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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

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Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#81

Post by Xorlev »

slackfan wrote: post #18
tomohawk wrote: post #4

When it came out that government was looking at all of the data on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https. Everyone got involved. Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous? Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?

The Federal Government purges data that was non-encrypted after a number of years. The Federal Government retains a copy of all https-encrypted communications indefinitely on the understanding that the encryption may be broken at some point. The push to HTTPS was gleefully supported by the US federal government. HTTPS is not a panacea, and is generally useless for most non-sales applications.

You're neglecting to consider the most important aspect of HTTPS, even if you don't care about privacy or believe the encryption will eventually be broken: integrity.

HTTPS significantly raises the bar on MITM attacks, such as ISPs adding or replacing ads with their own.

It also prevents folks sitting in the same coffeeshop as you from snooping.

Calling "generally useless" is incredibly uncharitable.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#82

Post by kfrzcode »

There's clearly a market for the ExpressVPN types to market a packet sniffer that identifies who's getting what data, and potentially shut it down. Allow lists. etc. The tech isn't new, but it's not accessible to your average data-well a.k.a. end user, and risks breaking functionality....

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#83

Post by seneca »

shrubble wrote: post #55
candiddevmike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.

Only "nobodies" get shot. Funny how they never target any politicians, huh?

> Funny how they never target any politicians, huh?

They do. Here are a couple recent examples:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#84

Post by 01100011 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #57
01100011 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.

We also built it. You, I, practically anyone who has touched tech built this society.

Without a doubt. Especially all of us in the deep learning stack.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#85

Post by Ozzie_osman »

tremon wrote: post #44
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…

It's not quite China yet What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?

Yes.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#86

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…

>It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.

The US has a much wider intellegence reach and surveillance, not only on our own citizens but on the worlds.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#87

Post by specialist »

Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time.

Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ignorance.

We used Seisent (since bought by LexisNexus) in the mid-aughts. At the time, every person in North America was accounted for, with pretty good coverage of the Caribbean and Central America. The NSA bought a few clusters, then wove in their own datasets (phone use, location tracking, credit cards, library usage, email, etc).

There are many entities maintaining all encompassing panopticonic demographic databases. Governments and publicly traded companies. This is not refutable.

Ironically, in the USA, both voter registration and gun ownership are explicitly excluded. Because reasons. (You can't manage what you don't measure.)

We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights over vote registration "fraud", gun ownership, and conducting the consensus. Turn all those flash points into simple database queries.

We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#88

Post by fundad »

Can they tell us what members of our corporate security departments participated in Jan At this point we know our employers know but are covering it up so as not to anger RWers. We don't even know if insurrectionists were purged from corporate security departments or if the rest of the department has been vetted extra.

All we know is our employers want us back into the office to serve as their human shields.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#89

Post by chrismartin »

nixpulvis wrote: post #25

We need to demand more options on technology platforms! We cannot impose effective consumer pressure when we are forced to choose between two locked down App Stores which make it impossible to categorically prevent these kinds of malicious actions. How long do you think it would take for a "Little Snitch"-like application to pop up that firewalls location API access if the platforms were more open?

If you have (or are willing to buy) a compatible phone, GrapheneOS is as good as it gets in my experience -- pushes the envelope of usability and security more than any other mobile device OS yet. The sandboxed Google services compatibility layer (using device profiles) lets you have your privacy cake and eat proprietary apps when you need them, too.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#90

Post by Scoundreller »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #53
vorpalhex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.

with large datasets like bioinformatics you often compress the data by extracting features and building matrixes, then only keeping things that score above a threshold

Sounds right. I like to say we’re all on a list and it just matters where you rank on it. And the precision is only good when you rank high on it.

No different than google search results. The accuracy of the 7th page of results just doesn’t matter.

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