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Comment by artdigital | Hacker News Reader

> Agents built a detailed financial picture of Larry. Inspecting his cloud accounts, they found a Google Glass photo of a computer screen showing the Helix administrator page

Wow, a picture taken with google glass is one of the things that got him

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Sounds like parallel construction.

I'm not sure it's very good parallel construction. They say they only got the picture after subpoenaing data from his cloud account. So the police talking about this picture doesn't eliminate any public discussion of how the police got enough suspicion and evidence in order to get a subpoena in the first place.

The purpose of parallel construction is to not disclose the actual methods used by law enforcement because they may be illegal and/or disclose sources of information that they would like to keep confidential. It only needs to be minimally believable as a “stroke of luck” to the court. Law enforcement doesn’t particularly care if the public believes it or not as long as the methods aren’t disclosed.

I'm not saying anything about whether it's believable or not.

I'm saying that parallel construction is an explanation the government gives of how they found someone. But the government isn't saying they found him from this picture. They're saying they first found him, then subpoenaed his cloud account, then found this picture. Since this picture isn't an explanation of how they found him, it's not parallel construction.

Likelihood that these are always on, dumping data directly to the Feds?

They don’t need to. Just mail over a warrant and Google will happily do the data collection for them.

Zero, given that anyone can sniff the traffic.

There can never be a problem with OpenSSL or Log4j, they’re open source. Too many eyes on it to be a problem. Absolutes, cut it out.

To quote Theo De Raadt: “My favorite part of the “many eyes” argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric ([S Raymond] the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code.”

Besides what other people said, if a device is always on, dumping data directly to the Feds then it will be hot and its battery life will be very short.

Maybe smart phones would last a week on one charge if they weren't running the fed rootkit? :-p

My iphone 12 does last a week. But I only use it to check work email a few times a day. My android lasts a day and abhalf with normal use.

My cheap mid-end Android phone with Lineage+microG lasts some 10-12 days if used as a phone+email.

Based on the replies you received, somewhere between zero and 101%.

Jokes aside, my guess is zero. Transmitting that much data would probably be a lot. Maybe you could take a picture every 30 minutes and hide it away with other data if you really wanted to, but Google Glass was so short lived I imagine they had bigger things to worry about.

Well, Google Glass was a niche product and monitoring its users may have been of particular interest.

101%

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