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FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

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Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#281

Post by hunterb123 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #255
hunterb123 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy,” he added. “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” > “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump continued. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.” That's all he said…

> That's all he said to the interviewer And then the next day, he clarified: Reporter: "Should there be a database or system that tracks Muslims in this country?" Trump: "There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems." And then he tried to backpedal. Decided it was a watch list, not a database, etc. Basically the usual shtick of his where he tries to say everything and no…

Again that's a generic response:

> There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems

Beyond databases. What does that mean? That could be analog systems, that could be anything not stored in a computer.

Nothing to do with identification which would need a database. It's a generic answer to avoid a hypothetical. It's a nonanswer.

He said nothing, not everything. You are attributing the reporters question to him. The reporter is posing the hypothetical that they created in the first place by the initial interview.

My main point was hypotheticals are always trap (unless among friends!), but that's a great example of an obvious one.

The usual shtick is to say nothing, because the journalistic usual shtick is to ask gotcha hypotheticals.

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#282

Post by cunthorpe »

no_time wrote: post #11

LINE,telegram,threema and WeChat are not even american companies. Can't they just tell the FBI to suck a fat one when they ask for user data?

Yes but they can still:

- block the company nationwide, see Huawei (also includes ceasing contracts with app stores, both of which are American)

- block access to your website, see TPB

- harass you when you travel, either to the US or fellow countries.

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#283

Post by shadowgovt »

kingcharles wrote: post #214
shadowgovt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your honor, the state agrees to not prosecute on any information inferrable from the text of the password." "Understood. The defendant's Fifth Amendment right to protection from self-incrimination is secured. As per the prior ruling, the defendant will remain in custody for contempt of court until such time as they divulge the necessary password to comply with the warrant."

I don't know why you're being downvoted. For a start, if it was a third party that had the passcode and refused to divulge it they can be held in jail until they release it, e.g. if your wife knows it. (There are many cases where people have been sentenced to years or decades in prison for not testifying) If it is you not divulging your own passcode, then legally the judge can't give you contempt, but in reality they…

I believe judges can, in fact, hold a defendant for refusing to give up their own passwords, and that the contempt could be indefinite. This is a point of law that is not settled at the federal level yet, and at the state level it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

In one case, the appellate court at the federal level simply refused to hear the case that had been decided at the sate supreme court level.

https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/us-supreme-court-nixe...

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#284

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

twobitshifter wrote: post #276
ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I think, that's what Nick Bilton thinks. The quality of his book makes me partial to his thesis, of course, but NSA conspiracy blah adds nothing. Also, lots more went into catching him than just heyy , but that was the lucky break that had him caught. Now he shares a prison with Dr. Unabomber Kazinsky.

That could be the story but since parallel construction is routinely used to hide the existence of surveillance tools and back doors it’s not unreasonable to doubt it. I thought I had heard it was stackoverflow, is that looped in somehow?

I don't recall StackOverflow being mentioned, no, but it's been a few years since I've read it.

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#285

Post by adamfisk »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #252
QuarterReptile wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The seed for that line of thinking is the fact that a US Navy lab built it.[0] Having said that, I believe that's the only basis and is a far cry from making the theory convincing or even probable. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

Wow, I feel like an idiot. All this time I had no idea the Navy built it, when a simple Wiki search would have pointed that out. Thanks!

“The Navy built it” is a bit of an exaggeration. Paul Syverson did early work on it at the Naval Research Lab, and Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson added to the collaboration at approximately the same time, with neither having anything to do with the Navy. That’s the extent of the military connection - some relationship in the first year or so of an 18 year or so project.

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#286

Post by [deleted] »

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #256
b8 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ulbricht was caught via poor OPSEC and not via a Firefox/Tor 0day afaik. Though there was/is speculation that a Firefox/Tor 0day was used to bring down some Tor markets and possibly to locate the Silk Road's server. Silk Road 2.0 was brought down in like a few months, which could indicate such a 0day existed. Or that it was ran by some former Silk Road staff members who got doxed when Silk Road 1.0 was shut down.

Ulbricht was caught because an FBI agent, who would read things slowly and twice, recognized these 4 letters : heyy . That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey , and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address. Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recom…

[deleted]

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#287

Post by [deleted] »

Eelongate wrote: post #270
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's (scarily) interesting that they react with actual personal attendance based purely on a very limited set of electronic information. From your further description: > We are not religious (at all). We do not attend church, synagogue or mosque. We are lower middle class white Americans born and raised in the USA and have never traveled outside the country. Would not the FBI have been able to any amount of backgroun…

I think what he experienced is another manifestation of the same phenomena as zero-tolerance policies in schools; institutions ask their enforcers to suspend common sense and strictly enforce the letter of the law/guideline/etc, even in situations where any reasonable person would decide it made no sense. They do this because such common sense and gut feelings is how bias and prejudice might creep into their oh-so-pe…

[deleted]

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#288

Post by adamfisk »

CyanBird wrote: post #253
adamfisk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but the reality is that without publicly funded software like Tor, Signal, OTF, and my own Lantern, our world would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet. We need more public funding for open source software (with public…

> from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits Ahh yes, the famed operation Condor, operation Gladio, operation iceberg and so many other famed "humanitarian" projects At the end of the day all that you mentioned goes back to a post-facto "it is good because *we* do it", I would go to say that most people here in HN are well aware of the start of Google when it was funded by…

I’m certainly not defending all US government actions. That’s exactly the point. Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance. The US government funds the NSA, that is true. It also funds food stamps. And torture. The trick is to untangle it.

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#289

Post by adamfisk »

pphysch wrote: post #247
adamfisk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but the reality is that without publicly funded software like Tor, Signal, OTF, and my own Lantern, our world would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet. We need more public funding for open source software (with public…

This comment is an incredibly naive attempt at a smear. > Without them, we’d basically be left with Wikipedia as the only popular entity on the internet outside of corporate control. Wikipedia is absolutely not "outside of corporate control". It is trivially astroturfed to advance special interests. > All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in m…

Um, ok. All of the above projects use not only reproducible builds for many platforms, but they’re all open source, and they all have public security audits. Those three pillars are about as good as it gets. Is there something you would add?

I’m not claiming PBS and the BBC are perfect entities, but they do offer an alternative source of information that runs against the grain of corporate media. You would prefer…what exactly?

Re: FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

#290

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #267
unobatbayar wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they want you to think. He was caught because; Nothing can match against the surveillance arsenal of the NSA.

That's not what I think, that's what Nick Bilton thinks. The quality of his book makes me partial to his thesis, of course, but NSA conspiracy blah adds nothing. Also, lots more went into catching him than just heyy , but that was the lucky break that had him caught. Now he shares a prison with Dr. Unabomber Kazinsky.

Correction: He was transferred to a penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona.
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