Yes
There should be rules stopping the collection of that data
There should be rules against locking down devices people "own" that prevent countermeasures
Private use of this data is as worrying as government use. More so. States are often democratically accountable
Also, based on repeated leaks, our public records laws are completely inadequate.
At least when an ad tech company gets caught breaking the law, they get fined a couple seconds of revenue, and there is a theoretical chance someone might get sent out for a few days of community service or probation.
One of my proudest moments is (through reporting) getting the Chicago police department to admit they made an enormous mistake in their analysis, which a colleague says was the first time he's seen them admit to such a mistake in the years he's done this work. So there are signs that it's not all lost. Happy to chat about ways to contribute towards this work if you're interested.
One thing I'll say about leaks is that they occasionally have the effect of revitalizing interest in these issues. But again, it takes persistence.
Maybe in a parallel universe. /s
Around the same time OAuth 1a came out and it seemed like a great ideal to offer a platform that leveraged these relationships to sell location to app developers, subject to consent and with a bunch of features to protect privacy.
In the end, we had one app developer who was even remotely successful and the less privacy-focused aggregators partnered with the next generation of app developers and the product had no future.
Nostalgia is fun.
the article makes it sound like LE is freely able to tap any VoIP call. how would that work?
i thought the usual setup for a VoIP call is SIP to ring the other party (which is partially secured), followed by ICE/STUN/TURN for the parties to find the most direct route between them, followed by the actual audio stream. do clients just not encrypt the audio stream? do carriers MITM everything downstream of that first SIP hop? (that would be inconsistent with the read-only probing suggested: “hardware taps or switch/router mirror-ports are employed to deliver copies of all of a network's data to dedicated IP probes.”).
From my experience, using SIP to interact with the PSTN usually means your first point of entry into the PSTN also proxies the media.
> do clients just not encrypt the audio stream?
SIP encryption is very uncommon, and unless you use ZRTP (which is end-to-end), I believe any SIP server within the path mediates the key exchange and can thus capture the key or downgrade/disable the encryption.
Given the above points, a packet capture on a switch port would give you both signalling and media traffic and is most likely how SIP lawful intercept is implemented.
Victim-blaming? Maybe. But you can choose to turn your phone off.
IIRC the baseband can potentially do all kinds of crazy stuff too (no evidence that iphones actually do anything unusual, but perhaps that could change if the government sent a very compelling court order)
This can be fully disabled in Settings.
As far as i remember my iPhone told me that even if i disable WiFI the iOS might turn it on when it needs it.