Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This is structurally brilliant. All of those complaining about hypocrisy or partisanship are missing the point.

Ignore the specific issue. The critical question this raises is this: if, as the administration says, the NSA needs all this data to find terrorists, who gets to say what it's used for or not? Ignore the entire privacy argument. If the executive branch is keeping records on all of this stuff, is it also claiming unique and sole access to it?

Because if they are, anybody with a brain can see the problem. In fact, the partisanship of the Congressman spells it out in clear relief. Just picture that guy as the next president. If you give that much power to the executive and they alone make the decision how to use it, then by definition such information will be used for political purposes. Who gets to decide what is so evil that requires this special, and extra-constitutional, treatment? Everybody doesn't want terrorists, but how about supporting congressional investigations? Helping wrongly-accused people get out of jail? Divorce proceedings? Civil cases?

Are we going to have a system of law and order where certain evidence is presented or not solely depending on the decisions of the executive branch?

What this shows is that this NSA data thing just isn't bad, it's bad on multiple levels. It completely breaks the way our constitutional government is supposed to operate. Even if somehow the political weasels in DC get away with keeping the lid on it, the criminal and Congressional cases alone are going to cause a nightmare. Can you imagine how Congress is going to act if some pet cause of theirs could have been supported by evidence NSA refused to release? How criminal defendants are going to react if, years later, they learn that the government was holding exculpatory information?

And it's just going to go on, and on, until they finally open it all up. Then there'll be a hell-storm.

ADD: And I'm willing to bet 20 bucks that part of the data NSA is collecting is the location tracking information from our cellphones. (accurate to within 50 meters). Can you imagine the number of places in the rest of government operations where such information would be useful?

> location tracking information from our cellphones.

Here's what a smart congressperson would ask: "Director Clapper, on April 15th, 2009, there were large protests around the country. Did your agency request cellular meta data covering that day?"

It's likely obfiscated by the telco as I understand it, but imagine that freakout.

We could pull our batteries out in 2003, but we don't have that feature anymore.

>We could pull our batteries out in 2003, but we don't have that feature anymore.

Many of us still do. Some of us still greatly prefer phones with a removable battery--I wouldn't buy a phone without one. Goodbye HTC, hello Samsung.

Your phone doesn't emit any signals at all when turned off. If it did, people from the FAA to every geek with a spectrum analyzer at work would be screaming bloody murder.

Can the phone be made to receive while "powered off" -- even sporadically?

They wouldn't want to tip their hand re:transmission capabilities. They'd probably only activate the capability on-demand, and only for high-value targets (ie. by sending a special packet to be received by the "powered off" handset). It's sorta like turning your phone into a listening "bug" while powered on... you wouldn't want to constantly stream data and tip your hand -- you'd only activate the capability when there is a strong likelihood of a valuable conversation occurring.

No, not undetectably. Someone would notice, trust me.

Nah, we'd have seen statistically more plane crashes. /s

It probably wouldn't take noticeable power to run voice-activated microphone audio compression and storage. Then the recorded audio could be transmitted later when the battery was back in.

Any attempt to do stuff like that will still require a clock signal somewhere. That clock will be noticed. An attempt to do it in the analog domain with no synchronous logic would be even more apparent to anyone who studies the internals of the phone.

In short, no, it ain't gonna happen. It would show up on Bunnie Huang's blog one day and there would be blood in the streets the next.

> Any attempt to do stuff like that will still require a clock signal somewhere. That clock will be noticed.

I wouldn't expect to get away with it on all phones all the time. But certain phones targeted by surveillance malware? Sure.

Note that powered-off phones still have real time clocks running, for things like keeping time.

> An attempt to do it in the analog domain with no synchronous logic would be even more apparent to anyone who studies the internals of the phone.

I agree, there's little chance of an analog tape recorder being in the phone.

> In short, no, it ain't gonna happen. It would show up on Bunnie Huang's blog one day

Go ask Bunnie if he thinks a well-funded attacker could implement it, having access to the baseband design docs. Then ask him how long it could be used in the wild against unsophisticated targets before it ended up on his blog.

> and there would be blood in the streets the next.

This surveillance malware is being found on phones and in some places there is, in fact, literal blood in the streets.

https://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792290/Spyware_Hac...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57573707-38/meet-the-corpo...

I wouldn't expect to get away with it on all phones all the time. But certain phones targeted by surveillance malware? Sure.

Malware can't run when the power management logic has shut down the SoC and baseband hardware.

There are many processors and subsystems in modern cellphones. Malware could continue to run on some of them while the rest are sleeping.

How many people actually measure the battery life of their phone when they believe it's off?

I'm looking at my phone and the power button is conspicuously not a toggle switch. You press the same button to turn it off as to turn it on. That means the phone has to have some logic enabled (even when it's "off") to distinguish whether closing the circuit on that button is supposed to turn the device on or turn it off (or wake up the screen or lock the device etc.)

Is it so hard to imagine part of that logic including the mobile phone equivalent of wake-on-lan?

Is it so hard to imagine part of that logic including the mobile phone equivalent of wake-on-lan?

Yes. You don't have to power up the cellular transceiver to poll a power button. That's usually handled by a dedicated power-management chip with few/no other capabilities (and an internal clock in the kHz range at most, I'd expect.)

Also you don't need to poll a power button - it's perfectly possible to build a momentary switch which would connect a circuit long enough to turn on a FET to the battery, which could then be monitored by digital logic to use the same connection to power off.

How many people actually turn off their mobile? I don't think I've turned mine off in a year.

The FBI has been known to hack phones such that the microphone is turned on and transmitting when the phone is on but not in use.

You must have not heard of the "roving bug".

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/12/can_you_hear_m...

That sounds an awful lot like the GM OnStar eavesdropping case.

"The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them," James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News.

Absurd. Total fiction.

You don't believe in OTA firmware updates?

Not when the phone's powered down, I don't.

They issue the update while the phone is powered on. They can then change the behavior of the "shut down" element in the UI to black out the screen and refuse calls but continue to transmit GPS or audio on the radios.

Good news for people with phones without removable battery: get a Faraday cage case for times when you want it to appear dead.

>>Are we going to have a system of law and order where certain evidence is presented or not solely depending on the decisions of the executive branch?

No, in the absence of a FISA order the information cannot be released. This isn't a legel dilemma at the moment(ethically certainly). There are almost certainly implied constitutional protections on the use of the data.

The only interesting exception would be if someone decided to waive their protections and petitioned the courts to grant access to their phone records. The courts may allow this as no constitutional rights would be violated and no else would have an interest in preventing this(except the Government possibly).

Bingo. If our government went to war over supposed weapons of mass destruction, how can we trust them with weapons of mass surveillance?

prediction: the collection won't stop, NSA will simply become an even better funded service bureau to provide evidence and information "for official use only", for random court cases etc...thus paving it's way for this kind of collection to become broadly socially acceptable

This works both ways. The people in power are being tracked, too, and if not, then it's another scandal.

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