Slashdot Mirror
At Canadian Airports, Your Conversation May Be Remotely Recorded
New Jazari writes "Careful what you say when traveling, since the authorities will soon be able to zoom in on your conversations and record them for an indefinite amount of time. The story is about Canada, but I see no reason to think that this capability will not soon be installed in most places (if it's not already)."
And that is actually legal?
is canada the FIRST country to do so? i doubt it, but what IS a FIRST is publicly admitting they're going to be recording people in the airport.
my sig pwns your sig
Who cares, anyways, if you are talking in such a place, it will be overheard by many people
If you say something significant, people will also remember it
Does it matter if the govt records what you do in public areas?
I feel safer already!
This is ridiculous, I use to do risk assessments and anti-terrorism work in the aviation sector protecting airport assets and I see no practical reason for listening in on conversations. If a threat is already within the area-of-interest then you've this doesn't help with detection because the main threats we are meant to look for these days aren't the sort of people who are going to go blabbing on their cellphone about what they're about to do within the AOI. This technology does nothing about reducing attack surface area or reducing the impact of a successful attack. However, if we shift focus away from anti-terrorism this technology becomes slightly more useful in monitoring crime within airports, which believe it or not, happens more often then you think. Either way, it's still unethical and I know that this would be illegal in the jurisdiction I worked in at least.
Break the wind !!
I'd suspect that anyone who traveled through a post-911 NORAD-airspace airport who hadn't already assumed that their conversations might be monitored and / or recorded is either:
A) Naive, or
B) a fool (and also A.)
If you're standing inside a modern-day airport in North America, consider that you may have had more liberty hanging out in a Stalinist Gulag. The airport is just a cage slightly more gilded.
Reading stories like this makes me extra glad I'm sequestered away on my mountains surrounded by 300 Ninja guard pigs. Besides, I'm not saying anything that matters. :)
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place anyway. I can't speak for Canada, but in the US case law is already being made that establishes that recording in public places is not an invasion of privacy. This includes photography, videography and audio.
It applies not only to the public but to government agencies as well.
This is what Canadian security folks are interested in so that they can Tax you on it.
While travelling in England in 2010, my wife and I were told by a security person at an international airport in London, that they monitor conversations of people in queues. I can't remember how/why the topic came up, but we were both not surprised that it happens.
I just want to publish here to block all patent efforts, "Method and apparatus for secure audio communications in open air". If you don't mind looking like a fool, you can have secure audio conversation with your travel buddy and no one will be able to overhear or record your conversation. If they confiscate one or both of your devices, no one will be able to decrypt any of your previous conversation audio after about 15 seconds, even if it was recorded. Think "OTR for speech audio".
Abstract: This device, when used in pairs, will allow secure audio exchange in an open air environment. Users will speak into a cup that is held over their mouth and nose. The device will establish a secure link with another device located in the vicinity and once the link is established, everyone but the authenticated parties will only hear white noise emanating from the devices. Only the wearers will hear each other through standard headphones or earphones attached to the device.
Detail: The primary purpose of the device is to allow secure audio conversation with no chance of intercept or decryption by unauthorized parties. The primary component of the apparatus will be a circular cup designed to cover the wearer's mouth and seal perimeter of the wearer's mouth. The device will be secured to the wearer's face by way of two straps that connect behind the wearer's head. The portion of the main device that covers the wearer's mouth will allow for sufficient airflow for breathing, but the overall design of the cup will prevent all sound generated at the wearer's mouth from departing the cup. The outside of the device will feature open air audio interfaces (i.e. two disc-shaped speakers and a small microphone in the center). The device will feature a commonly used 3/32" "headphone jack" port for listening where the wearer will attach standard headphones or earphones.
In order to achieve secure audio communications over open air, two of devices must be within a distance that can be covered by audio being broadcast at a volume used in typical conversation in public. When the two users wish to establish a secure link with each other, each wearer will press a button located on the side of the cup marked "Auth". A secure key exchange or "handshake" algorithm will cause the two devices to securely identify themselves to the other user. Each wearer will then look for a label printed on the other user's device showing the digital fingerprint of the device. They will compare the digital fingerprint shown on a small screen on their own device to the one shown on the other user's device and press the "Auth" button again on their own device to indicate that the other user is authenticated.
Once the wearers have authenticated each other, they will then attach their respective devices to their faces by holding the cup over their nose and mouth before securing the straps behind their head, securing the cup in place. As each wearer speaks into the cup secured over their mouth and nose, the sound of their speech will be encrypted using a key that can only be decrypted by the other user's device. To people not using the device or not authenticated by a user, the sounds of the ongoing conversation will only be white noise. Each authenticated user will only hear the other speaker's voice in their earphones or headphones.
In order to avoid detection and unauthorized decryption, the device will periodically transmit the white noise audio even if the user isn't speaking. Also, paired devices will change their encryption key at regular intervals (i.e. every 15 seconds). The encryption algorithm will also feature "perfect forward encryption" as the keys used during the conversation will change frequently, rendering all previous exchanges of data unreadable even if either device used during the conversation were to be compromised.
See "Off the Record Messaging" for an approach to secure handshake and perfect forward encryption.
Rational people do not disclose PRIVATE things in PUBLIC places.
Well, my private things are in pubic places, and rarely exhibited in public places (other than public toilets)....
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Al Queda, blow-up, fake passport, blow-up FBI/NSA/CIA... Obama is NOT actually a Muslim. I hate republicans (well not all, some). There, is that enough to get me arrested?
Speaking French should be outlawed. Jim Carrey no good. Neil Young no good..."
I am going to speak in French to foil them listening in, take that snoops! :p
I think after listening to people discuss hockey for a few hours I'd feel like blowing my brains out.
WTF?!
People broadcast their signal (voice) out into an open channel (the air) without encryption in a public area, and they dare to expect any privacy?!
Any person with 2 brain cells would have either encrypted their conversations (speaking in code words) or whispered directly to the ears of their partners.
Don't everybody knows that signals broadcasted unencrypted is open to be listened and/or recorded by whomever out there? /sarcasm
I found out some time ago that all conversations at my local bank (and therefore all banks, eh?) are recorded when you are banking at/with a human teller. The public is not made aware of this, but I can confirm it. My understanding is due to bank robberies, this system along with video recording was put into place, but how much more can it be used or is it used for?
This makes me wonder then if the same thing is not happening at all other "public" spot where you interact with a human being behind a desk. For example, we know that all 911 calls are recorded, and all calls to "customer service" of large corporations are recorded "to ensure quality" (yeah, right). So why not every information desk in a mall or a hotel, every cash register at every major department store, and more?
Another thing I noticed is if you look real close at video cameras in some retail stores, gas stations and restaurants you will see that the camera is not always pointed at the customer, but at the cash register. I first noticed this after a story about "inside" or employee theft at a local fast food restaurant made the newspaper, and the new cameras at the time were pointed at the cash station. I imagine in all these cases, there must be audio in addition to video recording.
I think the only reasonable assumption, if there is such a thing, is to treat every public encounter you have - be it ordering coffee, paying a utility bill or paying for gas, to be recorded when you are dealing with a human face to face. Don't worry if you pay all your bills online, I am sure your IP address is locked and loaded into some database somewhere too every time you pay a bill too. I guess 1984 really did come and go quite some time ago. :(
Try reading from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150281/REVEALED-Hundreds-words-avoid-using-online-dont-want-government-spying-you.html
See what words trigger the US voice to text dictionary alerts.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ket ... although that would probably be enough to brand me a terrorist.
You see, this is the perfect method for catching terrorists! Proof: Take a look at the following typical airport situations:
Conversation 1
A: Got more of those peanuts?
B: Sure, help yourself. They were expensive enough.
A: Did you see those magazines. I'd love to buy one, but they are just way too overprized. I don't wanna spend all my money on fucking overprized stuff. I'd rather spend it in Berlin.
B: Yeah, it sucks. And we still have to kill four hours.
Conversation 2
A: Have you got more plastic explosives?
B: No, you said you'd fetch it from the van.
A: It does not matter my friend, because Allah is with us. With Allah's help we will kill many infidels today even if we don't have enough plastic explosives.
B: Why do we have to wait longer? My Kalashnikov is ready and I'm ready. I want to kill infidels!
A: Patience, patience my brother. We still have to wait until the first bomb explodes. Then your time is come to become a martyr.
Clearly, conversation 2 is just by two foreign exchange students pranking around and making jokes. No terrorist would have this kind of conversation on a public airport. Conversation 1, however, satisfies all criteria for an immediate SWAT takedown. Obviously, the term 'peanuts' refers to the bullets in an AK-74 magazine. Also, the two subjects complain about the airport prizing, the clear sign of coming from a communist or socialist "people's revolution" state like Iran. Finally, "killing hours" is disguised speech for "killing infidels" -- it's time for immediate action!
Audio recordings of third parties are illegal in Canada. One person participating in the conversation must give consent. This includes security cameras which must not have audio because they would never be guaranteed to always have someone consenting in every conversation..
When I was a kid, I always wondered what it was like for the average person going about their lives in Nazi Germany.
Looks like those who are currently toddlers won't have to wonder much.
No, you are the idiot. Because at the end of the day it's all pieces of paper and politics - REAL politics - comes from the barrel of a gun. That is, once you give up on paper.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think I would much prefer this to the x-ray or groping options. As long as I'm in a public place. Although it seems like they'd have to spend a lot of money on hiring translators for every foreign language since those are the people that they are most interested in.
I should also mention that most of the time I'm flying alone so my conversations are limited to cell phones which they are already recording. Or they could listen to my video game music.
Just how long we are going to let these retards run this place........?
...to mention aloud how you've heard that the inflight movie is "a real bomb!"
...they sure are liberally applying the surveillance.
We should not be afraid to speak in public. Speech is not something people should have to hide.
Yeah yeah yeah, fire in a crowded theater (the excuse given to uphold the conviction of someone who dared to pass around anti-draft pamphlets), but the reality of these technologies is that they will make people think twice about what they say before they say it. You know, like how someone who remarks to a friend that the security seems lax, that the giant line seems like a target for terrorists, that security theater is a waste of tax dollars, that the conservative prime minister is an idiot, etc., how any of the above might result in that person being taken out of line and escorted to some windowless room for questioning.
This is the equivalent of having police officers following every person around and recording their conversations.
Palm trees and 8
Recording telephone conversations, e-mail, tweets, etc. between suspected terrorists might be useful if one has the time to analyze them and act on the analysis. But until accurate real time multi-language speech processing becomes available, recording stuff in an airport is a bit too late.
Sure, it would be interesting to play the tapes back (I know. Get off my lawn, kid!) after the airplane slams into a high rise. But what good is that going to do?
Have gnu, will travel.
I bet a majority of the recorded conversations would begin with something like this:
"Let's go get some donuts at Tim Hortons, eh?"
Many people are thinking that if I am not near a microphone, it is hard to record my conversation and pick it out of a room full of people. This is normally the case. There is a recent technology advancement being used in sports using a phased microphone array.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/picking_a_singl.html
This has alrady been posted in Slashdot.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/11/1838252/high-tech-microphone-picks-voices-from-a-crowd
If you record each microphone as a seperate track, and maintain timing syncronasation of the tracks, you can steer the array after the event to pick out individual conversations in a crowd.
Live or recorded, the beam forming can be steered either way.
The article was too thin on details to confirm if this is the tech being used, but I I was going to impliment recording for a room full of people that needed later seperation to review the drug lord converstaion, this is the tech that could do the job.
A for privacy, there is littel chance anyone would steer the array from the stored recording to have any interest in what you were saying to the lady next to you that isn't your spouse.
The truth shall set you free!
This is what happens when we look to our governments to make us feel safe and secure because we fear the boogeyman or we have an irrational fear of crime and the dark. If we thought for ourselves and didn't have knee jerk reactions to the news, we might actually protect what little freedoms from government incursion that we still cherish.
They know that they could walk into a mall or megachurch and do the same damage they did with an airplane.
No they can't. In order to get casualties in the hundreds, you need a bomb bigger than a person can carry without looking suspicious (100 pounds), even in crowded areas. With modern medicine, many potential casualties will be merely 'wounded'. You need a car or truck bomb to kill hundreds in most cases. Whereas, tens of pounds of explosive, maybe less in the right place, will suffice to take down a 737, and kill ~200 people.
"Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law."
We are all guilty. They just have work out what we are guilty of.
I was a grill cook shortly after relocating to Houston at waffle house, it was one of a three restaurant
franchise, and he had each store rigged with video and audio that tap live feed from all sources in real time from home, recording everything the whole time. My wife was working at another one, and there was extensive coverage from multiple cameras after they got robbed one night while my wife was working. I was watching on the news as they had the new chick trying to open the register, but she was panicking and couldn't do it. They started putting the gun in her face, and she started losing it, and ideas my wife say fuckit, and go open the register. That's my baby!
p.s. There's cameras watching the register. There's cameras in the back, too. Even in the freezer lol, one of the managers got fired for giving a new hire young punk ass kid a bj in the walk in freezer.
p.p.s. Captcha = burned
Nice out-of-context headline. Yes, this is happening at certain Canadian airports (YVR, YOW, YUL, YYZ) but only in Canadian Customs areas (e.g. international arrivals). This posting makes it sound like it's everywhere.
It's primarily intended to help bust smuggling efforts by airport employees.
Which is why in the article, they clearly say that the audio isn't turned on. The OP obviously didn't read the article. They want to turn it on but are working with their privacy experts to figure out how to do it, since it isn't actually legal.
Righto. I'm sure nobody's using one of these:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/super-microphone-picks-out-single-voice-in-a-crowded-stadium/
The video is gone, but it was able to pick up someone popping bubble gum in a packed basketball game during an exciting play.
Unless we (as a society) take some very concrete legal steps to make it illegal for our governments to use the results of certain types of surveillance, our children will read 1984 and ask "so, what's the big deal?"
This is not some paranoid worry. If the marginal cost of recording everything you say (online or offline) is near zero (and technology is driving it there), why shouldn't they keep it on file, just in case? (Think of how easy it would be to prosecute certain crimes if you could go back and re-play every conversation the criminal had).
Of course, before that happens "they" will probably buy the publishing rights to the novel, and use forever-copyright and DMCA to make sure nobody ever reads it :)
I was in line at the Edmonton International Airport in 1997 to go on a student trip to Hong Kong.
I was very far back in line and I whispered to a friend that I hoped my baby brother hadn't put a toy squirt gun in my luggage.
When I got near the front of the line a security woman approached me and warned me not to joke about guns in the airport and that I was lucky to get on the flight.
I assumed they had microphones in the ceilings above the security line after that.
A similar occurrence 8 years later in Vienna, Austria didn't result in any action though. My girlfriend at the time mentioned the word bomb - I fully expected to get questioned.
Let's face it. We the people can't enforce privacy. There will alway be a bureaucrat who "HasTo Know" to stop "Terrorism" (or whatever).
I know it sounds crazy, but think about it. I suggest we don't put any restrictions on governments spending our tax dollars on observation. Instead make it open slather on the gathering of information in public places. But all of that information must be put into the public domain immediately.
Because this is the INFORMATION AGE and information is more valuable than feudal land ownership or money. (Just ask Sergei Brin). And the value and danger of information is enhanced by exclusivity.
And all of those reasons for privacy (at least all that I've heard) can be cancelled or ameliorated by the open slather policy.
"Mom, our school play totally bombed in the trials. The competition just obliterated us as the audience burst into applause. We just felt plain down.........Hey, who are you guys? Leave me alone! Mooooom!?"
Table-ized A.I.
And the only thing I would add. Any taxpayer funded "invasion of privacy" should be put in the public domain. I want to know the extent of their spying!
there's still the problem of interpretation. Which is the subject of a truly great Francis Ford Coppola film.
this is pointless, as if some terrorists wont have it fully planned before arrival.. i hope this story is a joke, if not.. it and the airport government bugs are complete waste of tax money.
Here in Canada we do not obsess about terrorism the way our southern neighbours do. This is not intended to catch terrorists. It's to catch travellers talking about which goods they're planning to declare (and not declare).
The familiar "anything to declare" question will become rhetorical.
If this is true, then Thank you. I was starting to get a bit paranoid and wondering if all those tinfoil hat people had it right all along...
"International laws and treaties are binding even above the US constitution." A common misconception. There are no actual international laws. There are treaty agreements made by ministers or officials at some meeting. They have no effect until they are later ratified by national governments. Then a domestic law, or regulation under an existing law, is produced to implement the agreement, or parts of it depending on ammendments during the passage of the bill through the legislature, Then this local law is binding on the citizens of that country, with the priority relative to the Constitution or other laws given in the Act. "International law" is a loose general term used to refer to thebulk body of treaty agreements and implementation laws in various countries. When considering what is permissable, it is usually more expedient to check the treaty rather than the detail of the laws of the countries concerned. There are no international police either. Interpol is just a message switch. In this case it could easily be argued that the privacy invasion is necessary to provide air safety - much like opening a bag to look for a bomb. Dubious, I know, but the public interest case usually wins. There is probably an ICAO treaty regarding the obligations of member nations to do their utmost to protect air safety. I doubt if there is a treaty protecting the right of citizens to private conversations - particularly at airports.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Canada Border Services can make regulations only according to the powers given to it in its legislation. Those powers would have been constructed with compliance to treaty obligations in mind. Listening Device legislation usually makes use by anyone a criminal offence unless it done with the knowloedge of those recorded, or is covered by a judicial warrant. Presumably the CBS does not have the power to get a warrant, and anyway it could not get one in relation to unidentified people milling around an airport. There is no loss of soverignty because citizens are bound only by the laws of their own country. At least this is the way it should be. There was a case a few years ago where an Australian in his home violated a US DRM law regarding copying protected music without breaking any Australian law. The American music publisher protested and he was extradited to the USA to face a prison sentence. If you can be punished in another country for something that you did in your own country which was not a crime there, then there is definitely a loss of soverignty. At that time Australia had a pathetic conservative government that was grovelling to the G W Bush Administration in a totally disgraceful fashion. They even permitted an Australian to be incarcerated for years in the Guantanamo gulag in violation of all of his citizenship rights.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.