Right, but if I die, I don't want people accessing my phone after death. They can still get call and text metadata from the phone companies for 90+ days. In fact, I think even the text contents of SMS messages are available for 90 days. The stuff I send over encrypted services, I don't want read.
Wrong. It's a big part of it, but many enjoy the power. Many want an opportunity to just steal from you personally. Many want to get their numbers up and be the officer with the most stops/arrests/citations. We need to put solid limitations, nationally, on what they can and can't do.
Police don't get reprimanded in America. They just get paid vacation at worst. Shoot a handcuffed guy in the back of your squad car? "Oh, he must have had a gun we just didn't find when we searched him." Right. Right.
No, I think it's related to Facebook being a PRISM company and having a deplorable privacy policy, and generally giving no shits about privacy or security. Also, Mark's internet.org wasn't going to support HTTPS.
Yes; the entirety of our internet infrastructure is...almost...hopelessly insecure. The OpenSSL team refuses to even use SSL/TLS on their website because "they don't want anyone to get the slightest illusion that it's secure" and want everyone to manually verify the SHA hashes.
2) The OpenSSL source code is stored in a git repo in GitHub. While this doesn't ensure that the code hasn't been tampered with, git does make it substantially easier to detect tampering than other VCSs do.
3) All of the release tarballs are PGP signed. Verification of the authenticity of these files is just about as automatic as it gets.
Have they posted their concerns regarding SSL/TLS? It would make interesting reading. I am assuming the issue is the certificate issuance hierarchy and correspondent lack of transparency, but that's just a guess.
Of course if those hashes are also served via plaintext, then comparing them also doesn't matter, and using them as verification is akin to praying to not be compromised
It's not about oversight. They don't need to be spying on citizens whom are neither suspected of a crime nor have a warrant against them. I don't give a fuck it it solves crimes; I'd rather the criminals get away with it if this is the cost. It needs to stop.
Most forensic and evidentiary processes are pseudo-science at best this includes fingerprints which are still mostly matched by humans against smudges and not through some nifty CSI super computers since they well don't give as many positive results under any circumstances as law enforcement would like.
Other stuff like lie detectors which are in quite often use in the US are complete nonsense.
Witnesses are inherently unreliable, rarely they produce even remotely accurate testimonies, and in most cases tell the cops what they want to hear rather than what has actually happened.
Expert witnesses including law enforcement agents constantly give flawed testimonies and are inherently biased based on the nature of the case and the apparent guilt of the perpetrator.
Paid expert witnesses are even worse because they have a clear incentive to give testimony that will strengthen the case for the party which paid for their services, both state and federal level prosecutors have their pet experts that will tell the jury just what they want them to hear, same goes for many large criminal law firms.
So far only 2 types of evidence seem to increase conviction rates while drastically decrease wrongful convictions and these are audio/video recordings and DNA.
While I understand the fact that people do not like to be watched, and a smarter man that me once said that those who are willing to give up liberty for security are not worthy of either. In our current reality however increased privacy might actually result in loss of liberty, especially if you are a member of an at-risk group as far as unlawful convictions go.
This debate is decades old, and history shows that complaining about "spying" is not an effective method to keep new technology out of police hands.
If the police use a search light for better visibility a night? Not spying. Use binoculars? Not spying. Fly overhead? Not spying. Look into the windows of a barn which is "accessible only after crossing a series of "ranch-style" fences and situated one-half mile from the public road"? Not spying.
At least, not according to the US Supreme Court. There are of course many who object.
It's not even so much about "keeping technology out of the hands of police", it's about having appropriate safeguards against misuse and accountability for people granted the power to use (and abuse) it.
If we can't even indict police who shoot people in the back to go to trial(1), how can anyone believe cops won't use this to stalk ex girlfriends or anyone else they feel randomly curious about?
(Which is what I started off with, two comments upwards, with the statement 'one of the issues is to get right the level of oversight, transparency, and trust in the system to minimize abuse'.)
No, no. The FBI planes have "Stringray" devices on board and pick up people's private calls and their IMSI IDs. They also have FLIR/high-res cameras. This shit is not "public" when they pretend to be a cell-tower to MiTM your phone.
To be fair, stingrays now require warrants for anything other than immediate life/death situations and national security, and nothing is really private once they have a warrant.
"require"--cute. Even if "required" in all states including federally, who oversees this to ensure that said requirements are being followed? What keeps them from using it anyway?
Also, the very nature of these devices ensure that they capture data that does not belong to the suspect under warrant. Just because a suspect lives in an area near me, does not give them any right whatsoever to collect my data.
Someone like the CIA might ignore court rulings the FBI, other federal/state/local police don't ignore them as a matter of policy[1]. They'd never be able to introduce evidence from that in a court case, which is what their goal is.
[1] - of course, individual bad actors do break the rules. But as far as that goes, buying and servicing a drone is something that is hard to off the books.
>They'd never be able to introduce evidence from that in a court case, which is what their goal is.
This is often not true. Many cases have shown evidence of being put together through parallel construction. It's easy to find damning evidence if you know exactly where to look, the phone conversation that leads them to the evidence is not required.
The FBI planes circle cities for hours and hours, equipped with Stingrays and FLIR cameras. This has no place in a free society, period. The "orwelianness" is pretty dead-on-balls fucking accurate.
They use thermal cameras and stingrays. This is not technology that the public has access to. If traffic and CCTV cameras had thermal and cell-interception capabilities, people might be a bit more concerned. If I'm in my house, no one should be able to look inside it or intercept the signals from my phone. Do I need to thermally-insulate my house to get some fucking privacy?
Neither Thermographic nor SWIR cmeras can actually see through house walls, any internal heat source will be diffused, and bodies won't be picked up at all this isn't Hollywood.
Most modern CCTV cameras have SWIR mode for night operations.
Cell-interception is more easily achieved on a metro scale through carrier or base station based interception.
In any case Stingray is a brand name for an IMSI catcher made by Harris, they sell many other IMSI catchers to local law enforcement agencies.
Miami PD for example bought their hand-held version back in 2006.
They are quite often used in raids to pin point a specific house or an apartment.
Local police units have had this tech since the late 90's, in many places this was used in counter-drug and counter-organized crime operations, you had patrol cars with IMSI catchers that would drive through a neighborhood catching all cell-id's and matching them to known numbers of drug dealers and gang members.
Another average white guy here. I've had over 100 interactions with the police. More than 60% of the time, I was doing nothing wrong at all. Just gotta live in the wrong neighborhood.
