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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

#361

Post by asjfka »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #199
tiedieconderoga wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do the cameras/microphones need to be controlled by the baseband? Naively they seem like they should be at a slightly higher level than the main radios, and should be controlled exclusively by the OS. I'm guessing from your comment there's some reason that's not the case though?

There is this [0] thread from a few years ago. According to the linked article, "unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily." No idea how true this statement is.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905643

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

#362

Post by berniedurfee »

tbrock wrote: post #155
freedomben wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments regularly have a steady flow of zero days to use, but once it's used it's "burned" so it's not something they throw around willy nilly. I would guess they are going to force manufacturers to play ball, and I would gues that the manufacturers will.

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

What would stop manufacturers from selling their products in France with whatever customizations are required by law?

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

#363

Post by rsync »

tivert wrote: post #340
miohtama wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> 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. You must mean the phone network, because GPS doesn't run on SS7.

No, I suspect he meant GSM .. which is also sort of wrong-ish but does make sense…

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

#364

Post by pteraspidomorph »

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...

Soonish?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...

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

#365

Post by s1artibartfast »

JasonFruit wrote: post #40
rythmshifter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying all cops are anything is exactly the same thing as saying all blacks are thieves, all Jews are greedy, or any of the other blanket statements that can never apply to any large group of people. It’s disgusting.

Then let's handle it like we do race: the average cop is a bastard. This is not necessarily true of all individuals, but it's statistically predictive.

If we want to be analytical, what is the definition of bastard? Does the average cop have a net positive or negative impact? How many rude interactions are negated by preventing an auto theft ? How many unjustified beatings are Justified by locking up a serial rapist or killer?

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

#366

Post by rsync »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #199
tiedieconderoga wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do the cameras/microphones need to be controlled by the baseband? Naively they seem like they should be at a slightly higher level than the main radios, and should be controlled exclusively by the OS. I'm guessing from your comment there's some reason that's not the case though?

In addition to the basebandy RF stuff that you expect the baseband to do, it also does real-time voice modulation and call quality things like echo and noise cancellation… things that high level OS would do too slowly.

In 2023 I suspect this is less and less necessary- apple silicon is very fast and a lot of voice comms goes through an app (FaceTime?) anyway but … I’m sure those capabilities are still in the baseband processor …

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

#367

Post by fsflover »

px43 wrote: post #349
fsflover wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, according to the Snowden documents, the NSA spun up the MUSCULAR program specifically because Google was refusing to play nice. This was where they dug up dark fiber between Google data centers to tap into the information being sent between them. Within a month after the MUSCULAR leak, Google was encrypting all comms between data centers, which in theory, killed all the MUSCULAR taps.

Only if you trust Google that it was the only attack vector. I wouldn't.

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

#368

Post by yellowsir »

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…

kinda spooky you see your neighbours doors on your cameras :O

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #151
hackandthink wrote: post #118

Civil rights are a favor that can be revoked at any time. Ultimately, there are too few who stand up for them. Today I read an article by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a liberal intellectual. He downplays police violence, order must be restored, how is not so important.

That doesn't sound very liberal. ("Liberal" meaning "in favor of freedom for people".) It doesn't even sound very politically liberal, meaning "in favor of peoples' right to protest injustice" and "in favor of peoples' right to not be shot dead by police". Isn't "order" the concern of the conservatives? I've heard a number of times that politically left and right mean different things in Europe; is this one of those…

[deleted]
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