Get the police department phone number from the town's government and not google maps.
Contact the state government to ask? There’s a good chance nobody will be able to provide the answers you seek on short notice.
Not going to work internationally anyway.
You are engaging in bad faith, please stop it.
It’s not even about being a “devils advocate”, the balance of probabilities rests squarely on the side of this being far more difficult than many commenters here try to make it out to be.
I think it is you who is engaging in bad faith.
Sounds like you’re just repeating the point that authenticating these requests is impossible, as that authentication would have to happen fast.
And then you need to do this internationally. What will you do? Contact the embassy? Suddenly your authentication process could take months, which is a problem if you’re legally required to comply sooner than that.
Who said that?
Worst case scenario is probably a horrible PR disaster after a child dies because you couldn’t process a real request fast enough.
And we’re not talking about seconds, but easily days or weeks.
It is literally impossible for request recipients to solve this problem.
This I agree with. I'm trying to find the actual text of the law, I'm surprised the government isn't pretty specific about what constitutes a valid EDR, who can send them, etc. Bureaucrats love to write rules.
The end solution is either an authentication scheme, a $1000 rush processing fee that includes a verification process and the requirement to call it in (It is an emergency, isn't it? Emergencies do not happen often, so what is $1000 to an american organization funded by taxpayer dollars?) or E2E encryption that makes it they can't give data.
Another thing about the $1000 fee, is you get to see the payment information about the account it comes from, and you can further require it comes from a government account which matches the requesting organization. Thanks to governments being very gung ho about their financial surveillance infrastructure being a hard requirement for almost everything now.
No?
Anecdotally, from what we are reading today, a typical EDR response time is on the order of an hour. So while someone on my team is gathering the requested data, someone else is doing the verification.
> Sounds like you’re just repeating the point that authenticating these requests is impossible, as that authentication would have to happen fast.
If anything, I'm implying that if the government mandates that EDRs exist, they should have to back it up with someone to handle authentication. A phone number at the state level would do the trick.
> And then you need to do this internationally. What will you do?
First I'd have to be convinced why I should do this in every jurisdiction, why that jurisdiction would have access to customer data from other jurisdictions, etc.
Sounds like you're saying the problem is that the government is mandating things and providing no rules about how it should work. That seems like such an un-government-like thing to do, they usually get weirdly specific.
The whole point is that verification will take much longer than hours.
> Sounds like you're saying the problem is that the government is mandating things and providing no rules about how it should work. That seems like such an un-government-like thing to do, they usually get weirdly specific.
The government is very specific when it comes to what is required of you. The government is not very specific when it comes to what is required of the government.
How can it take longer than hours to reach the actual police department in $someSmallTown, USA ?
$Deity forbid you actually happen to live in $someSmallTown and need the police in a hurry...
Really?
I'm struggling to get my head around how a tiny and/or part-time police force should be the (sole?) point of contact for an emergency data request when <drum roll> they're not even there for the majority of every 24h cycle.
"Dear $TelCo, you must immediately release location data for subscriber 1-800-555-2368, it's so important and urgent we haven't got time to find a judge. Since it's almost 4pm we're going off duty now and will be at our desks from 9am tomorrow. Yours, $PartTimeForce"
Q: Is government mandating this? At what level?
...and if so, why?
Alternatively, it's possible that understaffed and overworked providers are more concerned about their company looking bad when "Missing Child X with schoolbag containing cellphone" isn't located before the next news cycle?
Doesn't due process exist for a reason? Even if that's occasionally a PITA for the authorities?
I mean I want to call some entity in the US that doesn't have its number on a website, how do I do that now in a non emergency situation? Is there any reason that wouldn't work in an emergency?
This doesn't seem like an actual problem anyone has ever had.
Not that the inability to confirm a phone number in a hypothetical phone book would be an excuse for noncompliance anyway.
This was the question I responded to. I'm not sure how else to explain it?
Ah yeah, because fake subpoenas didn’t work before the internet existed?
> I do not believe that those channels for government no longer exist. If they choose to make themselves impossible to locate offline, this is on them.
Who says they ever existed? Back in the pre-internet days the situation was just worse.
Even the federal government can’t manage this, just look at misissuances of .gov domain names.
Back in the NES days Tengen called the United States Copyright Office and told them they needed the technical details of the NES lockout chip to defend themselves in a copyright lawsuit. The Copyright Office faxed over the requested information. Except it was social engineering, there was no copyright lawsuit. Tengen used that proprietary information to build their own cartridges without paying the NES licences costs.
(Sorry to have to ask) but are there [m]any towns in the USA without telephones?
There are towns in the US where the local government consists only of a couple of people who may only do local government work for a few hours a week.
There are towns with essentially no online presence, you could easily create your own fake local government, police and whatever you’d like.
How does anyone authenticate anything allegedly issued by such small parts of local government?
"Not very quickly" is presumably one part of the answer?
It’s actually a pretty novel idea that companies should be prepared to deal with fake court orders, etc. In theory it’s supposed to be the job of law enforcement to prevent this, but of course that is also essentially impossible.
If the federal lawmakers wanted the federal government to undertake the herculean task of making all these documents verifiable and traceable, they could of course do that. Are they likely to do so? No.
Also, there’s an important detail that is largely being ignored in this conversation: How many hours of paralegal time can we expect companies to spend verifying legal requests concerning accounts that don’t belong to paying customers?
So if a stranger in a suit were to turn up on your doorstep with a "search warrant" to search your house, issued by a court/judge/jurisdiction you'd never heard of, you'd not attempt to authenticate it?
> verifying legal requests
I'm not sure that these EDRs as described can be said to be "legal requests".
Aren't they just asking for disclosure of data without the usual legal checks and balances?
Most people would not, no. I’ve had a search warrant served on my home once by police in civilian clothes, they handed me a piece of paper and refused to give ID even though I insisted.
What are you going to do? Physically fight them? Bad idea.
> I'm not sure that these EDRs as described can be said to be "legal requests".
The thing is that real search warrants or court orders do not provide any additional security over these EDRs when the submitting party is not acting in good faith.
I'm not sure what you're saying there, can you expand on this? Are you saying a fake search warrant or fake court order is no more secure than a fake EDR?
My point is that the EDR system (if we can even call it a system) appears designed to avoid any and all scrutiny, verification or legal process. "We need this in a hurry, lives are on the line, we haven't got time to get a court order" doesn't exactly invite the recipient to understand that they have every right to say no.
EDRs are basically backdooring an otherwise fairly well-understood system with checks and balances.
I guess I don't see the value the town government contact details is providing here. If you have some way of figuring out the real contact details for every town why wouldn't that same mechanism work for figuring out the real contact details of every police department?
Turns out the government actually has no duty to convince you, locking you up tends to be convincing enough.
Look, if you want to preserve your rights you've gotta stand up for them.
> Look, if you want to preserve your rights you've gotta stand up for them.
You have absolutely no such right to refuse to comply with subpoenas, search warrants or court orders not delivered via your preferred means.
> Expecting them to show up in person in some capacity and show you the paperwork is fully reasonable
It’s not reasonable, because actual judges will not partake in such games. They will just hold you in contempt.
It might sound reasonable to a layman, but your lawyer will think you’ve gone crazy.
I'm willing to agree the law is crap and you might go to jail (briefly) anyway, but that's not an excuse for "it should work this way" which is the direction everyone seems to be taking it.
> but that's not an excuse for "it should work this way" which is the direction everyone seems to be taking it.
I see many people arguing that the recipients should solve this problem by doing better verification, I don’t think that’s reasonable.
This is absolutely something that the lawmakers need to fix, but that will be a herculean task.