Why are we still adopting small steps that makes our authorities like those in China?
France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
441–450 of 465 posts
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The question is how accurate is cell tower triangulation?
A few years ago, when I was studying, my friend and I did a project on that in Xamarin. It took us two evenings, and the accuracy was 300 meters at worst, and 30 meters at best. It's worth noting that this was in a larger city.
So, if two students can achieve even 30 meters accuracy in two days, big telecom corporations will certainly do better in a few decades.
EDIT: By the way, it wasn't only triangulation but also signal strength change analysis. It wasn't as serious as it sounds, there are formulas already made for calculating that.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#443So how does this work technically? Does the bill require, for example, Apple to build the capability to remotely activate the microphone and camera on their laptops? Or does it just say that the government can use their magic spy tech to do this when they want to?
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The question is how accurate is cell tower triangulation?
Did the friend park the car out the front of his house, with a license plate that would have been shared by the sister? In the suburbs you don’t need to be overly precise, do a drive by and stop at the house with the car?
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
it most likely really will only be a small number of cases BUT that doesn't matter it being abused against just one or two times in very important contexts (political, human right activists, etc.) can already be a major negative impact for laws like that the "it's just a few" argument was always worthless even if true
I dunno, I think the number will increase above dozens. They certainly won't start out doing dozens a year, then pare it down to one or two, and eventually realize the don't even really need it. More likely, the number of uses per year will creep up, until eventually it's not as controversial as it used to be, at which point it'll jump dramatically. As a comparison, in the U.S., no-knock warrants were controversial w…
Eh... French cops are relatively lazy.
I've seen people literally smoking joints in front of the police station.
Listening in on someone to find evidence of them doing something illegal is actual work, the odds of them doing it to everyone are rather low, I think they'd rather go watch a football game or something.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, best in class network probes will regularly give you positions that are wrong by a few km, you need quite a bit of cleaning to reconstruct accurate paths. That's why something like MDT was added to 3GPP standards and emergency calls trigger a hard GPS fix.
Sure, that seems like something that could happen. However, meanwhile, in practice, my friend was having a mental break and the cops narrowed my friend's location down to 3 possible houses in a neighborhood.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617330
Abusing emergency location services is a much better explanation here. They can ping the device for a short time and it'll do its best (using A-GPS and WiFi) to provide an accurate position, without involving anyone since it's fully automated. Collecting positions from a carrier's network infrastructure is a more complex and slow task in comparison.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#447Don't forget the call to block social media sites during riots by the Frnace's president [1] [0]: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20230705-macron-s-call-to...
Same guy who likens himself to the Roman god Jupiter. Macron is an aspiring autocrat.
> aspiring
he thinks he's smarter than everyone, and he therefore feels justified ramming his policies down everyone's throats.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#448Earlier 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. 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…
A typo of GPRS is more likely.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't have any backdoor and they don't mandate ones. This is meant for using zero days legally
Oh. We've been doing that for decades in the US.
The US can force Google & Apple to share private information and has a unique position, France just cannot do any of that.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea, very human. Social engineering basically. And at the end, they are not required to tell you their method.
But they can't find a stolen bicycle with a gps tracker as the gps information 'may not be accurate'. Similar for phones. /(am in europe)
That's just it, they are doing their own thing. This is why I liked the explanation, it reflects that the police is not an organization that's somehow representing and enforcing a higher moral standard, but rather a distinct thing that has its own life and culture. And that social engineering and parallel construction are part of daily life.