Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused • Hacker News Board

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#111

Post by cronix » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #29

keyme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no power. The moment you'll come close to regainig it in any way, it'll be called an "insurrection" and you'll be neutralized and disgraced.

Doesn't take an army to invent alternatives to our always on, always pinging smart phones. At some point someone will.

I treat my cell phone like a land line. It just sits next to my desk, even when I leave. For the last several years, I don't carry it with me anymore. I lived just fine before they existed and to me the convenience isn't worth the potential ramifications. It's not only whoever is currently in power today and what they deem acceptable...it's also the potential future use of the data by future "leaders" because it's all recorded. Just don't give them anything to record, or as little as humanly possible in this day and age. I know most won't do that, unfortunately. There's rarely anything important enough to actually need instant communication for most people. I bring this up all the time to family and friends: imagine if Hitler, Stalin or Mao didn't have to rely on a network of snitches and spy's (manpower) to get their info on gays, jews, capitalists, dissidents, etc., and just had to keyword search a database and instantly get a list of anyone who used certain words, phrases or ideas, or visited certain establishments via gps records at anytime in the past

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#112

Post by kornhole » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #105

kornhole wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most phones do not actually turn off. You need to put them in a faraday sleeve. The other options more difficult for many is to use phones with alternative OS such as Graphene, Calyx, Lineage, Linux.. with only safe FOSS apps installed. SIM card mitigations are to switch number to VOIP and only occasionally use burner SIM's or https://invisv.com/pgpp/ .

>"Most phones do not actually turn off." Can you elaborate? It is possible to power cycle a phone which implies that it's capable of powering off. Are you saying a powered-off phone still communicates with the network?

In a word, yes. Some relatively rare phones such as Pinephone and Librem have actual power switches, and maybe some others actually go off. The vast majority of consumer phones appear off but are still calling home to the mother ship. Many diagnostic test have been done and published to prove this. If you really need it, I could probably go find them for you.

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#113

Post by kristopolous » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

curtainsforus wrote: post #106

kristopolous wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have two people: one has the right to take others lives and the other doesn't have even the right to their own life. How can that system be justified? Label one "good guy" and the other "bad guy". It's one of the most pure forms of the ideology I've seen. You have people like George Zimmerman doing pro-gun confederate flag artwork, the connection is rugged and robust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Confedera…

>How can that system be justified? The 'bad guy' is whoever is the aggressor. Everyone has a right to life; if someone starts shooting at you, or swinging a bat at you, you have the right to defend yourself, and if you kill the aggressor in self-defence, so be it. I've heard from an internet lawyer that it's possible in principle for two people attacking each other to both have grounds for self-defence, too, if both…

It's a cognitive trick used to assign a label. All you need is a frame of mind, a professed sincere belief and it's done.

Most wars of aggression were sold as self defense.

Jonathan Swift even poked fun of this in the 1700s. It's a really old trick.

The problem is some people get extended the credulity of self defense and others aren't.

Could I declare self defense against a police officer?

Why not?

Aren't they just another human susceptible to the same emotions and aggressions?

They are always given the benefit, a priori, regardless of circumstances, carte blanche, every time. Even in a mere theoretical framing, police are immediately assigned the "self defense" role. It could be over the death of a child playing in the front yard or a family dog, doesn't manner, apparently justified self defense every time.

That's exactly this dynamic at play again. It gets used in the writings of gruesome mass shooters. They were forced to kill all those people to defend some amorphous idea, the country or the race or some thing.

Self defense is a valid physical construct but it's what everyone claims. Do you expect someone to twirl their mustache, furl their cape, guffaw in laughter and snark on how much of an evildoer they are?

Everyone wants to think they were in the right. It's almost as if the theoretical is immaterial.

Let's take the horrible crime of rape for example. Some teenagers are quite a bit larger than adults and we can theoretically imagine a child offending an adult but we've decided that's so unusual that we defined a presumed relationship (of the child being the victim).

This is completely reasonable because the conceit of agreeing with the mental exercise doesn't dissuade us from the historical and practiced reality of sexual crime against children being so dominant that it's presumed unless extraordinary evidence is presented otherwise. I'm sure a quick Google search will reveal these unusual exceptions because it's a "man bites dog" kind of story for journalists. The fact they can be itemized as individual stories instead of presented as a statistic is evidence of its rarity.

Self defense might be similar. Perhaps the relationship is mostly aggression and antagonism. There's an occasional zebra of a true self defense where someone jumps out of the inky shadows to subdue an innocent damsel but perhaps we need to set the bar in the court of public opinion far higher (in the legal court I believe it's already quite a gambit but IANAL)

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#114

Post by thatguy0900 » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

wonderwonder wrote: post #47

beprogrammed wrote: post #24

I find it less concerning that the police have this info, than the fact that it's just a random company providing it and presumably anybody with the cash to buy access could buy the same or equivalent system.

There have been instances of cops using this info to stalk women and ex-partners.

More than a few, it's even got a name, loveint

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#115

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 7:30 PM UTC

maxehmookau wrote: post #20

robk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t followed them enough but is it possible to support them without supporting other charitable causes of a political persuasion I don’t support? I fully support everything directly related to their cause but it gets me very upset when charities are supporting other various agendas around gender/immigration for example that are unrelated to their main goal.

To say that agendas around "gender and immigration" are unrelated to the EFF's goals is missing the point. You can guarantee that if society moves towards criminializing trans people, or further demonising immigrants, or tracking women's fertility for the purposes of further restricting access to abortion; surveillance technology will be at the forefront of that effort and the EFF's goals of technological privacy and…

[deleted]

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#116

Post by javajosh » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC

landemva wrote: post #71

javajosh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save your blood and accept the simple fact that "the police" are a actually a set of more-or-less independent small government departments who get to beat people up and get away with it. And then arrest the beaten up person putting them in jail indefinitely before trial, and creating an immediate huge financial and social burden on that person. Mostly the public is unaware of this because the frog has boiled in fits…

As you wrote, redress in the courts is expensive and unlikely to succeed against the government. The USSC made-up doctrine of government immunity should be removed. BLM got side-tracked into ineffectiveness by avoiding this underlying problem.

It's simply because the courts are not in the habit of doing their jobs anymore. They are expected to hold the LEO accountable to the law just as much as the citizen, but the de facto system aligns the executive and judicial completely, such that neither is willing to take action against the other. If the courts were faster, more flexible, they would have more experience holding the executive accountable, and issues like leveraging surveillance capitalism in investigations and prosecutions, or the unjustified murder of unarmed citizens, of any race, would routinely result in speedy, accurate application of the law to everyone involved.

The badge should never have meant protection from the law, but these perverse incentives have conspired to make it so, and the solution is NOT legislation about cops, as much as it seems like it should be, but rather legislation about courts.

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#117

Post by sylware » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #51

sylware wrote: post #35

Something I don't really understand. In my country, it is not even legal to sell/provide a piece of equipement/a service which enable people to communicate ... which cannot be spied on. As far as I know, it is the law.

These spying capabilities generally only require to work once a valid warrant has been provided. The US has those as well, but what's being discussed is warrantless mass-surveillance to anyone who's happy to pay for it.

yep, as far as I know, there are no laws about mass surveillance. At the same time, I don't think there are laws to forbid big data owners to use their global access to this data in order to get an unfair advantage, for instance linkedin.

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#118

Post by kornhole » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

This is why stop and frisk is rarer when you don't need to stop people to see their ID's. Cops can just pull up their screen and know each of those guys standing on the corner. We all get frisked many times a day and don't even know it.

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#119

Post by vlod » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

shaftoe wrote: post #48

hnbad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes "charitable causes" can be apolitical. I guess the ACLU might be closer to what you want then? They have a recent history of criticism for defending the far-right in the name of free speech while generally being thought of as "liberal". The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're St…

The ACLU has increasingly become exactly what he seeks to avoid. https://reason.com/2022/08/31/the-student-loan-debate-shows-... I would support a truly civil-liberties-only ACLU, but not what they currently are.

Thanks for posting this, I was not aware how far they've strayed off civil liberties.

Have not investigated this, but pg [0] seems to thumbs down ACLU and thumbs up FIRE:

[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1533824076896260098

Re: Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused

#120

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

maxehmookau wrote: post #20

robk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t followed them enough but is it possible to support them without supporting other charitable causes of a political persuasion I don’t support? I fully support everything directly related to their cause but it gets me very upset when charities are supporting other various agendas around gender/immigration for example that are unrelated to their main goal.

To say that agendas around "gender and immigration" are unrelated to the EFF's goals is missing the point. You can guarantee that if society moves towards criminializing trans people, or further demonising immigrants, or tracking women's fertility for the purposes of further restricting access to abortion; surveillance technology will be at the forefront of that effort and the EFF's goals of technological privacy and…

Grand-parent and most folks interested in EFF are typically concerned with unnecessary surveillance of innocents, rather than protecting "law breakers." (Not all laws are legitimate of course; it's a factor but orthogonal.)

But you seem to have grand-parent's take backwards.