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

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

aclu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 327 posts

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

#91

Post by _jal »

01100011 wrote: post #10
hunglee2 wrote: post #2

I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a surveillance state

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.

It is a sad kind of funny, watching people realize what happened.

I saw someone I know ranting elsewhere recently about how "nobody saw this coming" and "nobody warned us". I called him out on this, because I vividly remembered a conversation with him when he was telling me what a paranoid weirdo I was, and how self-important I was being, to assume anyone cared enough about what I had to say.

He claimed to not remember it. I found the email thread, mostly to make sure I wasn't wrong, but chose to stop responding instead.

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

#92

Post by nixpulvis »

kelnos wrote: post #77
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?

I mean, we have that: Android has plenty of alternative ROMs, many of which have Google services removed or otherwise sandboxed. But, overwhelmingly, people (myself included) do not choose to take this route, because they are much less user-friendly, and you lose functionality. Regarding "firewalling location API access", that's something that you get for default on both Android and iOS, no? Granted, there's no guara…

What I'm trying to say is that there should be significant pressure on companies like Apple and Google to take their successful and user friendly platforms and open them up so we can implement the functions we want without opting to replace the whole thing (rooted or jailbroken) ROMs.

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

#93

Post by StanislavPetrov »

ok_dad wrote: post #40
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…

Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…

>Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up.

It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues):

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer...

By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day".

>It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...

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

#94

Post by StanislavPetrov »

vorpalhex wrote: post #42
ok_dad wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…

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.

The NSA has an unlimited budget to store all the data they want. They have massive, billion-dollar data centers around the country (and the world?). The one in Utah is perhaps the best known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

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

#96

Post by tomohawk »

gruez wrote: post #17
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?

It's literally not possible because the mobile network needs to know where your phone is so it can route packets to the tower that you're connected.

But it doesn't need to know who you are.

The whole problem is that a person's identity is more and more entangled with a tracking device.

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

#97

Post by wahnfrieden »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #56
atlas_shrugged wrote: post #50

I wish the apple privacy team would address this, otherwise what good are their privacy claims

Depends on your threat model. I don't include state actors in mine, they can employ $5 hammers just as easily as crypto breakers

you’re fine with state actors being able to precisely target propaganda / inciting calls to violence based on psychological profiles etc, including your neighbors

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

#98

Post by sneak »

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.

This is not accurate.

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

#99

Post by gruez »

tomohawk wrote: post #96
gruez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally not possible because the mobile network needs to know where your phone is so it can route packets to the tower that you're connected.

But it doesn't need to know who you are. The whole problem is that a person's identity is more and more entangled with a tracking device.

In that case you can just get a burner phone + data SIM, and route all your calls/texts via VOIP provider.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

sva_ wrote: post #9

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN