Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gazettengr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 465 posts

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

#271

Post by soared »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #232
paxys wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s for the person who is actively calling 911 though, not a random persons phone.

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

#272

Post by pessimizer »

noisy_boy wrote: post #71
Animatronio wrote: post #38

Meanwhile China is bad.

So your argument is: So what if I slapped Bob, look what Jim is doing?

No, the argument is that if you slapped Bob, why are you always talking about Jim?

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

#273

Post by dathinab »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #110
cde-v wrote: post #10

I'm sure this will stop the rioting.

I feel like this would worsen the feelings of grievance that are causing the rioting. Not that I know what's going on

I believe it's somewhat unrelated to the rioting.

If you look at France it's not all of France rioting (through all of France was protesting).

Instead its a specific group of people defined by at what kind of place they live in: Banlieues. This is a form of ghetto which is historically mostly populated by people which grand parents had a migration background and which due to an economical shift had en-mass lost their jobs (the grand or grand grand parents).

This people grew up as French where told all the social norms and expectations of French society etc. At the same time they are often not treated as French have close very little chances to get any job at all. Just having a address at the border of a Banlieues is enough for you not even be considered for a job.

Over the last decades this has gotten so bad that by often police isn't really present in the Ghettos at all, and if only in larger groups. At the same time this distress is frequently abused by extremists, e.g. religious ones.

But that also means that most people in Banlieues probably do not care too much about this law as it is unlikely to ever affect them anyway. At the same time it's also true the other way around, the police cares too little about the Banlieues to abuse it to target the huge majority of people there. Similar if they move against people there they know very well that this people do not have good ways to properly legally defend themself.

But who will be targeted by this are e.g. environmental activists. For example France has in the past already (many times) declared some environmental activists as domestic terrorists and used anti-terrorist laws to spy on them in various ways.

I probably are wrong in some points at least somewhat, but I think it might be still worth to consider some of the arguments.

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

#274

Post by PartiallyTyped »

internetter wrote: post #225
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or CalyxOS. calyxos.org

Firmware and stuff even lower level still is unchanged right?

Yes. It offers only OS code and the Linux kernel updates.

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

#275

Post by pessimizer »

freedomben wrote: post #150
noisy_boy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is: So what if I slapped Bob, look what Jim is doing?

Indeed, we seem to be in the age of binary thinking. Maybe it's always been this way and I am mostly now noticing, but it is quite maddening.

Binary thinking is when you refuse to complain about other people doing the same thing that you are currently doing.

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

#276

Post by soared »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #191
cm2187 wrote: post #105

I am confused. Are they mandating a backdoor, or is there already a backdoor, or are they allowing the police to exploit zero days? If it is the latter, it is sad that the authorities assume weak security as a given.

They may have access to backdoors in the baseband firmwares. The baseband is an opaque binary blob that operates outside of the phone's main OS, and its contents are usually considered a trade secret by the manufacturer since it handles low-level hardware interactions with the main radios/etc. Personally, I would be surprised if those systems weren't compromised by agreement. It's already common to see criminals and…

> It's already common to see criminals and dissidents get busted because they think that turning a phone off stops it from reporting location data.

That’s an incredible claim to make with no source. It seems unreasonable to suspect Apple and google would allow some chips they don’t access to battery even when powered off.

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

#277

Post by jokoon »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #191
cm2187 wrote: post #105

I am confused. Are they mandating a backdoor, or is there already a backdoor, or are they allowing the police to exploit zero days? If it is the latter, it is sad that the authorities assume weak security as a given.

They may have access to backdoors in the baseband firmwares. The baseband is an opaque binary blob that operates outside of the phone's main OS, and its contents are usually considered a trade secret by the manufacturer since it handles low-level hardware interactions with the main radios/etc. Personally, I would be surprised if those systems weren't compromised by agreement. It's already common to see criminals and…

I wonder if the microwave tip works.

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

#278

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

soared wrote: post #269
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They can locate anyone's phone on demand. The services that do this can generate a likely street address from GPS or tower triangulated location. This is how many criminals now get caught while on the run. It isn't magic police work but rather the personal tracking device everyone carries. Likewise some spree killers have been tracked down by geofencing phones known to be around all crime scenes and zeroing in on…

Source?

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/cell-phone-data-from-lori-...

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

#279

Post by tiborsaas »

pantulis wrote: post #78
tiborsaas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bill could be step one. Step two could be a requirement for SW/HW manufacturers to add a backdoor since this is not really effective to fight crime this way. I'm not saying it is planned or there's some conspiracy for establishing a totalitarian state. But we can't really predict the future and more loose rules could be introduced by the next government with a totally different agenda who might thank for the pre…

> Step two could be a requirement for SW/HW manufacturers to add a backdoor since this is not really effective to fight crime this way We have already been there, it's just like good old phone calls. They can be intercepted under the proper judicial supervision. I don't have criteria to answer if this is a necessary evil or directly a blatant totalitarian push, but one needs to consider: does the French government ha…

Good point, most people however don't expect their phone calls to be private for this very reason.

> does the French government have a bad track record of abusing the capability of eavesdropping any phone communication?

I'd rather look into possible future scenarios, I don't know about past cases, but I don't really follow french politics. I know discussing politics is HN is not encouraged, so I'd just rather suggest to look up what's coming for France (and EU) if the current government fails and major powers switch. Sorry if you already know this.

> has this capability been useful for law enforcement?

In Hungary, Pegasus was used to eavesdrop on many citizens who were simply in an opposing position. Law enforcement is a good cover for data collection and of course can be effective, but we need transparency and safety to see if these tools are abused or not. There are no good answers I'm afraid.

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

#280

Post by sidewndr46 »

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,…

As long as you turn the microwave on, yes that will be effective.
Post reply on HN