The Manual for the Mass Surveillance Tool Cops Use to Track Phones
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A warrant should be required. A warrant should be a cryptosecure signed file from the judge(s). The search tool should validate the signatures. The parameters in question should also be signed across and be the only allowed inputs.
Also there should be accountability for the reasonable expectation aspect of warrants. A realistic threshold should be enforced... If an officer or judge starts to dip below the threshold they should be seen as incompetent.
The issues run deeper. Court orders are widely rubberstamped. Circumventing legal processes like this creates a verneer of judicial review that's meaningless, because "judicial review" should not mean "a judge's eyes have scanned the warrant for the signature line he needs to sign on".
As a cherry on top, things like the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine are pretty unique to the US - most countries don't have something like it, or only forbid using evidence if the manner in which it was gathered was too egregiously illegal, but otherwise it doesn't matter if prosecutors obtained evidence legally or not. It doesn't take a genius to see how that's not exactly conducive for the LE system to stay in their legal lane.
We need CAPCHA for warrants!
I wrote the following to try and address that. I agree it's a big problem. > Also there should be accountability for the reasonable expectation aspect of warrants. A realistic threshold should be enforced... If an officer or judge starts to dip below the threshold they should be seen as incompetent.
Do you even? Who would you vote for for that not to happen? As far as I can tell, virtually 100% of both parties everywhere in the country support all of this.
2. Are you seriously trying to say that racial issues have nothing to do with excessive police surveillance?
Which is a politically worthless coalition if you want to actually get something done.
I think theft, property damage, violence upon innocent bystanders all clearly count as rioting.
The fuzzy part is more like what proportion of the people are rioting and how many are protesting and how to separate the former from the latter for the sake of justice.
And part of their job is to reasonably accurately not affect innocent people in the process.
Guess the amount of attributable property damage, and then click [1].
[1] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/2020-protests-changed...
The short answer to that is "the police have effectively executed a soft coup, and no politician or political process can meaningfully oppose them"
Let's put warrants on the block chain while we're at it!
I'm more talking about accountability and auditing (like an audit log of actions)
All paths to the dark side start with Fear.
Say what you want about the "system" and the two parties and so on, but we the people send our senators and reps to Congress, and the same is true at the state level. This type of thing would be best done at a state level to show people, particularly those in other states that it can work well.
Before you even get in the weeds as to how voting actually works, that two party thing you mentioned provides, at the ideal best, two people with two sets of ideas about how to get things done. IF they don't agree on how to manage something (say we get the rare politician who's not in favor of further deregulating banks), there's no guarantee that one of those two ideas will be any good, or aligned with the political zeitgeist they're supposed to represent. Much more often, the wedge issues they differ on are a fraction of the things they'll be making decisions about, and stuff like military spending, bank deregulation, and general market deregulation are bipartisan supported. So if you don't like either of those, you're effectively excluded from the political process.
Then, you have all the ways in which the voting process is gamed by those in charge of it. Gerimandering is an obvious and easy one to spot, but there are other, more pernicious methods employed - like restricting voting to a single day, not making voting a holiday, purging voter rolls prior to the primaries (we'll deal with the primaries in a second), restricting felons from voting (whilst making things like marijuana possession a felony, an easy way to shunt out the underprivileged). There's more, for good reading on this topic check out Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig.
We are married to first-past-the-post voting, which is demonstrably the worst system but the easiest to game.
The supreme court, which makes many of the most impactful political decisions, isn't voted in. And they have life terms. So even if you manage to make progress elsewhere, they can just decide that things should be different and change the way the law works.
The Senate arbitrarily distributes the power to block legislation among the least populous states, making it easier to manipulate the population into voting for people who will do this.
K Street (the lobbyists) literally get paid to 'help' draft legislation that favors only those who can afford it. Some of our laws are actually for sale.
Then you have the primaries, which are effectively controlled by two fairly small cabals of (who exactly? I dare you to enumerate the people involved). Each of which has it's own set of obtuse rules that's not subject to an iota of the scrutiny that actual elections are subject to, even though you could make the argument that the primaries are the more important election, because they decide what the two options will be.
Then there's the news. Rather, there's the institutions that claim to be news, but all of which behave more like winged propaganda machines, pumping their color and fueling anger at (whatever the wedge issues are for the other team today). These outlets all have things they will not talk about, like the issues with our elections or growing income inequality, because these things are precisely the things that the power structure, which all major news networks benefit from, is founded upon.
One thing both parties agree on completely; there should only be two parties. This would strike one as odd if they weren't so deeply acclimated to the situation.
Oh wait, no... that never actually happened because governments actually willingly give up power all the time.
And outside of the two instances you mentioned, the vast majority of quarantine measures were indeed voluntarily lifted without injunction from the courts.
But I suppose it's simply the nature of modern hyperreality that we must remember the past differently.
So you're saying that an investigator looking for a specific type of evidence cannot find other evidence of the same crime? Are they then supposed to go back to a judge to say now we need to modify the warrant or get a new warrant? Do they leave people around so the new evidence isn't removed while the new/updated warrant is obtained? Are their time limits on the execution of a warrant?
“Fruit of the poisonous tree” is a legal metaphor used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that if the source (the "tree") of the evidence or evidence itself is tainted, then anything gained (the "fruit") from it is tainted as well.
The doctrine underlying the name was first described in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920). The term's first use was by Justice Felix Frankfurter in Nardone v. United States (1939).
Such evidence is not generally admissible in court. For example, if a police officer conducted an unconstitutional (Fourth Amendment) search of a home and obtained a key to a train station locker, and evidence of a crime came from the locker, that evidence would most likely be excluded under the fruit of the poisonous tree legal doctrine.
The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine is intended to deter police from using illegal means to obtain evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
See also “exclusionary rule”:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22273682/fog-data-sci...
Appears the “device IDs” mentioned in the manual are:
- Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) or
- Android’s Advertising Identifier.
EFF post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/what-fog-data-science-...
I wish we knew which apps are contributing user location data to the Fog Feed. This is an egregious abuse of user trust, just to make a buck (or fractions of a penny per user).
Do Apple and / or the Google Play Store have policies about this? Are the app developers in breach of ToS?
That used to be true until apple implemented CSAM a black box that scans for hashes of straight to federal prison files. Without your consent or any way to audit it. No oversight.
Yeah I know its not 100% implemented yet but that is just a matter of time.
Of photos uploaded to iCloud. That's a far cry from persistent surveillance.
You'd have to be crazy to think the most popular American phone is free from government surveillance.
You've moved the goalposts. We're talking about warrantless surveillance. FISA courts are flawed. But they're subject to investigation, deliberation and reform in a way police buying commercial data is not. (The warrant process is first and foremost a gate. When it fails at that, as it appears to have with FISC, it serves as a judicial record.)
If we're going to demand user privacy, we need to do it properly. Apple has zero accountability, so they have zero incentive to not sabotage your privacy.
Is this distinct from the dataset of iCloud users that the NSA maintains, or the same one?
Finding out who visits the local gay clubs. Finding out whose fucking especially when this is valuable blackmail material. Making a list of everyone's religious affiliations because nobody has ever misused THAT before.
Keep track of all the abortion clinics and sell lawsuits as a service. Plug in your name and let it tell you if there is anyone you are eligible to collect 10,000 from. Just check a box to have papers sent to your door and theirs and wait while other people harvest their money like they already reaped their privacy.
Privacy laws are in need of radical revision and I think I need a new phone. Ideally one that isn't tied to my name and makes voip calls over an out of country vpn.
Once your location pops up in one of these things you are now a "person of interest" which is just a fancy way for the police to avoid saying "suspect"
You are now in a position forced to defend yourself from guilt rather than them finding something that points to you. Everything about police work is motivated towards finding a reason to pin guilt on you. Nothing is about exonerating you.
We will know that sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning someone robbed a location and due to imperfection of GPS signals your suspects will include dozens of people including people who walked by 2 streets over. Over time your suspect list will be less and less likely to contain the criminal but it will statistically likely contain at least a few who got in trouble previously especially minorities who can be threatened with 10 to 20 years in jail in order to make them accept 6 months -> probation or risk facing a jury of mostly white people. You can then successfully close tons of cases without finding any actual criminals, doing any real work, or even risking court.
And your local businesses get unpaid slave labor rented to them cheap. What a goddamn paradise. All we need is some cotton that needs picking you know or a soul and a shred of decency.
Yeah, It actually becomes worse for the innocent. The criminals can just leave their phone at home and actually have an alibi while committing the crime.
Meanwhile Mary Jo, is now a suspect for a murder because she wanted a coffee.
> It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails.
> …
> On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising IDs that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates rules the commission enforces. And there are bills before Congress now that, if passed, would regulate the industry.
1: https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-government-surv...
>>Fog Reveal refers to a company called Venntel as its “data partner,” but neither company would clarify their relationship to the outlet. Motherboard has reported extensively on how Venntel sources global advertising data from its parent company Gravy Analytics. The data itself comes from apps installed on peoples’ smartphones; app developers often enter agreements to sell their users location information to third parties. Venntel then sells its own surveillance product to government agencies, including Customs and Border Protection.
Seems this is no particular app, just apps SELLING the location data on to aggregators, who then sell it to Fog, who surface it in their Reveal product.
So, no need to identify a person or phone and phish them into installing your tracker. This is just find your crime, ID the phones in the area, and start tracking them based on location data sold into the marketplace...
While it's a great capability for the cops, it means that we really are at the point where we've all been sold a covert device to track our every move.
(And deleting our Google location history is worthless, as Google has nothing to do with this.)
Fingers crossed for 2023, though.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/440...
[1] https://www.commerce.senate.gov/hearings
[2] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/resources/pdf/2021_calend...
I think I need a smart phone without the actual phone part? But sometimes I need remote data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684
I remember a HN post from several years ago where a location data provider left an exposed API or web page that allowed anyone to enter a phone number and see the location of the device in real time, but I can't find it now.
Surveillance is really going in its worst way, if there's not a worse one.
All the google stuff spying on you goes to Google databases, which (at least as far as we know from public info and the news story here) requires a warrent.
It's non-Google apps that are sending location data to the 3rd party brokers supplying this tool. deGoogling a phone has nothing to do with these apps.