Cops wanted to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You'll get some cool swag and, more importantly, ensure that they continue their excellent work.
You probably mean 4/4: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/043091431.
I wouldn't.
If the EFF really wants my financial support, they can split their org into two; one that focuses exclusively on defending our digital rights (to whom I would gladly donate) and one that focuses on social justice.
This mentality of packaging the bad with the good is precisely what got the US where it is now.
Well this is inevitable. People just don't have time to be involved in every issue, so you find the parties / organizations / representatives that _most_ represent you, and that's what you get. There's never going to be an org or politician that perfectly represents you; you have to pick which people/orgs will most help shape the world to be the one you want to live in.
Also, if among free speech & digital rights supporters you're in a minority that doesn't like stuff like, iono, gender equality... well you can find other ways to express that point of view. I seriously doubt EFF's work is changing peoples' minds about that anyway; their involvement in some of those issues is more reflecting how most EFF constituents feel.
MZLA used AI to generate wallpapers for Thunderbird that nobody asked for, somebody is in a salaried role doing it that's funded by donations. What a complete waste of money considering the AI isn't even FOSS, and they are promoting it on the Thunderbird blog. That's without even getting into the arrogance displayed by a big name from their camp on AI ethics. Did all kinds of mental gymnastics to say he was a very talented artist for typing text into Discord.
Open source email clients don't need marketing gimmicks, they need substance.
BTW, did you know the same person in that role is now introducing a Thunderbird podcast? Who asked for a podcast for a FOSS email client? Nobody.
Dude has proven once again that Mozilla should just focus on making great software as they close-to-zero credibility left after working with Meta and shambolic PR disaster after PR disaster.
FWIW, even though I'm a huge FOSS evangelist, I switched to Vivaldi and Gmail, because fuck that.
I know I am painting with a broad brush here, but I am at a point where I want it severed into something else.
The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're Stirner but egoism is a different topic for debate). Because this is a gradient and because most people's political positions evolve over time through lived experience and exposure to other people, it's impossible to pin down a fixed position on that spectrum without eventually veering in one direction or the other.
The EFF generally tries to use the ideal of individual privacy as a fixture for its politics but the recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
So if the SCOTUS thinks "right to privacy" is intrinsically tied "various agendas around gender/immigration", it shouldn't surprise anyone that the EFF would think the same, no matter what your stance on those issues is.
It's almost like the Overton window has two natural endpoints but will frictionlessly slide in between them if you start pushing, so if you want to prevent it from moving further you have to exert force that will easily cause it to slide back the way you started at.
PS: On a complete tangent, I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Russian revolution overthrowing the monarchy turned into the authoritarian Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks tried to reel in the more anarchist revolutionaries and asserted dominance of the party, insisting on a central command bureaucracy instead of a federated direct democracy. But I digress.
https://reason.com/2022/08/31/the-student-loan-debate-shows-...
I would support a truly civil-liberties-only ACLU, but not what they currently are.
Take a look at FIRE, https://www.thefire.org.
Have not investigated this, but pg [0] seems to thumbs down ACLU and thumbs up FIRE:
The SCOTUS decision in Loving (the anti-miscegenation laws, i.e., interracial marriage)[1] doesn't rest on right to privacy. This decision is built (approximately) on the equal protection clause. As such, the reversal or Roe doesn't put Loving on shaky ground at all. A good thing for me, since my wife and I are of different races.
The right to privacy wasn't established by Roe so overturning Roe doesn't have any effect on it.
https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right...
That's not correct. They found that the right to privacy didn't cover abortion in the exact, specific and detailed manner that Roe set precedent for (see my previous comment about the specific rules for each trimester).
14th amendment "liberty" covers privacy covers abortion, only the abortion precedent was overturned privacy was not. Thomas took aim at privacy in his opinion but that's not supported by the rest of the court.
given that we're commenting on a thread about invasive police surveillance it's pretty funny to think there's no very obvious correlation to immigration. Which groups do you think are among the most targeted by law enforcement surveillance tech?
People who get hung up on this, what's the underlying mindset? "I love privacy for white dudes, but god forbid they accidentally help a Mexican woman in an iCE camp or an abortion clinic"? Marginalized are always the primary target of police force, and increasingly beta-test subjects of police tech[1], so the relationship should be quite obvious.
[1]https://theintercept.com/2021/01/30/lapd-palantir-data-drive...
> The "shitty technology adoption curve" describes the arc of oppressive technology: when you have a manifestly terrible idea, you can't ram it down the throats of rich, powerful people who get to say no. You have to find people whose complaints no one will listen to.
>
> So our worst tech ideas start out with prisoners, asylum seekers and mental patients, spread to children and blue collar workers, and ascend the privilege gradient to the wealthy and powerful as they are normalized and have their roughest corners sanded down.
An outgroup that is bound by the law but not protected by it.
So maximum liberty for me and law and order for thee.
Another example: Best defense against a "bad guy with a gun" (outgroup) is a "good guy with a gun" (ingroup).
See also Rhodesia, Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, and Western Expansion under the Homesteading acts.
This is how some people can claim they want both maximum freedom but also, maximum autocracy and arbitrary authority entrusted in deputies.
It's how the same people can have cruel hot takes when there's a minority killed by police but pull their hair out if one of their religious or political leaders is taken to court.
It's not inconsistent. There's different systems applied to groups that get different labels. Could be based on the geographic coordinates of where they were born, perceived skin color, what religion they may vaguely be associated with, ethnic identity, personal wealth, the gender they sleep with or identify as, political identity, citizenship status, whatever. One group doesn't have the right to have rights. That's the crucial part. How to get there is somewhat arbitrary.
It's best if it's just a tiny bit porous so there's a token instance where the classification is broken so it can be pointed to in order to deny the system exists. See antisemitic organizations with an ethnic Jewish person involved, white supremacist organizations run by a non-white person, anti-feminist organizations run by a woman, etc. They play an important role in perpetuating such systems
How can that system be justified? Label one "good guy" and the other "bad guy".
It's one of the most pure forms of the ideology I've seen.
You have people like George Zimmerman doing pro-gun confederate flag artwork, the connection is rugged and robust
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Confederate_battle_flag...
The tribal ingroup outgroup dynamic happens all the time. Take Kyle Rittenhouse versus Ashli Babbitt for instance.
The 'bad guy' is whoever is the aggressor. Everyone has a right to life; if someone starts shooting at you, or swinging a bat at you, you have the right to defend yourself, and if you kill the aggressor in self-defence, so be it.
I've heard from an internet lawyer that it's possible in principle for two people attacking each other to both have grounds for self-defence, too, if both were in reasonable fear for their lives. Whether A kills B, or B kills A, either may be able to argue self-defence given the right (wrong) circumstances. But that's just some internet theorycrafting I heard.
Most wars of aggression were sold as self defense.
Jonathan Swift even poked fun of this in the 1700s. It's a really old trick.
The problem is some people get extended the credulity of self defense and others aren't.
Could I declare self defense against a police officer?
Why not?
Aren't they just another human susceptible to the same emotions and aggressions?
They are always given the benefit, a priori, regardless of circumstances, carte blanche, every time. Even in a mere theoretical framing, police are immediately assigned the "self defense" role. It could be over the death of a child playing in the front yard or a family dog, doesn't manner, apparently justified self defense every time.
That's exactly this dynamic at play again. It gets used in the writings of gruesome mass shooters. They were forced to kill all those people to defend some amorphous idea, the country or the race or some thing.
Self defense is a valid physical construct but it's what everyone claims. Do you expect someone to twirl their mustache, furl their cape, guffaw in laughter and snark on how much of an evildoer they are?
Everyone wants to think they were in the right. It's almost as if the theoretical is immaterial.
Let's take the horrible crime of rape for example. Some teenagers are quite a bit larger than adults and we can theoretically imagine a child offending an adult but we've decided that's so unusual that we defined a presumed relationship (of the child being the victim).
This is completely reasonable because the conceit of agreeing with the mental exercise doesn't dissuade us from the historical and practiced reality of sexual crime against children being so dominant that it's presumed unless extraordinary evidence is presented otherwise. I'm sure a quick Google search will reveal these unusual exceptions because it's a "man bites dog" kind of story for journalists. The fact they can be itemized as individual stories instead of presented as a statistic is evidence of its rarity.
Self defense might be similar. Perhaps the relationship is mostly aggression and antagonism. There's an occasional zebra of a true self defense where someone jumps out of the inky shadows to subdue an innocent damsel but perhaps we need to set the bar in the court of public opinion far higher (in the legal court I believe it's already quite a gambit but IANAL)
You can guarantee that if society moves towards criminializing trans people, or further demonising immigrants, or tracking women's fertility for the purposes of further restricting access to abortion; surveillance technology will be at the forefront of that effort and the EFF's goals of technological privacy and free speech will be important to fight against it.
To support the EFF is, in my opinion, an inherently political act and to say you support their overall aims of online privacy and free speech but also "get upset" when they support groups that directly benefit from their causes is (IMO) a contradiction.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me"
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
But you seem to have grand-parent's take backwards.
Many non profits reject those kind of donations though. But money talks.
First, they'll come for gender/immigration, but you didn't say anything. Then they'll come for you and nobody will be left to say anything.
For fifty dollars, no. If you’re giving more substantially, of course.
To an extent, depending on the fraction of the budget you're contributing.
Practice versus theory. If I'm donating 50% of an organization's budget, I get to say what my 50% does as well as the other 50%. That's power. (If they don't comply, I pull my funding. Assuming the other half is diffuse.)
I honestly don't give a damn about abortions in the US and I don't care about any local policital movement, that is cool for the season.
My question is, what can we do to fight such oppressive surveillance mechanisms as individuals? Beyond the standard donation to EFF and such. In my rage I want to see the Fog Data Science people prosecuted and the police depts which unquestioningly used their product stripped of their post, but what power do we have as a collection of individuals to work against these nefarious machinations?
I'll tell you what the problem is. It's the justice system itself. It's extremely slow and expensive. Defense lawyers have perverse incentives -- delays make money. Prosecution have perverse incentives -- they just want easy wins. The courts have perverse incentives -- they don't want to decide cases. So you get a system rooted in all-powerful patrolmen who effectively serve as judge, jury and executioner, with the rest of it serving as a willing, very highly paid window dressing. So why would a PD ever say no to getting any legal advantage?
The solution must be to rethink justice from top to bottom, such that excesses like this are punished meaningfully. I'm uncharacteristically optimistic about the possibility, mainly because of computers and the internet. Justice is about making sound decisions informed by reality after applying agreed upon rules (laws), and it requires a judge/jury. Computers can help with each of these elements in ways barely explored by modern-day courts. They can help with information gathering and jury selection/operation. If we wanted, we could have same day trials of higher quality than the months or years long things we have today.
For people aware of these problems, the only solutions they hear involve fixing the justice with new legislation or by electing the right sheriff, mayor, police chief, or if a higher level of government steps in (like the FBI or federal courts). Or even worse that odious pablum "just vote" - if you've been served shit for dinner it won't taste better if you push it 'round your plate.
(If someone with infinite money (and with open-minded connections with judges in various courts, and supportive politicians) wants to fund a serious effort in this area, please reach out to me, because this need is critical.)
The badge should never have meant protection from the law, but these perverse incentives have conspired to make it so, and the solution is NOT legislation about cops, as much as it seems like it should be, but rather legislation about courts.
Government prosecutes criminal law. There are various reasons, including politics or career progression, that government prosecutors overlook some crimes. Individuals don't successfully charge others with criminal violations.
Individuals prosecute civil law. If civil law penalties continue to be unavailable because 'government immunity', then bad actors in government will not be restrained through the courts.
I'm uncertain what court legislation you would propose, other than removal of USSC doctrine of government immunity.
The solution to this particular problem is political. The USA needs federal privacy laws.
This is all according to plan. The best part it's totally politically ambiguous. Republicans are war hawks and "the party of the people" (Democrats) have been responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings overseas. Both major parties LOVE this idea. Who wouldn't want to be able to manufacture a crime against your alleged political adversaries?
Nothing. An individual is weak.
> what power do we have as a collection of individuals to work
This is the right question to ask!
First of all analyze where does power need to be applied to change this practice. State/Fed lawmakers? Courts? Apple/Google? The data brokers? DoJ/State Attorneys General? The FTC? Police Depts themselves? All of the above?
Next, for each of these analyze what would make them change course. For example, via courts a relevant legal challenge and adequately funded counsel is obviously one element, but in truth Judges pay attention to factors outside the courtroom like public opinion, re-election campaigns (for elected judges). Not only that but in the long term which judges are sitting is something that can be influenced either by elections or the appointer.
Then consider how do we build organizations that get the power to apply that influence. For example funding the EFF, ACLU et al is great for the "a relevant legal challenge and adequately funded counsel" part, but they do a bad job with public opinion and don't even attempt the other parts. So you can seek out or start organizations that do those elements.
Or alternatively imagine you want the US DoJ to step in. Well, ultimately high level DoJ serves the political needs of the current administration, so pressure needs to be applied there. Sadly in the US this is a very difficult angle but it's possible (see: tea party!). For other issues I might suggest joining DSA or something like that, but I don't think that's relevant here. Possibly making a stink within the Democratic party would be effective.
As you can probably see, this fans out to a large number of different organizations with different strategies along the way. You can join and support multiple of them, but it's not really practical to do everything so you have to pick a bit. This is why you need to think through what you believe is a viable strategy and find organizations you think are effective.
I don't think there is much beyond that to be honest. Those people are the experts and, honestly, a big difference between this country and those that we would not like to become is that we are able to make such a donation without repercussion.
In a lot of other places, such activism would have severe consequences.
This is why any and all claims of anonymization are gaslighting. You can't know something and not know it. The entire concept is incoherent and anyone who claims ad tracking and privacy are in any way compatible is lying to your face.
Basically, it only takes a few pointed datapoints to deanonymize a person. They are weaponizing this concept.
-- former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden, 2014
"We Kill People Based on Metadata"
-- local cop with a beef with you, 2025
(Anyway, you have an address the phone lives at. Finding out who lives at an address is some of the basics of investigating, starting with a query of DMV databases, followed by credit reporting databases.)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-to...
Handshaking between mobile/cell phone and mobile/cell bases continues somewhere between every 10 to 20 minutes.
Data exchanged include; IMEI [1], IMSI [2], and both handset transmit power level, receiver power level to each mobile/cell bases databases.
Coupling both the mobile/cell bases databases and the locations topographical data allows RDF [3].
So even if you have location data turned off, you can still be tracked.
[1] International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMEI
[2] International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_mobile_subscri...
[3] Direction Finding (DF) (aka) Radio Direction Finding (RDF) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_direction_finder
I hope cell phone companies require warrants for the data (they should per Carpenter v. United States) although I don't really trust them.
EFF guide "How to Disable Ad ID Tracking on iOS and Android"[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/how-disable-ad-id-trac...]
Again. We've come full circle from the wide open Wild Wild Web to now, with silos & gatekeepers. For, you know, security.
So if they had a near-unlimited budget, they would have even scarier tools. Obviously law enforcement isn't the NSA, but that part made me think. Just how far does LE want to go with technology if money is not an object?
If someone really doesn't trust the government to spend money on the right programs, then they shouldn't expect that reducing tax revenue will make the government prioritize the same things they would. Besides, governments can produce very bad outcomes with almost no budget at all, since some of the worst things in life are free.
If cops like spending money on toys rather than doing the hard work of solving or preventing crimes, then giving them less money won't suddenly make them stop brutalizing vulnerable people (and potentially might make them more likely to do so, out of boredom or revenge).
We need to get away from focusing on intent of a change and look at the practical effects of the change.
For me, with our current political system in the US, every candidate disqualifies themselves be simply having the level of narcissism needed to believe that they belong in office because they are the most qualified person for that office. Especially at the level of POTUS.
The caveat is that you are on your own for securing your property and the department basically laughs at the "standards of polite behavior and endangering the public" crimes that the HN crowd tend to take very seriously.
Overall I'd give it a 9/10. I'm very happy with my department's performance so far as I can see it.
Read the list of demands from the Seattle protestors who created CHAZ[0] in the midst of the BLM riots. Their very first point was not to "starve the beast" in small government terms, but abolition of the police in its entirety. That's what "defund the police" is supposed to be. Not a reasonable compromise but a revolutionary ideal. Obviously what defund became after white liberals appropriated it, watered it down and used it for clout wouldn't work because the teeth were taken out of the concept so that it couldn't actually pose a threat to the status quo.
[0]https://medium.com/@seattleblmanon3/the-demands-of-the-colle...
Things that are outside of the purview of police forces.
I wonder if we will ever see an article from ArsTechnica about corporate surveillance? Indeed, their focus seems to be on state surveillance, only: https://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=surveillance
I know a lot of people will say that cell phones are too useful to turn them off. And that's fine and reasonable. Just be aware they literally are tracking devices and it is your choice. There will be no legislative solution for this. The government spying ratchet only goes one way.
Can you elaborate? It is possible to power cycle a phone which implies that it's capable of powering off. Are you saying a powered-off phone still communicates with the network?
I can imagine a scenario: A dumb-box is put in a squad car that can run queries specific to a person. You get pulled over, give the cop some lip for harassing you over your license plate expiration (the new sticker is in the mail). The cop goes back and uses the dumb-box to pull up 10 mile areas around a major crime and you happened to be in one of them. Now you're in the back of the squad car to be "interviewed" (read: assaulted) over an alleged association with a crime. Doesn't matter if within that 10 miles is a grocery store and a bank.
It doesn't end with the police though. This is enabled because we willfully carry tracking devices everywhere we go. It's the greatest slight of hand ever pulled by the CIA and FBI. So great in fact I doubt the legend of corruption Hoover could imagine it. Some of us avoid the obvious traps like social media and some of us even have hardware switches on our phones. The vast, vast majority of Americans are beacons brighter than the sun with Tiktok (CCP intelligence app), Facebook (US intelligence app), etc.
Privacy advocates have been shouting from the rooftops for two decades now about the future of spying and we gave up privacy for convenience and even paid for it. In some sense, we deserve exactly what we paid for.
What else would be needed is possibility to provide fake data (for location, sensors, contacts, etc), including fake error codes (which is also possible to test program working in case of errors).
>Why bother with warrants when cops can buy location data for under $10k? : https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/01/eff_fog_data_broker/
HN discussion thread of the article - 12 hours ago | 51 comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32685046
(and of course, some jealous ex-boyfriends work at the police office, so they already do a bit of that)
In the autocratic state, you do what you are told. In the free west we do what we want, but coincidentally what we want aligns with what the powerful want us to do. We may have more options to opt out in the west once we learn how we have been tricked into things.
Maybe stop spending so much money on war toys.
As far as I know, it is the law.