Isn't it a good thing to record data that helps solve a murder? The police are still getting it with a warrant and presumably from physical access to the device, so it's not the same worry as bulk monitoring.
Recording everyones data everywhere just in case it might be relevant to an extremely rare event like a murder is very dangerous. The use of NSA recording capabilities by employees to digitally stalk victims of their affection (LOVEINT) is a clear example of how badly this kind of collection can go wrong.
I've certainly used anti-surveillance arguments like "what if some employee misuses the data", and I mean them, but it's not my fundamental objection. On a much deeper level, I worry about surveillance as an inherent harm. Partly as the death of privacy (a right in itself, to me), largely as a de facto power transfer to the state.
I think Seeing Like a State is right when it argues that states depend on 'legibility'. If it can't be logged, measured, or predicted, it can't be handled on the statistical level where states have to operate. And so everything that increases the legibility of our lives eases the real power of the state, without any need to expand its legal power.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn...
This data when used properly (which is probably the case 90%+ of the time) helps to make the world better, or provides efficiency for the company who uses the tools.
Would you like an arbitrary line in the sand? Sure, let me give you one. The crime you're trying to stop has to affect at least 0.0001% of the population before I'll even consider lowering the quality of life of 99% of the population to protect against it.
0.0001% is an order of magnitude over the percentage of the US population that got murdered or manslaughtered in 2015, if you were counting.
Individually, I'm sure you can rip out, mutilate, deface, damage or what have you to devices that report fine-grained time-series data. But the moment you go anywhere else, you're being recorded, watched, monitored, measured, and recorded.
It's already being done, and it's way past time that we do have that discussion. Because without string and stark dialogue, we'll end up with "We're not doing anything wrong, so why should we care?" kind of responses. Or worse yet, people won't understand what something like accurate TS data from power input can lead to.[0]
And as an addition on the above comment, I also wrote a CPU-bound facial recognition app. I wrote it initially for a convention that we have for our hackerspace every year... But it took me a week to do in my spare time, using open source libs (OpenCV, QT). This stuff is just getting more ubiquitous.[1]
[0]: http://www.hennebert.org/download/publications/isspa-2012-ma... MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES FOR ELECTRIC APPLIANCE CLASSIFICATION
>Individually, I'm sure you can rip out, mutilate, deface, damage or what have you to devices that report fine-grained time-series data. But the moment you go anywhere else, you're being recorded, watched, monitored, measured, and recorded.
There are a variety of ways that this can be done, most of them revolving around visibility and community education.
Stop using facebook, stop buying voice assistants. Refuse to sign up for accounts that require your personal data. Be offended. Tell cashiers in shops on no uncertain terms that they don't need your email address to sell you things. Be a leader by telling people around you that you have consciously made these decisions, and /why/ you have made them.
Attach your public key whenever you email someone. Inevitably, someone will ask what the attachment is. Use it as an excuse to tell them about encrypted email.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Early next month I'll be getting an old stock but new in box feature phone from the UK. it's from 2011, it cost me $30 including shipping. It has a browser, SMS, a phone and /nothing else/. I look forward to showing off my new phone to everyone at work and explaining I ditched my Galaxy ace 4 because I didn't feel in control of it. It's partially a token gesture, I can still be tracked via the GSM connection, but it's a talking point. It keeps the problem in peoples faces.
The US government doesn't give a shit about the legality of what they're doing. They have a "secret court" that no one is allowed to ask about that is "authorizing" all the things they are doing. Clearly, you're not going to win them over by town hall debates. What we need is gentle but powerful groundswell opinion against surveillance, the kind that threatens election results.
P.S, you can also move to places where this shit doesn't happen. I moved from Australia to Iceland, and at least 30% of my reasoning to do so was that Australia is actively turning into a surveillance state.
Indeed. But I also think, that much of this community education and "awareness" has gotten people to ignore these types of things. A lot of it comes down to "ehh, whatever" or similar "convenience > privacy".
Facebook's a problem child. You have an account even when you don't have one, because other people put things up there and link to you. Indeed, having an account allows some modicum of control of other user-posted junk, whereas not having an account = no control.
Facebook also has network effect going for it; easy to chat on, and easy to see events and parties around. And being "that guy" means you're likely forgot about events. I'd love a viral solution to claw away from Fb and get my friends on. Ello seemed to be a good candidate but quickly turned into a shithole. I'll honestly have to look into Diaspora and its user-friendliness. Because again, network effects rule.
> Be the change you want to see in the world.
Indeed. I try to be. I have my own IoT infrastructure. Built it myself. I have a few different buildings I do stuff in, and use Tor to tie my network together. I've documented what I've done here: https://hackaday.io/project/12985-multisite-homeofficehacker...
> The US government doesn't give a shit about the legality of what they're doing.
Absolutely agree, being a US citizen. I am looking at emigrating elsewhere. Iceland was a consideration, as was a few other countries in Europe. But it also feels like trading one set of problems for another set of problems.
In this case, there are traditional limitations on law enforcement (requirement of a warrant) and a specific crime that has been committed.
In my opinion, using a warrant to get the data from the water usage device is no more problematic than using a warrant to search the house.
Obviously malicious law enforcement could still circumvent that just as they could a warrant depending on their level of capabilities and your house's security, but there isn't a similar path to securing your water usage data against warrant-less searching. Its security is wholly in the hands of a third party and any security breaches are essentially invisible to you.
That said, we're both painting in broad strokes.
We're trading the potential to solve a major crime for the potential for a minor crime of stalking to happen. As long as we require that a warrant be involved in getting the data and there are punishments in place for accessing without a warrant I'd feel safe with them collecting it.
1) The information might be used "off-label" for all sorts of personal and political reasons. There are countless examples of this in history.
2) The standard of evidence must remain high. Circumstantial evidence has been, and continues to be, used to convict innocent people of crimes. Giving the authorities what amounts to a mountain of circumstantial evidence could allow them to build a case out of thin air.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he must be guilty: he entered the bar two minutes after the victim, and left a minute after they did. He took an Uber along the same route and exited at the same address. 3 minutes later the murder weapon was purchased by a man matching his description a block away." ... and so on.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu (disputed, but classic)
Imagine what can be done with a lifetime of data from hundreds of sensors?
2) There's already plenty of avenues for circumstantial evidence already, this is the reason we have lawyers and judges to argue over and prevent evidence that isn't solid
2. The water company collects all this data from everyone with the device.
3. As the Mirai botnet showed, it's not just the government who might have access to that data.
You might trust the current custodians of $BACKDOOR, but do you trust all future possible custodians that have dominion over that role? Keep in mind that nothing is technically restricting them to look only at possible murder.
Hypothetically speaking if you were doing some grey-hat, "illegal" probing/hack at the time of a murder the police question you about; admitting to your actual activity could result in more time behind bars than a murder. If this activity was somehow vaguely recorded and correlated with an activity of the murderer then you have a serious problem.
"legitimate".
Take criminal cases where they find drugs in your system and use that to make it look like you're more apt to commit said crime.
Ideally we'd want to get the benefits without the abuse, but that requires a solid bureaucracy and strong rules.
I tried logging my electricity use. You can easily see what time I wake up each day, when I get home, whether I watch TV or not, whether I cook using the microwave or the hob.
It doesn't show up on my graph, but I'd bet from the data you can see exactly when I go to bed, since I plug in my phone (+1W) and switch off the last light (-5W).
Within all this, the fridge compressor turning on and off is easily ignored.
EDIT: the internet surfing patterns are another story. But you can probably VPN to your home through some newly-installed network interface and access the net as if you were there.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the government tries to require a device that logs all our conversations at home. It'll be sold as "crucial for law enforcement".
The Echo is a technological marvel. But who's to say Amazon doesn't get a "national security letter" one day where they're forced to send a patch to the machine to have it log everything?
Some day, if I'm bedridden or some such, I'd welcome an Echo in the house. Until then, I'd rather get up and turn a manual switch. I could use the exercise anyway :-)
I was lucky to move house just after the rules came in, but before cheap, residential versions of the logging devices were on the market -- mine has a serial port! It outputs a line of XML every 6 seconds showing power use, measured with a probe which clamps around the live wire where it enters the house.
I've since moved again, and my newly built apartment has the wires hidden, so I can no longer use the probe.
http://www.currentcost.com/product-envir.html -- but make sure you get one with a serial port.
You left off the implied "unless the intent of those systems is to create the appearance of occupancy". You know that a pattern associated with waking up happened. You don't know if I'm home or not. Now add in the case which happens to me sometimes where my morning ritual automation kicks in because my phone is home (but I'm not).
I imagine it'd be a harder argument to make, before a jury in a criminal trial, that the dataset showed the house was occupied because the occupant had rigged beforehand an elaborate system of intentional resource wastage to fake occupancy in the way that would fuzz a police investigation, as opposed to the much simpler explanation "the suspect was home." Burden of proof might be high.
You'd probably have a viable business model if you could actually do that. Existing options like Neurio cannot reliably detect devices pulling single-digit power draws.
That's obviously a slippery-slope argument, but it's not outwith the realms of possibility that if I can think of doing something like that, politicians (especially those!) can think of it as well.
....phones?