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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

reuters.com

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Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#461

Post by JohnFen »

ddalex wrote: post #422
JohnFen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, "reasonable suspicion" means "whenever they want."

If you're taking this view, any armed forces can do whatever they want and the constitution is just a piece of paper. In practice, the evidence gathered by unlawful searches is going to be discarded in a court of law. Other wise said, there is no carving in penal law for "100 miles " from the border.

> If you're taking this view, any armed forces can do whatever they want and the constitution is just a piece of paper

I don't understand how you reach this conclusion.

> In practice, the evidence gathered by unlawful searches is going to be discarded in a court of law

Yes, of course. What I'm talking about is the threshold for when evidence is considered "unlawful".

The "reasonable suspicion" threshold is intentionally an extremely low bar. Low enough that it's barely a meaningful threshold. In practice, it's incredible easy for any officer to make up some articulable suspicion for pretty much anything.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#462

Post by I_Am_Nous »

hedora wrote: post #424
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying things shouldn't change, just that the reality we live in right now is that using the internet means you are tracked. Of course we shouldn't just accept that and not push back, and of course we should build things like the internet we had before social media "became the internet". Being aware of the tracking and risks means people can make efforts to reduce the tracking, but it's almost becoming imposs…

This requires legislation, and a court system that upholds the law. In the US, the courts just decided there's no right to privacy (despite what the 4th amendment says) as part of rolling back Roe v. Wade. So, the path forward is to vote in legislators that respect basic human rights, followed by court packing (or just impeaching the judges that have been publicly accepting bribes and failing to recuse themselves on…

Exactly, and all of that is hard and slow. We live in the now, with the internet tracking our every move by current design. Pretending it isn't tracking us doesn't mean it actually isn't.

People are generally keeping themselves monitored as they use the internet. It's a panopticon with more steps. So it's no surprise governments are using the plaintext of anything they can find to track people.

And if people don't care about that because they are more focused on their pet political issue, it will never change, and silently get worse.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#463

Post by gosub100 »

kec wrote: post #458
gosub100 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"people not knowing the law" can be a symptom of bureaucracy though. How many pages of law do you think exist to open a bagel shop or add a room to your house in SFO?

How is that relevant to the example of enabling disabled folks to interact with society & some bad actors abusing it?

It's a remark about the broader topic of bureaucracy and how you can't blame people for not knowing the nooks and crevasses of modern liberal legislature. You know, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#464

Post by withinboredom »

forward1 wrote: post #268
lolinder wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strong legal basis and case law going back to Terry I frankly don't care what's legal or not at this point. The surveillance and police state has gotten out of control, and needs to be rolled back. If we constantly just accept past precedent as dictating our future, our rights will be chipped away one by one. I don't want to live in a society where I can be stopped and asked for identification by law enforcement at…

> I frankly don't care what's legal or not at this point. Oh, but you should - your freedom may depend on it. > police state has gotten out of control, and needs to be rolled back Maybe, but this is the world we presently find ourselves living in, and we can either choose to become empowered with knowledge about it, or throw a hyperbolic tantrum and wish for the moon. > I don't want to live in a society where I can b…

> unless you have been suspected of a crime by a lawful sworn agent of the state.

They generally ask. If you refuse, you are now suspected of a crime. If you refuse again… well, I hope you like the back of a squad car.

Source: went for a walk in my own neighborhood at 3am.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#465

Post by verisimi »

standardUser wrote: post #405

The only way out of this mess is with new laws and that will require new lawmakers. Any other solution - relying on the kindness of corporations, toiling away with obscure technologies, gong 'off the grid' - are all foolish or unrealistic for 99% or so of people and shouldn't even be considered. The most promising starting point is probably at the state level.

You want the state to write laws to prevent it spying on its citizens?

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#466

Post by aaroninsf »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #310
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #303

It's crazy to me that so much effort is being expended pretending that companies and the government are doing anything in the name of privacy, when we have all the proof by Assange and Snowden that they're doing realtime surveillance of ALL communications, 24x7 -- no matter what any laws say -- and we don't even talk about it any more. What's the point of any of this? All we can do is assume that our every position,…

I think where we go wrong is to allow the conversation to revolve around what evil corporations are doing with our information, rather than what the evil government is doing with it. I believe the risk to our freedom is much greater from the latter. Of course governments can extract the information from corporations that have it, but let's keep the spotlight on the government itself, and use THAT as a reason to give…

Now do,

"declining to hire, insure, or loan to you" and "declining to admit your kids into school|sports program|internship"

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#467

Post by dylan604 »

satchlj wrote: post #346
dylan604 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, that's not basically it. MITM to me means being able to read the data by placing yourself in the encrypted chain. that's not how push notifications work. they don't need to know the contents of the message

The notification is separate from the message. It absolutely is MITM, just for the notifications, which are messages themselves with real content ( you have received a message from so-and-so ).

I don't know what you think you are proving here. They did not view the contents of the message. An MITM "attack" would allow them decrypt the content of the message. This is just metadata being used. It's no different than all of the other metadata uses that the TLAs have been using. We've known for a long time (for me since Snowden was the first time I ever even considered it) that metadata can tell us a whole hell of lot about people that is just as much evidence that the actual contents of the message are irrelevant. With metadata alone, you can build up an entire network of people to investigate. You can do that investigation without ever decrypting anything. It's no different from the police following a suspect to see who they meet, and then following that person, and continuing until they find the bigBoss. They can then roll up the entire network in one fail swoop if they so choose.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#468

Post by OneLeggedCat »

> "The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States"

Oh look! The US end-running constitutional protections again via 5+Eye proxy governments. Who could ever have guessed.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#469

Post by saagarjha »

nonethewiser wrote: post #444
xyst wrote: post #150

Would be great to see an example of notification metadata that can supposedly link it to real users. Seems like this is what is being implied: Given: - users with notifications enabled - have X app installed - targeted user(s) reside in USA - targeted users(s) following “foo” on X app When: - issue FISA warrant for all smartphone users that received notifications in regards to “foo” user Then: - able to pull all Appl…

Just to make it crystal clear, we recently learned that the FBI served Twitter a search warrant for Trumps account which gave then access to all of his twitter followers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66365643.amp

Isn’t an account’s follower list basically public, though?

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#470

Post by mckn1ght »

hedora wrote: post #438
zeppelin101 wrote: post #399

This reminds me, whatever happened to mesh networks? If you wanted to be out and about in public, you could simply carry a very anonymized device that had only more basic abilities. But among those abilities, you could certain send messages and maybe even smaller-sized files - all over a mesh network. Feds could infiltrate it, but it wouldn't be nearly as trivial as it is right now. And users could rotate their devic…

Apple AirDrop was basically this, but they neutered it at the request of the Chinese government. It still works, but it automatically turns itself off every 30 minutes, so you can't (for instance) opt-in to allowing people to automatically push uncensored news to your phone during your daily commute (without interacting with the phone every half hour). (It isn't technically a mesh, since it doesn't support multi-hop…

Apple also has an API called MultiPeerConnectivity[0] that handles this better than AirDrop. I’ve long wanted to try building a mesh network with this. Not sure about multi-hop, maybe that could be part of the business logic.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...

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