9 ms·

Terrifying for only 2 reasons: 1. Any malicious person savvy enough to pull off a crime of interest to the Feds is smart enough to provide a wiped or burner ph

• dylan604 4y ago
  >Any malicious person savvy enough to pull off a crime of interest...and they have to know this. You'd be amazed at how many dumb things smart criminals/people can do. Maintaining proper OpSec is hard. It only takes one mistake to give the LEOs a string to pull to unravel the whole sweater. Everything else, I tend to feel the same way as you. Just wanted to mention the OpSec part
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    One of the Pirate Bay founders, Varg, a proper hacker, stored unecrypted mails from the others and "framed" them when the police seized his computer.
    • CommitSyn 4y ago
      What do you mean by "framed" them?
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Just use stationary.
• dhruval 4y ago
  I just just reading this Bloomberg story about a Chinese spy who was busted. It’s mind boggling how sloppy even state backed malicious agents are at information security. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-16/chinese-spy-uses-gmail-icloud-showing-tech-privacy-is-harder-than-it-looks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-16/chines...
  • cguess 4y ago
    It's hard to keep up security. You get tired, lonely, bored, exhausted. Everyone screws up at some point, you hope that those you're hiding from don't notice. It's similar to torture training in the US Military: they teach you that everyone breaks eventually, the trick is to hold out long enough the information you provide isn't that useful anymore.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  It's not about security, it's just another method for the government to use to make you feel like their bitch. Now take off your shoes and walk through the scanner.
• throwaway743 4y ago
  For only those two reasons? You best be joking
• gambiting 4y ago
  >>So, what is the point in doing this if not to target law abiding citizens. It's the old rule known to governments all over the world - there is no such thing as an innocent citizen, there is only a citizen who you haven't investigated enough. Call me cynical but storing ALL of your digital data allows the agencies to basically find something, anything, that will allow them to further blackmail you into complying. Even the most innocent person will have something that can be misconstrued as criminal, from jokes about tax evasion to pictures of your toddler in a pool - threaten going to trial if the person doesn't do X, and most people will comply, not because they aren't innocent, but because the might of the American justice system is such that you really don't want to fuck with it on the receiving end.
  • UI_at_80x24 4y ago
    To add to your point, our laws are so overly broad that it is impossible to exist without breaking some law. (your point talks of 'digital data' my comment refers to real-life) From driving 1mph over the speed limit, to skipping FBI warnings on DVDs, to countless other "innocent" infractions. If they look hard enough they will find SOMETHING. And that's all they need.
    • vdqtp3 4y ago
      Three Felonies a Day by Silverglate (ISBN 1594035229) and even https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://twitter.com/CrimeADay make it obvious. Every citizen escapes prosecution only by the grace of Federal law enforcement.
    • sjf 4y ago
      For people renting it is routine to receive mail for several previous tenants. Everytime you throw away a credit card sign-up offer for someone else, you are committing a felony.
      • Operyl 4y ago
        Yup! Write "Not at this Address" and put it in the outbox if you have one, or back in your mailbox with flag up.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  > 1. Any malicious person savvy enough to pull off a crime of interest to the Feds is smart enough to provide a wiped or burner phone to DHS/ICE, and they have to know this. So, what is the point in doing this if not to target law abiding citizens. This isn't even remotely true. See for example the recent Anom honeypot[1]. Criminals do more or less the same things that ordinary citizens do, and often have strictly worse security practices because they believe "ordinary" things are weaker. This makes them great targets for snake oil. That being said, I agree with (2). It's simply an unnecessary risk to keep this much data around for this long. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7veg8/anom-app-source-code-operation-trojan-shield-an0m https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7veg8/anom-app-source-code-...
  • roenxi 4y ago
    Although grandparent's logic is faulty, I think it does go to an important point. They don't need 15 years warrantless storage of phone data. On anyone, including foreigners. If it takes them 15 years to realise they shouldn't have let someone over the border it is around 14 to 14.995 years too late. The powers these agencies have is far in excesses of what they need to do their jobs, and it is going to be abused. These aren't particularly upstanding people, they're the sort who think DHS/ICE represents an ideal that they are OK with.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      I agree completely.
    • hutzlibu 4y ago
      "If it takes them 15 years to realise they shouldn't have let someone over the border it is around 14 to 14.995 years too late." Well, hypothetically some old data could be combined with some new data, to not let a potentially terrorist in NOW (or let them in, but supervised). So more data to have is definitely useful for the agencies (if they can analyse it and do not drown in data). And a total surveillance state would be even more effective, but for some reasons people does not want it. Maybe because power abuse is a real thing.
• colordrops 4y ago
  Only 2? 3. How is this legal? Is it legal?
• 988747 4y ago
  Haha, just 5 minutes ago I read a story about Iranian 'hacker' who wrote a ransomware note in Microsoft Word, so the file metadata contained his full name :)
  • chubot 4y ago
    Similar SecOps problems happened to both John McAfee and the Silk Road founder. As far as I remember, McAfee shared an iPhone photo with location metadata when he was in Belize, so American authorities were able to track him down. The Silk Road founder had some sort of PHP coding error which led police to his San Francisco location. That is, you could simply visit the Silk Road home page and his location leaked. So yeah criminals aren't better at SecOps. They're just more reckless than most people...
    • Operyl 4y ago
      It was actually Vice that did the McAfee leak, with a Vice employee phone. [0] [0] https://www.wired.com/2012/12/oops-did-vice-just-give-away-john-mcafees-location-with-this-photo/ https://www.wired.com/2012/12/oops-did-vice-just-give-away-j...
      • chubot 4y ago
        Ah OK, thanks for the source
    • peteradio 4y ago
      Eh? I thought silk road guy had old stack overflow questions with same alias or something.
    • rsync 4y ago
      "As far as I remember, McAfee shared an iPhone photo with location metadata ..." This reminds me of the workflow I use for publishing pictures on my website: magick convert IMG_2673.HEIC -strip -quality 80 -shave 10x10 -resize 91.1% -attenuate 1.0 +noise Uniform out.jpg ; exiftool -a -u -g1 out.jpg (where 80 is a random number between 75 and 85 I choose at the time and 91.1 is a random (real) number between 91.0 and 91.9) You cannot exiftool purge a HEIC because it breaks it - you need to exiftool purge the resulting jpeg ... also, weirdly, -attenuate needs to come before the +noise switch in the command line.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  I thought of a third reason: 3. they took your phone and kept all your data
• ransom1538 4y ago
  "USGOV has a spotty track record of keeping this information secure." No only problems with security. Flat out handing it out in forms of subpoena.
• no_time 4y ago
  >This is the problem when a non-technical generation makes the rules and regs. If this is the doing of the "luddites" then I'm dreading the dawn of tech sawwy rulers.
  • indymike 4y ago
    > If this is the doing of the "luddites" then I'm dreading the dawn of tech sawwy rulers. Knowledge disparity has always been a source of power.
  • tenpies 4y ago
    It's not just luddites, it's also the knowledge that these rules will never apply to them or their children.
• kornhole 4y ago
  I think I know what you mean when you say Luddites, but the Luddites were actually very knowledgeable about technology. They rebelled against technology being used against them without any benefit to them. If you understand that history, you might agree with me that we want Luddites such as Wyden in government.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    I do think it's a shame that nobody seems to understand what the Luddites were actually about. They weren't ignorant of or against technology at all. Their beef was about economics.
• randomdata 4y ago
  > This is the problem when a non-technical generation makes the rules and regs. The millennials hold the power these days. If you consider them non-technical, I'm not sure there will ever be a technical generation... Which may be a fair assertion as I work with a lot of people in the tech industry who wouldn't even consider the issues you raise unless it was handed to them on a silver platter. If actual tech people aren't considering it, those who have other focuses in life certainly won't be.
  • stevehawk 4y ago
    the millenials do not hold the power. They are not the blue badgers in the intelligence community that are making decisions.
    • randomdata 4y ago
      The intelligence community only exists because those in power grant it so. The millennials hold the power. Certainly they delegate – there is only so much time in the day – but the outcome still rests on what lies at the top. The reality is that millennials, as a generation, don't see a problem with this. Select individuals may, but individuals don't hold power.
      • gmadsen 4y ago
        im not sure what definition you are using, the executive is nearly 80, the average age of congress is 60, average age of CEOs is 58. You know, the people with actual power. These are not millennial ages..
        • geoelectric 4y ago
          For the most part, they're barely even Gen X ages. Still a boomer world in the upper ranks once you get outside tech.
          • randomdata 4y ago
• godelski 4y ago
  > A foreign actor is likely to access this info eventually. This is one thing that has always confused me about the data collection in democratic countries. I understand the appeal from an authoritarian perspective, but it seems that people don't recognize that this same data can be used as a weapon against their own citizens. So you're left with three real options: 1) Minimize data collection, 2) Spend massive amounts of money on encryption, research, and constant audits to minimize the risk of data leakage (which will eventually get leaked in some form), 3) leave your population (and your political positions) vulnerable to manipulation by foreign and domestic entities that do not have the public's (or your) interest in mind. It seems like we're going with #3 but it even seems like a bad strategy for authoritarians. #2 seems better for that one. But #1 seems best for democracies and people in positions of power where power is not highly centralized. (Can we at least get homomorphic encryption and learning algorithms?) But I guess these same people are still under an impression that a backdoor doesn't work like any other door: that anyone can use a door as long as you can figure out how to break or crack the lock (which always happens).