I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist. Highlighting instances of abuse and the quasi-legal nature of the industry doesn’t really get at the interesting part, which is _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_.
I recently completed Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (a partial account of his presidency), and he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. I often think about this when I drive past Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores; our leaders seem more enticed by the power of this technology than they are afraid of vague abuses happening in _not here_. It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue.
By analogy, I feel that reporting on the dangers of fire isn’t really as effective as reporting on why we don’t have arson laws and fire alarms and social norms that make our society more robust to abuse of a useful capability. People who like cooked food aren’t going to engage with anti-fire positions if they just talk about people occasionally burning each other alive. We need to know more about what can be done to protect the average person from downsides of fire, as well as who is responsible for regulating fire and what their agenda for addressing it is. I’d love to see an article identifying who is responsible for installing these Flock cameras in my area, why they did so, and how we can achieve the positive outcomes desired from them (e.g. find car thieves) without the negatives (profiling, stalking, tracking non-criminals, etc).
armchairhacker 2 days ago [-]
Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions.
An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology.
The problem is in practice:
- Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes.
- Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one.
- Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power.
Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.
tripzilch 4 hours ago [-]
don't try and tell me that some power can corrupt a person, you haven't had enough to know what it's like
(Nine Inch Nails - Capital G)
bombdailer 2 days ago [-]
There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other.
Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.
potato3732842 2 days ago [-]
>governments and laws exist to ensure justice
Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies.
Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient.
You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.
airstrike 2 days ago [-]
Governments exist to monopolize violence in the hands of a few so that we may have less violence and more order overall.
churchill 1 days ago [-]
>There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other.
So, Singapore?
martin-t 2 days ago [-]
> Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors
This whole way of thinking makes my skin crawl.
Just like sex, any kind of power exchange needs consent.
This whole idea that people are led or need to be led is wrong. Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine. What politicians are is decision makers, not leaders.
We don't have time to vote on every single law personally, so we appoint temporary assistants who do it for us, based on our preferences. That's how it should work.
These assistants should work for us, not lead us. We should always have the power to override their decisions and to remove and replace them at any time. Of course, making this work in a practical manner, while satisfying constraints such as secrecy of votes, is difficult. I don't dispute that but we should be striving to find ways to get as close to this ideal as possible, not making politics into a career or treating it as a reality show.
And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
hammock 2 days ago [-]
Personally I would still call that leading/being led*, nonetheless that is a great reframe and I agree.
It also helps make the point of what it means to say “society is breaking down” or “democracy is at stake” or “faith in institutions in decline.” What it really means is that those whom were thought of as leaders no longer have the consent of the followers, who are making their own decisions now- often to ill effect of any strangers around them
*cf servant leadership as one particularly clear conceptualization
CobrastanJorji 2 days ago [-]
Voting isn't necessarily a better system. The majority of people will very frequently give up rights in any given specific case that, in general, they hold dear. We're not rational actors.
And there are a lot of really weird discussions to be had about "consent," too. If we allow unlimited speech, that means that we're all subject to marketing and propaganda, and that's another thing that people are quite vulnerable to. Being convinced to vote via propaganda isn't really a great example of consent. But banning any speech that resembles propaganda is rife with problems.
Anyway, my point is that democracy/voting and free speech isn't necessarily the most free/consented-to form of government. I'm not sure what would take its place, though. I certainly wish I knew.
hammock 2 days ago [-]
Dunno where parent said anything about democracy. Democracy and voting aren’t the same thing also they rejected the idea of voting on every law (democracy).
It seems inherent in your worldview that you lack faith in people to self govern (that is, for a person to govern themselves. Which would explain why you are at odds with the parent. I suggest you read a bit of Jefferson’s ideas of self governance, education, etc. There are tradeoffs as with everything else, I do think based solely on your short commentary here that there may be an opportunity for your perspective to be enriched however
scandox 1 days ago [-]
> Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine.
In aggregate most people do need leadership. The kind of technocratic/managerial approach you suggest has led to the current societal problems we have: a vacuum of real leadership being filled by people willing to do it.
Whether it "should" or "shouldn't" be your problem is irrelevant to the reality.
AnthonyMouse 2 days ago [-]
> And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
Whether they pick them or you pick them, you still have the same problem.
Bad people often get into office. Politicians lie, major parties both run bad candidates, sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo.
Expecting that never to happen is a lot less pragmatic than setting things up ahead of time to mitigate the damage when it does.
potato3732842 2 days ago [-]
>Bad people often get into office.
The constraints of the office ought to account for that.
armchairhacker 2 days ago [-]
But the people in office need some power, enough to cause problems if they're bad. Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
Hence the root problem, that we haven't discovered a way to consistently have "good" government, whether it's a dictatorship or democracy. Perhaps with technology, we can invent a better form of government, e.g. a "super-democracy" where people vote on individual decisions (though even today I can imagine issues that would cause).
Until then, the key point I make is that you can have a government where some people ("leaders") do have more power than others, but not enough power for total control. The hopefully-realistic ideal is that the government has enough power to defend itself against an external threat always, and coordinate large projects when functioning well; but not too much so that, when functioning badly, essential internal systems are preserved, and when it's replaced (because as mentioned it will eventually collapse) the transition is minimally disruptive.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> But the people in office need some power, enough to cause problems if they're bad. Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
You can prohibit the government from doing things it should never do (e.g. mass surveillance) without prohibiting it from doing things it ought to be doing (e.g. enforcing antitrust laws).
The problem is we currently do the opposite: The government is doing mass surveillance but not antitrust enforcement.
potato3732842 2 days ago [-]
>Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
We're pretty f-ing far from even having to think about those problems.
martin-t 2 days ago [-]
> sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo
This is absolutely a thing and it's a thing because at some point, people notice how little power they actually have.
Every person's opinion is a point in N-dimensional space.
Representative democracy is describing that point (expressing their political opinion) by picking 1 point out of a handful of pre-determined options (parties/representatives). Some countries only have 2 real choices.
That's absolutely insane, no wonder people feel like their vote doesn't matter, they often can't even find a choice remotely close to their real preferences.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
First past the post is bad. Score voting is good. Guess which one we currently use.
vasco 1 days ago [-]
Ego got triggered by the thought of being led?
Your only suggestion other than the semantic complaint seems like it would work terribly, there's a reason we elect people for fixed terms and don't yank them out randomly.
snackbroken 1 days ago [-]
Functioning democracies do yank out their elected representatives. Not randomly or even arbitrarily of course, but when they step egregiously out of line. Votes of no confidence, recall elections, impeachment, general strikes demanding resignation, and a smattering of other measures are crucial checks on the abuse of power. Electing someone to be untouchable for a set period of time is a recipe for malfeasance with examples going back as far as the invention of the term "dictator".
vasco 1 days ago [-]
Re-read the comment I replied to and check if that comment was referring to everything being great already because those systems are in place or if they were calling for some kind of ad-hoc popular vote at any point during a mandate based on not liking the policies, rather than for egregious actions as you described. Your reply is theoretically correct but not what I replied to.
immibis 1 days ago [-]
> the benefits of low crime
Note: An ideal government wouldn't define a bunch of victimless behaviour as a crime. Low crime would mean low murder, low car hijackings, etc - things that actually affect people.
Definitions differ person to person, but many things we consider benign today like sexual activities between consenting adults, racial integration, even free travel have at times and in places been considered crimes.
Today, homelessness is often criminalized. As is drug use even among otherwise productive law abiding citizens. Assisted suicide is often criminalized, even for terminally ill and suffering consenting adults.
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
I think it really depends on what you consider to be a victimless crime. I think nobody considers the same thing both to be a crime and a victimless crime. For example the article discusses adultery. There is obviously a third person harmed there, it only matters whether you care about that enough. Same with drug use. Drug use forces people to do other crimes and also invites people to take drugs that wouldn't otherwise, whether you consider these to be victims is on you of course.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
> Drug use forces people to do other crimes
Something like 98% of humanity partakes of caffeine which is very clearly an addictive drug with one of the higher measures of addictive potential among all drugs in most evaluations. Drug use isn't what drives people to commit crime. Lack of support systems do. Drug use is often a coping mechanism associated with lack of support systems.
To quote John Ehrlichman, Whitehouse counsel and assistant to President Nixon: “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”
Disrupted communities lack support systems and further drive folks to criminality as a means of surviving.
Homosexuality and sodomy (i.e. sex without the intent of procreation) are clearer examples of criminalized sexual behavior between two consenting adults. I know some folks who'd like to outlaw them today in the US and they are currently outlawed elsewhere, but I believe what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their own business.
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
> caffeine
Not all drugs are created equal, withdrawal symptoms are different.
> Homosexuality and sodomy
They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
> Not all drugs are created equal, withdrawal symptoms are different.
Not in my experience. I have voluntarily withdrawn from caffeine, opiates (administered by a hospital), and cannabis. All experiences were remarkably similar. When I run support groups for folks who've used drugs, I recommend folks experiment with caffeine withdrawal to gain experience with the process. It requires at least two weeks of cessation.
> They do affect the future population count
Seems that you're assuming homosexual folks would otherwise procreate if forced into heterosexual relationships, which is quite a stretch. I also know quite a few homosexual couples who raise scads of children. And childless heterosexual couples. This argument doesn't hold water.
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
> All experiences were remarkably similar.
Cool, my decision to not use caffeine is justified then.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
What you do in the privacy of your own home is your business :) Victimless as it were.
That said, should you find yourself in a health emergency, as I did, and hooked up to a dilaudid drip for weeks, as I was, you may find experience with the symptoms of withdrawal to be quite useful for getting yourself through the worst of it, as I did.
Withdrawal is part of the human experience you don't always have a choice to avoid. Fear, avoidance, and ignorance of it makes potentially involuntary encounters with drugs more dangerous. Besides fueling unnecessarily destructive policy decisions.
Worth a think.
1718627440 24 hours ago [-]
Sadly there are way more drugs in the world to never have used any. Drugs (now-a-days) don't even need to be physical.
Sindisil 23 hours ago [-]
> They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born.
So does abstention.
By your logic, then, if sodomy and homosexuality were illegal, then adults of child bearing age would be legally required to have sex.
Likewise, those unable to participate in conception would be prohibited from having sex.
1718627440 22 hours ago [-]
Preventing misuse does not necessarily mean everyone should do it, so I fail to accept your logic.
Anyways I didn't want to discuss that, my claim was that you either think of something as victimless or you think it is a crime. Your data point seams to only fit this claim. To disprove it you would need to find something you consider victimless, but still think it should be a crime.
immibis 16 hours ago [-]
Why is misuse of drugs bad? And don't say "because it's misuse" - that would be circular.
I agree that people who think drugs, anal sex, or whatever should be a crime, can also rationalize that someone is the victim. They're wrong, of course, but they still think it.
When you said:
> They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.
It appeared that you were not just stating what those crazy people who think anal sex should be a crime think, but what you thought. That's why you got replies arguing against the idea that anal sex should be a crime. You could have made it clear if you were just stating the views that crazy people have.
1718627440 15 hours ago [-]
> And don't say "because it's misuse" - that would be circular.
Well that's the meaning of misuse, if it weren't bad it wouldn't be misuse. You can only ask whether something is misuse or how bad it is, asking whether misuse is bad is questioning a tautology.
> Why is misuse of drugs bad?
Actually I was replying to this:
> By your logic, then, if sodomy and homosexuality were illegal, then adults of child bearing age would be legally required to have sex.
So I was talking about misuse of sexuality.
> I agree that people who think drugs, anal sex, or whatever should be a crime, can also rationalize that someone is the victim.
Yes that what I wanted to point out. I was merely enumerating examples from the Wikipedia article.
> but what you thought.
I do think homosexuality is bad and unnatural. (No don't tell me it occurs in animals, any behaviour occurs in animals.) I don't think it should be a crime, so I don't think my opinion affects other people.
------
If we were to talk about my opinion about drugs in general, I think as to them being bad, they are kind of at the same level as money. You shouldn't become attached to them. They are more dangerous the more likely you become attached to them.
For any specific drug, I find the smell of cannabis to smell dangerous and poisonous in a weird and unexplainable way. I would like it, if this would go away, so I am in favor of banning it again. I also heard of studies indicating a rise in schizophrenia especially among young people (<30) and I don't wish that to anybody, just because someone tries to make money. I also don't think it's smart to do that, if you already have a lack of young people. But I lack the knowledge to check this for soundness.
I wouldn't mind smoking to go away from public spaces, I hate when I'm forced to inhale this. But I can't judge if it is justified.
I think alcohol is grand-fathered in. I also think there are very different kind of alcoholic beverages and also very different kind of usages. There are cultures that regularly drink liquor before eating heavy food, because it has a positive impact on the digestive system, but this is only about a few milliliters, so it is more like medicine. There is also a bit of alcohol in every apple. I think alcoholic beverages are too fundamentally incorporated in our culture, so I would find it sad to see it go away. I wouldn't mind having additional restrictions on harder stuff.
I don't think coffee causes any larger issues.
I also think we don't need to discuss restricting access to sugar. Medical appliance of drugs is very restricted and constantly reevaluated.
I wish that large amounts of money would be more regulated, but I don't think we should touch the concept of private ownership. Also fashion or cars are the drugs of many, and now there is a large supply of non-physical drugs, but I don't know any non-restrictive policy that I want to support there.
I don't have experienced any other/harder drug and I prefer it to stay that way.
timschmidt 5 hours ago [-]
>> And don't say "because it's misuse" - that would be circular.
> Well that's the meaning of misuse
> I do think homosexuality is bad and unnatural. (No don't tell me it occurs in animals, any behaviour occurs in animals.)
Well, friend, that's the meaning of natural. "Found in nature"
Playing word games with one will get you called out in the same way on the other, regardless of your cognitive dissonance on the subject.
IT4MD 20 hours ago [-]
You state this like there aren't numerous other ways to fund these programs already.
We can start with actually taxing people with multiple piles of Scrooge McDuck money, as opposed to the current approach of cutting social programs that benefit millions of citizens to provide even MORE tax breaks for these "people".
Are you even serious with this?
1718627440 18 hours ago [-]
What programs? What are you even talking about? Can you quote the stuff you are responding to?
IT4MD 17 hours ago [-]
Your statement:
> Homosexuality and sodomy
They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.
===============================================================================
I assumed you were concerned with all social programs and not just your personal pension, hence the statement. Fixing pensions, while all other social safety net programs get gutted is not the way. Basic breeding by heterosexuals isn't the panacea you seem to believe it is, imo.
The real issue with US population growth is the insane world we live in. It's not "the gays failing to procreate". That's a laughable statement.
WTF would want to bring children into the world when literal criminals, rapists and alcoholics are running things, racism is on the rise and cheered, laws are optional for specific groups of people while abused for everyone else, SCOTUS is a complete parody of a court, Congress is run by wholly unserious people, prices of everything are rocketing up not because of genuine supply chain issues, or similar, but because of plain, old greed and much, much, much more.
Let's not forget that AI is being developed at a record pace to replace jobs, while shafting the working class, instead of being used to uplift everyone.
"The gays" were never the problem and never will be for population growth.
1718627440 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, I was only talking about pensions, I don't think homosexuality has an effect on any other social security system.
Trying to fix pensions by forbidding homosexuality is laughable yes. There aren't even enough homosexuals for that to matter.
However a standard way to evaluate social norms is the categorical imperative. If everybody was homosexual we would have an issue there. But the only thing I wanted to say is that it does affect people, I didn't want to propose or defend any policy change.
Also I wasn't talking about money. This only gets you a portion of the future economy, the amount of young people decides how much economy there will be.
> WTF would want to bring children into the world when literal criminals, rapists and alcoholics are running things, racism is on the rise and cheered, laws are optional for specific groups of people while abused for everyone else, SCOTUS is a complete parody of a court, Congress is run by wholly unserious people, prices of everything are rocketing up not because of genuine supply chain issues, or similar, but because of plain, old greed and much, much, much more.
I don't live in the USA, so I don't think I should have opinions about your internal issues, but I do think you have a problem with authoritarianism there. But whose country hasn't so who am I to judge. However I do not understand this sentiment. How does it matter if the world is a shit show? When wasn't it that in the large scale of things? That seams to be the exception not the rule. It also completely fails to account, that people tend to have more children in darker times not less. Also how do you improve that world if not by raising children. You won't have any more lasting impact on the way of life of someone than on your children. "Science advances on funeral at a time." I think this applies to everything.
immibis 16 hours ago [-]
The categorical imperative always admits more than one possible rule. The rule that works here is that everyone should have sex with whatever gender they want to - not that everyone should be homosexual. Since most people are straight, the human race won't go extinct.
1718627440 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
immibis 4 hours ago [-]
"It's bad to breathe molecule #346739572384143 of oxygen, because if everyone would breathe molecule #346739572384143 of oxygen, we'd all share the same lungs and be some kind of Siamese octbillionuplets"
The categorical imperative says: decide rules that would be good if everybody followed them, and then follow those rules. "Everyone should be homosexual" seems to be a bad rule, but "everyone should have sex with whatever gender they like" seems to be a good rule, so you should follow it. It doesn't say you shouldn't be homosexual because it would be bad if everyone was homosexual.
immibis 22 hours ago [-]
If inviting someone to take drugs is a crime because it harms others, then inviting someone to take drugs should be the crime - taking them yourself should not be. You could even stretch it to mean that taking drugs in public should be a crime (like how it is with sex) since other people might see you. But it doesn't justify making it illegal to take drugs in private.
1718627440 22 hours ago [-]
That's how it works in some jurisdictions and I think that is a good approach.
> Although the acquisition, cultivation and possession, import and export (smuggling), and trade, as well as other forms of distribution of narcotics, are punishable under the Narcotics Act, this does not apply to mere consumption. The consumption of a drug meets the freedom of action and is therefore protected by the German constitution. Colloquially, this is also called “the right to get high”. Any prohibition or ban would be against the constitution and, therefore, is not enforceable. But since the offence of possession is already met by solely holding something in your hands, one of the above-mentioned actions is always going to be equally met when consuming a drug.
It doesn't obviously change anything in practice.
immibis 1 days ago [-]
Think of smoking marijuana on your balcony at home. Society does not get better if we punish that more - or at all. That just shouldn't be a crime to begin with. You also shouldn't do it, because smoking is bad for you, but that's not a reason to make it a crime.
Though it may be that a better society makes fewer people want to smoke.
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
You do pay people growing plants that don't provide a good to society and you do alter your state of mind which affects others and you do destroy your health a cost which also payed by others.
xkcd-sucks 1 days ago [-]
Basically these are the effects of a job in software management, minus the plants
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
Care to elaborate that?
immibis 22 hours ago [-]
Watching Netflix. You pay people streaming movies that don't provide a good to society and you do alter your state of mind which affects others and you do destroy your health a cost which also payed by others.
The argument you used earlier could be applied to literally anything, so if it's valid, literally everything should be a crime. I don't think the argument is valid.
You can't counter-argue that streaming movies is good for society, but growing plants isn't. I think it's the other way around, actually.
1718627440 22 hours ago [-]
They do produce movies. I think comparing them to producing addictives to keep a mafia and money washing system operating is a bit disingenuous. I also think movies in general do not remove your ability to form clean thoughts, having goals in life and invoke hallucinations and make you paranoid.
Maybe I shouldn't have used a bunch of euphemisms that sound ridiculous when taken literally.
immibis 16 hours ago [-]
Some drugs are addictive. Some are not. Some are pretty benign. Do you drink coffee? Alcohol? Actually, alcohol is much worse for you than some illegal drugs are. So is Tylenol - that's actually one of the easiest drugs to fatally overdose on, and you can buy it over the counter. Perhaps each substance should be judged on its own merits and not whether it's legal or illegal.
1718627440 15 hours ago [-]
No. Yes ~5 times a year, cumulative maybe half a liter. Yeah heard that.
Honestly I am neither a medicine, nor a chemist, nor a psychologist, so I don't feel qualified to discuss anything here.
1718627440 1 days ago [-]
Everyone has good intentions including the actual Nazis.
AnthonyMouse 2 days ago [-]
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety.
This is a cowardly excuse. It's another way of saying that if you reform mass surveillance you'll be blamed for anything bad that subsequently happens, regardless of whether the mass surveillance would have prevented it. And bad things happen on a regular basis with or without mass surveillance, so then the politically risk-averse move is to not solve the problem you promised to solve and not expose yourself.
Which is cowardly specifically because the candidate's original position was correct. You can solve crimes without mass surveillance, or prevent them by reducing poverty etc. If you do those things then the chances of something bad happening go down instead of up.
And it will still not be zero -- it won't be zero no matter what you do -- but in that case you're only worried about adversarial pundits blaming you for things that weren't your fault, and adversarial pundits are going to do that regardless.
calibas 1 days ago [-]
> _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_
Surveillance makes their jobs easier, so there's a kind of natural tendency towards authoritarianism. We've known about this for a long time, the 4th Amendment was created to put limits on government surveillance.
If you're wondering why the government would allow private businesses to spy on everybody when the government itself isn't allowed to, that's because this allows for the government to effectively bypass the 4th Amendment. The government spying on everybody is against the Constitution, but a private business spying on everybody and selling the data to the government is "legal".
vintermann 1 days ago [-]
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety
Assuming that he was sincere about wanting reform in the first place (and that's a big if for any book like this! The best you can say for Obama vs. most other politicians, is that he at least likely wrote it himself), what it means was that he was persuaded that mass surveillance was useful. He doesn't say how, or by who, he just vaguely waves at the burden of command.
potato3732842 2 days ago [-]
> It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue.
It's the same "impose a small but poorly defined cost on everybody and act as though it's worth it because it maybe saves one defined life and therefore anyone who wants to call you out has an uphill battle" model you see used by bad people and dishonest comment section types the world over.
Society has no good way to reason about these "it's not much individually but when you do it to all of society it adds the F up" type downsides.
Like if you could save one life per year at the cost of making it take everyone an extra minute per day that's obviously not worth it at the scale of the united states because you're actually losing more life than you're saving.
But replace the "one minute" with something more subjective and nobody calls it out.
hammock 2 days ago [-]
You hit on it. The harms of surveillance is an externality, like air pollution. We think they are SELLING surveillance to us in the court of public opinion, but they aren’t. We aren’t the customers! They’re selling it to political donors, megaglobocorporate, a ruling class. And Joe Plumber is only consuming toxic byproducts
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety.
Obama didn't swear an oath to safety, but he did swear an oath to protect the constitution. He is an oath breaker and not a man of integrity, but if we choose to trust his excuse then maybe we can forgive him as an individual for being frightened by the horror stories told to him by power hungry three letter agencies, but we should never forgive him as a president for his failure to uphold his oath. Obama studied and taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how important the oath he took was and what would be at risk if the constitution was ignored.
It will always be more "safe" to take people's freedom and control them. Safety is just not an acceptable excuse to take away the freedoms of every American.
Gigachad 2 days ago [-]
I’m not totally opposed to surveillance, I just wish it was more transparent and limited to need to know uses.
If the police need your google search history thats ok as long as they can get a warrant showing they have justification and then perhaps at a delayed time, the account owner should be notified that this happened.
If they need access to your phone, rather than hacking it they should just take it off you and get the password from you.
This limits tracking since this is a fairly disruptive and visible thing and prevents just passive tracking of everyone all the time.
Businesses who use facial recognition for loss prevention should be legally required to only use their data for this purpose and never for marketing and analytics. They must not ever sell the data and delete it within a reasonable time.
martin-t 2 days ago [-]
What kind of crimes does surveillance prevent or help solve?
1) It does not _prevent_ the most serious crimes. People who are going to murder or rape someone are often not mentally capable or understanding how likely they are to get caught or caring about it in the moment. It might help solve it but there's usually more than enough conventional evidence. And these crimes are typically not what people coordinate with others so surveilling communication does not help much.
2) Stealing? Maybe. I can imagine cameras dissuade some opportunists but then again, shoplifting is reportedly high with self-checkouts and those are packed with cameras. Other kinds like burglars will probably just learn to be more careful with gloves and masks. And surveilling communication does not help unless we're talking organized crime and those people should be competent enough to use encrypted comms even if the major platforms are backdoored.
3) Crimes of opportunity like vandalism. Again, cameras are enough, if they work at all. The extra fraction of idiots who would be caught because they brag only about setting a trash can on fire it negligible compared to the downsides.
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What surveillance absolutely could deter and help catch is organized resistance like staging a protest/riot/insurrection or individuals doing research before an assassination.
And that's why politicians, who are the most likely victims of these crimes, want surveillance. And you might genuinely believe that no current politician in your country deserves to be shot or that the current government should not be overthrown.
But we have to keep in mind that the next government will inherit these systems. Nothing is permanent, no democracy will last forever.
Historically, most countries have periods of freedom and authoritarianism, separated by collapse or revolt. At some point, in your country too, people will need to rise up to reassert their rights again.
It's a matter of when, not if.
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I see where you are coming from and there were times in my life where more surveillance would have helped my side but ultimately, it's a balancing act and surveillance tips the scale in favor of people who already have a lot of power.
Gigachad 2 days ago [-]
Semi regularly the police do stop terrorism plots before they happen. And just solving existing crimes is valuable itself. Especially for things like car crime, unless there was a video of it happening there is very little chance you’ll find the perpetrator.
Increasing the chance of criminals getting caught does a lot more for dissuading crime than increasing the penalties. Would you litter if you knew there was a 100% chance of getting a $50 fine?
It’s probably the case that politicians also don’t want to be the ones who blocked the data which would have lead to preventing a terrorist attack. And they get more visibility behind the scenes after taking the job.
martin-t 1 days ago [-]
Terrorism is barely an inconvenience. Just now in another top HN post, terrorism accounts for less than 0.001% of US deaths. That's percent so less than 1 in 100k. It essentially does not matter. It could increase tenfold and I'd be fine with it.
But the point I am trying to make is that surveillance does not work to stop the crimes people actually care about. Even if your biggest fear is terrorism, surveillance is not gonna stop somebody ramming their car into a crowd. Those who want to create fear have a myriad of ways which cannot be stopped without absolute, total surveillance, which makes any kind of resistance impossible.
I don't wanna live in a society where I have a 10% chance to get caught littering. Not because I wanna litter but because at some point, I might find myself homeless and needing to steal food to not starve. Or I might find myself living in a dictatorship and needing to drone the fucker who's sending my friends/family to a gulag.
Everything has a price. If the price of reducing common crime by 10% reduces the chance of a successful revolution by 20%, then it's not worth it. Because people are only free as long as they revoke their consent. If 50% of the population agree they live in a dictatorship, they should have a way to remove the government, whether by a ballot box or an ammo box.
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
Mass surveillance is an attempt to make a high trust society artificially out of a low trust one.
It somewhat kind of works, which is the problem. The real solution is deeper, and harder, and longer.
socalgal2 1 days ago [-]
Surveillance could prevent traffic crimes. I kind of feel like diving a 3000lbs thing down the road should require you to drive responsibly with it.
I guess though this problem will get solved as most transition to self driving cars over the next 15-30 years.
hammock 2 days ago [-]
Who says that the purpose of surveillance is to fight crime? Seems like you introduced a premise out of nothing.
(Downvote me for “being obtuse” but I’m pointing out unspoken assumption that’s worth considering)
King-Aaron 2 days ago [-]
> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist.
It boils down to one thing that allows these surveillance technologies to exist: public apathy.
hammock 2 days ago [-]
That’s tautology. Why are people apathetic about it?
martin-t 2 days ago [-]
Because when you call them leaders and when they see themselves as leaders, they see themselves as a separate class. A permanent difference from the " mere citizen" class.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on." -- Larry Ellison (who should not be anthropomorphized)
And Ellison is not even a politician, he doesn't even has any kind of immunity. Meanwhile, EU politicians want to impose Chat Control on everyone except them.
The core issue is that they see themselves as different from us.
Politics should not be a career. It should be something a person does for 5, at most 10 years max and after that they are back to being like everyone else, with 0 benefits (and with potentially more surveillance, I think politicians' finances should be under extra scrutiny for the rest of their lives).
lyu07282 1 days ago [-]
It's really strange how we disconnected ideology from politics, in people's minds ideology only exists on the fringes of the far-left and far-right which are considered identical. If you criticize a politician you should be aware of their ideology, because they certainly are very much "political", but you aren't. When "leaders" talk about activists they say things like they were "politicized" as a derogatory term, in contrast to the default which is "depoliticized". Our leaders are waaaay more politicized than we are and way more ideologically consistent in their actions than you will ever realize.
immibis 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if Congress would behave differently if they were consistently called "law janitors" or "public servants" or if those terms would just acquire the same connotations as "leader" and "politician"
sans_souse 1 days ago [-]
I know this isn't a popular stance but in the present age of surveillance, mandated 24/7 body cams on every civilian might actually not be such a bad thing so long as you aren't a bad person. [edit] ideal world, and all of that et al
Greenpants 1 days ago [-]
You might want to read "The Circle" if you haven't already. The reader gets to see an open-minded perspective of exactly this. Given your prior, I'd be curious what you think of it after reading.
neogodless 1 days ago [-]
Bathrooms?
Bedrooms?
Changing diapers?
This is a weird stance.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 days ago [-]
It might be like prison reform and prisoners' rights - Nobody gets elected on a "soft on crime" platform, and civic engagement at the state and local level is so bad that people typically put up with cameras instead of agitating to get them banned. I say agitate. Show up, keep showing up, keep talking, keep telling friends. We can fight this. Democracy will work if we get people onboard, one way or another
3eb7988a1663 2 days ago [-]
You are more optimistic than I am. Flock and friends seem something like ChatControl. Those in power who want it have unlimited patience. They will keep pushing for expanded capabilities for the day when public attention has failed. Once they win, near impossible to revoke.
themafia 2 days ago [-]
> it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety.
That seems highly disingenuous or just ignorant. We publicly had this problem starting in the 1990s. The NSA used to have a program that would capture data but then encrypt it and protect it from random access. They discontinued that program and instituted a new one that had zero privacy protections in it.
This was right at the turn when the "war on terror" started. Which was the excuse then used to abandon the better program for the egregious one since it was projected to be better for this particular use case. It's debatable whether that was true or not.
> Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores
Record it if you want. Law enforcement, at any level, should require an actual warrant to access it in any form. This isn't a binary. You can enhance security and privacy at the same time.
octoberfranklin 1 days ago [-]
although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety
Power corrupts.
hulitu 1 days ago [-]
> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist
You mean to ask questions ? No way. /s
janwillemb 2 days ago [-]
It is about a company, First Wap, that makes it possible to track individuals. Their USP is a piece of software that operates at phone network level and uses the fact that phone companies still support an old protocol, Signalling System 7:
> Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.
> These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers.
overfeed 2 days ago [-]
> The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose
'Fun' fact: "other networks" includes all foreign networks with a roaming partnership. It's possible to abuse SS7 to track people across borders, from half the world away.
> it’s more than that. it’s any device that can present itself as a possible base station.
can you elaborate on this a bit? what devices are able to to present themselves as possible base stations? do i need any form of entitlement to participate in the network or not? From past encounters with SS7 and its, uhm, capabilities, it seemed the hardest part would be getting access to the network, albeit not hard really, it sounds like you were hinting at possibly gaining access by participating in the network without any official entitlement, by posing as a base station.
rsync 19 hours ago [-]
I believe he is referring to femtocells which have (are ?) given freely to end users who need cellular signal boosting, etc.
Many of these femtocells, historically, could be trivially altered or updated to participate as literal peers on SS7.
I haven't looked into this for many years but there was a time when operating a certain femtocell granted the owner an enormous amount of leverage on the global telecom network ...
the group:
- dragged its feet on resolving SS7 security vulnerabilities
- repeatedly ignored input from DHS technical experts
- [identified] best practices.. using different filtering systems
- [but] pushed.. to rely on voluntary compliance
nostrademons 2 days ago [-]
It's fascinating how these secrets are turning up in the press now. The article is (probably intentionally) vague about it's sources: they only say "Lighthouse found a vast archive of data on the deep web". But reading between the lines - does that imply that this surveillance company kept records on thousands of targets, and then left them in an open S3 bucket? Not the first time - the TM_Signal leak of upper-echelon U.S. government communications was also facilitated by an open S3 bucket that contained the message archives of everything that, say, the Secretary of Defense was messaging to the POTUS.
But it is highly ironic that these companies specialize in surveillance, tracking, and security, and then have a tendency to leave the data that they steal from others open to the Internet in a very amateurish security lapse that in turn leads to everyone stealing from them.
mdani 1 days ago [-]
If I can make a guess, I'd say that the reporters engaged with them as a potential customer and demanded a sample of the data so they can indeed verify the accuracy. That's how they obtained the sample records, not via a s3 leak.
r4nd_f 1 days ago [-]
The reporters published a YouTube video in which they went undercover to a security convention (ISS Europe), and requested information about how the product works, some usecases, etc. [1]. Although, I don't recall the presenter indicating anything about leaked sample data...
Is it possible the phreakers are so specialized they have no experience with cloud admin and just went with some copypasta from SO answers to get the boring shit done so they could get back to phreaking? Not everyone is an expert in cloud management. It is easy to bork something when you have no idea what you're doing because you don't want to be doing it. They could have also hired low level people to do something for them and just didn't spend enough to have it done correctly. There's many reasons for a very specialized group of smart people to do something utterly dumb and easy to avoid by people with other specialized skills. These people would probably look at you as silly and amateur for using SMS.
2 days ago [-]
dontNotDoDrugs 2 days ago [-]
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baxtr 2 days ago [-]
For anyone interested, they also have a technical explainer that describes their methodology in detail.
"Signalling System 7, or SS7, is a decades-old set of protocols that allows phone networks to communicate with one another, routing messages and calls across borders. It was never designed with security in mind, and while operators have moved to more secure evolutions with 4G and 5G, they still need to maintain backwards compatibility with SS7. This is likely to remain the case for years if not decades to come.
Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.
These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers. Surveillance companies have often leased GTs from phone operators and used them to send unauthorised signalling messages into other networks, benefitting from the fact that the signalling messages appear to be coming from the legitimate operator which owns the GT.
First Wap primarily works via in-country installations of Altamides. In this setup, a government client uses Altamides via an SS7 link belonging to a local phone operator. The local phone operator provides the GTs and Altamides uses these GTs to conduct location tracking domestically and internationally."
So basically the telecoms network itself has no security. Anyone operating network equipment on the telecoms network can see where any phone is at any time.
I didn't know we lived in a world that is this stupid. Great. If you're a dissident you basically cannot have a phone or be around anyone who has a phone.
sciencejerk 2 days ago [-]
SS7 telcom vulns still seem to be prevelant in 2025:
Femtocells and Fake Base Stations
Attackers deploy femtocells — small cellular base stations — or fake base stations, commonly known as IMSI catchers, to intercept SS7 traffic. A modified femtocell can act as a man-in-the-middle, capturing signaling messages between a phone and the network.
Fake base stations mimic legitimate cell towers, tricking devices into connecting and relaying SS7 messages to the attacker’s system.
IMSI catchers exploit a known security vulnerability in the GSM specification, which requires the handset to authenticate to the network but does not require the network to authenticate to the handset. They broadcast a stronger signal than legitimate cell towers to lure mobile phones into connecting. Once connected, an IMSI catcher can force the transmission of the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and compel the connected mobile station to use no encryption or easily breakable encryption.
For 3G and LTE networks, sophisticated IMSI catcher attacks may involve downgrading the connection to less secure non-LTE network services to bypass enhanced security features. For example, a hacker might deploy a fake base station near a target to capture their IMSI and initiate SS7 queries.
> The story of Altamides dates back to the early 2000s, when former *Siemens* engineer Josef Fuchs recognised a critical vulnerability in the global telecom network. By exploiting (...)
Reminder that around the same time a joint venture of Nokia+Siemens had been developing and deploying deep packet inspection and surveillance systems in Egypt and Iran. They got called out by human rights organisations and posted an "oops sorry\" press release.
yupyupyups 1 days ago [-]
In Europe:
- Almost everyone has a phone.
- Almost everyone takes their phone wherever they go.
- All SIM-cards have been forcefully (by law) linked to people's identities.
- Almost all people are therefore being tracked.
sellweek 6 hours ago [-]
One small note - Czech Republic still allows for anonymous SIM cards. You can walk into any tobacco shop, pay around 4€ and get a pre-paid SIM which can be charged in cash.
kklisura 2 days ago [-]
> This investigation began with an archive of data. [...] It contains 1.5 million records, more than 14,000 unique phone numbers, and people surveilled in over 160 countries.
Why not HIBP (Have I Been Pwned) style site to check against the database if your number is in?
hughw 2 days ago [-]
Right! I expected one.
titzer 2 days ago [-]
Stallman was a firebrand and jerk, but he was right. When it comes to devices that have the potential to invade our privacy and make us easy targets for authoritarian governments, every last line of code and every transistor should be open.
dogman144 2 days ago [-]
Reads like they’re doing one of several way to get mobile device IDs, and then x-ref those against anon’d adtech datasets that anchor on the mobile ID.
If your device privacy is a mess, mobile ID links you to all the good and bad things you do on a phone.
Had no idea this was part of the tool options, but backbone cell network makes sense.
Other TTPs I’d read about was variations on geo-fenced adserving to phish a mobile ID basically via user interaction or scroll past the ad. Small enough geofence and do it a few times, one could safely figure out the user being the ID. Googling “RTB surveillance” or “DSP surveillance” are ways into the topic.
Scary stuff! Pair that with this tech has been working for years, and is international. Frames a bit differently every action by a public figure - also at risk via the same threat model.
Also long have wondered what data analysis like this is done on technical forums… ran by a VC firm… with a lot of insider context (product market fit?) in the comments.
absolutevibe 13 hours ago [-]
Take a look at the agenda and tracks for the conference referenced in the article some of the talk summaries are wild
https://www.issworldtraining.com/ISS_EUROPE/
"In this talk, we shall discuss various security mechanisms used in WiFi and Bluetooth networks and how to abuse them"
And then they call people paranoid to go off the grid.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
That's what they do to the people that figure things out. They discredit them so other people will not listen to them. It's the ones that go full tilt with lining the walls of their houses to be Faraday cages that make it all fringy cringy the rationally paranoid folks get lumped in with.
physarum_salad 2 days ago [-]
Well its always funny to observe politicians/other VIPs use similar technologies to the most "loopy" prepper when they need to. Like actual faraday/signal jamming tents during negotiations or similar.
2 days ago [-]
lawlessone 2 days ago [-]
tbf, when the UK introduced a text to notify people of missing children ,some people(including relatives) were complaining on facebook that it could be used by the UK government to track everyone.
As if their government couldn't just track the smartphone or them via social media already.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
The cognitive dissonance of thinking that apps are needed to track someone with a phone vs just being able to track your phone directly is very telling. Even before smart phones with apps, the tracking was there as a required feature to make mobile work. Granted, the number of people that spend any cycles thinking about how mobile signals work probably rounds to 0. It takes someone really dialed in to the details to come up interesting bolt on things to an existing system like tracking people with a mobile device just by looking at the logs. Same thing with looking at "just the metadata". While it may be obvious to those dialed in, to those oblivious it sounds crazy.
2 days ago [-]
Tenemo 2 days ago [-]
> We found Netflix producer Adam Ciralsky, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Benny Wenda, Austropop star Wolfgang Ambros, Tel Aviv district prosecutor Liat Ben Ari and Ali Nur Yasin, a senior editor at our Indonesian partner Tempo.
Political figures being there I somewhat understand, but a Netflix producer? Why would anyone need to track a Netflix producer?
layer8 2 days ago [-]
He’s also a journalist and had a carrier at the CIA. Why don’t you look him up if you’re curious about that?
attila-lendvai 2 days ago [-]
look up Operation Mockingbird. half of the media is government operatives...
netflix is a crucial tool of narrative control...
they are nowhere near "just producers"...
trinsic2 2 days ago [-]
This is why I think Microsoft, Apple and Google are owned as well. And answers a lot of questions about gatekeeping and vendor lock-in
gnatman 2 days ago [-]
Looking at his career and production credits, it’s probably more accurate to describe him as a journalist who’s covered some sensitive subjects.
baobun 1 days ago [-]
There're also apparently random every-day civilians in the dataset. TFA mentions one person targeted by a stalker.
1 days ago [-]
kipchak 2 days ago [-]
Maybe hoping to bump into them for a impromptu elevator pitch for a show?
2 days ago [-]
Nasrudith 22 hours ago [-]
Insider trading is my best guess, but they deal with the day-to-day and there isn't a major way to tell if they are working on a flop or a success - much less if it was significant.
kjs3 2 days ago [-]
They're a critic?
ocelotBridge 1 days ago [-]
Privacy isn't just about hiding, it's about having the freedom to grow and change without constant watching. We need more leaders who understand this simple truth.
1 days ago [-]
2 days ago [-]
aucisson_masque 2 days ago [-]
I didn't quite understand how they are capable of tracking people and breaking WhatsApp encryption.
There is mention of fake antenna but I don't think they cover entire country with that, how do they do?
CGMthrowaway 2 days ago [-]
They use vulns in the outdated SS7 system to trick networks into revealing a numbers location (1), and intercept SMS including the verification codes sent by apps like WhatsApp - allowing them to hijack accounts and monitor messages and calls directly (2). This method works remotely and doesn’t require antennas
The SMS are intercepted because thru SS7 by tricking the network into thinking the target phone is roaming (3).
> intercept SMS including the verification codes sent by apps like WhatsApp
For anyone worried, this approach:
1) Breaks the existing phone from receiving WhatsApp messages, so you can notice that behavior
2) Can be prevented by setting up a WhatsApp pin in your settings
simultsop 1 days ago [-]
Probably these were addressed way too late. Developers are the last to know their backdoors surprisingly.
citizenpaul 2 days ago [-]
Not just vulns. It is possible to simply purchase access or become a provider in the SS7 system (<$20-50k USD). SMS is basically a completely open system at this point. Cybersecurity companies do it all the time for pentesting. So do "Cybersecurity companies".
Horrifying that nearly banks still require you to use sms as a 2fa and do not offer any other alternative.
Did you really think the US Gov was OK with facebook running the biggest "encrypted" SMS system on earth. LOL of course they already had access to all the messages.
varenc 2 days ago [-]
Hijacking WhatsApp SMS authentication codes can be prevented by just adding a PIN to your account. Doing this attack also doesn't grant you access to someone's old WhatsApp messages, and contacts with "security notices" enabled will see that your device has changed. It's quite different than big gov just having access to all your WhatsApp messages. (But there might be other ways they can do this, but just SMS sniffing doesn't get you there)
bayindirh 2 days ago [-]
> Horrifying that nearly banks still require you to use sms as a 2fa and do not offer any other alternative.
In my country banking applications are tied to your phone via IMEI, SIM and other hardware dependent information available.
Forget getting banking details and use another device without the user knowing, either.
If someone clones your SIM or gets a replacement in behalf of you, your all banking access is blocked until you enable them one by one with your ID card or other means.
One of the banks can use FaceID as a secondary factor, too.
So, other methods are possible. It's an "implementation detail" at this point.
jonplackett 2 days ago [-]
Yes - and they also claim not to track users themselves. Is that just a lie or is there someone else doing the tracking?
This article answers none of my questions!
kipchak 2 days ago [-]
There's more details in the technical explainer linked in the article.
What I understand is that this SS7 is difficult to get rid of. If I understand it correctly, the purpose of the location queries is for routing calls/messages. Couldn’t (shouldn’t?) telecom providers run monitoring and alerting if location queries are fired without a subsequent call/message?
ThaSwissA 17 hours ago [-]
Where can I find the list? I got some contacts that might be in there
nebularHaven90 1 days ago [-]
When even Obama couldn't resist the power of surveillance, maybe it's not the tech we should fear, it's how easily power changes good intentions.
alganet 2 days ago [-]
I think the world is not ready for the level of surveillance that exists in the wild.
For example, this post could have been a product of just probing a particular group of people to understand if they are interested in the subject and what they have to say about it.
That can be done indirectly, by suggesting someone (offering a link or planting an idea) that is already known to be interested in surveillance and prone to share interesting discoveries (in other words, the poster might not even be aware he could be an asset).
Think about the many ways someone could know your interests and how prone you are to react to something and how that could be used. If you are in tech, think about all the silly ways that kind of information can leak publicly.
People often disregard the possibility that they could be an active part of a surveillance network (as an unkowingly asset), instead focusing on more fantastical ideas such as technological hacks or coding wizardry.
lschueller 2 days ago [-]
Another brilliant example, why we need good (cooperating, international) journalism
Mars008 1 days ago [-]
I must say translation in Firefox is great. Now I don't have to learn Turkish...
As for article, imagine, at those times and for thousands years after in most places humans were still hunting-gathering..
Lapsa 2 days ago [-]
mind reading technology is here, an actual reality
huflungdung 2 days ago [-]
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DyslexicAtheist 2 days ago [-]
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daxfohl 2 days ago [-]
Did I miss something? This was not surprising. I figured all this would have been possible (and commonplace) decades ago. I was expecting this to be about government eyes and ears in my toilet or something.
I recently completed Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (a partial account of his presidency), and he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. I often think about this when I drive past Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores; our leaders seem more enticed by the power of this technology than they are afraid of vague abuses happening in _not here_. It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue.
By analogy, I feel that reporting on the dangers of fire isn’t really as effective as reporting on why we don’t have arson laws and fire alarms and social norms that make our society more robust to abuse of a useful capability. People who like cooked food aren’t going to engage with anti-fire positions if they just talk about people occasionally burning each other alive. We need to know more about what can be done to protect the average person from downsides of fire, as well as who is responsible for regulating fire and what their agenda for addressing it is. I’d love to see an article identifying who is responsible for installing these Flock cameras in my area, why they did so, and how we can achieve the positive outcomes desired from them (e.g. find car thieves) without the negatives (profiling, stalking, tracking non-criminals, etc).
An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology. The problem is in practice:
- Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes.
- Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one.
- Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power.
Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.
(Nine Inch Nails - Capital G)
Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.
Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies.
Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient.
You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.
So, Singapore?
This whole way of thinking makes my skin crawl.
Just like sex, any kind of power exchange needs consent.
This whole idea that people are led or need to be led is wrong. Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine. What politicians are is decision makers, not leaders.
We don't have time to vote on every single law personally, so we appoint temporary assistants who do it for us, based on our preferences. That's how it should work.
These assistants should work for us, not lead us. We should always have the power to override their decisions and to remove and replace them at any time. Of course, making this work in a practical manner, while satisfying constraints such as secrecy of votes, is difficult. I don't dispute that but we should be striving to find ways to get as close to this ideal as possible, not making politics into a career or treating it as a reality show.
And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
It also helps make the point of what it means to say “society is breaking down” or “democracy is at stake” or “faith in institutions in decline.” What it really means is that those whom were thought of as leaders no longer have the consent of the followers, who are making their own decisions now- often to ill effect of any strangers around them
*cf servant leadership as one particularly clear conceptualization
And there are a lot of really weird discussions to be had about "consent," too. If we allow unlimited speech, that means that we're all subject to marketing and propaganda, and that's another thing that people are quite vulnerable to. Being convinced to vote via propaganda isn't really a great example of consent. But banning any speech that resembles propaganda is rife with problems.
Anyway, my point is that democracy/voting and free speech isn't necessarily the most free/consented-to form of government. I'm not sure what would take its place, though. I certainly wish I knew.
It seems inherent in your worldview that you lack faith in people to self govern (that is, for a person to govern themselves. Which would explain why you are at odds with the parent. I suggest you read a bit of Jefferson’s ideas of self governance, education, etc. There are tradeoffs as with everything else, I do think based solely on your short commentary here that there may be an opportunity for your perspective to be enriched however
In aggregate most people do need leadership. The kind of technocratic/managerial approach you suggest has led to the current societal problems we have: a vacuum of real leadership being filled by people willing to do it.
Whether it "should" or "shouldn't" be your problem is irrelevant to the reality.
Whether they pick them or you pick them, you still have the same problem.
Bad people often get into office. Politicians lie, major parties both run bad candidates, sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo.
Expecting that never to happen is a lot less pragmatic than setting things up ahead of time to mitigate the damage when it does.
The constraints of the office ought to account for that.
Hence the root problem, that we haven't discovered a way to consistently have "good" government, whether it's a dictatorship or democracy. Perhaps with technology, we can invent a better form of government, e.g. a "super-democracy" where people vote on individual decisions (though even today I can imagine issues that would cause).
Until then, the key point I make is that you can have a government where some people ("leaders") do have more power than others, but not enough power for total control. The hopefully-realistic ideal is that the government has enough power to defend itself against an external threat always, and coordinate large projects when functioning well; but not too much so that, when functioning badly, essential internal systems are preserved, and when it's replaced (because as mentioned it will eventually collapse) the transition is minimally disruptive.
You can prohibit the government from doing things it should never do (e.g. mass surveillance) without prohibiting it from doing things it ought to be doing (e.g. enforcing antitrust laws).
The problem is we currently do the opposite: The government is doing mass surveillance but not antitrust enforcement.
We're pretty f-ing far from even having to think about those problems.
This is absolutely a thing and it's a thing because at some point, people notice how little power they actually have.
Every person's opinion is a point in N-dimensional space.
Representative democracy is describing that point (expressing their political opinion) by picking 1 point out of a handful of pre-determined options (parties/representatives). Some countries only have 2 real choices.
That's absolutely insane, no wonder people feel like their vote doesn't matter, they often can't even find a choice remotely close to their real preferences.
Your only suggestion other than the semantic complaint seems like it would work terribly, there's a reason we elect people for fixed terms and don't yank them out randomly.
Note: An ideal government wouldn't define a bunch of victimless behaviour as a crime. Low crime would mean low murder, low car hijackings, etc - things that actually affect people.
Definitions differ person to person, but many things we consider benign today like sexual activities between consenting adults, racial integration, even free travel have at times and in places been considered crimes.
Today, homelessness is often criminalized. As is drug use even among otherwise productive law abiding citizens. Assisted suicide is often criminalized, even for terminally ill and suffering consenting adults.
Something like 98% of humanity partakes of caffeine which is very clearly an addictive drug with one of the higher measures of addictive potential among all drugs in most evaluations. Drug use isn't what drives people to commit crime. Lack of support systems do. Drug use is often a coping mechanism associated with lack of support systems.
This is very clearly articulated in the following study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/98787/
To quote John Ehrlichman, Whitehouse counsel and assistant to President Nixon: “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”
Disrupted communities lack support systems and further drive folks to criminality as a means of surviving.
Meanwhile, many of the founding fathers and modern political leaders have writtten quite fondly and positively about smoking cannabis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_politici...
> For example the article discusses adultery
Homosexuality and sodomy (i.e. sex without the intent of procreation) are clearer examples of criminalized sexual behavior between two consenting adults. I know some folks who'd like to outlaw them today in the US and they are currently outlawed elsewhere, but I believe what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their own business.
Not all drugs are created equal, withdrawal symptoms are different.
> Homosexuality and sodomy
They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.
Not in my experience. I have voluntarily withdrawn from caffeine, opiates (administered by a hospital), and cannabis. All experiences were remarkably similar. When I run support groups for folks who've used drugs, I recommend folks experiment with caffeine withdrawal to gain experience with the process. It requires at least two weeks of cessation.
> They do affect the future population count
Seems that you're assuming homosexual folks would otherwise procreate if forced into heterosexual relationships, which is quite a stretch. I also know quite a few homosexual couples who raise scads of children. And childless heterosexual couples. This argument doesn't hold water.
Cool, my decision to not use caffeine is justified then.
That said, should you find yourself in a health emergency, as I did, and hooked up to a dilaudid drip for weeks, as I was, you may find experience with the symptoms of withdrawal to be quite useful for getting yourself through the worst of it, as I did.
Withdrawal is part of the human experience you don't always have a choice to avoid. Fear, avoidance, and ignorance of it makes potentially involuntary encounters with drugs more dangerous. Besides fueling unnecessarily destructive policy decisions.
Worth a think.
So does abstention.
By your logic, then, if sodomy and homosexuality were illegal, then adults of child bearing age would be legally required to have sex.
Likewise, those unable to participate in conception would be prohibited from having sex.
Anyways I didn't want to discuss that, my claim was that you either think of something as victimless or you think it is a crime. Your data point seams to only fit this claim. To disprove it you would need to find something you consider victimless, but still think it should be a crime.
I agree that people who think drugs, anal sex, or whatever should be a crime, can also rationalize that someone is the victim. They're wrong, of course, but they still think it.
When you said:
> They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.
It appeared that you were not just stating what those crazy people who think anal sex should be a crime think, but what you thought. That's why you got replies arguing against the idea that anal sex should be a crime. You could have made it clear if you were just stating the views that crazy people have.
Well that's the meaning of misuse, if it weren't bad it wouldn't be misuse. You can only ask whether something is misuse or how bad it is, asking whether misuse is bad is questioning a tautology.
> Why is misuse of drugs bad?
Actually I was replying to this:
> By your logic, then, if sodomy and homosexuality were illegal, then adults of child bearing age would be legally required to have sex.
So I was talking about misuse of sexuality.
> I agree that people who think drugs, anal sex, or whatever should be a crime, can also rationalize that someone is the victim.
Yes that what I wanted to point out. I was merely enumerating examples from the Wikipedia article.
> but what you thought.
I do think homosexuality is bad and unnatural. (No don't tell me it occurs in animals, any behaviour occurs in animals.) I don't think it should be a crime, so I don't think my opinion affects other people.
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If we were to talk about my opinion about drugs in general, I think as to them being bad, they are kind of at the same level as money. You shouldn't become attached to them. They are more dangerous the more likely you become attached to them.
For any specific drug, I find the smell of cannabis to smell dangerous and poisonous in a weird and unexplainable way. I would like it, if this would go away, so I am in favor of banning it again. I also heard of studies indicating a rise in schizophrenia especially among young people (<30) and I don't wish that to anybody, just because someone tries to make money. I also don't think it's smart to do that, if you already have a lack of young people. But I lack the knowledge to check this for soundness.
I wouldn't mind smoking to go away from public spaces, I hate when I'm forced to inhale this. But I can't judge if it is justified.
I think alcohol is grand-fathered in. I also think there are very different kind of alcoholic beverages and also very different kind of usages. There are cultures that regularly drink liquor before eating heavy food, because it has a positive impact on the digestive system, but this is only about a few milliliters, so it is more like medicine. There is also a bit of alcohol in every apple. I think alcoholic beverages are too fundamentally incorporated in our culture, so I would find it sad to see it go away. I wouldn't mind having additional restrictions on harder stuff.
I don't think coffee causes any larger issues. I also think we don't need to discuss restricting access to sugar. Medical appliance of drugs is very restricted and constantly reevaluated.
I wish that large amounts of money would be more regulated, but I don't think we should touch the concept of private ownership. Also fashion or cars are the drugs of many, and now there is a large supply of non-physical drugs, but I don't know any non-restrictive policy that I want to support there.
I don't have experienced any other/harder drug and I prefer it to stay that way.
> Well that's the meaning of misuse
> I do think homosexuality is bad and unnatural. (No don't tell me it occurs in animals, any behaviour occurs in animals.)
Well, friend, that's the meaning of natural. "Found in nature"
Playing word games with one will get you called out in the same way on the other, regardless of your cognitive dissonance on the subject.
We can start with actually taxing people with multiple piles of Scrooge McDuck money, as opposed to the current approach of cutting social programs that benefit millions of citizens to provide even MORE tax breaks for these "people".
Are you even serious with this?
I assumed you were concerned with all social programs and not just your personal pension, hence the statement. Fixing pensions, while all other social safety net programs get gutted is not the way. Basic breeding by heterosexuals isn't the panacea you seem to believe it is, imo.
The real issue with US population growth is the insane world we live in. It's not "the gays failing to procreate". That's a laughable statement.
WTF would want to bring children into the world when literal criminals, rapists and alcoholics are running things, racism is on the rise and cheered, laws are optional for specific groups of people while abused for everyone else, SCOTUS is a complete parody of a court, Congress is run by wholly unserious people, prices of everything are rocketing up not because of genuine supply chain issues, or similar, but because of plain, old greed and much, much, much more.
Let's not forget that AI is being developed at a record pace to replace jobs, while shafting the working class, instead of being used to uplift everyone.
"The gays" were never the problem and never will be for population growth.
Trying to fix pensions by forbidding homosexuality is laughable yes. There aren't even enough homosexuals for that to matter.
However a standard way to evaluate social norms is the categorical imperative. If everybody was homosexual we would have an issue there. But the only thing I wanted to say is that it does affect people, I didn't want to propose or defend any policy change.
Also I wasn't talking about money. This only gets you a portion of the future economy, the amount of young people decides how much economy there will be.
> WTF would want to bring children into the world when literal criminals, rapists and alcoholics are running things, racism is on the rise and cheered, laws are optional for specific groups of people while abused for everyone else, SCOTUS is a complete parody of a court, Congress is run by wholly unserious people, prices of everything are rocketing up not because of genuine supply chain issues, or similar, but because of plain, old greed and much, much, much more.
I don't live in the USA, so I don't think I should have opinions about your internal issues, but I do think you have a problem with authoritarianism there. But whose country hasn't so who am I to judge. However I do not understand this sentiment. How does it matter if the world is a shit show? When wasn't it that in the large scale of things? That seams to be the exception not the rule. It also completely fails to account, that people tend to have more children in darker times not less. Also how do you improve that world if not by raising children. You won't have any more lasting impact on the way of life of someone than on your children. "Science advances on funeral at a time." I think this applies to everything.
The categorical imperative says: decide rules that would be good if everybody followed them, and then follow those rules. "Everyone should be homosexual" seems to be a bad rule, but "everyone should have sex with whatever gender they like" seems to be a good rule, so you should follow it. It doesn't say you shouldn't be homosexual because it would be bad if everyone was homosexual.
From https://se-legal.de/criminal-defense-lawyer/drug-offences-an... :
> Is the Consumption of Drugs in Germany Illegal?
> Although the acquisition, cultivation and possession, import and export (smuggling), and trade, as well as other forms of distribution of narcotics, are punishable under the Narcotics Act, this does not apply to mere consumption. The consumption of a drug meets the freedom of action and is therefore protected by the German constitution. Colloquially, this is also called “the right to get high”. Any prohibition or ban would be against the constitution and, therefore, is not enforceable. But since the offence of possession is already met by solely holding something in your hands, one of the above-mentioned actions is always going to be equally met when consuming a drug.
It doesn't obviously change anything in practice.
Though it may be that a better society makes fewer people want to smoke.
The argument you used earlier could be applied to literally anything, so if it's valid, literally everything should be a crime. I don't think the argument is valid.
You can't counter-argue that streaming movies is good for society, but growing plants isn't. I think it's the other way around, actually.
Maybe I shouldn't have used a bunch of euphemisms that sound ridiculous when taken literally.
Honestly I am neither a medicine, nor a chemist, nor a psychologist, so I don't feel qualified to discuss anything here.
This is a cowardly excuse. It's another way of saying that if you reform mass surveillance you'll be blamed for anything bad that subsequently happens, regardless of whether the mass surveillance would have prevented it. And bad things happen on a regular basis with or without mass surveillance, so then the politically risk-averse move is to not solve the problem you promised to solve and not expose yourself.
Which is cowardly specifically because the candidate's original position was correct. You can solve crimes without mass surveillance, or prevent them by reducing poverty etc. If you do those things then the chances of something bad happening go down instead of up.
And it will still not be zero -- it won't be zero no matter what you do -- but in that case you're only worried about adversarial pundits blaming you for things that weren't your fault, and adversarial pundits are going to do that regardless.
Surveillance makes their jobs easier, so there's a kind of natural tendency towards authoritarianism. We've known about this for a long time, the 4th Amendment was created to put limits on government surveillance.
If you're wondering why the government would allow private businesses to spy on everybody when the government itself isn't allowed to, that's because this allows for the government to effectively bypass the 4th Amendment. The government spying on everybody is against the Constitution, but a private business spying on everybody and selling the data to the government is "legal".
Assuming that he was sincere about wanting reform in the first place (and that's a big if for any book like this! The best you can say for Obama vs. most other politicians, is that he at least likely wrote it himself), what it means was that he was persuaded that mass surveillance was useful. He doesn't say how, or by who, he just vaguely waves at the burden of command.
It's the same "impose a small but poorly defined cost on everybody and act as though it's worth it because it maybe saves one defined life and therefore anyone who wants to call you out has an uphill battle" model you see used by bad people and dishonest comment section types the world over.
Society has no good way to reason about these "it's not much individually but when you do it to all of society it adds the F up" type downsides.
Like if you could save one life per year at the cost of making it take everyone an extra minute per day that's obviously not worth it at the scale of the united states because you're actually losing more life than you're saving.
But replace the "one minute" with something more subjective and nobody calls it out.
Obama didn't swear an oath to safety, but he did swear an oath to protect the constitution. He is an oath breaker and not a man of integrity, but if we choose to trust his excuse then maybe we can forgive him as an individual for being frightened by the horror stories told to him by power hungry three letter agencies, but we should never forgive him as a president for his failure to uphold his oath. Obama studied and taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how important the oath he took was and what would be at risk if the constitution was ignored.
It will always be more "safe" to take people's freedom and control them. Safety is just not an acceptable excuse to take away the freedoms of every American.
If the police need your google search history thats ok as long as they can get a warrant showing they have justification and then perhaps at a delayed time, the account owner should be notified that this happened.
If they need access to your phone, rather than hacking it they should just take it off you and get the password from you.
This limits tracking since this is a fairly disruptive and visible thing and prevents just passive tracking of everyone all the time.
Businesses who use facial recognition for loss prevention should be legally required to only use their data for this purpose and never for marketing and analytics. They must not ever sell the data and delete it within a reasonable time.
1) It does not _prevent_ the most serious crimes. People who are going to murder or rape someone are often not mentally capable or understanding how likely they are to get caught or caring about it in the moment. It might help solve it but there's usually more than enough conventional evidence. And these crimes are typically not what people coordinate with others so surveilling communication does not help much.
2) Stealing? Maybe. I can imagine cameras dissuade some opportunists but then again, shoplifting is reportedly high with self-checkouts and those are packed with cameras. Other kinds like burglars will probably just learn to be more careful with gloves and masks. And surveilling communication does not help unless we're talking organized crime and those people should be competent enough to use encrypted comms even if the major platforms are backdoored.
3) Crimes of opportunity like vandalism. Again, cameras are enough, if they work at all. The extra fraction of idiots who would be caught because they brag only about setting a trash can on fire it negligible compared to the downsides.
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What surveillance absolutely could deter and help catch is organized resistance like staging a protest/riot/insurrection or individuals doing research before an assassination.
And that's why politicians, who are the most likely victims of these crimes, want surveillance. And you might genuinely believe that no current politician in your country deserves to be shot or that the current government should not be overthrown.
But we have to keep in mind that the next government will inherit these systems. Nothing is permanent, no democracy will last forever.
Historically, most countries have periods of freedom and authoritarianism, separated by collapse or revolt. At some point, in your country too, people will need to rise up to reassert their rights again.
It's a matter of when, not if.
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I see where you are coming from and there were times in my life where more surveillance would have helped my side but ultimately, it's a balancing act and surveillance tips the scale in favor of people who already have a lot of power.
Increasing the chance of criminals getting caught does a lot more for dissuading crime than increasing the penalties. Would you litter if you knew there was a 100% chance of getting a $50 fine?
It’s probably the case that politicians also don’t want to be the ones who blocked the data which would have lead to preventing a terrorist attack. And they get more visibility behind the scenes after taking the job.
But the point I am trying to make is that surveillance does not work to stop the crimes people actually care about. Even if your biggest fear is terrorism, surveillance is not gonna stop somebody ramming their car into a crowd. Those who want to create fear have a myriad of ways which cannot be stopped without absolute, total surveillance, which makes any kind of resistance impossible.
I don't wanna live in a society where I have a 10% chance to get caught littering. Not because I wanna litter but because at some point, I might find myself homeless and needing to steal food to not starve. Or I might find myself living in a dictatorship and needing to drone the fucker who's sending my friends/family to a gulag.
Everything has a price. If the price of reducing common crime by 10% reduces the chance of a successful revolution by 20%, then it's not worth it. Because people are only free as long as they revoke their consent. If 50% of the population agree they live in a dictatorship, they should have a way to remove the government, whether by a ballot box or an ammo box.
It somewhat kind of works, which is the problem. The real solution is deeper, and harder, and longer.
I guess though this problem will get solved as most transition to self driving cars over the next 15-30 years.
(Downvote me for “being obtuse” but I’m pointing out unspoken assumption that’s worth considering)
It boils down to one thing that allows these surveillance technologies to exist: public apathy.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on." -- Larry Ellison (who should not be anthropomorphized)
And Ellison is not even a politician, he doesn't even has any kind of immunity. Meanwhile, EU politicians want to impose Chat Control on everyone except them.
The core issue is that they see themselves as different from us.
Politics should not be a career. It should be something a person does for 5, at most 10 years max and after that they are back to being like everyone else, with 0 benefits (and with potentially more surveillance, I think politicians' finances should be under extra scrutiny for the rest of their lives).
This is a weird stance.
That seems highly disingenuous or just ignorant. We publicly had this problem starting in the 1990s. The NSA used to have a program that would capture data but then encrypt it and protect it from random access. They discontinued that program and instituted a new one that had zero privacy protections in it.
This was right at the turn when the "war on terror" started. Which was the excuse then used to abandon the better program for the egregious one since it was projected to be better for this particular use case. It's debatable whether that was true or not.
> Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores
Record it if you want. Law enforcement, at any level, should require an actual warrant to access it in any form. This isn't a binary. You can enhance security and privacy at the same time.
Power corrupts.
You mean to ask questions ? No way. /s
> Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.
> These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers.
'Fun' fact: "other networks" includes all foreign networks with a roaming partnership. It's possible to abuse SS7 to track people across borders, from half the world away.
this also helped confirm the identity of the 2022 killer in idaho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_University_of_Idaho_murde...
can you elaborate on this a bit? what devices are able to to present themselves as possible base stations? do i need any form of entitlement to participate in the network or not? From past encounters with SS7 and its, uhm, capabilities, it seemed the hardest part would be getting access to the network, albeit not hard really, it sounds like you were hinting at possibly gaining access by participating in the network without any official entitlement, by posing as a base station.
Many of these femtocells, historically, could be trivially altered or updated to participate as literal peers on SS7.
I haven't looked into this for many years but there was a time when operating a certain femtocell granted the owner an enormous amount of leverage on the global telecom network ...
But it is highly ironic that these companies specialize in surveillance, tracking, and security, and then have a tendency to leave the data that they steal from others open to the Internet in a very amateurish security lapse that in turn leads to everyone stealing from them.
[1] https://youtu.be/xfWyU5iXJ3I
https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.
These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers. Surveillance companies have often leased GTs from phone operators and used them to send unauthorised signalling messages into other networks, benefitting from the fact that the signalling messages appear to be coming from the legitimate operator which owns the GT.
First Wap primarily works via in-country installations of Altamides. In this setup, a government client uses Altamides via an SS7 link belonging to a local phone operator. The local phone operator provides the GTs and Altamides uses these GTs to conduct location tracking domestically and internationally."
So basically the telecoms network itself has no security. Anyone operating network equipment on the telecoms network can see where any phone is at any time.
I didn't know we lived in a world that is this stupid. Great. If you're a dissident you basically cannot have a phone or be around anyone who has a phone.
Femtocells and Fake Base Stations Attackers deploy femtocells — small cellular base stations — or fake base stations, commonly known as IMSI catchers, to intercept SS7 traffic. A modified femtocell can act as a man-in-the-middle, capturing signaling messages between a phone and the network.
Fake base stations mimic legitimate cell towers, tricking devices into connecting and relaying SS7 messages to the attacker’s system.
IMSI catchers exploit a known security vulnerability in the GSM specification, which requires the handset to authenticate to the network but does not require the network to authenticate to the handset. They broadcast a stronger signal than legitimate cell towers to lure mobile phones into connecting. Once connected, an IMSI catcher can force the transmission of the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and compel the connected mobile station to use no encryption or easily breakable encryption.
For 3G and LTE networks, sophisticated IMSI catcher attacks may involve downgrading the connection to less secure non-LTE network services to bypass enhanced security features. For example, a hacker might deploy a fake base station near a target to capture their IMSI and initiate SS7 queries.
https://www.how2lab.com/tech/mobile-communication/ss7-vulner...
SS7: Locate. Track. Manipulate. [2014] https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6249_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412271...
https://media.ccc.de/v/25c3-2997-en-locating_mobile_phones_u...
Reminder that around the same time a joint venture of Nokia+Siemens had been developing and deploying deep packet inspection and surveillance systems in Egypt and Iran. They got called out by human rights organisations and posted an "oops sorry\" press release.
- Almost everyone has a phone.
- Almost everyone takes their phone wherever they go.
- All SIM-cards have been forcefully (by law) linked to people's identities.
- Almost all people are therefore being tracked.
Why not HIBP (Have I Been Pwned) style site to check against the database if your number is in?
If your device privacy is a mess, mobile ID links you to all the good and bad things you do on a phone.
Had no idea this was part of the tool options, but backbone cell network makes sense.
Other TTPs I’d read about was variations on geo-fenced adserving to phish a mobile ID basically via user interaction or scroll past the ad. Small enough geofence and do it a few times, one could safely figure out the user being the ID. Googling “RTB surveillance” or “DSP surveillance” are ways into the topic.
Scary stuff! Pair that with this tech has been working for years, and is international. Frames a bit differently every action by a public figure - also at risk via the same threat model.
Also long have wondered what data analysis like this is done on technical forums… ran by a VC firm… with a lot of insider context (product market fit?) in the comments.
https://www.giosec.uk/specialist-services---geo-location.htm...
Even the WAP part of the name makes me wonder[2].
I know I have some futile questions, but why does seem France so untouched? [3]
[1] <https://www.1rstwap.com>
[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol>
[3] <https://i0.wp.com/www.lighthousereports.com/wp-content/uploa...>
As if their government couldn't just track the smartphone or them via social media already.
Political figures being there I somewhat understand, but a Netflix producer? Why would anyone need to track a Netflix producer?
netflix is a crucial tool of narrative control...
they are nowhere near "just producers"...
There is mention of fake antenna but I don't think they cover entire country with that, how do they do?
The SMS are intercepted because thru SS7 by tricking the network into thinking the target phone is roaming (3).
(1)https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
(2)https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altami...
(3)https://www.fyno.io/blog/is-it-easy-to-intercept-sms-a-compl...
For anyone worried, this approach:
1) Breaks the existing phone from receiving WhatsApp messages, so you can notice that behavior
2) Can be prevented by setting up a WhatsApp pin in your settings
Horrifying that nearly banks still require you to use sms as a 2fa and do not offer any other alternative.
Did you really think the US Gov was OK with facebook running the biggest "encrypted" SMS system on earth. LOL of course they already had access to all the messages.
In my country banking applications are tied to your phone via IMEI, SIM and other hardware dependent information available.
Forget getting banking details and use another device without the user knowing, either.
If someone clones your SIM or gets a replacement in behalf of you, your all banking access is blocked until you enable them one by one with your ID card or other means.
One of the banks can use FaceID as a secondary factor, too.
So, other methods are possible. It's an "implementation detail" at this point.
This article answers none of my questions!
https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
For example, this post could have been a product of just probing a particular group of people to understand if they are interested in the subject and what they have to say about it.
That can be done indirectly, by suggesting someone (offering a link or planting an idea) that is already known to be interested in surveillance and prone to share interesting discoveries (in other words, the poster might not even be aware he could be an asset).
Think about the many ways someone could know your interests and how prone you are to react to something and how that could be used. If you are in tech, think about all the silly ways that kind of information can leak publicly.
People often disregard the possibility that they could be an active part of a surveillance network (as an unkowingly asset), instead focusing on more fantastical ideas such as technological hacks or coding wizardry.
As for article, imagine, at those times and for thousands years after in most places humans were still hunting-gathering..