Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way.
Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have.
Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times.
Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera?
Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location.
Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.
> Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way.
I was mad then. I'm more mad now. Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster? That's not solving problems. I don't want to gatekeep people from joining the movement to protect rights. I don't care if they joined as a tin foil hat or just yesterday after having literally been complacent in these atrocities. If you're here now, that's what matters.
> Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
Bull, and bull.
There are plenty of people fighting back. I'm pretty sure me getting ads in languages I don't speaks is at least some good sign. Maybe I can't beat the NSA, sure, but can I beat mass surveillance? Can I beat 10%? 50%? 80%? 1% is better than 0% and privacy will die when we decide everything is binary.
People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things. If people didn't care Apple (and even Google) wouldn't advertise themselves as privacy conscious. Signal wouldn't exist and wouldn't have 50 million users. It's not time to lay down and give up.
> mingus88 36 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Google Ordered to Identify Who Watched Certain You...
Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way.
Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have.
Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times.
Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera?
Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location.
Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
> The Snowden files changed nothing.
They didn't change enough, but that isn't nothing.
Tailscale [0] says the private keys never leave the device.
“Security
Tailscale and WireGuard offer identical point-to-point traffic encryption.
Using Tailscale introduces a dependency on Tailscale’s security. Using WireGuard directly does not. It is important to note that a device’s private key never leaves the device and thus Tailscale cannot decrypt network traffic. Our client code is open source, so you can confirm that yourself.”
That is true as far as it goes, but how does your node learn the public keys of the other nodes in your tailnet? My understanding is that they are provided by the coordination server, so you have to trust that the public key the coordination server gives you is actually the one for your peer device.
Tailnet lock helps mitigate this by requiring that node public keys are signed by a trusted signing node, but it isn't bulletproof.
Like what? I'm saying both sides of the connection would be given the wrong public keys by the coordination server. The private keys of which would be held by a MITM.
To add to that, they also provides Tailnet lock [0], which protects from the only way the coordination server can mess with the tailnets, by connecting unauthorized nodes.
Had nothing to do with Snowdon but with Google ranking algo changes. Google has a commercial interest of hindering competitors in the add brokering market from observing info on the wire.
It had everything to do with Snowden. Source: I was at Google at the time he started leaking.
Before Snowden encryption was something that was mostly seen as a way to protect login forms. People knew it'd be nice to use it for everything but there were difficult technical and capacity/budget problems in the way because SSL was slow.
After Snowden two things happened:
1. Encryption of everything became the companies top priority. Budget became unlimited, other projects were shelved, whole teams were staffed to solve the latency problems. Not only for Google's own public facing web servers but all internal traffic, and they began working explicitly on working out what it'd take to get the entire internet to be encrypted.
2. End-to-end encryption of messengers (a misnomer IMHO but that's what they call it) went from an obscure feature for privacy and crypto nerds to a top priority project for every consumer facing app that took itself seriously.
The result was a massive increase in the amount of traffic that was encrypted. Maybe that would have eventually happened anyway, but it would have been far, far slower without Edward.
You were at Google at the time, but your memory of the ordering of events is off. Google used HTTPS everywhere before Snowden.[1][2] HTTPS on just the login form protects the password to prevent a MITM from collecting it and using it on other websites, but it doesn't prevent someone from just taking the logged in cookie and reusing it on the same website. That was a known issue before Snowden, and Google had already addressed it. Many other websites, including Yahoo, didn't start using HTTPS everywhere until after Snowden.[3] I know because this was something I was interested in when using public WiFi points that were popping up at the time. I also remember when Facebook moved their homepage to HTTPS.[4] Previously, only the login form POSTed to an HTTPS endpoint, but that doesn't protect against the login form being modified by a MITM to have a different action for the MITM to get your password, rendering the whole thing useless.
What changed after Snowden was how Google encrypts traffic on its network, according to an article quoting you at the time.[5]
An important clarification is that the leaks about NSA snooping on Google motivated end-to-end encryption between all pairs of Google internal services. It was a technical marvel, every Stubby connection had mutual TLS without any extra code or configuration required. Non-Stubby traffic needed special security review because it had to reinvent much of the same.
People even got internal schwag shirts made of the iconic "SSL added and removed here" note [1]. It became part of the culture.
Over a decade later I still see most environments incur a lot of dev & ops overhead to get anywhere close to what Google got working completely transparently. The leak might have motivated the work, but the insight that it had to be automatic, foolproof, and universal is what made it so effective.
A minor quibble; iirc it was only connections that crossed datacenters that were encrypted. RPC connections within a cluster didn't need it, as the fiber taps were all done on the long distance fibers or at telco switching centers.
But otherwise you're totally right. I suspect the NSA got a nasty shock when the internal RPCs started becoming encrypted nearly overnight, just weeks after the "added and removed here" presentation. The fact that Google could roll out a change of that magnitude and at that speed, across the entire organization, would have been quite astonishing to them. And to think... all that work reverse engineering the internal protocols, burned in a matter of weeks.
According to the reporting at the time, the NSA has shut down the email metadata collection program, which was the only leaked NSA program that parsed data on those taps, back in 2011; so the reverse engineering work was burned by an interagency review two years prior to Google's cross-datacenter encryption work.
They were tapping replication traffic on a database that included login IP addresses. I remember it well because it was a database my team had put there.
It's heavily redacted but the parts that are visible show they were targeting BigTable replication traffic (BTI_TabletServer RPCs) for "kansas-gaia" (Gaia is their account system), specifically the gaia_permission_whitelist table which was one of the tables used for the login risk analysis. You can see the string "last_logins" in the dump.
Note that the NSA didn't fully understand what they were looking at. They thought it was some sort of authentication or authorization RPC, but it wasn't.
In order to detect suspicious logins, e.g. from a new country or from an IP that's unlikely to be logging in to accounts, the datacenters processing logins needed to have a history of recent logins for every account. Before around 2011 they didn't have this - such data existed but only in logs processing clusters. To do real time analytics required the data to be replicated with low latency between clusters. The NSA were delighted by this because real-time IP address info tied to account names is exactly what they wanted. They didn't have it previously because a login was processed within a cluster, and user-to-cluster traffic was protected by SSL. After the authentication was done inter-cluster traffic related to a user was done using opaque IDs and tokens. I know all about this because I initiated and ran the anti-hijacking project there in about 2010.
The pie chart on slide 6 shows how valuable this traffic was to them. "Google Authorization, Security Question" and "gaia // permission_whitelist" (which are references to the same system) are their top target by far, followed by "no content" (presumably that means failed captures or something). The rest is some junk like indexing traffic that wouldn't have been useful to them.
Fortunately the BT replication traffic was easy to encrypt, as all the infrastructure was there already. It just needed a massive devops and capacity planning effort to get it turned on for everything.
The first two links are about Gmail and personalized results in web search specifically. Even as late as 2011 SSL being activated for a product was treated as unusual enough to write blog posts about, and it was up to individual projects whether or not to activate it and how to trade off the latency costs.
You're right that I might be mis-remembering the ordering of things, but I'm pretty sure by the time Snowden came around the vast majority of traffic was still unencrypted. Bearing in mind that lot of Google's traffic was stuff you wouldn't necessarily think of, like YouTube Thumbnails, map tiles and Omaha pings (for software update). Web search and Gmail by that point made up a relatively small amount of it, albeit valuable. Look at how the Chrome updater does update checks and you'll discover it uses some weird custom protocol which exists purely because at the time it was designed Google was in a massive LB CPU capacity crunch caused by turning on SSL for as many services as possible. Omaha controlled the client so had the flexibility to do cryptographic offload and was pushed to do so, to free up capacity for other services.
> What changed after Snowden was how Google encrypts traffic on its network, according to an article quoting you at the time.[5]
That also changed and did so at enormous speed, but I'm pretty sure by June 2013 most external traffic still didn't have TLS applied. It looks like Facebook started going all-SSL just 8 months before Snowden.
Right, I remember (as an outsider to google) the push for https coming after Firesheep [1] and the google research on the actual CPU cost of https [2], both in 2010. Snowden's revelations came in 2013.
That's nice and all, but the "why" is more important than the "what".
Google was driven not out of some panicked rush to protect user privacy, but to protect Google's collection and storage of user data.
Google has 10+ years of my email. It doesn't treat that like Fort Knox because it gives a shit about my privacy; it treats it like Fort Knox because it wants to use that for itself and provide services to others based off it.
You do know that Google was heavily seed-funded by the NSA, right?
Google might just be the biggest advocate of https out there, certainly (from my recollection) post Snowden. There has been a lot of progress made over the years.
>Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster?
That we are nothing in the ocean of people who don't care. Someone upended their entire life to whistleblow on the government doing it as hard proof and no one cares (from a statistical POV, not a "literally 100% of the population" way).
They cared more about the boston bombing the month prior, which while tragic is a statistical molecule compared to the impact of what Snowden revealed.
>There are plenty of people fighting back.
This can be a game of numbers, but it isn't. This can be a game of power, but it isn't. Not enough people are fighting back and not enough powerful people are fighting back.
>People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things
well it sounds like they gave up. Different words, samae results
It's beyond absurd and desperately needs to be addressed. Too bad both the government and corporations stand to loose too much that I doubt it will be treated seriously.
How would a successful antitrust verdict against Apple further the NSA's implicit dogma of "insecure by default"? Especially if it winds up breaking up Apple into many pieces. It's far easier for a centralized tech industry to bend the knee to the NSA than a distributed one.
easier but you get less data. There's thousands of small knees to get to bend to. More points of failures for public outings Centralizing it to one company makes everyone's lives easieer.
Furthermore the NSA/FBI/CIA want all their spying behavior to be secret. If you have to bend a lot of small knees then someone's going to fib before they get the data they want. And moving off a small company that's bent the knee is way easier than moving off FAANG, which can keep secrets[0] and has your balls locked in a vise.
[0] Because, among other things, the whole "Surprise and Delight" doctrine demands internal controls and secret-keeping discipline not that far off from an actual intelligence agency
Forcing Apple to hand over data to a third party for commercial reasons (not needing a warrant) is much simpler than whatever scenario you have worked out.
Given recent events, I don't think Amazon Prime is that necessary anymore.
Mail servers, sure. The big issue there is another annoying pseudo-monopoly issue where so many major email servers assume anything not from [major email server] is spam, so you may not even get to communicate properly. More sticks for the fire.
I'm anything but a major mail provider and I don't have any issues. I did have some hiccups around 2008 and had to implement DMARC-DKIM. I use strict delivery so my mail server must delivery all mail directly.
Occasionally people have a vanity domain email that bounces back to me. I have to search the headers for the actual email address and re-send.
IMHO the problem here is really transparency. There IMHO can be situation in which it could be reasonable. But the concrete cases might be questionable as we are probably not talking about capital crime.
In Berlin there used to be a notification system if you were subjected to cell surveillance in Berlin. It was recently stopped [0]. IMHO we need the same for all IP assignment or account lookups. The problem IMHO is that we, individualy, and particularly vulnerable groups like journalists and activists, might be subject to far more of such activities than we know.
More-generally, imagine if every citizen was entitled to a yearly report on all how many times law-enforcement received records containing their names or personally identifying information, except in cases that are formally unsolved and in-progress.
So a line item might be something like:
{Ref ID}, {Date}, "All Youtube accounts that watched {Video Title}"
I don't think anyone is saying that rights can't be infringed upon for any reason. The issue is that there needs be sufficient reason. Is this sufficient reason? I think the action is sufficient reason were it specifically targeted at the individual under suspicion. But a dragnet is not. Those innocent people were not under suspicion and were not doing anything wrong or illegal.
If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply.
So for instance capturing my face on CCTV in a public place isn't a privacy violation, same with my license plate in a pulic place.
However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent.
Certian information isn't private, and that being stored is fine. Where the line gets drawn is what's up for debate.
I surely would want my contact details and name saved by a company that I intend to do business with in either direction. However if they spam me with information I should be able to lodge an harrassment claim against them. It's not a privacy issue but a decency issue.
I understand that completely. Just wanted to give a different viewpoint on that.
I'm all for finding a balance, it's just that many times people are against surveillance that does actually improve security or enforcement but mildy infringes on their "rights" when in reality they never had privacy in that situation to start with and the use of technology didn't substantially change that.
Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order?
If you are doing something shady you know how to obfuscate that information, if you aren't, sure your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that.
Living in a surveillance state where I have no choice but for the government to be able to track every single transaction I make financially and being able to link my cell number amongst other details directly to me, I feel like if I had to try to fight that I would only be causing myself undue anxiety and I've got enough legitimate reasons to be anxious.
>Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order?
Scale. This isn't "supbpeona to get all of Bob's info", it's "subpeona to get information on all of the people's info tangentially related to bob". Imagine if this was as tangential as "who watched this video with 10m views"? is the YT history of 10m people worth it? Is it even useful?
The issue comes down to whether or not "Youtube" is a public place. All logistical terms point to "no", hence this story.
>your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that.
That isn't how court orders work. They cannot make a single order to search an entire neighborhood's worth of houses because of drugs or whatever. That'd be N orders which may or may not go through based on the arguments made.
> and the use of technology didn't substantially change that.
This is complete BS. Technology made it scalable to track where everyone is and query it historically. This used to require tailing someone so it couldn’t be done at scale.
That same technology has also dramatically increased the cost of doing that.
Data isn't free and processing big data isn't cheap. As much as Google has the data, that means they need to store that data.
You know what used to happen before and still happens now, an example. I live in a restricted access area. Restricted in the sense rhat to get in some guy needs to take your name and license plate.
For many many businesses parks in my country that is still the defacto. There isn't really a camera watching that other than general CCTV that probably doesn't have the resolution to pick up text on our license plates. It's cheaper for them to literally pay a guy to stand at a boom and get that information than to install the technology required to track that automatically.
> It's cheaper for them to literally pay a guy to stand at a boom and get that information than to install the technology required to track that automatically.
It depends of the local cost of labor, also the technology is easier to scale, imagine New York City having employees at the bridges writing all the entering license plates! And searching through those records how many times a certain plate entered the city on a given time frame. To me the problem with technology is that they’re used for lazy policing to just inflate the numbers of solved cases. There were cases of cops feeding hand-drawn suspects to face recognition software. Every case becomes a “throw something to the wall and see what sticks”.
Your complaint seems more like a failing legal system than unnecessary surveillance.
Legitimately if an investigator put a hard drawn sketch through facial recognition and that was even remotely allowed into evidence by the court then the suspect evidence wasn't the issue
I don’t recall the actual case but what I try to point out is that technologies are used as dragnets to “fish anything” be it facial recognition, cell tower logs or license plate reads. I’m all out in favor of using any tool to catch criminals but not to manufacture them, specially when the only goal is revenues for the agency du jour.
The adtech industry made data and its processing not just free (as in more than covered by the ad revenue) but outright profitable.
This is frankly a one-in-a-lifetime gift to the government because we've not only built an unaccountable industrial-grade spying machine but the government doesn't even have to pay for it as it pays for itself and incentivizes its own expansion.
Thank you for so eloquently explaining the bootlicking and privacy not caring mindset I’ve never understood. Also sorry that I can’t come up with a less worse way to say that
So, when your in your own property, cellular tower shouldn't be allowed to allow your mobile phone to register? Because they will record your IMEI while you are in your private property.
Yeah but the electro-magnetic spectrum is a limited public good. You don’t own your broadcasted radio waves in the same way you own your house. Your cellphone is a pollutant.
Both the radio waves his cell phone emits, and the information (voltage change of an ADSL line or photons moving in an optic fiber) used to communicate over the Internet, actually leave his home, and then are registered. So I think in nature it's the same as sending a letter. So let's symmetrically consider that you send a letter, and police/agency asks the post office to attach to each letter information (from, to, weight, stamp...) the phone number from their database. If that happens for all letters going through a given sorting room, I can understand how that's an abuse.
> Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
I would argue “people don’t care” because… there isn’t a high enough number of people who suffer negative consequences from “their privacy being invaded”.
Maybe people would care more if there were more then two viable political parties to choose from?
Getting rid of First Past The Post voting in favor of something like Ranked Choice voting would allow people to vote 3rd party with no chance of a spoiler effect. This would introduce competition into the electoral process, improving the quality of candidates available to choose from. Even from within the current two mainstream political parties.
Most people don't know. Or if they know, they don't understand the implications. As Computer Scientists, part of pur whole shtick is to try to spread that lnowledge far and wide. Most, I hazard, spend precious little time on that particular responsibility.
Most people think Facebook secretly records all their conversations because their ad tracking is just that good. They don't know the root cause but they absolutely do understand the implications.
"people do not care" - Please stop repeating this false statement. When you repeat it you give it legitimacy, and take the time when other statements could be made.
Most people are helpless to make change. Greater than one million adults serve in uniform services of some kind where they literally must comply. The ad budgets and massive, overflowing volumes of money generated by "surveillance capitalism" buy the consent of the mercenary finance occupations. None of this means "nobody cares"
you get even 10,000 people to petition something to the government and you can get something rolling. This relatively moderate post probably had 10,000 views. You don't need to do much but you just got to get enough people to care enough to spend 10 minutes making a request. If they can't even do that much... well, they don't care.
This is the issue with an individualistic mindset, you hyperfocus on what immediately benefits you. Not the wider community around you which is needed for such petitioning.
You can have privacy and many of these things. You may be interested in homomorphic encryption or the weaker version differential privacy. There are such things as zero knowledge proofs.
But I think it is far easier to have these technologies without doing the encrypted aspects or protecting privacy. Then it is more a "never let a tragedy go to waste" situation. Paved with good intentions, right? This will always happen though as we rush and are unable to do things the right way. Often the right way can take the same amount of time but generally appears to take longer and that is enough, even if the wrong way actually takes longer. Because it also matters at what resolution we're concerned with.
So I'm saying it is mostly stupidity, not evil. Though evil loves and leverages stupidity.
you honestly think there is some masterplan? I love a good conspiracy theory but that is nuts.
Nobody has a made a plan so it hasn't been long planned. Shit is just happening and we as a society, a culture and a race are adapting to it like we've always done.
Not a masterplan, but definitely guides. I mean there are all sorts of meetings that occur where the rich and powerful meet and arrange this or that - eg Bilderberg, WEF, Trilateral Commission, UN, WHO, etc. These aren't elected bodies, but somehow all the governments act in tandem according their pronouncements. Its as if voting doesn't matter, as if its merely a pressure release valve.
Elsewhere I posted about technocracy inc - which Elon's grandfather was involved with. (https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/technocracy-incorpo...). Just 2 generations later, and you have this guy apparently putting out electric cars, space ships, neural laces, etc. Its more coherent than you think. Bill Gates's father headed Planned Parenthood.
It seems to me that there are a group of very rich individuals that try to shape policy and direct this or that. Its really a very natural state I think - we see this everywhere - eg a headmaster of a school will direct the school towards this or that, a CEO does the same in their company. This is the same principle, except at a far higher level. I don't think its even debatable that this is the case, tbh.
Well, I guess we're just naturally evolving and adapting into enslaving ourselves, just following nature's course... There doesn't need to be a "master plan", but clearly there are some working themes
Yep. Humans are lazy, greedy, and gullible. Give us a device which feeds our brains constant little dopamine hits and we will sacrifice anything for it.
Remember the experiments with rats and pigeons that could administer hits of plesure giving drugs? They all hit that button til they died. We are no different.
well, humans do teach and practice self control and restraint, so I wouldnt say we're all the same as rats. We just need more clever devices. The variety of content on the internet, constantly updating, means this can tailor to almost any taste.
Even then, sure. there have been extreme examples of such things like a few korean individuals dying in their rooms playing MMOs, not even taking enough care to feed themselves.
We know of the ruling class regularly getting together to plan, and surely they meet and collude far more often than we know about. Of course they are making plans.
No, but the argument did use "you" to imply that the reader was harmed. I consider that an illegitimate scare tactic. It would be better to talk about how someone else might be harmed.
Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have.
Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times.
Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera?
Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location.
Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.