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When the FBI seizes your messages from Big Tech, you may not know it for years

219 points by arkadiyt 5y ago

maybelsyrup 5y ago
https://archive.is/zbOvz https://archive.is/zbOvz
- neonate 5y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20210925220641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/25/tech-subpoena-secrecy-fight/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210925220641/https://www.washin...
beckman466 5y ago
> It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos. > the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret This is some scary shit. Seriously, social media companies are sociopathic friends who record everything you say and then throw it into the public in a mangled mess if you don't obey.
- jcadam 5y ago
  Yep, I'm old enough to remember when the general advice was to never use your real name on the internet. Then social media came along and suddenly that changed. And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    I've begun to think that our private and public selves should be legally distinct entities using a corporation with a screen name and keep your personal identity for offline use only.
    - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
      You are 10 years too late. Remember when Google plus was arguing that you had to use your "real name", endless arguments about that, very few for why this was a good thing. There were some naive claims that it would lead to some mysterious social pressure for people to behave if their real name was used. In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Is this even enough at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to somehow deanonymize these people.
        FearlessNebula 5y ago
        And even if it is enough, is it worth doing if it makes you look like a suspicious person and attracts NSA attention?
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Yeah, that's a good point. Anonymity relies on everyone using Tor as well so they all look the same. If there's just one weird guy using Tor it's easy to single him out.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address. It's probably time to reiterate this...
    - sneak 5y ago
      Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps. You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.
      - volkl48 5y ago
        Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.
        sneak 5y ago
        Try it from a VPN. It requires a phone number. If you do it from Tor, it requires a phone number and like 27 captchas.
        Pyrodogg 5y ago
        I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.
        KirillPanov 5y ago
        When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint. Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.
      - refurb 5y ago
  - bifrost 5y ago
    Indeed. Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies. You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    It's surprising how many sites don't even let you edit your name after you've input the data. I've seen this on a lot of them as I slog through my password manager to scrub and delete every account that I can.
- charlchi 5y ago
  Oh, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Most people have absolutely no idea how compromised the information system is. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, am I right? Unless people in government want to have you murdered for standing up against corruption, or for being an activist. Very, very deeply disturbing, actually.
  - reginold 5y ago
    Here's a good song that brings together a lot of what you're pointing to: Pet Shop Boys - Integral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKSTvzuPr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKSTvzuPr0)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ghuin 5y ago
  What do you expect Facebook to do in this situation? Disobey the order?
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    Not to record the conversation in a form that they can turn it over in a useful fashion in the first place. Eg mine your data from it and then delete it or encrypt it with only the user being able to decrypt it.
    - ghuin 5y ago
      They already have end to end encryption available in WhatsApp. Facebook chats are not encrypted and users are aware of it and the risks.
paulpauper 5y ago
Of course you are not going to know about it. That would defeat the purpose of an undercover investigation, unless I am missing something.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I believe it's just the comparison to how seizures used to work, where someone would show at your home, workplace, etc, with a warrant, so you knew about it immediately.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  "Secret investigation" carried out by all-powerful, faceless police-state agencies are incompatible with a free, democratic society.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
packetslave 5y ago
The subject of the article (Ryan Lackey) is also a fairly well-known user here (HavenCo/Sealand, etc.) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl
azinman2 5y ago
I’m getting really tired of this “big tech” word soup. It comes with a lot of presupposed negative connotation, despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing (instead it’s “big government”). I know I’m largely shouting into a void here but I wish we could bring back some neutrality to news, reduce the editing-choice of extraneous emotion, and actually look at things with some balance and gray instead of reducing everything down to some kind of political rhetoric.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing (instead it’s “big government”). Big tech stores personal data, big government subpoenas the data secretly. They're both strongly to blame. And I don't really see how the phrase 'big tech' loses any subtlety in an article about facebook and other major services.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    The lines between "big tech" and "big government" seem a bit blurry these days.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing Of course it is their doing. Why are they even storing messages and metadata to begin with? Why are they exposing us to this risk? There should be nothing there for any government to find. In an ideal world they'd be connecting us to each other peer-to-peer so that our encrypted communications don't even touch their servers. Bit Tech's insatiable hunger for personal data is a massive liability for all of us. Their guilt is not to be excused. Governments would have nothing if not for their extensive non-consensual data collection.
  - rajup 5y ago
    That sounds very nice, do tell us if you have come up with or know of a (successful) business model where you do not have to collect the data of users. Nothing comes for free.
jes 5y ago
Was it FBI agents, about 18 months ago, that were ordered to surrender their iPhones, and most of them wiped them before turning them in? When I was younger, I respected agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Now I think they are corrupt as hell and we’d be better off without them.
- throwaway12224 5y ago
  You wouldn't wipe your phone turning it in, even a work phone?
  - loonster 5y ago
    As a routine practice, yes. If my phone was subpoenaed (or likely to be in the future), wiping my phone would be against the law. I would only do so if the risk was worth it.
    - anamax 5y ago
      You have risk. FBI agents - not so much.
  - jes 5y ago
    Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records. It’s different if you’re just returning a work phone, or preparing to sell or transfer a personal phone. When members of a group do it more or less en masse, it implies that they have something to hide.
    - c0nducktr 5y ago
      > Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records. Yeah, isn't that very literally obstruction of justice?
      - crocodiletears 5y ago
        Only if they decide it is, or if a judge is willing to learn that their entire family decided to commit seppuku while they were at work.
Threeve303 5y ago
Its not just big tech, every company does it because they have to. Quite a few just choose to. And many sell your data for the right price. Others fake data breaches and get paid under the table then collect insurance. Its all an ugly game.
- cced 5y ago
  Source for “faked data breach” ?
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    Wouldn't be much of a fake if the source were known, now would it?
    - Threeve303 5y ago
      Fair point, I have no proof of that happening. It just seems like an easy way to sell data that shouldn't be sold for various reasons. If it hasn't happened yet, it is only a matter of time.
cryptodan 5y ago
Why don't they just quit doing it illegally and get a warrant.
- dkdk8283 5y ago
  They can pay for data, too. Your sentiment isn’t enough if you want to impede their access to data.
- rolobio 5y ago
  Why get a warrant when you can just use tax/printed dollars to purchase the data? Turns out the Constitution can’t protect us from businesses selling our data the the government.
- sneak 5y ago
  This is indeed done with a warrant - a gag ordered one. The ones done without a warrant are a tiny fraction of the ones done with. The "burden" of getting a warrant is almost purely token at this point. The agents write some stuff "based on my knowledge and experience" and describe the who and the why and the what, and the judge rubber stamps it. There is no real consequence or penalty for misstatements of fact in the warrant application, and frequently the basis for the probable cause is simply wrong. 100% of the signed warrants I have seen contained obvious and blatant falsehoods. It's pretty much a rubber stamp either way.
  - rdl 5y ago
    It is not clear it was done with a warrant. It may have merely been a subpoena for the account details but not really contents. Since FBI refuses to respond to me or my attorney (Jennifer Granick of ACLU, one of the top in this field), we don't know.
    - ianhawes 5y ago
      How many “Law Enforcement Notice” emails did you receive from Facebook? 1 or multiple? Did Facebook release the case ID associated with the legal action? Have you tried a Privacy Act request with the FBI? They may deny it based on “current or prospective law enforcement” but if you were scooped up in a dragnet, they may give you something.
sneak 5y ago
The person under surveillance in this article is a friend of mine. I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition. Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)
- bifrost 5y ago
  I admire your social media asceticism. I've been somewhat careful about what I put on social media, moreso lately, but I think you have really good points about this. I've been somewhat Anti-Google for a while but explaining why they're bad to the average person falls on deaf ears. They won't care until google bans them or deletes all of their files. Google banning personal documents has been more publicized recently, but it won't slow the layperson down who thinks "nobody is interested in me" or "I'm not doing anything wrong!". There will be a day that the Government and/or Google thinks you're doing something wrong and you'll lose out. We see FB handing out bans/timeouts for stupid things regularly, its only a matter of time before there's some government blocklist that they will all follow and be able to place you on...
  - sneak 5y ago
    > I admire your social media asceticism. Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile). Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet. I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.
sneak 5y ago
Note also that everything in this article also applies to Gmail, which likely contains your complete travel and purchase history.
6nf 5y ago
Honestly at this stage I just have to assume that the three letter orgs have access to all my online data. All my important data is being captured and stored forever. Even if I'm using encrypted communications channels, and even if I know that I'm doing it correctly, the other endpoint likely leaks like a sieve.
- refurb 5y ago
  Agreed. I’m starting to wonder if adding garbage to your online identity is the best path forward. If they try and use what you say online against you, well, make half of the content contradictory and easily falsifiable. When they come for you with a claim of “posted messages indicating involvement in a conspiracy” I wonder how good of a defense it would be to clearly show half of what you post are outright falsehoods and lies. Can they claim you were conspiring against X when half of your online presence is defending X?
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    They can do whatever they want. If the president isn’t safe from the fbi, then nobody is. The other agencies I think get a lot of unfair press. The fbi are pure shit, if for no other reason than it’s just way too large an organization to police itself. How many fbi employees even are there at this point? I’m sure a few of them (including those reading this post) are good, but the others are pure shit.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    I don't know, it seems that usually the alphabet people are the ones conspiring with you. But yeah, I think adding garbage is a good strategy. I tell myself this whenever I watch Netflix or a football game online. They'll think I'm just some Regular Joe, but actually, deep down, I'm a rebel...
    - blitzar 5y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/hiding-the-signal-in-the-noise/522564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/hidin... Hide in a mass of noise. *Protip: get your small startup on the list to juice your numbers.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Amendment VI In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. TL;DR? "...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;"
- heliodor 5y ago
  You're overlooking the fact that it starts with the qualifier "in all criminal prosecutions."
- rdl 5y ago
  The more relevant thing is Amendment IV: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Third party doctrine, by which my private communications are exposed because they use a cloud-hosted provider vs. being physically located in my home, is bullshit. Almost all laws on surveillance were made back when it was time and labor intensive to do searches -- even the pen registers for metadata collection -- vs. today where the cloud services run law enforcement portals and the process is very easy (and many judges and senior LE people don't push back on warrants and subpoenas.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nine_k 5y ago
I think that if you are doing anything even slightly controversial or dubious, you should assume that any 3-letter agencies might be interested in that stuff already have access to everything you write using big-tech messaging technologies. To my mind, you just cannot afford thinking otherwise.
still_grokking 5y ago
That's the default modus operandi for the German 3-letter agencies: If they spy on you, up to installing surveillance devices at your home, and following you wherever you go for years, you will be never told that happened in case this observation doesn't lead to some "official" accusation. It's now like that for a few years. Before that they (usually) needed to at least inform you after surveillance stopped. Now they don't. The justification for the new regulation is that it would be "too much work" for them to inform all people they spied on. The law was changed in light of mass surveillance by the German agencies… Because they did spy on most of people by searching almost the whole German internet traffic but never informed anybody they got data from, and that was illegal, our government just changed the law and made it legal.
- internet_user 5y ago
  if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand? Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    > if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand? No, of course not. What the German secret services do is mostly, well, secret. One of our ministers for inner affairs said once the following in an interview as an answer to some questions about what the agencies know: "Ein Teil dieser Antworten würde die Bevölkerung verunsichern."¹ It's actually even difficult to get to know what the normal police knows about you. But there they at least have to disclosure such information if you ask as long as there is no open investigation. > Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation". The German agencies don't have the capacity for such thing at the moment. I guess they really would like to have some data-centers like the NSA, but they don't have them currently. "Physical" surveillance is expensive and needs people. They also need usually some "real reasons" (like you're anti-government and you reach a lot of people online) to spy on you. What's expanding is digital mass surveillance—as it's considerably cheap. But that's a problem not only in Germany I guess… ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgmys5K1UnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgmys5K1UnA
caeril 5y ago
This is obviously unconscionable, but I did find this part of the article absurd and poorly researched: > the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term Knowing rdl's politics, this is patently ridiculous on the part of the journalist. rdl has been an enemy of the state for decades now, going back to cypherpunks and Haven. Some of this context could have been useful to their readers. > “I’m pretty confident that I’m a fairly boring person. I haven’t done anything that I would consider worthy of the FBI’s time or interest,” Lackey said. Masterful job trolling the WaPo. Bravo.

219 points by arkadiyt 5y ago

maybelsyrup 5y ago

https://archive.is/zbOvz https://archive.is/zbOvz

neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210925220641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/25/tech-subpoena-secrecy-fight/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210925220641/https://www.washin...

beckman466 5y ago

> It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos. > the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret This is some scary shit. Seriously, social media companies are sociopathic friends who record everything you say and then throw it into the public in a mangled mess if you don't obey.

jcadam 5y ago
Yep, I'm old enough to remember when the general advice was to never use your real name on the internet. Then social media came along and suddenly that changed. And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.
- shadilay 5y ago
  I've begun to think that our private and public selves should be legally distinct entities using a corporation with a screen name and keep your personal identity for offline use only.
  - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
    You are 10 years too late. Remember when Google plus was arguing that you had to use your "real name", endless arguments about that, very few for why this was a good thing. There were some naive claims that it would lead to some mysterious social pressure for people to behave if their real name was used. In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Is this even enough at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to somehow deanonymize these people.
      - FearlessNebula 5y ago
        And even if it is enough, is it worth doing if it makes you look like a suspicious person and attracts NSA attention?
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Yeah, that's a good point. Anonymity relies on everyone using Tor as well so they all look the same. If there's just one weird guy using Tor it's easy to single him out.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address. It's probably time to reiterate this...
  - sneak 5y ago
    Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps. You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.
    - volkl48 5y ago
      Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Try it from a VPN. It requires a phone number. If you do it from Tor, it requires a phone number and like 27 captchas.
      - Pyrodogg 5y ago
        I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.
      - KirillPanov 5y ago
        When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint. Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.
    - refurb 5y ago
- bifrost 5y ago
  Indeed. Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies. You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.
- isoskeles 5y ago
  It's surprising how many sites don't even let you edit your name after you've input the data. I've seen this on a lot of them as I slog through my password manager to scrub and delete every account that I can.
charlchi 5y ago
Oh, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Most people have absolutely no idea how compromised the information system is. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, am I right? Unless people in government want to have you murdered for standing up against corruption, or for being an activist. Very, very deeply disturbing, actually.
- reginold 5y ago
  Here's a good song that brings together a lot of what you're pointing to: Pet Shop Boys - Integral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKSTvzuPr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKSTvzuPr0)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ghuin 5y ago
What do you expect Facebook to do in this situation? Disobey the order?
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Not to record the conversation in a form that they can turn it over in a useful fashion in the first place. Eg mine your data from it and then delete it or encrypt it with only the user being able to decrypt it.
  - ghuin 5y ago
    They already have end to end encryption available in WhatsApp. Facebook chats are not encrypted and users are aware of it and the risks.

paulpauper 5y ago

Of course you are not going to know about it. That would defeat the purpose of an undercover investigation, unless I am missing something.

tyingq 5y ago
I believe it's just the comparison to how seizures used to work, where someone would show at your home, workplace, etc, with a warrant, so you knew about it immediately.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
"Secret investigation" carried out by all-powerful, faceless police-state agencies are incompatible with a free, democratic society.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

packetslave 5y ago

The subject of the article (Ryan Lackey) is also a fairly well-known user here (HavenCo/Sealand, etc.) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdl

azinman2 5y ago

I’m getting really tired of this “big tech” word soup. It comes with a lot of presupposed negative connotation, despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing (instead it’s “big government”). I know I’m largely shouting into a void here but I wish we could bring back some neutrality to news, reduce the editing-choice of extraneous emotion, and actually look at things with some balance and gray instead of reducing everything down to some kind of political rhetoric.

Dylan16807 5y ago
> nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing (instead it’s “big government”). Big tech stores personal data, big government subpoenas the data secretly. They're both strongly to blame. And I don't really see how the phrase 'big tech' loses any subtlety in an article about facebook and other major services.
- jcadam 5y ago
  The lines between "big tech" and "big government" seem a bit blurry these days.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> despite nothing in this article being “big tech’s” doing Of course it is their doing. Why are they even storing messages and metadata to begin with? Why are they exposing us to this risk? There should be nothing there for any government to find. In an ideal world they'd be connecting us to each other peer-to-peer so that our encrypted communications don't even touch their servers. Bit Tech's insatiable hunger for personal data is a massive liability for all of us. Their guilt is not to be excused. Governments would have nothing if not for their extensive non-consensual data collection.
- rajup 5y ago
  That sounds very nice, do tell us if you have come up with or know of a (successful) business model where you do not have to collect the data of users. Nothing comes for free.

jes 5y ago

Was it FBI agents, about 18 months ago, that were ordered to surrender their iPhones, and most of them wiped them before turning them in? When I was younger, I respected agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Now I think they are corrupt as hell and we’d be better off without them.

throwaway12224 5y ago
You wouldn't wipe your phone turning it in, even a work phone?
- loonster 5y ago
  As a routine practice, yes. If my phone was subpoenaed (or likely to be in the future), wiping my phone would be against the law. I would only do so if the risk was worth it.
  - anamax 5y ago
    You have risk. FBI agents - not so much.
- jes 5y ago
  Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records. It’s different if you’re just returning a work phone, or preparing to sell or transfer a personal phone. When members of a group do it more or less en masse, it implies that they have something to hide.
  - c0nducktr 5y ago
    > Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records. Yeah, isn't that very literally obstruction of justice?
    - crocodiletears 5y ago
      Only if they decide it is, or if a judge is willing to learn that their entire family decided to commit seppuku while they were at work.

Threeve303 5y ago

Its not just big tech, every company does it because they have to. Quite a few just choose to. And many sell your data for the right price. Others fake data breaches and get paid under the table then collect insurance. Its all an ugly game.

cced 5y ago
Source for “faked data breach” ?
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  Wouldn't be much of a fake if the source were known, now would it?
  - Threeve303 5y ago
    Fair point, I have no proof of that happening. It just seems like an easy way to sell data that shouldn't be sold for various reasons. If it hasn't happened yet, it is only a matter of time.

cryptodan 5y ago

Why don't they just quit doing it illegally and get a warrant.

dkdk8283 5y ago
They can pay for data, too. Your sentiment isn’t enough if you want to impede their access to data.
rolobio 5y ago
Why get a warrant when you can just use tax/printed dollars to purchase the data? Turns out the Constitution can’t protect us from businesses selling our data the the government.
sneak 5y ago
This is indeed done with a warrant - a gag ordered one. The ones done without a warrant are a tiny fraction of the ones done with. The "burden" of getting a warrant is almost purely token at this point. The agents write some stuff "based on my knowledge and experience" and describe the who and the why and the what, and the judge rubber stamps it. There is no real consequence or penalty for misstatements of fact in the warrant application, and frequently the basis for the probable cause is simply wrong. 100% of the signed warrants I have seen contained obvious and blatant falsehoods. It's pretty much a rubber stamp either way.
- rdl 5y ago
  It is not clear it was done with a warrant. It may have merely been a subpoena for the account details but not really contents. Since FBI refuses to respond to me or my attorney (Jennifer Granick of ACLU, one of the top in this field), we don't know.
  - ianhawes 5y ago
    How many “Law Enforcement Notice” emails did you receive from Facebook? 1 or multiple? Did Facebook release the case ID associated with the legal action? Have you tried a Privacy Act request with the FBI? They may deny it based on “current or prospective law enforcement” but if you were scooped up in a dragnet, they may give you something.

sneak 5y ago

The person under surveillance in this article is a friend of mine. I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition. Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)

bifrost 5y ago
I admire your social media asceticism. I've been somewhat careful about what I put on social media, moreso lately, but I think you have really good points about this. I've been somewhat Anti-Google for a while but explaining why they're bad to the average person falls on deaf ears. They won't care until google bans them or deletes all of their files. Google banning personal documents has been more publicized recently, but it won't slow the layperson down who thinks "nobody is interested in me" or "I'm not doing anything wrong!". There will be a day that the Government and/or Google thinks you're doing something wrong and you'll lose out. We see FB handing out bans/timeouts for stupid things regularly, its only a matter of time before there's some government blocklist that they will all follow and be able to place you on...
- sneak 5y ago
  > I admire your social media asceticism. Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile). Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet. I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.

sneak 5y ago

Note also that everything in this article also applies to Gmail, which likely contains your complete travel and purchase history.

6nf 5y ago

Honestly at this stage I just have to assume that the three letter orgs have access to all my online data. All my important data is being captured and stored forever. Even if I'm using encrypted communications channels, and even if I know that I'm doing it correctly, the other endpoint likely leaks like a sieve.

refurb 5y ago
Agreed. I’m starting to wonder if adding garbage to your online identity is the best path forward. If they try and use what you say online against you, well, make half of the content contradictory and easily falsifiable. When they come for you with a claim of “posted messages indicating involvement in a conspiracy” I wonder how good of a defense it would be to clearly show half of what you post are outright falsehoods and lies. Can they claim you were conspiring against X when half of your online presence is defending X?
- newbamboo 5y ago
  They can do whatever they want. If the president isn’t safe from the fbi, then nobody is. The other agencies I think get a lot of unfair press. The fbi are pure shit, if for no other reason than it’s just way too large an organization to police itself. How many fbi employees even are there at this point? I’m sure a few of them (including those reading this post) are good, but the others are pure shit.
- isoskeles 5y ago
  I don't know, it seems that usually the alphabet people are the ones conspiring with you. But yeah, I think adding garbage is a good strategy. I tell myself this whenever I watch Netflix or a football game online. They'll think I'm just some Regular Joe, but actually, deep down, I'm a rebel...
  - blitzar 5y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/hiding-the-signal-in-the-noise/522564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/hidin... Hide in a mass of noise. *Protip: get your small startup on the list to juice your numbers.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Amendment VI In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. TL;DR? "...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;"

heliodor 5y ago
You're overlooking the fact that it starts with the qualifier "in all criminal prosecutions."
rdl 5y ago
The more relevant thing is Amendment IV: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Third party doctrine, by which my private communications are exposed because they use a cloud-hosted provider vs. being physically located in my home, is bullshit. Almost all laws on surveillance were made back when it was time and labor intensive to do searches -- even the pen registers for metadata collection -- vs. today where the cloud services run law enforcement portals and the process is very easy (and many judges and senior LE people don't push back on warrants and subpoenas.)

deleted 5y ago

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nine_k 5y ago

I think that if you are doing anything even slightly controversial or dubious, you should assume that any 3-letter agencies might be interested in that stuff already have access to everything you write using big-tech messaging technologies. To my mind, you just cannot afford thinking otherwise.

still_grokking 5y ago

That's the default modus operandi for the German 3-letter agencies: If they spy on you, up to installing surveillance devices at your home, and following you wherever you go for years, you will be never told that happened in case this observation doesn't lead to some "official" accusation. It's now like that for a few years. Before that they (usually) needed to at least inform you after surveillance stopped. Now they don't. The justification for the new regulation is that it would be "too much work" for them to inform all people they spied on. The law was changed in light of mass surveillance by the German agencies… Because they did spy on most of people by searching almost the whole German internet traffic but never informed anybody they got data from, and that was illegal, our government just changed the law and made it legal.

internet_user 5y ago
if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand? Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation".
- still_grokking 5y ago
  > if they do not notify you automatically, can you ask them? are they obligated in law to disclose these records on demand? No, of course not. What the German secret services do is mostly, well, secret. One of our ministers for inner affairs said once the following in an interview as an answer to some questions about what the agencies know: "Ein Teil dieser Antworten würde die Bevölkerung verunsichern."¹ It's actually even difficult to get to know what the normal police knows about you. But there they at least have to disclosure such information if you ask as long as there is no open investigation. > Something tells me they'd simply decide to have an active investigation on everyone from birth to death and simply decline all requests due to "ongoing investigation". The German agencies don't have the capacity for such thing at the moment. I guess they really would like to have some data-centers like the NSA, but they don't have them currently. "Physical" surveillance is expensive and needs people. They also need usually some "real reasons" (like you're anti-government and you reach a lot of people online) to spy on you. What's expanding is digital mass surveillance—as it's considerably cheap. But that's a problem not only in Germany I guess… ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgmys5K1UnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgmys5K1UnA

caeril 5y ago

This is obviously unconscionable, but I did find this part of the article absurd and poorly researched: > the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term Knowing rdl's politics, this is patently ridiculous on the part of the journalist. rdl has been an enemy of the state for decades now, going back to cypherpunks and Haven. Some of this context could have been useful to their readers. > “I’m pretty confident that I’m a fairly boring person. I haven’t done anything that I would consider worthy of the FBI’s time or interest,” Lackey said. Masterful job trolling the WaPo. Bravo.