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Your WiFi Can See You

mrereports.substack.com

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Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#71

Post by danw1979 »

Communitivity wrote: post #69

I wonder if this will cause an interest in in Faraday Cage walls: outer wall sheetrock with a copper wire mesh support, with a ground to prevent re-radiating. You'd also need to have the same mesh on the house roof and attic walls. Copper would be best for conductivity. The mesh holes would need to no greater than 5mm to block 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. This is rounded down to the nearest mm from the equation: hole size (m) =…

Leakage doesn’t seem to be the problem that is being explained here: it’s internal sensing within the home by existing wifi devices.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#72

Post by gloosx »

I don't understand, why the author's concern is focused around surveillance through wifi. The routers are private devices, so if secured properly, what kind of backdoor a third party could use to take imagery of your house insides?

Law enforcement for decades has used commercial cellular networks to spy on people, and with the modern 5g technologies these surveillance suites are very well developed and able to see EVERYONE at scale with centimeter precision.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#73

Post by 8organicbits »

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…

> It's also worth noting that in the case of incidental wifi surveillance, it's likely the plain-sight doctrine would apply

Plain-sight should mean observation with the natural human senses, and I think the courts agree. There is nothing "plain" about radio signals leaking through walls. The thermal imaging example in the article as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_surveillance_doctrine

> the drone observed “each window of Plaintiffs’ residence and outbuildings” and was “outside [law enforcement’s] visual line of sight,” violating both federal and Indiana law.

Placing a device outside a home to collect WiFi signals doesn't sound like "visual line of sight". I.E. clearly a 4th amendment search requiring a warrant.

Collecting records stored by devices that had been in the area already seems plausible, but would presumably require a legal justification to search those (warrant, consent, etc). But to my understanding, devices don't store such records.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#74

Post by Communitivity »

danw1979 wrote: post #71
Communitivity wrote: post #69

I wonder if this will cause an interest in in Faraday Cage walls: outer wall sheetrock with a copper wire mesh support, with a ground to prevent re-radiating. You'd also need to have the same mesh on the house roof and attic walls. Copper would be best for conductivity. The mesh holes would need to no greater than 5mm to block 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. This is rounded down to the nearest mm from the equation: hole size (m) =…

Leakage doesn’t seem to be the problem that is being explained here: it’s internal sensing within the home by existing wifi devices.

It doesn't need to be your wifi devices, it could be your neighbor's, if you're in a townhouse or your house is close enough.

But I agree with another commenter: if they've hacked your wifi router then you have bigger problems, as they've likely hacked all your devices then.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#75

Post by vjk800 »

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…

There are (at least) two ways to think about the law. One (which technical people tend to subscribe to) is that the law is analogous to a computer code for the society and the ideal is that it is followed at all times. The second is that the law is there as a backup when someone is clearly causing trouble and other, more informal means to stop them have failed.

In the second interpretation, it is desirable to have some sort of law always ready to apply when a problematic situation arises, and everyone committing technical felonies every now and then is just a (mostly) harmless side effect of the system working as intended.

The second interpretation is, I believe, also often applied when new laws are written. Usually the logic is: there is some kind of a problem that the politicians need to address, and the problem itself is too complex to directly address so some kind of proxy law is made that gives an excuse to throw problematic people in jail. See e.g. loitering laws.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#76

Post by XorNot »

grecy wrote: post #54
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…

> 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 y…

> 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.

That would have nothing to do with parallel construction and everything to do with someone having sufficient political power to change the law to target you - either specifically or generally.

Someone with that much power could also just wipe out illegal search and seizure restrictions.

But again this is also based on a misunderstanding of the process: you can't use parallel construction to make illegally obtained evidence valid to use. You can only use it to indirectly guide the discovery of other evidence which must already exist and be plausibly findable by regular means.

i.e. if the police stop on the high way and notice disturbed ground and discover a dead body, that's something which could happen by pure chance. Parallel construction is suggesting that a police car should stop at a particular point on a highway, and have a good look around.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#77

Post by vermilingua »

mk_stjames wrote: post #10
ARandomerDude wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The trajectory of technology generally is: possible -> prototype -> product -> common -> common and cheap If Wi-Fi surveillance were to become common and cheap, other methods would be produced to make data harvesting common and cheap to the surveillance state/bigco. The best way to avoid that dystopia is to safeguard it early in the process.

What I'm trying to get at is, even if this type of Wifi surveillance becomes commong and cheap, it still requires access at a low level to the wifi router itself. Which should be hands-off in the first place. It's like having cameras in your house on your local network... if the police could legally hack into your network, they could watch you on the cameras to see if you are committing crimes! But... the point is th…

In Australia we have the Assistance and Access amendment to the Telecommunications Act 1997, which allows the government to demand that companies or individuals insert backdoors into their products for use by law enforcement. My WAP/router already tries to update its own firmware, what’s to stop the govt forcing in new firmware with full cooperation from the vendors that enable this passive sensing and allow access to the output?

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#78

Post by SergeAx »

gloosx wrote: post #72

I don't understand, why the author's concern is focused around surveillance through wifi. The routers are private devices, so if secured properly, what kind of backdoor a third party could use to take imagery of your house insides? Law enforcement for decades has used commercial cellular networks to spy on people, and with the modern 5g technologies these surveillance suites are very well developed and able to see EV…

Amazon Alexa, Google Nest. BTW, every smatphone has a WiFi.

Re: Your WiFi Can See You

#80

Post by psd1 »

edgyquant wrote: post #24
mk_stjames wrote: post #5

If someone is worried that their government could be flashing the firmware of their WiFi router to use the beamforming antennae of the router to track them walking around their home.... Then they should be way more worried that their government is using any access to their wifi router at all. Like, you got way bigger things to worry about at that point, right? There are a million surveillance side-channels that could…

No, what could be a bigger worry than an omnipresent government intent on total control?

Cancer.
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