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Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

Not really, because we have rule of law. There are plenty of illegal ways to spy on people's private activity and we cope. If there's a hillside in view of your house, somebody can hide in the bush with a telephoto lens to watch you cooking dinner. Various active radar type technologies can see through walls. There are ways to pick up sound from a distance.

Last I heard, this seeing people with Wifi was very poor resolution and filled with noise but worst of all, the system had to be trained on the specific rooms it was being used on so you couldn't apply it secretly.

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You clearly don’t want to have to worry about this lol. Your first response is that it is illegal (so is speeding).

Second seems to be that the tech is uncommon and has poor resolution.

^ this is true with the first digital cameras as well.

As the MIT researchers first publishing their work on this know, the minimumly viable tech needed to use wifi to passively see observe each breath someone takes is 5% hardware and 95% software. We aren’t talking about cutting edge tech. We are taking about commonly available tech that is just used to observe distortions in the 3d radio propagation geometries.

The actual hardware required to see exactly where someone is behind walls and what their hands are doing costs less than $300. Most of it is software needed to reconstruct the geometry from the signals. Software like this is notorious for being randomly and abruptly open sourced.

Yea, and you can make bombs in your house and mail them to people. You can buy drugs online. You can trade child porn, you can abuse your own children. You can commit all sorts of crimes easily and secretly but you'll go to jail if you get caught.

You can also see if someone's breathing by noticing condensation on their windows in winter or seeing them enter their house one day and come out another day. They must have spent the intervening time inside breathing. If that's the level of invasion, it hardly matters.

> Not really, because we have rule of law.

Until we don't.

RIP Jon Lang. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFBeetiYMs

It's completely bonkers to claim that "rule of law" in the US protects our privacy from any type of digital intrusion. "cope" might be the right word if you mean "completely ignore/obseqiuously accept our lack of privacy".

Hackers on the internet are lawless because they're in Russia or wherever, but somebody looking through your walls with wifi will be personally present in your street where he's at risk of being caught so it's a completely different kind of risk.

You sound as if you aren’t aware of wifi beam antennas that can connect from about a mile away, or aware that drones can be equipped with multi-array wifi antennas.

I guess I used too extreme an example so you misunderstood. The distinction I'm making is that those things you mentioned put the person doing them at risk of arrest because they must be physically present while hacking from Russia doesn't.

Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.

Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.

Totally agree about peeping toms. But, if a company gets to spy on you via their devices with impunity, your politicians representing you get pay bumps.

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