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I'm pretty sure this kind of thing doesn't make governments nervous. For one thing, they can always place a virus or a bug on your phone. Or they can do it th

by tsotha 14y ago

I'm pretty sure this kind of thing doesn't make governments nervous. For one thing, they can always place a virus or a bug on your phone. Or they can do it the old fashioned way and bug your car/office/bedroom. This will only going defeat the "dragnet" type stuff that combs through millions of conversations looking for keywords. I guess that's something, but if you've managed to attract the all-seeing eye you shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of security because the link between your mobile and someone else's is secure.

fab13n 14y ago
> if you've managed to attract the all-seeing eye [...] But I guess that governments expect large-scale surveillance to be the primary way to attract the all-seeing eye. National security was done a certain way during the cold war, when facing highly organized intelligence services. The swarms of nutjobs, loosely herd by amorphous terrorist organizations, are much harder to detect; many people probably have high hopes about big data and statistical methods to find them.
dthunt 14y ago
There are big concerns with mobile phones, especially with the radio baseband. I'm reluctant to consider phones genuinely 'secure' until the radio doesn't have access to the user OS or non-radio related hardware, and the microphone and sensitive storage is physically separated from the phone.
mogrim 14y ago
They can also just legislate you out of existence: "You want to operate here? You comply with the law. And that means a backdoor." As long as this service is commercial (which apparently it is) it will have a payment gateway, and that point can be easily blocked by a local government.
- Vivtek 14y ago
  So everybody but the United States will have secure communications. Race to the bottom, then? The place seems more Soviet every day.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    The US has a lot more influence in these kinds of things than you would think. I'm continually amazed at how easily countries buckle when faced with, for example, financial industry sanctions. Look at the way copyright law has changed over the years.
    - Vivtek 14y ago
      Ouch - point taken.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
Yes, but the "dragnet" type stuff is the more important one. If you "attract the all-seeing eye" to the point of getting personal attention (being hacked or physically bugged), it means that government already has more than enough reasons to get rid of you and nothing can keep you safe from an AGM-114 flying through the window and/or enough red-tape being unleashed on you to make you die in misery. They probably just need some information from you to go after someone else. On the other hand, mass-scale surveillance enables you to actually find targets of interest out of sea of people irrelevant to the case. Because the usual problem is, you know there are Bad Guys[0] out there, but you don't know where. Mass-surveillance makes the search much, much less expensive. So they really care about it. And there's also an issue of Big Data, aka. whatever data they collect on people can in the future be used in a ways we can't even imagine now but won't like when it happens. So the data itself is also a danger. Also humans make mistakes, and algorithms are not always good, and no one would like to have their home raided because some long-forgotten bayesian filter buried deep in the system didn't use logarithms properly and introduced serious errors to probability computations. That's why people care. [0] - relative to what govt. sees as bad at the moment.

by tsotha 14y ago

fab13n 14y ago

> if you've managed to attract the all-seeing eye [...] But I guess that governments expect large-scale surveillance to be the primary way to attract the all-seeing eye. National security was done a certain way during the cold war, when facing highly organized intelligence services. The swarms of nutjobs, loosely herd by amorphous terrorist organizations, are much harder to detect; many people probably have high hopes about big data and statistical methods to find them.

dthunt 14y ago

There are big concerns with mobile phones, especially with the radio baseband. I'm reluctant to consider phones genuinely 'secure' until the radio doesn't have access to the user OS or non-radio related hardware, and the microphone and sensitive storage is physically separated from the phone.

mogrim 14y ago

They can also just legislate you out of existence: "You want to operate here? You comply with the law. And that means a backdoor." As long as this service is commercial (which apparently it is) it will have a payment gateway, and that point can be easily blocked by a local government.

Vivtek 14y ago
So everybody but the United States will have secure communications. Race to the bottom, then? The place seems more Soviet every day.
- tsotha 14y ago
  The US has a lot more influence in these kinds of things than you would think. I'm continually amazed at how easily countries buckle when faced with, for example, financial industry sanctions. Look at the way copyright law has changed over the years.
  - Vivtek 14y ago
    Ouch - point taken.

TeMPOraL 14y ago

Yes, but the "dragnet" type stuff is the more important one. If you "attract the all-seeing eye" to the point of getting personal attention (being hacked or physically bugged), it means that government already has more than enough reasons to get rid of you and nothing can keep you safe from an AGM-114 flying through the window and/or enough red-tape being unleashed on you to make you die in misery. They probably just need some information from you to go after someone else. On the other hand, mass-scale surveillance enables you to actually find targets of interest out of sea of people irrelevant to the case. Because the usual problem is, you know there are Bad Guys[0] out there, but you don't know where. Mass-surveillance makes the search much, much less expensive. So they really care about it. And there's also an issue of Big Data, aka. whatever data they collect on people can in the future be used in a ways we can't even imagine now but won't like when it happens. So the data itself is also a danger. Also humans make mistakes, and algorithms are not always good, and no one would like to have their home raided because some long-forgotten bayesian filter buried deep in the system didn't use logarithms properly and introduced serious errors to probability computations. That's why people care. [0] - relative to what govt. sees as bad at the moment.