The FBI's internal guide for getting data from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon

The US had a wiretap on Merkel. Do you think Russia, China, Germany, Israel, Iran and North Korea don't have the same on every other major political figure?

Let's face the truth: none of us is safe. Everything we do, even if we are just oedinary 9-5 office workers and not politicians or activists, is ending up recorded somewhere.

The only way out would be a nation-state effort of open source: everything from the VHDL of the chips over firmware to the OS, and enough money to fund audits of all components. At least, users could then somewhat trust at least their clients, and treat the network as a dumb leaky network of pipes.

Every 'interest' has this data. It comes down to money and time.

but the rest of the cost has created jobs! it's the great jobs program of our lifetimes.

/s

That seems to be something literally all governments, from Belarus over Turkey to China, the US and Europe can agree upon. Surveillance of ones citizens is good, consequences of this surveillance vary by country so.

I'm not so sure about that. I've been seeing it around more than I'd like recently. I even had to use it to talk to my thesis' supervisors.

That's my point. The US (and other countries) systems are superior because at least there is some mechanism to put a stop to it. In China there isn't - as you said it's official policy.

"we are far from living in a perfect world" well yes. And we never will live in a perfect world where privacy is never violated. There will always be people willing to break the rules to benefit themselves.

And since when has feedback mattered? It matters all the time? I mean the Democrats won an election and are now proposing a massive spending bill taking the country in a very different direction, just as one example.

> If the founders of the USA were to resurrect today, I wonder what they would think about the nation they created.

I don't understand the fetishisation of the US "founding fathers". What does it matter what a bunch of people who lived 200 years ago thought and wanted and how they would feel about today's version of that? Considering some of the things that were normal in their time, like slavery, the subservient role of women in society, power only in the aristocracy or rich people ( even the "bastion of democracy" US wasn't a popular democracy where everyone had a vote until after WWI), segregation, etc. of course they'd disagree. And so would Louis XVI, Franz Josef, Queen Victoria, Hitler, etc.. so what?

Who cares what those people would theoretically think and why?

I don't know why. How many different ways do companies have to look at me to understand I am broke?

"They wanted to expand surveillance while telling us they were protecting us."

The issue is that they (i.e. government) have always done this. I'm only 35, but I remember this being very clear immediately after 9/11. You just say the boogeyman is terrorism, and that is used to justify end-runs around the constitution via the "PATRIOT" Act, etc. etc. Before terrorism, the excuse was communism. Maybe I'm just cynical now or read too much "1984" as a teenager, but I feel like there will always be a new boogeyman that they use to justify more authority, more powers, and all the while saying it's for our own good and to 'protect' us.

That is probably true in most cases. Choose your poison.

Also, don't use a VPN provider that knows who you are and don't use one in your own jurisdiction.

> EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan

Just curious, how many captchas do you solve with this setup daily? Or even IP bans?

I did exactly the same thing once and it was so annoying.

t3.micro = $0.0104 x 750 = $7.80/mo without taking your bandwidth into consideration.

Lightsail costs $3.50/mo with 1tb transfer bundled or $5/mo with 2tb.

If your setup is scripted then it probably makes sense to switch over to save a bit of cash. Others following the same path could save some money by using Lightsail as opposed to EC2.

Google wirehole, just needs a single docker-compose up

without net neutrality this could be useful for future billing arrangements

>> This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.

> Heh, just to analyze and improve customer experience? Nothing else a bit more unsavory?

The point is this data would get captured regardless, surveillance or no. Mass surveillance (at least in this matter) often isn't so much about what gets captured, but how long it gets retained and who gets access to it.

I wonder if this sort of activity would be detectible on publicly available balance sheets?

Employee surveillance in a low trust environment and bad working conditions I would assume.

I've used such an app myself on my work environments and if anyone ever questioned what I did a certain day I could always go back and look.

Very helpful when filling out the time report if you are reporting time on many different customers.

If a company force installed it on your PC it is probably not a good place to work at.

The purpose is for time tracking. I am a developer but I go through periods where I work on _many_ different projects. And also I sometimes get pulled in (without warning) to support the team on client calls.

It is not uncommon for me to have 15-30 different time tracker entries for things I worked on in a single day. This is not an exaggeration. Then other days I will work on a single task for entire day.

So all of this unscheduled stuff gets lost pretty easily. Calls scheduled for an hour run only 30 minutes. Client A needed 10 minutes of support here, 20 minutes there, 5 minutes there. I want to be as fair as possible to our clients.

And related to client support, there is often the question of "who owns this bug" and who pays for the call. So I can use screenshots of the client environment to relate to the team and get more information about whether we should really be billing for the call or if that's something that needs to be improved in our software.

Also I support other developers. Skype calls with developers tend to be short. But boy can they add up. If I'm spending 3 hours a day on support overall, I really need to track that. That time needs to go into the right project at the very least.

So that's where the screenshots come in. This is not something the company asked for or have ever requested access to. They know I do this. So when I say I spent two hours supporting a client, they feel confident sending out that bill.

It actually started as one of those experiments into time lapse video. But I multitask way too much for these to be usable videos. Though I have hand picked select days and turned them into something very cool.

Nope

at the very least, t-mobile has static-routed public resolvers like google's to their own in the past.

Though legally speaking, there might be a difference between logging dns packets going to ??? and dns packets hitting the provider’s dns server.

The latter could be construed as necessary logging while the former is spying for the sake of spying.

DNSCloak does that, but it sometimes crashes, and unfortunately there are no recent updates.

Until eSNI or similar is implemented across all sites, it doesn't matter much.

Do you assume that the FBI does not have a similar document for Cloudflare (or any VPN or DoH provider)? I think it's probably healthy to assume that your accessed host history is semi-public regardless of how well you try to protect it. Note that even with esni your ISP or your VPN's ISP will still know the IP addresses you're getting to, and in most ordinary cases can do a reverse lookup.

Graphene suggests that it uses iommu and similar hardware on supported devices to mitigate (some) attacks like this.

What’s the story Apple/Samsung etc tell for GPS to be this leaky? Shouldn’t the GPS be solely handled by the OS?

You know, if you bring up the First Amendment in US, people usually stop listening. I haven't seen it brought up in court, though. But even in court. Unless of course there's something exceptional and sound in a strict sense about your argument (off the top of my head "I was born on the Moon. Because everybody who has ever walked on the Moon, and the only military on the Moon, were American, and the only country with a human presence on the moon, was America, therefore it is part of America, therefore I was born in America, and am therefore an American citizen." Suppose that's the truth, you were born on the Moon, and you say just what I wrote, and you believe it, and you mean it, oh man. American courts will, yeah, they'll really sympathize with you, and then yes, they will accept "freedom of speech" as an argument.

Lol woah - maybe I should check HN more than once a week. Let's dive in!!

1. “I doubt they [international agencies] send the kind of subpoenas…” - It’s a gross display of willful ignorance to assume things just so it agrees with your opinion. This is Facebook’s Transparency report (https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/co...) They are just one example, with hundreds of thousands of requests coming from outside of the United States. There are 195 countries in the world…170 of them have sent them to Facebook alone.

2. You are literally proving the point of why those data guides were created…so no one asks a company for data that they don’t have and waste everyones time/energy. The reality is that every company has some form of data…if a company didn’t have any sort of data how in the world would they be able to display any information, or do literally anything ever? There is always something to ask for.

3. Lol so many absurdities going on with this bullet so buckle in:

     3.1 - “If your process of handling mail…” - So do you not use email? Most people graduated from mailing addresses to email addresses because it was a better way of doing things and easier than mail…most companies use emails to deal with subpoenas…a tool like Kodex is easier than email and takes the burdens away from this legal obligation…keeping the process difficult only makes it difficult on the company, not the govt.

     3.2 - “USA has a slightly more repressive regime than [you] assumed…” - NDOs are used so the subject of a case isn’t tipped off. For example, would you prefer pedophiles to be told “the FBI just asked for the CSAM on your google drive” and have the pedophile go dark/get away, and continue to abuse innocent children as a result? Is that “repressive” towards the pedophile? Or a necessary legal vehicle to protect the innocent? Would you rather the USA take the unfortunate approach that some countries do, and not do anything about heinous crimes like that?

     3.3 - “Who the government is spying on…” - “Spying” and “investigating” are two very different things. Choosing to use the language “spying” for a subpoena is either ignorance, or a determined effort to fit the narrative you want and demonize what is actually going on. Subpoena’s are legal documents that go through a court. Spying does not. That NSA/Snowden scandal had nothing to do with subpoenas…that was all Top Secret spy programs that did not involve courts, or legal documents…Subpoenas are all unclassified information used for investigations, not on-going spy programs.

     3.4 - “Publicizing…Protected by first amendment…” - You can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Aka Free speech is moot when it is “a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” You have a right to express your opinions, desire’s etc, but not to put others in harms way.  These investigations are to prevent harms. 

     3.5 - “Hide a subpoena from the user while it is in effect…” - Kodex makes it easier for the client to follow the law, and allows them to ethically follow up with the user once the law no longer prohibits the company from doing so. Would you rather hope the company just remembers to go back to the mail room and fish through a file cabinet to see which user should be notified each day when that isn’t a priority for the company’s bottom line? Or would you want the company to be automatically reminded when such a date comes? Keeping this process more disorganized than it needs to be just for the sake of silently convincing yourself you live on a higher moral plane is what is more unethical.

4. “Mass circumvention…” - You seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that consequences exist, once again. You know copyright infringement/file sharing pioneers like Napster were ultimately shut down…right? You know, because it was illegal and the consequence was…being shut down? If you try to say that changed the music industry to help the onset of streaming/Spotify you might be right, but then why would you ignore that something like Kodex can be the same type disruption to subpoena processing that streaming was to music…making it easier and more accesible? Moreover, it wasn’t the general disregard for the rules that created Spotify, it was the realization of the desire for instant access to every song, rather than pay $1.29 for some songs.

5. “The process doesn’t need to be clunky, messy, or disorganized” - Thank you, I agree!

I’d encourage you to learn more about this topic, because you seem to have put little effort into understanding what’s really going on, and instead have chosen to just yell at the sky/internet about what you think is going on - simply for the sake of yelling.

There's one thing that all combat sports, not only Jujitsu teach you. Even if you're good at fighting, it's best not to start fights.

You might do this once, and "win" the battle. The federal government will come for revenge.

Where local service provider is just the tower.

https://www.firstnet.com/power-of-firstnet/firstnet-advantag...

>FirstNet is designed with a defense-in-depth security strategy that goes well beyond standard commercial network security measures, providing protection without sacrificing usability. And now, we’ve gone farther than anyone in the industry to secure public safety communications. FirstNet will be the first-ever network with comprehensive, tower-to-core encryption based on open industry standards.

Which implies every other network doesn't encrypt that traffic (or does it with some proprietary scheme... which wouldn't give me a lot of confidence)

Telcos rarely do end-to-ends, usually they handle signaling out of band, strip headers, decipher payload and re-cipher with new session information each time your data switches medium. In-band signaling with E2E and recursive encapsulations like TLS over TCP over IP are very Internet/IP pattern.

I'm not sure if you're shadow banned or what, but every comment of yours I have encountered has been marked dead. I vouched for this and another one I saw elsewhere in the thread.

It was well known in telecom at the time this was due to the nsa situation. Don't always take things at face value.

As I understand it, the explanation of the "false accounting records" and "losing business" had to do with expected government contracts vanishing because of refusing to cooperate about the NSA surveillance.

It was well known why Google got rid of their "don't be evil" tagline... except now nowhere on the internet seems to have a record of the exact reason either...

These kinds of stories get 'forgotten' very quickly.

It depends a lot on how you define “their”. In both those cases you could also argue that the president was still establishing the supremacy of a democratically elected republican government as the process for achieving change rather than perpetual revolution. It’s different then having elected officials undermined by permanent bureaucracies.

I’m not defending the sedition act, but it’s quite important that it was implemented during a quasi-war and was still barely passed. There’s also a reason that two hundred years later it’s constantly held up as a paragon of bad law and there’s no way it would pass judicial review at any point since then (it didn’t at the time either, because it expired 2 years after it was passed and before judicial review was established).

Dead on, and those are a couple excellent illustrations of why, no matter how good a chief executive had been before taking office, you have to watch them relentlessly.

not to mention that we're speaking of colonists who intentionally set out to genocide the native population on a regular basis. and most were slavers, putting the lie to any talk of freedom. in the end, little mattered to them in that revolution than removing English fetters on themselves. that people identify with a group that would almost certainly would have denied them the right to legal personhood and look to them as guarantors of freedom only speaks to their historical illiteracy.

I have a feeling they would want to burn all 17 to the ground.