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France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

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Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#231

Post by logifail »

xnzakg wrote: post #185
logifail wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also is ineffective at blocking audio If you turn your phone off and immediately put it in a Faraday bag, how would it receive a remote command to turn on and start recording audio?

That's implying that it is actually off and not just pretending to be off, and that it requires a command to start recording instead of just constantly recording and only uploading when commanded to

If we're assuming a well-funded and motivated attacker, surely any device is fair game for being modified to record you even when it's apparently off?

Of course this applies whether it appears to have a removable "battery" or not.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#232

Post by AmericanChopper »

paxys wrote: post #204
neoromantique wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or they just triangulated using his cell phone, it can be very accurate in urban settings

Police need a warrant to get location data from your cell phone provider. No department is bothering with that for a welfare check unless the situation is really dire, and the process still takes a while to carry out. "Where do you think your brother is?" "Oh probably at XYZ's place" is a much more straightforward and common process.

I have some family who are dispatchers (not in the US), and they have the ability to immediately get location data directly from providers if they think somebody is in imminent danger. They can’t do it to track a suspect (not without a warrant), but they would regularly do it for suspected suicides, or when a caller communicated they were in danger but failed to give their location for what ever reason.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many jurisdictions around the world had similar systems.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#233

Post by navjack27 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #190
px43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pixel phone probably gives you the best chance of resisting this sort of attack. The most vulnerable phones are the older, cheaper phones that run outdated versions of Android. Pixel phones are generally the first to get security updates, and so the quickest to get patches when spyware companies start using new bugs.

Nexus/Pixel devices literally come out of the box with Verizon background crapware installed that you cannot disable or remove even if you're not a Verizon customer. Google long sold out, friend.

Lol no! I bought mine from Fi.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#234

Post by orwin »

voytec wrote: post #161
tbrock wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the manufacturers will just not sell their phones in France. Ultimately it’s the French citizens that will miss out.

My guess is that France will soon have followers in form of other EU states. Both left and right are contesting who can be more authoritarian these days.

The only left wing governments in the western world are Portugal and Spain. And PSOE is barely left-wing imho (I won't fall into the 'no true scottman' here, but I really wanted to).

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#235

Post by rtkwe »

someplaceguy wrote: post #183
dismalpedigree wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faraday bags are not effective against all frequencies. Specifically the 5G frequencies are known to be very difficult to block with a cage ( but do have relatively short ranges)

Would putting it inside a microwave work? I think I recall Snowden did that but I'm not entirely sure I remember correctly. Edit: on the other hand, I'm now considering the possibility that the phone might be recording your audio even without network access and then transmit it later when you take it outside the microwave. So you'd have to be physically far away from the microwave for the microphone not to hear you,…

Running or not? /s The former is a definite yes but expensive while the latter is probably also fine for many situations.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#236

Post by haswell »

hiatus wrote: post #52
lagolinguini wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not the same. One of them is an institution conceived through organisation of people, laws, traditions and customs, the existence and membership of which is a choice. The other categories are associations made by accident of birth. I don’t have a horse in the race but it is important to understand that those situations are not the same. When people say stuff like ACAB they are free to criticise the existence…

> The other categories are associations made by accident of birth. Just because someone says you are a Christian because you were baptized or whatever doesn't make it so. Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.

> Just because someone says you are a Christian because you were baptized or whatever doesn't make it so. Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.

Hard disagree here. I didn't choose to be born to parents of a fundamental baptist cult. I didn't choose to be subjected to physical abuse in the name of that religion, or to be sent to seminars ingraining deeply harmful ideas about self and the roles of men/women. I didn't choose to spend my entire adult life in therapy unwinding the bizarre ideas that had been hammered into me as a kid.

Yes, you can "choose" to leave your religion behind, but many cannot choose to avoid the indoctrination, abuse and twisted mental models that can come from the experience.

I left my faith behind around age 18. 20 years later I'm still actively working on getting rid of the rest of the baggage.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#237

Post by knaik94 »

dheera wrote: post #90
knaik94 wrote: post #59

From an opsec standpoint, would leaving the phone in airplane mode and turning off location services effectively block access to the phone? From my understanding airplane mode disables the sim, wifi, gps, and bluetooth entirely, but it's possible to re-enable wifi, gps, and bluetooth. It's something I got into the habit of doing because my phone searching for 4g cellular data ate into my battery.

For the camera your best bet is to just put a physical cover. There are a lot of sliding adhesive ones you can buy online that are convenient. I stick them on laptops as well, especially work-issued laptops. For the microphone ... ideally build and install LineageOS yourself on an Android device. Don't trust iOS or Google's official Android builds, they have closed source software that may have France-specific backdo…

From what I've read, the current theory is that access is initially possible using the cellular modem. Building and running a custom Android wouldn't necessarily help in that case, because the modem/baseband firmware is completely isolated and runs independently of the OS.

It seems like general camera/audio recording would need a secondary exploit.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/219230/where-is-...

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#238

Post by MartijnBraam »

internetter wrote: post #213
dunham wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I recall that the green light on the apple camera is controlled by the camera's firmware, making it more difficult to turn on without the light come on. (You'd need to overwrite the camera firmware.)

Why does this even need to be controlled with firmware? Can't it be a simple circuit? (I know nothing about this)

It could be simple, just hook the led to the reset line of the camera and you'll know if the camera is in use. Downside is that the led will blink on boot when linux probes the driver.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#239

Post by brianstorms »

I figure the day's coming when cops will be able to remotely activate the inside camera and microphone in a Tesla, or remotely disable the car and/or have it pull over, etc. Perhaps first in China, but probably everywhere eventually.

Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone

#240

Post by nirav72 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #190
px43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pixel phone probably gives you the best chance of resisting this sort of attack. The most vulnerable phones are the older, cheaper phones that run outdated versions of Android. Pixel phones are generally the first to get security updates, and so the quickest to get patches when spyware companies start using new bugs.

Nexus/Pixel devices literally come out of the box with Verizon background crapware installed that you cannot disable or remove even if you're not a Verizon customer. Google long sold out, friend.

Sure , if you buy a pixel from Verizon or any of the other major providers directly . I didn’t have that problem when I bought a pixel couple years ago directly from Google’s online store to use on T-Mobile’s network.
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