Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

aclu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 158 posts

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#81

Post by ahbyb »

altec3 wrote: post #74
oil25 wrote: post #4

What a poorly designed site. Nothing but a spinning circle with Javascript disabled - Firefox reader mode doesn't work, either. Completely unacceptable from a privacy and usability perspective.

It's great if websites work without Javascript but, I don't think its fair to call them poorly designed if they dont. The web is made from HTML, CSS and Javascript. Turn off one of them and of course things aren't going to work or look right.

You don't need javascript to show some paragraphs of text with hyperlinks. You don't even need css. If that does not work, this is not a case of poor design, this is simply absolute crap.

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#82

Post by saagarjha »

lefstathiou wrote: post #79
caconym_ wrote: post #7

I wish we would stop emphasizing the social justice/accuracy concerns so heavily when talking about this. Starting that way will cause a huge segment of the population to switch off as soon as you start talking. Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who yo…

Yes. I don't believe our government is inherently evil and unjust. They have and will continue to have access to all this information legally anyway (if it exists, they can legally get it). On the plus side, I see a lot of positives with this. I'm tired of graffiti everywhere. The other day I was walking home and some kid picked up a metal trash can on the corner of 37th and 8th, dumped it in the middle of the road a…

> They have and will continue to have access to all this information legally anyway (if it exists, they can legally get it).

There are checks in place for this so they don’t abuse their access; checks that we find so important that we put it directly into our Bill of Rights.

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#83

Post by Springtime »

throwaway_law wrote: post #56
mfer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spoken with people who have said they are ok with it. But, when I start asking questions or sharing details on how this has been abused I tend to find they have not thought it through and are often unaware. In some cases people think I'm crazy until I show them press coverage on it. I've learned that many don't have the depth of knowledge I have on the topic and have formed opinions with a puddles worth of infor…

>I've spoken with people who have said they are ok with it, when I start asking questions or sharing details on how this has been abused I tend to find they have not thought it through In the future just ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to you so you can look at their email, text and browser history. Watch them hesitate and refuse.

This form of argument was covered in Daniel J. Solove's ''I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (available to read online), which goes into some detail about how such analogies are rather easily countered since they're not based on actual examples (privacy 'dead bodies' so to speak) that demonstrate abuse/negative impacts.

In this case the analogy being made is that by accepting certain forms of say, government agency snooping, they should therefore be fine with you seeing their data at a whim. However people often see themselves as an irrelevant target to the government and/or that given the vast number of data being collected they would be a blip and less likely to be personally spied upon, so they reason themselves out of being concerned (or having any concern for others that may be impacted).

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#84

Post by dredmorbius »

caconym_ wrote: post #7

I wish we would stop emphasizing the social justice/accuracy concerns so heavily when talking about this. Starting that way will cause a huge segment of the population to switch off as soon as you start talking. Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who yo…

A fair point, thought the accuracy issue is a real one, and one that may get traction as more people deal with incorrect, misleading, false, and/or outdated information in various records such as credit reports or health records. At scale innacuracies enter into data stores, and are difficult to root out. They can persist for years.

My rephrase of Acton's dictum cuts two ways: Data corrupts, and absolute data corrupts absolutely. That is, it both tends to corrupt the institutions, organisations, and individuals holding, accessing, or influencing it, and the information itself recorded tends to acquire errors and inaccuracies over time. Those inaccuracies will often be far more significant to the subjects of that information than the holders or collectors.

(In fact the original formulation of that phrase referred to a case of data corruption, not institutional corruption, though both were manifestly apparent at the time.)

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#85

Post by dredmorbius »

Springtime wrote: post #83
throwaway_law wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've spoken with people who have said they are ok with it, when I start asking questions or sharing details on how this has been abused I tend to find they have not thought it through In the future just ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to you so you can look at their email, text and browser history. Watch them hesitate and refuse.

This form of argument was covered in Daniel J. Solove's ''I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (available to read online), which goes into some detail about how such analogies are rather easily countered since they're not based on actual examples (privacy 'dead bodies' so to speak) that demonstrate abuse/negative impacts. In this case the analogy being made is that by accepting certain fo…

Solove, "I've got nothing to hide": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#86

Post by state_less »

bilbo0s wrote: post #72
state_less wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my response would be, "My party voted in the government, so yeah, we voted for the right to look through your phone. Now hand it over or do you want to be a law breaking criminal too?"

And they'd still say, "You're not the government." And they'd be right. If you were part of the government, you wouldn't need to ask to see the data on her Facebook or whatever. You'd probably already have some secret access. I mean they're right. "You're not the government, and if you were you wouldn't need to ask." Point is, they trust the government implicitly. (And, for most voters, completely, in matters of secu…

And I'd say, "My party cares enough about safety that we voted that any card carrying party member can do a citizen search if they sense anything suspicious about another citizen. So hand over the phone"

Hopefully we can install a sense of where things can lead to.

Most folks aren't familiar with such strong tactics, but hopefully they are starting to become more so with party sanctioned violence (e.g. punch that opposing guy in the face).

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#87

Post by oil25 »

altec3 wrote: post #74
oil25 wrote: post #4

What a poorly designed site. Nothing but a spinning circle with Javascript disabled - Firefox reader mode doesn't work, either. Completely unacceptable from a privacy and usability perspective.

It's great if websites work without Javascript but, I don't think its fair to call them poorly designed if they dont. The web is made from HTML, CSS and Javascript. Turn off one of them and of course things aren't going to work or look right.

> The web is made from HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Considering the World Wide Web predates Javascript by many years, and the fact it's possible to create a functional, readable, and accessible Web page without Javascript altogether, this characterization is absolutely inaccurate.

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#89

Post by 1996 »

lefstathiou wrote: post #79
caconym_ wrote: post #7

I wish we would stop emphasizing the social justice/accuracy concerns so heavily when talking about this. Starting that way will cause a huge segment of the population to switch off as soon as you start talking. Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who yo…

Yes. I don't believe our government is inherently evil and unjust. They have and will continue to have access to all this information legally anyway (if it exists, they can legally get it). On the plus side, I see a lot of positives with this. I'm tired of graffiti everywhere. The other day I was walking home and some kid picked up a metal trash can on the corner of 37th and 8th, dumped it in the middle of the road a…

I prefer to live with the occasional graffiti.

You like mainland, go live there. One more sea turtle, everybody is happy.

Re: The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

#90

Post by oil25 »

hackerrenews wrote: post #71
oil25 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of assuming you could lock down your internet pipe. Use a RPi as a security appliance with strong whitelisted firewall policy. At least have some insight into what traffic is going to and from your LAN. Not only would a Raspberry Pi be severely under-powered for routing even a small home network, in no way does monitoring that "goes to and from your LAN" defend against an adversary Snowden warns about. > Co…

You used “either”, then “nor”, sorry I lost the point you were making. Wasn’t sure on your point about the adversary already owning the pipe. Tailored exploitation is a good point though. Admittedly RPi isn’t any current advice except for outdated hobbyist advice. If I cared to defend against nation state I’d avoid gen purpose CPU’s altogether and focus on in house manufactured minimal circuits, possibly fpga’s and p…

> The poster was concerned about video being hacked. This would be hard to hide, at least for being owned in real-time, if one were keeping track of the packets coming and going.

How would keeping track of packets detect a compromised web cam absolutely? An SSL-encrypted connection to Amazon servers, for example, could easily be used to exfiltrate pictures, audio and even low-bandwidth recordings while still blending in with typical, expected Web traffic.

Post reply on HN