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Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

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Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#41

Post by zaroth »

devconsole wrote: post #31
comex wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once hardware begins to turn against you, there seems to be nothing anyone can do to protect themselves. Encryption doesn't work against an adversary that has access to your computer's memory. In the future (or today, depending on your setup), IOMMU. In the present, there is no evidence that baseband backdoors of this type actually exist (as opposed to hacks). When the adversary adds backdoors deeper in the hardwar…

The reason it's good to proactively think of future threats is because so many past concerns have proven to be true. Several months ago, no one on Hacker News really believed that BIOS backdoors were much of a threat. But today it's a well-established fact, for example. The tools of law enforcement probably aren't going to be revealed, and they're hard to discover. Nobody knew about the zero-day exploit employed agai…

  Nobody knew about the zero-day exploit employed against Tor browser,
  for example, and there are almost certainly many more tricks like that
  up their sleeve.
I had actually been patched already upstream, so it was not really a zero-day. I'm not sure if it a patched Tor Browser Bundle had been released and people just hadn't upgraded, or if the patch hadn't made its way to the bundle yet.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#42

Post by zaroth »

leorocky wrote: post #19
dragontamer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, the 4th Amendment was about "due process" and "but upon probable cause". Everyone seems to forget about the "Probable Cause" line.

Probable cause is an under-appreciated term. Every American should know what it means. You'll see actors in movies and TV say to other actors posing as police that they can't enter their home without a warrant and that's not true. Police can enter your home without a warrant, all they need is probable cause. What is probable cause? Probable cause is when a police officer is 51% sure that a crime is occurring. So if p…

This seems not quite right to me... you need probable cause to get a warrant. You can't skip the warrant just because you think you have probable cause.

However, there are 'exigent circumstances' where the police can enter your house without a warrant. I think that comes down to things like hearing screams for help, preventing destruction of evidence, etc.

  tl;dr: Probably never try to physically or even verbally stop police
  from searching your house, car and person and property.
Actually, my understanding is you should always verbally explicitly refuse to consent to a search. But if they search anyway, of course you do not physically try to stop them. They will probably claim you gave consent and misplace the recording, but it's the best you can do.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#43

Post by cam_l »

devconsole wrote: post #13
comex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The takeaway is that your children may grow up in a world where it's impossible to guarantee the government can't get into your computer if it really wanted to. This is impossible to guarantee today. Certainly if you run the zero-day magnets known as browsers, and even if not, there is always some possibility of physical intrusion. > More and more network adapters seem to have DMA access to your computer. With an I…

Unfortunately, projects such as DROPOUTJEEP confirm that the iPhone isn't to be trusted. This is impossible to guarantee today. Certainly if you run the zero-day magnets known as browsers, and even if not, there is always some possibility of physical intrusion. Today you can use OS's such as Tails to prevent most exploits from embedding themselves into your computer. This is what Snowden used, for example. But if har…

"strong anonymity tool and GPG"

just thinking, the problem, it seems, is that end-to-end encryption is not really end-to-end. the user is the endpoint, not the computer.

from a ux point of view, a dongle between screen / keyboard and computer for an encryption overlay could be a way to unambiguously protect information - so information never exists decrypted in a machine.. just the screen.

user input-output accessories are much more technologically static than software / hardware, so an open-source hardware solution may be possible?

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#44

Post by zaroth »

This sounds a lot like the 'general warrants' which helped spark the first American revolution.

LA is tracking cars through cameras / license plate detection. In response to an FOIA request for details on the tracking, their response was that all the data was part of an "active investigation" and would not be disclosed. I think this was the first time a city has tried to hide details of a surveillance dragnet like this, across an metro area, by claiming basically the entire city was being actively investigated. [1]

In that light, this development is extremely concerning, and I can only hope the judiciary will push back hard to protect some semblance of the 4th. The average person doesn't typically consider themselves a target, but as the number of dragnets increase, and if the Feds can perform mass-hacking of our personal devices where the results are directly admissible in court (putting aside parallel construction for a moment) this mentality will have to change.

The writing has been on the wall for a while, but there's always been some comfort that at least the mass surveillance wouldn't be admissible. Now you start to see, we're getting boiled like frogs. The direction this is all going leads up to a very draconian future just 5 - 10 years out. I'm not sure there's any way to stop it, I don't think enough of the American people can get their heads around how this is cyanide to a free society.

[1] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/los-angeles-cops-argue...

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#45

Post by tom_jones »

"secretly access suspected criminals’ computers in bunches, not simply one at a time."

Note the word "suspected". I really don't think its a good idea to have a legal standard granting authority to a government worker when that standard is based to one degree or another on the level of that government worker's paranoia.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#46

Post by wyager »

zaroth wrote: post #44

This sounds a lot like the 'general warrants' which helped spark the first American revolution. LA is tracking cars through cameras / license plate detection. In response to an FOIA request for details on the tracking, their response was that all the data was part of an "active investigation" and would not be disclosed. I think this was the first time a city has tried to hide details of a surveillance dragnet like th…

> I'm not sure there's any way to stop it,

Ideally, clever technology. We can at least try to stop digital dragnet surveillance with better technology. It might be possible to frustrate physical dragnet surveillance the same way.

As a fallback, there's always violence if people get pissed off enough.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#47

Post by Retric »

zaroth wrote: post #42
leorocky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probable cause is an under-appreciated term. Every American should know what it means. You'll see actors in movies and TV say to other actors posing as police that they can't enter their home without a warrant and that's not true. Police can enter your home without a warrant, all they need is probable cause. What is probable cause? Probable cause is when a police officer is 51% sure that a crime is occurring. So if p…

This seems not quite right to me... you need probable cause to get a warrant. You can't skip the warrant just because you think you have probable cause. However, there are 'exigent circumstances' where the police can enter your house without a warrant. I think that comes down to things like hearing screams for help, preventing destruction of evidence, etc. tl;dr: Probably never try to physically or even verbally stop…

Is in progress is different from has occurred in the past. Also, the bar for a warrant is much lower than 51% probability of having committed a crime.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#48

Post by dragontamer »

bediger4000 wrote: post #30
dragontamer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, the 4th Amendment was about "due process" and "but upon probable cause". Everyone seems to forget about the "Probable Cause" line.

Did you read the article? a proposal made public yesterday that would give federal agents greater leeway to secretly access suspected criminals’ computers in bunches, not simply one at a time. "Secretly access" and "in bunches". Sounds rather like a general warrant to me, and without probable cause, except maybe to fearful know-nothings, where "hacking" is essentially the same as "magic".

Did you read the proposal? Or are you one to only gather information from biased news articles? Hell, the proposal isn't even up for public review yet.

    If the standing committee agrees to take up the 
    matter, the proposal would be opened for public 
    comment in August for six months. It could be 
    amended before the comment period begins and 
    would eventually need to be reviewed by Congress 
    for changes.
We can't even _look_ at the primary source material until August, and you've already got an opinion on it. Until then, I'm going to post sarcastically to privacy advocates who likely haven't even read the damn thing yet.

And you've already closed your mind and think its an "unconstitutional general warrant". Hah.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#49

Post by noblethrasher »

zaroth wrote: post #44

This sounds a lot like the 'general warrants' which helped spark the first American revolution. LA is tracking cars through cameras / license plate detection. In response to an FOIA request for details on the tracking, their response was that all the data was part of an "active investigation" and would not be disclosed. I think this was the first time a city has tried to hide details of a surveillance dragnet like th…

> I'm not sure there's any way to stop it,

It's not enough to campaign, vote, or even lobby. We need to form a vanguard party and run our own candidates and get them elected.

We should think more broadly than just legislators and chief executives. Consider sheriffs, judges (where they're elected), district attorneys, city controllers, public utilities commissions, etc.

Re: Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

#50

Post by logn »

I think this violates the 3rd Amendment too. The government wants to (among other things) be able to secretly monitor laptop cameras of people never suspected of wrongdoing. That's basically an electronic-age version of this 3rd Amendment case: http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/04/a-real-live-third-amendment...
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