Off-topic but, I just discovered your music on spotify a few weeks ago and can't stop listening to your albums, amazing stuff man!
The virus will go soon enough, one way or another, the surveillance state built for it, will not.
I guess the issue is not how they do it but if they should do it at all. I think freedom is a balance of what we want and what society needs. If we're living in a society, there's a degree of sacrifice in our personal freedom we must make sometimes. Things like vaccines, limits to speech, and taxes are examples of things that we agree are necessary to run a society that's better for everyone, at a personal cost to our own freedoms or resources. Finding that balance is tricky but I don't think that "maximize personal freedom always" is an approach that always leaves you better off.
The other thing is how much trust you put in your society and the government. Taiwan's government had a rocky past, but it's on a good trajectory of strong personal freedom and democracy now. I can forgive them for using this power in this extreme circumstance, but after all this is done, I'd like to see them review this process and ensure there are the right safeguards and oversights in place.
Of the reported cases, police got involved to track down said persons, and they were fined depending on the severity of the infraction. I don't know if the form DB is now cross-checked with the immigration DB.
If you are visitor and if they need to, within a few hours of landing at an airport and arriving at your destination, you will get a phone call at your destination location/hotel, etc if the government needs to find you -
Have you ever wondered why you fill out those landing / immigration cards that they give you on the plane? For the US and Canada, those are only formalities. For Taiwan, the cards get scanned in and then the authorities will call the number you put on that card to see if you're there or if you've checked into the hotel, for example.
In regular times, this system is mostly used for things like catching overseas males dodging conscription for example, but the system is active already for times like these when it's critical to know where a person has gone after they leave the airport.
So... what happens when you’re not there? I.e. if the government just can’t find you? Does this then translate to a police APB or something?
https://twitter.com/MiloHsieh/status/1241540231595044864?s=1...
Also lack of local sim doesn't mean you aren't transmitting. It just means the towers are choosing not to provide you with service. A SIM's only purpose is to link your usage to a billing account and phone number.
Yes and no. Airplane mode, turning your phone off, etc.
But also, even if your phone is pinging the tower with your device’s IMEI... how would they know it’s your phone’s IMEI? There’s no registry mapping IMEIs to legal identities, in any country, AFAIK. Carriers have that information, but you wouldn’t have yet signed up with any Taiwanese carrier. So the Taiwanese government could only get that information from a foreign carrier.
(Yes, you could plug all the tower pings into a graph DB and run Dynamic Network Analysis to figure out what common unidentified IMEI matches the route pattern you extracted from the CCTV data—but you’re expecting a lot here; that hardly works even when you have tens of thousands of bits of evidence of e.g. a crime ring; and that kind of analysis is one of the “slow checks”, like DNA PCR assaying, that takes months to run—especially if you’re having to go process-of-elimination by adding everyone else’s IMEIs into the graph to find the “UFO” IMEI [which presumes that doesn’t also involve O(N) warrants somehow. I’ll be nice and assume it doesn’t.] Add the fact that the only people trained in Network Analysis will be in your country’s fraud squad, and someone between Customs Enforcement and Fraud will have to come up with the idea of getting the fraud people to use this technique outside of its usual domain of application, and... not seeing it happening.)
Basically, for the Taiwanese government to know your phone’s IMEI, you would have either had to tell them the IMEI on the customs form†; or they would have to ask your previous phone provider in your country of origin what IMEI they last saw registered to your IMSI (in turn attached to the phone number on your customs form); and then, provided your domestic provider had any reason at all to want to answer that question (they certainly wouldn’t be compelled to), then the Taiwanese govt would be able to track you.
But that helps nothing if, again, you just provided the phone number of the hotel you’re staying at as your “contact number” on the customs form, as they ask you to. Then they’d need to take another step back and figure out what your cellular numbers in regular use are, given only your other details, without even knowing what carriers you have relationships with in other countries. (Sure, okay, look it up on LinkedIn. That works for a normal person. I’m assuming a person motivated to hide here.)
It also helps nothing if you bought a new phone at any point between when you last signed up for a SIM in your last country of known residence, and when you showed up in Taiwan; and it also helps nothing if you just set your phone to spoof your IMEI. (IMEIs are like MAC addresses: a hardware-fused default with a software-programmable override!)
† ...or they could read it off the millimeter-wave scan of your phone they took at the airport, if they tune the scanner just so. That solves everything for them except the IMEI spoofing, really.
Think low tech. Taiwan didn't even have a computerized registry when I was born, so everything was done by hand (I can confirm this because when I had to look up my birth certificate, it wasn't in the records! and they had to look up the records by hand - but the records exist and are easily findable by humans)
also, don't neglect a simple phone call from the police to your boss - that's a super easy way to find out what's going on. Especially for Western folks who seem to be tied to their work.
True enough, I guess. Require that you turn all devices on, then either require unlock and look at the IMEIs yourself, or pass the person through a Stingray in an RFID cage.
But I would assume that if Taiwan was doing that, people would notice (requiring turning devices on is a very unusual step) and would have mentioned online somewhere that that’s something that happens when you visit Taiwan.
Also, it still won’t help if this immigration-evader turned super-spy is rolling their spoofed IMEI regularly.
(Also, where would they get the information on who your boss/company is? From your customs form? That’s one of those things too expensive to verify for every case ahead of time, so they won’t bother until they actually want to find you; in other words, that’s one of those things that’s perfectly easy to lie about. From your visa, presuming you need one? Information like that could be entirely outdated by the time you visit.)
They ask you at the customs checkpoint. Human intelligence collection is the custom official's job. Even when coming through Canadian Customs border, they do (and are able to) ask directly: who do you work for. What do you do? What is your job? Do you have family here? Where do you live? How old are you?
Those are level 1 questions for crossing the border at pretty much any country.
Driving through the Peace Arch border crossing into the US, I've been asked all of those questions.
And sure, you could leave it on airplane mode -- but you have to keep in mind that you are eventually going to be found, and I'm not really clear why we're even evading quarantine but when you are found the punishment is going to be much more severe if the government believes that you were intentionally avoiding detection. Keep in mind, Taiwan still punishes drug trafficking with death -- I can't imagine they'd look kindly on intentionally endangering their entire population.
Although upon further thought, IMEI should be fine too. Consider that international travel is mostly shut down right now. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 international travelers at the airport within 30 minutes of you. They would just check every one against their quarantine reporting status (hint: EVERYONE else will be where they're supposed to be and checking in as part of the procedure) Then all you have to do is remove IMEIs that are at their correct reporting location one by one. I'd guess less than a hour's work given that the reporting is already being handled.
Are these civil servants that have been re-purposed from other jobs? Are they telco company employees?
Off-topic, my son is a big fan. Neon Shore is one of his favorites, so I have that playing as I type.
I feel mostly the same. That’s what I’m looking forward to after this quarantine. I’m on day 6 as well - The lack of exercise or movement is the worst part.
I detailed my experience in another comment.
At the same time they've been making changes to support people who's jobs are going away (tourism is big, it's collapsed) and to keep businesses running (last week), mortgage holidays (today).
It's not going to be easy, there's going to at least be a recession, and we're likely to be cut off in some form for far longer than a month.
So yes you can do what China and other Asian countries have done in the West, but you do need real leaders capable of framing an issue so that the whole society can get behind it