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Your WiFi Can See You

mrereports.substack.com

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Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#51

Post by scrps »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #12
xahrepap wrote: post #4

I feel like “putting wifi in my home” is similar to “putting bodies that emit heat in my home”. Neither of which implicitly grant law enforcement to come and observe either through the walls of my home. I am not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with the SCOTUS case referenced in the article. But I really hope it is precedent enough to make any judge throw out any such violations without any hassle.

Still enables parallel construction. They can illegally search and surveil you without your knowledge and there's not much anyone can do about it. They can't submit any findings as evidence but they can totally anonymously tip off other authorities or something. It must be physically impossible to violate our privacy or it doesn't work.

The one upside to this being based on open standards also means that there is no reason this tech can't be used against say, police, politicians, executives.

Though I'd like to actually look at how it is practically done first, for all I know this could require more than just access to an AP. This is not my area of expertise so maybe someone that is an expert can confirm my intuition that beamforming even on enterprise grade access points isn't locative (if that is the right word?) enough on it's own, I'd imagine this would require some type of kit to be deployed in order to accurately map a room?

Also plaster walls or at least my plaster walls seem to be great at blocking anything over 2.4GHz :\

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#52

Post by est »

newhouseb wrote: post #32

I'm a little skeptical of the paper in question: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00250.pdf If you look at the training and test set info: > We report results on two protocols: (1) Same layout: We train on the training set in all 16 spatial layouts, and test on remaining frames. Following [31], we randomly select 80% of the samples to be our training set, and the rest to be our testing set. The training and testing samples…

Also

> It should be noted that many WiFi routers, such as TP-Link AC1750, come with 3 antennas, so our method only requires 2 of these routers.

> WiFi-based perception is based on the Channel-state-information (CSI) that represents the ratio between the transmitted signal wave and the received signal wave. The CSIs are complex decimal sequences that do not have spatial correspondence to spatial locations

AFAIK, access to raw CSI data is not available on consumer routers. You need specific FPGA/SDR boards which happens to speak the WIFI 2.4G/5G protocol.

There are some open sources efforts such as https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#53

Post by cperciva »

scrps wrote: post #51
matheusmoreira wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still enables parallel construction. They can illegally search and surveil you without your knowledge and there's not much anyone can do about it. They can't submit any findings as evidence but they can totally anonymously tip off other authorities or something. It must be physically impossible to violate our privacy or it doesn't work.

The one upside to this being based on open standards also means that there is no reason this tech can't be used against say, police, politicians, executives. Though I'd like to actually look at how it is practically done first, for all I know this could require more than just access to an AP. This is not my area of expertise so maybe someone that is an expert can confirm my intuition that beamforming even on enterpri…

It's probably not the plaster blocking the signal, but rather a wire mesh which was put up to support the plaster.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#54

Post by grecy »

XorNot wrote: post #23
matheusmoreira wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still enables parallel construction. They can illegally search and surveil you without your knowledge and there's not much anyone can do about it. They can't submit any findings as evidence but they can totally anonymously tip off other authorities or something. It must be physically impossible to violate our privacy or it doesn't work.

Parallel construction only works if you've actually committed a crime and left evidence somewhere it can be plausibly found - i.e. "a random search of the public woods near your area found a shallow grave, and tire-tracks matching your car" - but the search was conducted because what actually happened was you were telling a guy "yes I definitely killed Tony and buried him in the woods". People keep using the term as…

> Parallel construction only works if you've actually committed a crime

What about if you're doing something that isn't illegal yet, but a new Politician decides he doesn't like the cut of your hair and then targets you later because you were doing it.

What about if you just have someone come over to visit your home who is known to disagree with someone that becomes a Political leader in the future and they punish you for it.

etc. etc.

There are a million reasons why privacy is very important.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#55

Post by atoav »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #26
XorNot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel construction only works if you've actually committed a crime and left evidence somewhere it can be plausibly found - i.e. "a random search of the public woods near your area found a shallow grave, and tire-tracks matching your car" - but the search was conducted because what actually happened was you were telling a guy "yes I definitely killed Tony and buried him in the woods". People keep using the term as…

Even if you committed a crime, police should not be able to find out about it through illegal means. Police should not be allowed to run SIGINT operations on citizens. They should not even have that capability. Why is it normal for police to have these literal spy movie technologies?

Because in the typical American mind a thee-not-me-mentality is very prevalent. They are the sole protagonists of their own lives and they believe they have invincible plot armor like the protagonists in the action movies.

That means people believe the police having Gestapo-capabilities will only ever hurt others (who must then have deserved it!) and never them.

That a free democracy is a finely balanced system between the power of the people and the powers of the three branches isn't something they ever consider. That capabilities can breed their own perverse incentives and a culture of disservice is a few complexity levels further up the tree still.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#56

Post by developer93 »

bhaney wrote: post #27
XorNot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel construction only works if you've actually committed a crime and left evidence somewhere it can be plausibly found - i.e. "a random search of the public woods near your area found a shallow grave, and tire-tracks matching your car" - but the search was conducted because what actually happened was you were telling a guy "yes I definitely killed Tony and buried him in the woods". People keep using the term as…

Ah, so we don't need to worry about egregiously illegal privacy violations as long as we have nothing to hide. Thanks.

I don't think that's what they were saying. I read it as the law is unlikely to protect you

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#57

Post by checkyoursudo »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #34
XorNot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel construction only works if you've actually committed a crime and left evidence somewhere it can be plausibly found - i.e. "a random search of the public woods near your area found a shallow grave, and tire-tracks matching your car" - but the search was conducted because what actually happened was you were telling a guy "yes I definitely killed Tony and buried him in the woods". People keep using the term as…

> committed a crime and left evidence somewhere A Harvard professor wrote a book titled Three Felonies A Day which argues that there are so many laws to break that an average working professional in America will commit an average of three felonies every day. I do not know the accuracy of the claim but this idea of over-criminalization is an interesting one to think about. Specifically, how likely is it for a person t…

I am skeptical of the claim but not the conclusion. I take the claim anyway to be a bit of hyperbole to sell more books.

One of the biggest problems in law is what IT/CS people might call technical debt. New laws get added all the time while old, often-outdated or useless laws rarely get removed. The problem is that those old, even outdated and useless laws can sometimes be leveraged against you in new or novel ways, sometimes that the drafters of the laws never would have expected. Legislative intent is not always clear and not always decisive.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#58

Post by u8g78gv »

xahrepap wrote: post #4

I feel like “putting wifi in my home” is similar to “putting bodies that emit heat in my home”. Neither of which implicitly grant law enforcement to come and observe either through the walls of my home. I am not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with the SCOTUS case referenced in the article. But I really hope it is precedent enough to make any judge throw out any such violations without any hassle.

[flagged]

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#59

Post by transpute »

est wrote: post #52
newhouseb wrote: post #32

I'm a little skeptical of the paper in question: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00250.pdf If you look at the training and test set info: > We report results on two protocols: (1) Same layout: We train on the training set in all 16 spatial layouts, and test on remaining frames. Following [31], we randomly select 80% of the samples to be our training set, and the rest to be our testing set. The training and testing samples…

Also > It should be noted that many WiFi routers, such as TP-Link AC1750, come with 3 antennas, so our method only requires 2 of these routers. > WiFi-based perception is based on the Channel-state-information (CSI) that represents the ratio between the transmitted signal wave and the received signal wave. The CSIs are complex decimal sequences that do not have spatial correspondence to spatial locations AFAIK, acces…

> FPGA/SDR boards

Custom firmware is available for existing WiFi radios, e.g. sub-$20 ESP32 WROOM.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480760

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#60

Post by sambazi »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #12
xahrepap wrote: post #4

I feel like “putting wifi in my home” is similar to “putting bodies that emit heat in my home”. Neither of which implicitly grant law enforcement to come and observe either through the walls of my home. I am not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with the SCOTUS case referenced in the article. But I really hope it is precedent enough to make any judge throw out any such violations without any hassle.

Still enables parallel construction. They can illegally search and surveil you without your knowledge and there's not much anyone can do about it. They can't submit any findings as evidence but they can totally anonymously tip off other authorities or something. It must be physically impossible to violate our privacy or it doesn't work.

> It must be physically impossible to violate our privacy or it doesn't work.

it has to be expensive enough in order to not be worth it.

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