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The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

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Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#81

Post by patmcguire »

blackbagboys wrote: post #48
white-flame wrote: post #2

To me, Comey is a man who has lost the goal in pursuit of his particular mission. Defense, intelligence, policing, all these things exist in order to uphold the constitution, protect the "American ideals", etc. Many of his statements pretty directly show that he doesn't care about the collateral damage to innocent people's privacy or any founding principles, he just wants his mission to be unhindered. It's the same m…

This is a pattern you see in a lot of high-performing people. They aren't particularly interested in the 'big picture'. They may say they are, they may think they are, but on a practical, day-to-day basis, it's irrelevant. They know the mission of their organizational unit, they know the goals that need to be accomplished to achieve that mission, they know the metrics they need to hit to advance within that organizat…

Yeah... if you really do promote based on who's done what's best for the org, and it's sufficiently competitive, such that it's always between people who had a lot to give who gave their all, eventually all the other bits are stripped off, and it's just a cosine between the vector of you and the vector of the next step.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#82

Post by Drdrdrq »

rdl wrote: post #38
shurcooL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I understand what you said at the end correctly, are you willing to commit to buy 8 million dollars worth of laptops?

Yes. (and then sell them, obviously, ideally for much more than $8mm)

You think there is a market for 10k of those?

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#83

Post by HappyTypist »

rdl wrote: post #29

I care about audio so much more than video, and text/keys/etc captured from the machine even more. As long as my screen and keyboard are out of the frame of the camera, I don't really care about it getting RATed. At worst, you'll see me naked, or making angry/etc. faces at someone on irc or email. While embarrassing it would be less bad than most of what you could accomplish by stealing actual information. OTOH, carr…

All smartphones now come with programmable low-power audio recognition DSPs for always-on "Hey Siri" and "Ok Google".

So it's here.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#84

Post by HappyTypist »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #34
billhendricksjr wrote: post #16

Don't almost all cameras activate their "on" light when being used?

A lot of people ask why the light isn't automatically turned on when it's in use. I think the problem is it's easier to turn it on through software than hardware. Plus, if you can treat the webcam as just a microphone, then anytime a device accesses the microphone (games for example), the light would turn on. Not a problem, per se, but the light would be turning on and off a lot if you use a push to talk game. Someth…

Just make it have a 3 second fade time where instead of the LED being at 100% intensity, have it as 75% intensity so it's not distracting by coming on and off.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#85

Post by HappyTypist »

everly wrote: post #19
billhendricksjr wrote: post #16

Don't almost all cameras activate their "on" light when being used?

It seems reasonable to assume that a bad actor who is able to gain access to a computer's webcam could also override the software that activates said "on" light.

Most laptops have them wired in hardware, i.e. you can't power on the webcam without the circuit also lighting up the light as a side effect.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#87

Post by hueving »

CorpOverreach wrote: post #5
comboy wrote: post #3

I don't really understand the webcam paranoia. If my computer is completely compromised, somebody watching my face is the least of my worries.

To me it's not about the computer being compromised, but rather joining a WebEx/Hangouts/other conference/meeting software that suddenly decides to start sharing your webcam without prompting you. There's been numerous times where I've joined meetings and someone gets caught with a goofy face or working from home in their PJs because they mis-clicked something on a crappy e-meeting UI.

Yep, I just joined a early morning meeting via webex recently and accidentally revealed to about 20 people from around the world what I look like without a shirt on. It's not pretty.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#88

Post by rhizome »

zhte415 wrote: post #68

Every corporate laptop I've worked with has the camera and microphone physically removed. If needed for a function, a USB camera and/or microphone is applied for through various chains of approval, and plug-in pull-put tracked.

I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad 450S about 6mos ago and configured it without a webcam/mic.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#89

Post by AnthonyMouse »

blackbagboys wrote: post #48
white-flame wrote: post #2

To me, Comey is a man who has lost the goal in pursuit of his particular mission. Defense, intelligence, policing, all these things exist in order to uphold the constitution, protect the "American ideals", etc. Many of his statements pretty directly show that he doesn't care about the collateral damage to innocent people's privacy or any founding principles, he just wants his mission to be unhindered. It's the same m…

This is a pattern you see in a lot of high-performing people. They aren't particularly interested in the 'big picture'. They may say they are, they may think they are, but on a practical, day-to-day basis, it's irrelevant. They know the mission of their organizational unit, they know the goals that need to be accomplished to achieve that mission, they know the metrics they need to hit to advance within that organizat…

> they know the metrics they need to hit to advance within that organization

This is really the one.

It seems like the country is in a crisis of metrics. Nobody trusts anybody to do their job anymore so everything has to have a surrounding bureaucracy with the stated purpose of keeping everybody honest but having the actual consequence of setting many misguided and contradictory rules and then strictly enforcing an arbitrary subset of them.

The people who succeed are then the people best able to game the bureaucracy rather than the people who are honest and good at their jobs.

That is basically how the Soviet Union fell. Something has got to change if we don't want to be next.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#90

Post by downandout »

I think it's a big stretch to compare this to uncrackable encryption. While the piece of tape makes one avenue of surveillance impossible, it doesn't block them all. If law enforcement needed to surveil him in the same way that a webcam could, they could get a court order and place a camera in his home.

Uncrackable encryption, on the other hand, blocks all possible avenues of surveiling the desired communications. That isn't a bad thing, but it is different than placing tape over a webcam. I am definitely a proponent of government-proof encryption technologies, but grasping at straws trying to call this guy a hypocrite seems like a wasted effort to me.

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