies.
Are the contents of push notifications not encrypted? Or are we talking about payloads rather than transport?
They mention metadata in the article. Imagine sending a message to a Signal account at time X, then asking Apple a list of all users that received a Signal notification at that specific time.