When the FBI seizes your messages from Big Tech, you may not know it for years
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The law was changed in light of mass surveillance by the German agencies… Because they did spy on most of people by searching almost the whole German internet traffic but never informed anybody they got data from, and that was illegal, our government just changed the law and made it legal.
Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
No, of course not. What the German secret services do is mostly, well, secret. One of our ministers for inner affairs said once the following in an interview as an answer to some questions about what the agencies know: "Ein Teil dieser Antworten würde die Bevölkerung verunsichern."¹
It's actually even difficult to get to know what the normal police knows about you. But there they at least have to disclosure such information if you ask as long as there is no open investigation.
> Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
The German agencies don't have the capacity for such thing at the moment. I guess they really would like to have some data-centers like the NSA, but they don't have them currently.
"Physical" surveillance is expensive and needs people. They also need usually some "real reasons" (like you're anti-government and you reach a lot of people online) to spy on you.
What's expanding is digital mass surveillance—as it's considerably cheap. But that's a problem not only in Germany I guess…
Why cannot they just keep the case open? No need to do anything actively. Just in case it's needed.
They need to report to that panel on secret service affairs in parliament I've mentioned, and there are laws in place for what they are allowed to look for (even you could construct something arbitrary at any time against anybody as we saw in the past; if someone needs a reason for an investigation they will find one for sure).
On the other hands side, as I said, as nobody can really control what they're doing hell knows what kind of data they collect. If someone (like a board of inquiry after some scandal) asks to much questions and wants to look into things they would shred the records likely again, and every involved person "couldn't remember" anything (that last thing is a common trope before parliamentarian boards of inquiry anyway).
Why would they tell you you're a suspect or under investigation? That's counter productive, you could hide your actions better or plan an escape.
But after the case is closed (and there is no accusation) they should inform you so you could take legal steps to validate the rightfulness of such actions. If observation over a long time doesn't lead to accusation there is a strong pointer that this observation wasn't actually justified in the first place…
As it stands there is no possibility for those affected by state surveillance to ever prove any wrongdoing of the agencies that spied on them!
Now only a very small group in parliament can check cases after the fact. But they can't check mostly anything as this is I think 10 or so people against three agencies and hundreds of cases (if you take internet surveillance into account it's actually millions of cases…).
This allows for for selective targeting and prosecution based on all manner of reasons form political to personal.
It is not something we should just simply excuse away as "well everyone else does it so it valid and OK"
I sense some issues with this approach.
> the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret
This is some scary shit. Seriously, social media companies are sociopathic friends who record everything you say and then throw it into the public in a mangled mess if you don't obey.
And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.
In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.
Is this even enough at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to somehow deanonymize these people.
It's probably time to reiterate this...
You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.
Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.
Of course it would be trivial to link to my IP, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.
Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies.
You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, am I right? Unless people in government want to have you murdered for standing up against corruption, or for being an activist. Very, very deeply disturbing, actually.
I’m starting to wonder if adding garbage to your online identity is the best path forward.
If they try and use what you say online against you, well, make half of the content contradictory and easily falsifiable.
When they come for you with a claim of “posted messages indicating involvement in a conspiracy” I wonder how good of a defense it would be to clearly show half of what you post are outright falsehoods and lies.
Can they claim you were conspiring against X when half of your online presence is defending X?
But yeah, I think adding garbage is a good strategy. I tell myself this whenever I watch Netflix or a football game online. They'll think I'm just some Regular Joe, but actually, deep down, I'm a rebel...
Hide in a mass of noise. *Protip: get your small startup on the list to juice your numbers.
Of course they will use only the data that supports their case, and pretend they didn't see the other half of the data.
And I don't think incoherency and contradictory statements generally work well in court.
A Chewbacca defense only works in cartoons.
It happens all the time in actual court cases. Someone say “i hated John” and that’s used to show motive so the defense beings a witness who said the defendant drove John to church every Sunday.
They only need to demonstrate that you had motive sometimes, not all the time.
I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition.
Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)
I've been somewhat careful about what I put on social media, moreso lately, but I think you have really good points about this.
I've been somewhat Anti-Google for a while but explaining why they're bad to the average person falls on deaf ears. They won't care until google bans them or deletes all of their files. Google banning personal documents has been more publicized recently, but it won't slow the layperson down who thinks "nobody is interested in me" or "I'm not doing anything wrong!".
There will be a day that the Government and/or Google thinks you're doing something wrong and you'll lose out. We see FB handing out bans/timeouts for stupid things regularly, its only a matter of time before there's some government blocklist that they will all follow and be able to place you on...
Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile).
Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet.
I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.
When I was younger, I respected agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Now I think they are corrupt as hell and we’d be better off without them.
FBI agents - not so much.
It’s different if you’re just returning a work phone, or preparing to sell or transfer a personal phone.
When members of a group do it more or less en masse, it implies that they have something to hide.
Yeah, isn't that very literally obstruction of justice?
>Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Frank Herbert
(Godwin law, yadda yadda, but the examples are directly applicable here.)
This quote don't carry us very far.
Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being.
Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values.
It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.
This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money!
> That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.
Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.
But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.
Nope. All chains are corruptible. Nothing should ever be based on the idea that some core group of people is above reproach. That is the stuff of superhero movies. Realworld trust systems must be built on the basis that everyone and anyone might be a bad actor. All nodes should have oversight. All actors should be accountable to multiple levels of supervision. Everything should be documented. Those who become corrupt need to be detected and removed. When dealing with classified information the process will operate more slowly but must still take place.
This is a lovely way of phrasing something that I have been thinking about.
Basically that low accountability systems are really bad across the board. If they work for one generation (as in a benevolent dictatorship) then that’s nice, but it’s not a long-term solution.
We need a parity chip on everything.
But an institution must be larger than a single person. Because if you want something to last longer than about 40 years (which is about the maximum amount of time a superhero can be super) you have to have succession.
It's also notable that those "greats" had in common a vision larger than themselves. Selflessness and an annihilation of ego, in service of a larger project, seems to be a requirement for getting yourself to that superhero status in the first place.
FDR tried to manipulate the supreme court by increasing the number of judges.
Lincoln engaged in secret manipulating of the media.
Washington was a slave owner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bil...
https://observer.com/2014/11/abraham-lincoln-as-media-manipu...
Injecting more naive rationalist bureaucrats into the system won't quell its demise. Those who have the greatest leverage over world outcomes have no interest in remedying even an iota of the social decay. And those who directly act under the dictates of the moment of those people have only self-interest to motivate them. Those of us at the bottom are onlookers, helpless to move the inertial mass away from its predestined impact, or blind to it - either by deliberate delusion or by ignorance and perhaps both. All of this because we allowed the reins to be taken by mere men, unprepared to pilot the immeasurable potential of mankind responsibly.
Its hard to envision any foreign nation state level threat that is more dangerous than domestic state police that surveil, torture and murder people completely outside the law and the Constitution.
Hear, hear. I'd abolish these institutions long before I abolished the police (and I'd love to reform US police into something basically unrecognizable).
Then they hired and trained an entirely new police force, including the top officers. As a result, corruption in the new police force basically does not exist.
I suppose most people in NSA are not renowned cryptographers; it's not they who are most corrupt.
This is obviously speculation but if the NSA was reformed into something that mostly respected the rule of law most of the time, more excellent cryptographers and cryptanalysts would want to work there.
I imagine that the NSA’s ostensible mission of protecting United States communications and compromising the communications of legitimately menacing regimes would be better served without domestic full-take and secret courts.
However, I would argue the FBI is likely less corrupt now than in the Hoover days when it was a one-man kingdom. More opportunities for leaks of electronic documents, etc.
Corruption was built-in, easy, while "we-the-people" have the power to highlight corruption and act on it there's hope to get a better system at some point.
While other countries that attempt to root out corruption in the public way, get the perception of being more corrupt only because the government is transparent about it.
At least police are being policed and watched now because of body cameras and the Internet.
It's also the sheer incompetence that's crazy.
> the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term
Knowing rdl's politics, this is patently ridiculous on the part of the journalist. rdl has been an enemy of the state for decades now, going back to cypherpunks and Haven. Some of this context could have been useful to their readers.
> “I’m pretty confident that I’m a fairly boring person. I haven’t done anything that I would consider worthy of the FBI’s time or interest,” Lackey said.
Masterful job trolling the WaPo. Bravo.
TL;DR? "...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;"
Third party doctrine, by which my private communications are exposed because they use a cloud-hosted provider vs. being physically located in my home, is bullshit. Almost all laws on surveillance were made back when it was time and labor intensive to do searches -- even the pen registers for metadata collection -- vs. today where the cloud services run law enforcement portals and the process is very easy (and many judges and senior LE people don't push back on warrants and subpoenas.)
I know I’m largely shouting into a void here but I wish we could bring back some neutrality to news, reduce the editing-choice of extraneous emotion, and actually look at things with some balance and gray instead of reducing everything down to some kind of political rhetoric.
Big tech stores personal data, big government subpoenas the data secretly. They're both strongly to blame.
And I don't really see how the phrase 'big tech' loses any subtlety in an article about facebook and other major services.
Of course it is their doing. Why are they even storing messages and metadata to begin with? Why are they exposing us to this risk? There should be nothing there for any government to find. In an ideal world they'd be connecting us to each other peer-to-peer so that our encrypted communications don't even touch their servers.
Bit Tech's insatiable hunger for personal data is a massive liability for all of us. Their guilt is not to be excused. Governments would have nothing if not for their extensive non-consensual data collection.
Really? I'm not so sure about that.
If the FBI wants my data, they'll need to come to my premise with a warrant.
Otherwise, they're SOL. And how much does that cost me over and above what I spend for the infrastructure I require? Zero.
How many companies that mine my personal information (for whatever reasons) do I use? Zero.
You are substituting your trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature, IMHO.
http://valueflo.ws asset backed flow -protocols built on top of the holochain dweb framework.
As time went on, people wanted more and more user data, click bots made targeting entirely neccesary.
Or how livid people get when their photos are gone. Most iPhone owner's backup plan is "iCloud".
Most people don't care about privacy, they care about convenience.
Sometimes backup customers will use sub-services that require that, but it would be nice if it was behind a big privacy toggle.
I would posit most people don't care if a 3rd party has access to their data, all they care about is not losing their stuff when they lose their device/password. They don't care about the technology behind it, which requires the 3rd party to have access.
And I don't know if most people are aware of how easy it is for their data to be stolen.
Backing up to a computer could be made somewhat easier, though. And iCloud could have a warning instead of being on by default.
How? It's about as easy as it gets. It's just easier to use iCloud backups because it takes less steps.
> And iCloud could have a warning instead of being on by default.
Why? If it had a warning and the person doesn't have another computer to back up to, they wouldn't have backups at all. That actually makes things worse for the consumer.
You could theoritally make an argument that the phone could auto-detect if you have a suitable computer for backing up to and then suggest that instead of iCloud, but why would Apple do that?
And furthermore, there would then need to be additional warnings about how you need to back up your computer too otherwise if you lose your phone then your computer is your only backup until you get a new phone.
I think you're grasping at straws here. It's a better user experience for the average user to just have iCloud on by default. They made it plenty easy for power users and even non-power users who care about privacy to avoid iCloud. I don't think they have a legal or moral obligation to steer you away from iCloud.
None of this cloud storage stuff is necessary. It's nice to have the option to use it but it should be optional. I'm sure these companies are smart enough to automate this process without requiring third party servers or even an internet connection.
It is optional. But people choose it because it's a lot easier than what you do.
The money is in the metadata
Turns out the Constitution can’t protect us from businesses selling our data the the government.
The ones done without a warrant are a tiny fraction of the ones done with. The "burden" of getting a warrant is almost purely token at this point. The agents write some stuff "based on my knowledge and experience" and describe the who and the why and the what, and the judge rubber stamps it. There is no real consequence or penalty for misstatements of fact in the warrant application, and frequently the basis for the probable cause is simply wrong. 100% of the signed warrants I have seen contained obvious and blatant falsehoods.
It's pretty much a rubber stamp either way.
Did Facebook release the case ID associated with the legal action?
Have you tried a Privacy Act request with the FBI? They may deny it based on “current or prospective law enforcement” but if you were scooped up in a dragnet, they may give you something.
I have the case IDs but my lawyer (Jennifer Granick; she is basically among the best in the world for this) has been unable to get a response from FBI -- they blew her off 5 times.
I did FOIA myself and got "no information since last time you requested" (~10 years ago, which was also basically null)
A Senator's office is involved now. (This is all complicated even more because I currently live in a US Territory where we don't have Congressional representation.)
People get upset or outraged about warrantless stuff, and they should, but it's important to remember that even search warrants in the USA are essentially rubber stamp (unless they specify like "every photo posted to instagram on x date" or some other obviously overbroad thing). The companies' own transparency reports show the scale of warrants/etc versus NSLs, FISA orders, and the other warrantless stuff people take issue with.
Even without FISA 702 (aka PRISM), National Security Letters, et c, providers having huge, long term, comprehensive non-e2e troves of our data (ie gmail, instagram) is a hazard due to search warrants and of course the insane third party doctrine.