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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

#131

Post by Schroedingersat »

api wrote: post #8
hunglee2 wrote: post #2

I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a surveillance state

One thing I’d love to know is whether there is an upside and if so how much. How many kidnapping victims get found or violent plots foiled by this tech vs old school police work? Of course I suspect this info would be hard to get. Authorities would likely cook the books to make these things look more valuable than they really are.

Using it for kidnappings would draw attention to it, and remove the pretext for expanding it.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#132

Post by lern_too_spel »

nixpulvis wrote: post #92
kelnos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we have that: Android has plenty of alternative ROMs, many of which have Google services removed or otherwise sandboxed. But, overwhelmingly, people (myself included) do not choose to take this route, because they are much less user-friendly, and you lose functionality. Regarding "firewalling location API access", that's something that you get for default on both Android and iOS, no? Granted, there's no guara…

What I'm trying to say is that there should be significant pressure on companies like Apple and Google to take their successful and user friendly platforms and open them up so we can implement the functions we want without opting to replace the whole thing (rooted or jailbroken) ROMs.

You can do that right now with Android without root, including Little Snitch functionality.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#133

Post by bradgessler »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #127

No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness"…

Anybody want to take a shot at how all of this will unwind?

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#134

Post by Schroedingersat »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #62
candiddevmike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.

My understanding is that in the vast majority of these mass shooting cases, authorities are well aware of the danger but there's no enforcement mechanism for "probably going to do a mass shooting".

Yeah there is.

It's called not paying to bombard them with great replacement conspiracy theories all for a decade and instead paying twice as many teachers as well as getting dedicated mental health staff.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#135

Post by [deleted] »

ccvannorman wrote: post #103
kelnos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised no one has bought location data for prominent Congresspersons and used it to embarrass them into writing up laws around this.

They have. John Oliver did it this year, and it was f*king great! https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-we...

[deleted]

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#136

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

sneak wrote: post #98
slackfan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Federal Government purges data that was non-encrypted after a number of years. The Federal Government retains a copy of all https-encrypted communications indefinitely on the understanding that the encryption may be broken at some point. The push to HTTPS was gleefully supported by the US federal government. HTTPS is not a panacea, and is generally useless for most non-sales applications.

This is not accurate.

All encrypted communications are treated as foreign origin regardless of its true origin. The US government uses this twist of illogic to justify their domestic collection.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#137

Post by user3939382 »

hunterb123 wrote: post #130
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #127

No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness"…

Please don't speak for everyone. I care. Many people care. You may feel as though the median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered, and that may disempower you, but there are many other people who tirelessly work against these types of overreaches, whether its' FOIA requests, campaigns, articles, or otherwise. I see no point in such a post, it drifted into some sort of anti-democracy rant.

I feel that the entire machinery of the government at the state and Federal levels is so thoroughly captured and corrupt that its levers can now never be used to cleanse itself.

The American people have/had rights they didn’t have to sacrifice to get, but which are valuable to a very determined and well-organized group of people, and so they are and will evaporate. The average American has never even heard of Snowden.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#138

Post by arwhatever »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #56
atlas_shrugged wrote: post #50

I wish the apple privacy team would address this, otherwise what good are their privacy claims

Depends on your threat model. I don't include state actors in mine, they can employ $5 hammers just as easily as crypto breakers

Govt can’t use $5 hammers on 330 million people at once as they can with data collection.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#139

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

kfrzcode wrote: post #82

There's clearly a market for the ExpressVPN types to market a packet sniffer that identifies who's getting what data, and potentially shut it down. Allow lists. etc. The tech isn't new, but it's not accessible to your average data-well a.k.a. end user, and risks breaking functionality....

So long as you have deep control of inbound and outbound peers you can deanonymize traffic by throttling one end and finding streams that are affected. The service providers selling faux security don't have to be involved.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#140

Post by zaptheimpaler »

hunterb123 wrote: post #130
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #127

No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness"…

Please don't speak for everyone. I care. Many people care. You may feel as though the median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered, and that may disempower you, but there are many other people who tirelessly work against these types of overreaches, whether its' FOIA requests, campaigns, articles, or otherwise. I see no point in such a post, it drifted into some sort of anti-democracy rant.

Sorry about the drift into a rant.

My point is to say that the standard playbook for creating social or policy change is broken. The playbook is roughly -

1. build awareness via a nice article like the link

2. people read it?

3. people do something about it?

But very few people read. The actual issues in broad public awareness are whatever crap is on Fox news. Beyond that, even if people get mad they have no structured way to demand a change and it rarely happens.

The rant is tangentially related because we still haven't seen any action on the Uvalde PD, abortion laws just got revoked, there is a war in Ukraine, we might soon be in a recession, the climate might kill us all, etc etc. These are issues where the public actually cares, but nothing seems to change. Surveillance is not even on the list with all the other fires burning.

I guess I'm just saying "caring" about an issue is meaningless in the absence of the power to effect any change. We dont even have the basic ability to ask a government official a question and get a straight answer. We don't seem to have any common knowledge or consensus on how to demand accountability from the government. These are much deeper issues that have to somehow be addressed before anything happens.

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