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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

#321

Post by InCityDreams »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
msoad wrote: post #12

[flagged]

> #ACAB At least for me, this comment loses its thrust with this hashtag. It takes a potent observation and adds unnecessary partisanship. It's also connected with the mother of all blowback slogans: defund the police.

#AB - 'Auditing Britain', on youtube, regularly demonstrates why #acab can be seen to be a thing...in Britain, at least. Given the power cops have - at their discretion, perhaps the #a can be dropped, but the police sure don't make it easy for themselves as far as the rest goes.

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

#322

Post by miohtama »

JohnFen wrote: post #308
donatj wrote: post #180

United States, couple years ago my friend in his mid-thirties was feeling depressed after his mom died. Came over to hang out, and wasn’t responding to his sisters calls. His sister called in a welfare check on him and suddenly I have three cops knocking at my front door. They ask for him by name, say he isn’t in trouble. I go get him; he asks “how did you know where I was?” and the cops say “we pinged your phone”. W…

> the cops say “we pinged your phone”. What that entails exactly I have no clue. The cell phone infrastructure knows where your phone is. It has to in order for it to operate. The police routinely ask cell phone companies for locations of cell phones. Many (most?) not only won't require a warrant, but provide an official portal the police can use to conduct their queries without having to get a phone company employee…

Note that it is not just police. The core of GPS network, SS7 system, is more than 50 years old in this point. It is often exploited by authoritarian states, sometimes to the end to get human right activists and journalists murdered.

https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1430/002/

Our crook friends in Israel sell this as a service

https://privacyinternational.org/examples/3429/nso-group-off...

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

#323

Post by fsflover »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #203
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a Pixel phone be vulnerable to USA giving Google a 'national security letter' saying to make your phone remotely accessible with a personalised update, say? Google seem like they could - and if paid, would - readily do that whilst other companies could hide behind lack of resources or whatever. I just assumed that USA three letter agencies paid larger companies upfront to implement back doors; seems to fit w…

Google could likely refuse this on the basis that rolling a personalized update for a single user would be an undue burden on them. The particulars and thus validity would be for a court to hash out.

According to Snowden't documents, Google is collaborating with NSA, so I think your point is moot.

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

#324

Post by fsflover »

rtkwe wrote: post #49
hinata08 wrote: post #34

I regret getting a pixel, and not a fairphone with a removable battery With the current level of oversight on the police (police of police is a meme by now), and the level of cybersecurity at the government, everyone's phones will be activated within a few months. At least some government agent will have fun watching what ppl visit on the internet during their spare time, and can enable the camera to watch what they'…

There's always the faraday bag or simply not taking it to your meeting/activity that have been the recommended options for opsec even when phones had removable batteries.

I prefer hardware kill switches (and my phone has them).

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

#325

Post by baby »

jb1991 wrote: post #162
Awelton wrote: post #126

They could at least have the decency to just secretly do it and then pretend like they aren't, like our government does. This is why physical switches and removable batteries are the only way forward.

what is "our" government? this site is worldwide..

I like this comment because I always assume a majority of people here are Americans, but I'm not, and maybe it's not true anymore.

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

#326

Post by jb1991 »

baby wrote: post #325
jb1991 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is "our" government? this site is worldwide..

I like this comment because I always assume a majority of people here are Americans, but I'm not, and maybe it's not true anymore.

I'd be willing to bet that less than half of this site's users are American. There is a huge software engineering community in Europe, for example, and there are more Europeans than Americans, let alone the large populations of Asia, Australia, New Zealand...

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

#327

Post by summarity »

varispeed wrote: post #288
soared wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would you have a source if the tech is "secret"?

Because signals can be measured?

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

#328

Post by meragrin_ »

varispeed wrote: post #286
Awelton wrote: post #126

They could at least have the decency to just secretly do it and then pretend like they aren't, like our government does. This is why physical switches and removable batteries are the only way forward.

> and removable batteries Probably that's why the batteries are not removable in the phones...

Nah, profit motive by the companies is reason enough.

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

#329

Post by LatteLazy »

The level of government surveillance, in the EU, UK, US and elsewhere is already so massively OTT, that we have all the downsides around self-censorship, parallel construction, subversion of democracy etc.

So why not actually use the possible up sides of these dangerous immoral systems?

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