Bugged, Tracked, Hacked
9jumpin.com.au
9jumpin.com.au
But nobody is doing anything. Nobody is making noise. Young people (and I feel old for saying this) accept this as the norm. Bleh
These days you might feel a bit uncomfortable with sending pictures to a friend. But life in the western world is not uncomfortable enough to spur the masses into direct action. I think the change with regards to spying/hacking/bugging will come slowly and not as a result of mass protesting.
- Protest? Recent events have shown the media will simply turn face and demonize us as pariahs.
- Activism? When faced with the backlash from "I have nothing to hide....you must have something to hide," most people don't know how to respond to this logical fallacy[0]
- Spreading Awareness? Now this is something I can get behind. But tell me how one goes "greyhat" and explains himself to authorities. AFAIK, even POTUS is given sec disclosures and does nothing on them.
Finally you have to consider the sheer amount of young folks, men and women, who are now earning their livelihoods from this same issue. I scoff at it as a developer, but I can't harp on the vast numbers of unemployed seeking ad revenue on their blogs (which goes hand and hand with massive corporate surveillance) as a way to make money and support themselves.
- Activism? When faced with the backlash from "I have nothing to hide....you must have something to hide," most people don't know how to respond to this logical fallacy
> Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/just_days_left...
While more and more people are seriously considering the question, a good majority of people would still say yes without any reservation.
Until we can convince the majority of the population we don't need to give up privacy to continue to be safe, they're going to keep brushing those "anti-government nutjobs" off. It's just noise to them until they're personally impacted.
Last year a student discovered that Slovenian military and police communications system TETRA isn't configured to encrypt: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
The official response was to terrorize and prosecute, even in cases of responsible disclosure. Of course, it's impossible for them to fix issues that arise from insecure design, but they also seem to be ignorant of the Streisand effect.
As somebody else commented, we have yet to reach the tipping point, when general public becomes concerned with the privacy of mobile networks. Mainstream TV shows like this one might bring that moment closer. I just hope they do enough fear-mongering before deadly crime happens, or people gradually accept lack of privacy as the norm. The former is tragic, and the latter paves the way for oppression.
For instance on the IMSI catcher, from what I understood they are a form of MIM attack where a fake base station connect to your phone and forces it to switch to non-encrypted mode. Why non-encrypted mode exists? Well, in the past (20 years or more) encryption was expensive and base station huge and bulky, none believed it was a conceivable attack. So they introduced a signal to switch of encryption to increase capacity in emergency.
Now you could trick cellphone to switch to un-encrypted and intercept traffic. Why this vulnerability hasn't been closed? Many reasons, first of all even if base station are no longer configured to support this mode, they should accept unencrypted traffic for inter-operability and the same it's for phones. Furthermore, it makes a lot easier to implement devices like personal base station to enhance network coverage in buildings.
Also, there's the "next gen" bug. It is almost 8 years that telco company think about 4th gen technology, the LTE network and VoLTE. This is an paper a totally new systems built with new technology and new threat model in mind. It is not perfect but far better. The issue? Implementation took longer than expected (as usual) and none want to spend money and time in fixing something that will be replaced. Sounds familiar?
The way I see it is this: If it can have security holes, it will have them and they will be exploited. And what software cannot have security holes? By that line of reasoning, we reasonably should have known that such a system would have security holes that would be exploited when it was created in 1975. So this is hardly news.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/for-sale-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/12/18...