9 ms·

I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone

I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone records from corrupt policemen. These were only available due to a law allowing police to have access to private data, and apparently pretty commonly used by jealous spouses to spy on their SO. A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide. EDIT: After watching / reading the article and also the comments about parallel construction, there is indeed an inordinate amount of information being just there for the taking. The BBC did a documentary on this intelligence black market some time ago[0], which shows the magnitude of it. I can't really imagine how it's like living over there, think 4-chan-on-steroids levels of doxxing that can be unleashed by anyone with some petty cash. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307

yters 6y ago
Nice, it'll be easier to discover who poisoned me in the future.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  ...because of your HN comments.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  At least our glorious American leader openly tells his millions of followers to voluntarily poison themselves by injecting disinfectants. We have a much more open society!
jonny_eh 6y ago
You've made a great case for it.
- foepys 6y ago
  How? These agents have nothing to fear. It might now be publicly kown that they are responsible but the people in charge are the ones who ordered it. It doesn't help one bit that privacy is gone.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    >> they are responsible but the people in charge are the ones who ordered it. So you are not responsbile for your actions because you're not at the top? So many great tragedies throughout history where this was the justification and we're still stuck with this mentality...
    - foepys 6y ago
      I don't know how you can read this into my comment. Everybody should be punished but the people ordering the punishment are complicit.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      Your comment would have made sense if you were talking about some country that wasn't actually corrupt to the core of almost every government service and run as a disguised dictatorship. Who cares about human rights and moralistic laws in a country where every government service is for sale, except for those which are needed by one of Putin's friends, that being the only thing that trumps money? What is 'morally right' is just not the issue there. Russia will need to go through some major development steps before moral issues can even be meaningfully talked about.
  - HorkHunter 6y ago
    This argument is moot* since the Nuremberg trials
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      "Moot", not "mute". Moot means (in this context) irrelevant or not admissible in court. Mute means unable to speak. So, the argument is still presented, so it's not mute, but it is moot, because it's not going to fly in court.
- noctune 6y ago
  Until Russia starts catching the leakers using something like a canary trap [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
  - SXX 6y ago
    That doesn't work when everyone working for the government are corrupt. Do you think some boss of the guy who leak something don't know about it? Nah, he does and he get his share of profits; then pays share to his boss; etc. The only way you can get to high position in police or special agency hierarchy is by corruption: either by family connections or just paying a lot of money.
hengheng 6y ago
The solution would then be to make all phone records public to avoid the black market issue, and I know that my parents wouldn't find anything wrong with that.
- Throwaway1771 6y ago
  Because they can't imagine a world where people skip phones when they do crime, or
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    In such a world, not having a phone on you will be viewed with suspicion. When this fact is brought up in the court, it will be often enough to sway the jury to convict the accused.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      you assume law enforcement won't become too reliant on phone records to find you in the first place.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  You mean like a phone book? (which still is a thing where I live)
kodah 6y ago
The people who promote anti-privacy will be stuck there I think. You know, until something awful happens to them. I think this has turned into a cultural issue unfortunately, and once it's culture all reason, sensibility, and middleground is lost.
- neilv 6y ago
  I've seen a bunch of TV shows (police procedurals, etc.) in which the heroes matter-of-factly use surveillance infrastructure to fight bad guys. There are occasionally some in which the surveillance technology is used against the heroes, but even in some of those, the heroes tend to somehow get access to the infrastructure, and use it to turn the tables. Before surveillance was a thing, a variation that was ordinary in TV shows was for the heroes to break very important rules/principles they were sworn to uphold. For example, roughing up suspect, or even expressly denying them some procedural right gratuitously, almost as if the show was trying to condition people that those rights aren't actually rights for some other kind of people. The rules were in the way, and the heroes cared and were tough, and did what needed to be done, to fight the bad thing. It seems a dangerous idea, in a society based on people buying into admirable rights and responsibilities, but from what I've seen even casually and anecdotally (as a techie, not a humanities researcher or social scientist), the idea seems to have been drip-fed for most/all of our lives. So long, I couldn't guess whether it was an idea that already resonated strongly with people, and media just pandered to that, or it was planted/nurtured by media. This famous speech starts later in the progression towards a much worse situation, but seems like it might be relevant: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_..."
  - kodah 6y ago
    Oh for sure. A modern story like this is The Boys where Butcher pursues his vision of justice to no end. To a man who seeks to right a deep wrong this seems prudent within the context of a fantasmal story about the plight of super heroes into super villains. I've debated with a number of people whether Butcher is an anti-hero and I've found most people don't think so. The jurisprudence of his actions largely boiled down to, "He was trying to do the right thing, right? Sometimes you must disregard the system to attain real justice. That doesn't bother me as much as it bothers you." My takeaway was that we no longer fear the King Henry archetype, whereby an individual dawns the mask of judge, jury, and executioner. As long as justice is perceivably served then the means may not be laudable but they are passable. I don't know if this translates into how people view the real world and interpret real life events, but if it does then it's quite curious.
igravious 6y ago
You're naive to think that the stated methods are the actual methods. Remember we live in a world where Parallel Construction is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Given the eyebrow-raising information Bellingcat claims they have "uncovered" in many politically sensitive stories involving enemies of NATO, Occam's Razor dictates that rather than being expert open-source (what does that even mean in this context?, come on people) investigative journalists they actually have links to and/or are Western intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
- rubyfan 6y ago
  isn’t that the opposite of Occam’s Razor? a theory that makes a journalist part of an geopolitical intelligence conspiracy seems much more complex than the reality that data is fairly easily accessible.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    Well, the russians leaked data with 2016 Clintom e-mails. And journalists being fed data will probably still publish. Honestly, I think neither Occam, nor Hanlon's razor really apply here.
  - igravious 6y ago
    What about Operation Mockingbird[1] and the Church Committee report? In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee's report and said that around 400 press members were considered assets by the CIA. Undoubtedly this continues to this day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      USA journalists learned their lessons with Gary Webb and, some would say, Michael Hastings. From now on we can't rely on the "free" press.
shalmanese 6y ago
> A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide. This has been the reality in China for a while now and the result has been... largely fine. eg: This Reuter's piece from 2018 where you could get a picture of anyone's face for $1USD and a copy of their phone records for 50c: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-dump-china-sees-surge-in-personal-information-up-for-sale-idUSKCN1L80IW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-du... Like, if you ask a representative sample of people living in China what they feel the top 10 pros and cons of living in China were, that all of their personal information is for sale for a few bucks would not make it onto many people's lists on either side, it doesn't really affect your day to day life. There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being." Tragically, given the mass atrocities perpetrated throughout human history, it's inevitable that records of who people are, their race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and/or other data about them (which is now collected and distributed at a larger scale than at any time in human history) will be used to commit more mass atrocities. We are living on borrowed time.
  - tim333 6y ago
    I think if you look at historical atrocities, most of them cracked ahead without needing records (eg Hutus vs Tutsis, Myanmar people vs Rohingya, US Settlers vs native Americans, whatever). Also in the last century governments have had records on almost everyone and for the majority they have not had atrocities. I think it's a mistake to blame one for the other. Even with the holocaust although IBM record keeping may have made things more efficient, anti Jewish pogroms had gone on for centuries before.
ardy42 6y ago
> I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone records from corrupt policemen. These were only available due to a law allowing police to have access to private data, and apparently pretty commonly used by jealous spouses to spy on their SO. > A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide. I don't think that's necessarily true, because pervasive and tolerated corruption is required to get an end state like that. If a country has "[those] kinds of laws," but unlawful access is investigated and prosecuted, then the data will remain (more or less) restricted to police and government investigators. So, even though you still have to worry about the police and government abusing the data, as well as certain powerful or connected people, you won't have to worry so much about stuff like your SO buying your phone records for $10.

yters 6y ago

Nice, it'll be easier to discover who poisoned me in the future.

0-_-0 6y ago
...because of your HN comments.
DonHopkins 6y ago
At least our glorious American leader openly tells his millions of followers to voluntarily poison themselves by injecting disinfectants. We have a much more open society!

jonny_eh 6y ago

You've made a great case for it.

foepys 6y ago
How? These agents have nothing to fear. It might now be publicly kown that they are responsible but the people in charge are the ones who ordered it. It doesn't help one bit that privacy is gone.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  >> they are responsible but the people in charge are the ones who ordered it. So you are not responsbile for your actions because you're not at the top? So many great tragedies throughout history where this was the justification and we're still stuck with this mentality...
  - foepys 6y ago
    I don't know how you can read this into my comment. Everybody should be punished but the people ordering the punishment are complicit.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Your comment would have made sense if you were talking about some country that wasn't actually corrupt to the core of almost every government service and run as a disguised dictatorship. Who cares about human rights and moralistic laws in a country where every government service is for sale, except for those which are needed by one of Putin's friends, that being the only thing that trumps money? What is 'morally right' is just not the issue there. Russia will need to go through some major development steps before moral issues can even be meaningfully talked about.
- HorkHunter 6y ago
  This argument is moot* since the Nuremberg trials
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    "Moot", not "mute". Moot means (in this context) irrelevant or not admissible in court. Mute means unable to speak. So, the argument is still presented, so it's not mute, but it is moot, because it's not going to fly in court.
noctune 6y ago
Until Russia starts catching the leakers using something like a canary trap [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
- SXX 6y ago
  That doesn't work when everyone working for the government are corrupt. Do you think some boss of the guy who leak something don't know about it? Nah, he does and he get his share of profits; then pays share to his boss; etc. The only way you can get to high position in police or special agency hierarchy is by corruption: either by family connections or just paying a lot of money.

hengheng 6y ago

The solution would then be to make all phone records public to avoid the black market issue, and I know that my parents wouldn't find anything wrong with that.

Throwaway1771 6y ago
Because they can't imagine a world where people skip phones when they do crime, or
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  In such a world, not having a phone on you will be viewed with suspicion. When this fact is brought up in the court, it will be often enough to sway the jury to convict the accused.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    you assume law enforcement won't become too reliant on phone records to find you in the first place.
rightbyte 6y ago
You mean like a phone book? (which still is a thing where I live)

kodah 6y ago

The people who promote anti-privacy will be stuck there I think. You know, until something awful happens to them. I think this has turned into a cultural issue unfortunately, and once it's culture all reason, sensibility, and middleground is lost.

neilv 6y ago
I've seen a bunch of TV shows (police procedurals, etc.) in which the heroes matter-of-factly use surveillance infrastructure to fight bad guys. There are occasionally some in which the surveillance technology is used against the heroes, but even in some of those, the heroes tend to somehow get access to the infrastructure, and use it to turn the tables. Before surveillance was a thing, a variation that was ordinary in TV shows was for the heroes to break very important rules/principles they were sworn to uphold. For example, roughing up suspect, or even expressly denying them some procedural right gratuitously, almost as if the show was trying to condition people that those rights aren't actually rights for some other kind of people. The rules were in the way, and the heroes cared and were tough, and did what needed to be done, to fight the bad thing. It seems a dangerous idea, in a society based on people buying into admirable rights and responsibilities, but from what I've seen even casually and anecdotally (as a techie, not a humanities researcher or social scientist), the idea seems to have been drip-fed for most/all of our lives. So long, I couldn't guess whether it was an idea that already resonated strongly with people, and media just pandered to that, or it was planted/nurtured by media. This famous speech starts later in the progression towards a much worse situation, but seems like it might be relevant: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_..."
- kodah 6y ago
  Oh for sure. A modern story like this is The Boys where Butcher pursues his vision of justice to no end. To a man who seeks to right a deep wrong this seems prudent within the context of a fantasmal story about the plight of super heroes into super villains. I've debated with a number of people whether Butcher is an anti-hero and I've found most people don't think so. The jurisprudence of his actions largely boiled down to, "He was trying to do the right thing, right? Sometimes you must disregard the system to attain real justice. That doesn't bother me as much as it bothers you." My takeaway was that we no longer fear the King Henry archetype, whereby an individual dawns the mask of judge, jury, and executioner. As long as justice is perceivably served then the means may not be laudable but they are passable. I don't know if this translates into how people view the real world and interpret real life events, but if it does then it's quite curious.

igravious 6y ago

You're naive to think that the stated methods are the actual methods. Remember we live in a world where Parallel Construction is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Given the eyebrow-raising information Bellingcat claims they have "uncovered" in many politically sensitive stories involving enemies of NATO, Occam's Razor dictates that rather than being expert open-source (what does that even mean in this context?, come on people) investigative journalists they actually have links to and/or are Western intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

rubyfan 6y ago
isn’t that the opposite of Occam’s Razor? a theory that makes a journalist part of an geopolitical intelligence conspiracy seems much more complex than the reality that data is fairly easily accessible.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Well, the russians leaked data with 2016 Clintom e-mails. And journalists being fed data will probably still publish. Honestly, I think neither Occam, nor Hanlon's razor really apply here.
- igravious 6y ago
  What about Operation Mockingbird[1] and the Church Committee report? In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee's report and said that around 400 press members were considered assets by the CIA. Undoubtedly this continues to this day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    USA journalists learned their lessons with Gary Webb and, some would say, Michael Hastings. From now on we can't rely on the "free" press.

shalmanese 6y ago

> A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide. This has been the reality in China for a while now and the result has been... largely fine. eg: This Reuter's piece from 2018 where you could get a picture of anyone's face for $1USD and a copy of their phone records for 50c: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-dump-china-sees-surge-in-personal-information-up-for-sale-idUSKCN1L80IW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-du... Like, if you ask a representative sample of people living in China what they feel the top 10 pros and cons of living in China were, that all of their personal information is for sale for a few bucks would not make it onto many people's lists on either side, it doesn't really affect your day to day life. There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being." Tragically, given the mass atrocities perpetrated throughout human history, it's inevitable that records of who people are, their race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and/or other data about them (which is now collected and distributed at a larger scale than at any time in human history) will be used to commit more mass atrocities. We are living on borrowed time.
- tim333 6y ago
  I think if you look at historical atrocities, most of them cracked ahead without needing records (eg Hutus vs Tutsis, Myanmar people vs Rohingya, US Settlers vs native Americans, whatever). Also in the last century governments have had records on almost everyone and for the majority they have not had atrocities. I think it's a mistake to blame one for the other. Even with the holocaust although IBM record keeping may have made things more efficient, anti Jewish pogroms had gone on for centuries before.

ardy42 6y ago

> I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone records from corrupt policemen. These were only available due to a law allowing police to have access to private data, and apparently pretty commonly used by jealous spouses to spy on their SO. > A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide. I don't think that's necessarily true, because pervasive and tolerated corruption is required to get an end state like that. If a country has "[those] kinds of laws," but unlawful access is investigated and prosecuted, then the data will remain (more or less) restricted to police and government investigators. So, even though you still have to worry about the police and government abusing the data, as well as certain powerful or connected people, you won't have to worry so much about stuff like your SO buying your phone records for $10.