It would be pretty embarrassing if the recording about "We're going to put two spears of asparagus in a bottle of water, and charge $6 for it!" were to go public.
Does it even occur to you that the only reason that Islamic terrorism is so rare is because security services do an outstanding job of smothering it? This year there were something like 378 terrorist plots in France, of which 377 were successfully detected and disrupted.
No, it occurs to me that the only reason acts of terrorism wearing any ideology are so rare is because there are very few actual terrorists trying to attack anyone.
Wherever you are in the world, dear reader, stop right now and take 5 minutes to ponder how you might commit mass casualties in your city. They haven't made thinking illegal (yet), so pretend to be a psychopath for a few minutes and let that tape play out. Consider every scenario you can conjure up where you could kill or injure more than a dozen people at a time. Not well-funded and organized attacks like 9/11, not even plots that cost a few thousand dollars like the San Bernardino shooters. Just ways that one random radicalized guy who's been watching "these videos, again and again" as you say, could pull off. Got your list? Good. That was just 5 minutes worth of your time, and you aren't really trying to be a devious terrorist.
Now tell me, why aren't the things on your list happening multiple times every day all over cities across the Western world? Is it because security services are so good at detecting every last person who's motivated to commit an attack, and if so, how come the random attacks that do slip through weren't prevented even though the perpetrators always seem to have been "on the list" already? Or is it because there just aren't very many people who are truly motivated and willing to attack us? I submit to you that it's the latter. I wish people would stop being so afraid.
That's been known for years. Why no one has ever exploited it I don't know.
I'll tell you why: because despite the billions of dollars we're throwing at "security" each year, and all of the fear propaganda being pumped out of the television 24/7, there just aren't many terrorists trying to attack us. Weak points exist everywhere in our society, there are plenty of effective ways to inflict mass casualties, and yet it's not happening with any regularity. The lack of attacks is not attributable to draconian security measures, as plenty of avenues are currently unsecured; it's because nobody's trying. The fact of the matter is, the threat of terror attacks is incredibly tiny and is not worth the sacrifices we're making.
By the way, one guy did attack a TSA line in Louisiana earlier this year. He wasn't brown, though, so nobody paid much attention.
Many people I know have no Facebook profile whatsoever.
Sure they do, they just haven't claimed it yet. Facebook compiles as much information as it can to build dossiers about people who haven't signed up, and that "shadow profile" can be linked to their account if they do make one. The Belgian government recently banned this practice, but the rest of us are stuck with it for now.
Can someone explain it to me how it hurts the Netflix user's account when it's stolen?
Depends on your definition of "hurt." By my own definition, it would "hurt" me if Netflix saw my account logging in from some other country and shut it down. Now I have to contact Netflix and see why my account isn't working, maybe spend awhile on the phone swearing up and down that I haven't given my password to some guy in Russia and I promise I'll make a 45-character passphrase. All of this takes time and effort. It's not nearly as severe as having credentials to a bank account stolen, but it's still "harm" as far as I'm concerned.
He placed some limits on it, but only at the federal level. Forfeiture is still rampant at the state level. I don't think Lynch has reversed Holder's federal directives yet.
It's troubling because the very nature of the stingray device means that innocent people are getting swept up in the fishing net by design. The stingray isn't capable of targeting the communications of a suspect in a criminal investigation; instead, it interferes with and collects the cellular signals of everyone in physical proximity to the device. There's a good reason the DOJ is trying to hide this technology behind corporate NDAs as if they somehow trump the law; there's a good reason they're fighting tooth and nail to keep stingrays out of court, even to the point of dropping charges when they think a stingray would be brought into evidence. They don't want to lose their fancy toy the first time a judge gets the chance to rule on its constitutionality.
They should have the same tools available to them as other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, Secret Service, DEA, ATF who have responsiblity to investigate organized crime.
I agree, and none of them should be using stingrays. Get a fucking warrant and go after your target through CALEA, which already has loopholes big enough to drive a truck through, and quit spying on innocent bystanders.
People can at least opt out of the phone book. And with the prevalence of mobiles and the decline of landlines, there's an entire generation of people now who have never been listed in a phone book and don't have to worry about it. I don't even remember the last time I got an updated white pages tossed on my porch, it's been years for sure.
Battered wives, stalking victims, controversial bloggers, Twitch gamers, and people who just value their privacy in general, really don't need Comcast broadcasting their home address to the world. Especially when nobody knew it was happening, and especially when Comcast explicitly said they wouldn't do that. Getting doxxed and stalked/swatted/etc. is a big enough threat already without one's ISP making things even easier.
So I'm likely to know I'm on a Stingray. Do you think I could sort of wardrive to try to locate the device?
Kinda. You can install AIMSICD on an Android phone; it displays a map of cell towers and alerts you when the presence of a stingray is likely. An icon in the phone's status bar will change from green, to yellow, to orange, to red indicating the threat level. I've seen a couple of yellows, which means something weird is going on with tower IDs, but isn't necessarily dangerous. If you got an orange or red icon you could pull up the tower map, find the dot, and drive towards it (or very fast away from it!).
Is there any information a stingray can collect that the cellular carriers don't also collect?
Yes, everyone else's information in addition to the hypothetical suspect's, with zero requirement for any semblance of probable cause.
The stingray just seems like an end-run around getting a court order to subpoena the information from the carriers.
Right, that's the whole point. The court would never grant a subpoena for information about "everyone who was in the area of Main St. and 4th Ave. on January the 9th," so they're subverting the court altogether.
With Apple's market penetration, I can see this taking off where some previous offerings haven't done so well. I wonder about the logistics behind any such system, would you have to tie a checking account to your Apple ID? Would people be willing to do that?
On a lighter note, I saw a recent episode of Drugs Inc. where they showed a cocaine dealer with his Square dongle plugged into his phone, bragging that he can take credit cards. Consumer to consumer micro-transactions are an interesting [To Read the Full Comment, Subscribe to My Comments]
Do you use the internet? You are on a watchlist. The more interesting question would be which ones, and of course most of us have no way to know.
I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on current events on another site, and I like to back up my comments with citations, so this leads me to Google all sorts of things. Offhand today I've searched for feces swastika (re: the U of Missouri stuff) and officers shot or killed (a story about one officer shooting another off-duty officer). Last night I was reading a thread about the Mazda RDX and so I Googled RDX; RDX is also the name of a military explosive. Around that time I was also searching for various terms related to the Missouri protests.
Some overzealous algorithm might see a person searching for RDX and Mizzou and officer and shooting all within close proximity, and get me on a list I really would rather not be on. That's one of the big problems with automated bulk surveillance, I imagine it's connecting a lot of dots that truly aren't connected.
Chase is good in my experience. They let you set up your own alerts, for example they'll send you a text message anytime a purchase is made over a certain dollar amount. You can set it to $1 and receive a text every single time the card is used, which is nice both for fraud detection and for remembering how much money you're spending on recurring subscriptions. I think other card issuers offer this feature now but Chase was the first of my cards to implement that. They were also the first to send me a chip-style card, almost a year before the requirement became effective.
All credit card issuers in the US are required to reimburse you for unauthorized charges. The law states you're liable for up to $50 but in practice I've never heard of a card issuer sticking the customer with any charge at all, if you dispute a (legitimately) fraudulent charge, they just remove it from your statement. Not sure how things work in Thailand. Anecdotally, I've never seen a bogus charge on my Chase Freedom card, but I don't know whether that's because they've prevented things from going through or whether nobody's tried.
I was finally talked into getting an iphone when it was time to upgrade. So far I don't have any problems with the phone itself... but one BIG noticeable difference is every few weeks after using my new phone I get random calls from phone scammers/telemarketers.
The real heavy hitters have to be tethering, but there are normal use cases that can consume 23GB a month on the phone itself. Streaming practically anything adds up faster than you might notice.
Let's look at Spotify. They stream at 160kbps (72MB/hr) when you choose high quality, and paid Spotify users get a 320kbps (144MB/hr) option. Suppose you routinely leave Spotify streaming throughout your 8 hour workday; I know people who do this. Over the course of a month, 4 x 40-hour weeks, the 160kbps stream will use up 11.5 gigs of data. Interestingly enough, that means the 320kbps stream will use up... 23 gigs! Anyway, that's just listening to background noise while you're at work.
Now add in a month's worth of checking emails, random brief web surfing sessions, watching some funny YouTube clips here and there, checking in with a couple of games, poking around at a sports scoreboard app full of refreshy ajaxy bandwidth-hungry gadgets, posting a dozen 2MB photos to Facebook and Instagram every day, watching your local TV news livestream during your lunch break and/or the train ride home, and all the other shit people like doing on their phone. It adds up. You and I might not use our phones like that, but look around. Millions of people do.
23 gigs isn't the enormous quantity of data that it once was, especially when we're being constantly bombarded with advertisements telling us to consume even more.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be pretty embarrassing if the recording about "We're going to put two spears of asparagus in a bottle of water, and charge $6 for it!" were to go public.
No kidding. "Microsoft Government Facial Recognition Program" probably got stack-ranked to the bottom of name candidates for being too accurate.
When storage wells like this crack open, there's almost nothing that can be done, and no ability to do anything quickly in any case.
Surely someone nearby owns a quadcopter and a road flare...
Come on, man. You can't funnel 10 million dollars to one of your preferred bidders if you just go buy three shotguns.
Does it even occur to you that the only reason that Islamic terrorism is so rare is because security services do an outstanding job of smothering it? This year there were something like 378 terrorist plots in France, of which 377 were successfully detected and disrupted.
No, it occurs to me that the only reason acts of terrorism wearing any ideology are so rare is because there are very few actual terrorists trying to attack anyone.
Wherever you are in the world, dear reader, stop right now and take 5 minutes to ponder how you might commit mass casualties in your city. They haven't made thinking illegal (yet), so pretend to be a psychopath for a few minutes and let that tape play out. Consider every scenario you can conjure up where you could kill or injure more than a dozen people at a time. Not well-funded and organized attacks like 9/11, not even plots that cost a few thousand dollars like the San Bernardino shooters. Just ways that one random radicalized guy who's been watching "these videos, again and again" as you say, could pull off. Got your list? Good. That was just 5 minutes worth of your time, and you aren't really trying to be a devious terrorist.
Now tell me, why aren't the things on your list happening multiple times every day all over cities across the Western world? Is it because security services are so good at detecting every last person who's motivated to commit an attack, and if so, how come the random attacks that do slip through weren't prevented even though the perpetrators always seem to have been "on the list" already? Or is it because there just aren't very many people who are truly motivated and willing to attack us? I submit to you that it's the latter. I wish people would stop being so afraid.
That's been known for years. Why no one has ever exploited it I don't know.
I'll tell you why: because despite the billions of dollars we're throwing at "security" each year, and all of the fear propaganda being pumped out of the television 24/7, there just aren't many terrorists trying to attack us. Weak points exist everywhere in our society, there are plenty of effective ways to inflict mass casualties, and yet it's not happening with any regularity. The lack of attacks is not attributable to draconian security measures, as plenty of avenues are currently unsecured; it's because nobody's trying. The fact of the matter is, the threat of terror attacks is incredibly tiny and is not worth the sacrifices we're making.
By the way, one guy did attack a TSA line in Louisiana earlier this year. He wasn't brown, though, so nobody paid much attention.
Many people I know have no Facebook profile whatsoever.
Sure they do, they just haven't claimed it yet. Facebook compiles as much information as it can to build dossiers about people who haven't signed up, and that "shadow profile" can be linked to their account if they do make one. The Belgian government recently banned this practice, but the rest of us are stuck with it for now.
They left the nut jerbs, though.
You might be thinking of Dick Cheney.
Can someone explain it to me how it hurts the Netflix user's account when it's stolen?
Depends on your definition of "hurt." By my own definition, it would "hurt" me if Netflix saw my account logging in from some other country and shut it down. Now I have to contact Netflix and see why my account isn't working, maybe spend awhile on the phone swearing up and down that I haven't given my password to some guy in Russia and I promise I'll make a 45-character passphrase. All of this takes time and effort. It's not nearly as severe as having credentials to a bank account stolen, but it's still "harm" as far as I'm concerned.
He placed some limits on it, but only at the federal level. Forfeiture is still rampant at the state level. I don't think Lynch has reversed Holder's federal directives yet.
It's troubling because the very nature of the stingray device means that innocent people are getting swept up in the fishing net by design. The stingray isn't capable of targeting the communications of a suspect in a criminal investigation; instead, it interferes with and collects the cellular signals of everyone in physical proximity to the device. There's a good reason the DOJ is trying to hide this technology behind corporate NDAs as if they somehow trump the law; there's a good reason they're fighting tooth and nail to keep stingrays out of court, even to the point of dropping charges when they think a stingray would be brought into evidence. They don't want to lose their fancy toy the first time a judge gets the chance to rule on its constitutionality.
They should have the same tools available to them as other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, Secret Service, DEA, ATF who have responsiblity to investigate organized crime.
I agree, and none of them should be using stingrays. Get a fucking warrant and go after your target through CALEA, which already has loopholes big enough to drive a truck through, and quit spying on innocent bystanders.
Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled drives is a great way to get into the cloud.
Pants are optional, but recommended for you.
I don't have sympathy for people selling modifications to a game which the maker of the game says are illegal.
s/game/car/g
Out of curiosity, does your opinion change any?
People can at least opt out of the phone book. And with the prevalence of mobiles and the decline of landlines, there's an entire generation of people now who have never been listed in a phone book and don't have to worry about it. I don't even remember the last time I got an updated white pages tossed on my porch, it's been years for sure.
Battered wives, stalking victims, controversial bloggers, Twitch gamers, and people who just value their privacy in general, really don't need Comcast broadcasting their home address to the world. Especially when nobody knew it was happening, and especially when Comcast explicitly said they wouldn't do that. Getting doxxed and stalked/swatted/etc. is a big enough threat already without one's ISP making things even easier.
So I'm likely to know I'm on a Stingray. Do you think I could sort of wardrive to try to locate the device?
Kinda. You can install AIMSICD on an Android phone; it displays a map of cell towers and alerts you when the presence of a stingray is likely. An icon in the phone's status bar will change from green, to yellow, to orange, to red indicating the threat level. I've seen a couple of yellows, which means something weird is going on with tower IDs, but isn't necessarily dangerous. If you got an orange or red icon you could pull up the tower map, find the dot, and drive towards it (or very fast away from it!).
Is there any information a stingray can collect that the cellular carriers don't also collect?
Yes, everyone else's information in addition to the hypothetical suspect's, with zero requirement for any semblance of probable cause.
The stingray just seems like an end-run around getting a court order to subpoena the information from the carriers.
Right, that's the whole point. The court would never grant a subpoena for information about "everyone who was in the area of Main St. and 4th Ave. on January the 9th," so they're subverting the court altogether.
Rule #1, never talk about Kermit.
With Apple's market penetration, I can see this taking off where some previous offerings haven't done so well. I wonder about the logistics behind any such system, would you have to tie a checking account to your Apple ID? Would people be willing to do that?
On a lighter note, I saw a recent episode of Drugs Inc. where they showed a cocaine dealer with his Square dongle plugged into his phone, bragging that he can take credit cards. Consumer to consumer micro-transactions are an interesting [To Read the Full Comment, Subscribe to My Comments]
Do you use the internet? You are on a watchlist. The more interesting question would be which ones, and of course most of us have no way to know.
I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on current events on another site, and I like to back up my comments with citations, so this leads me to Google all sorts of things. Offhand today I've searched for feces swastika (re: the U of Missouri stuff) and officers shot or killed (a story about one officer shooting another off-duty officer). Last night I was reading a thread about the Mazda RDX and so I Googled RDX; RDX is also the name of a military explosive. Around that time I was also searching for various terms related to the Missouri protests.
Some overzealous algorithm might see a person searching for RDX and Mizzou and officer and shooting all within close proximity, and get me on a list I really would rather not be on. That's one of the big problems with automated bulk surveillance, I imagine it's connecting a lot of dots that truly aren't connected.
See you on the list!
Chase is good in my experience. They let you set up your own alerts, for example they'll send you a text message anytime a purchase is made over a certain dollar amount. You can set it to $1 and receive a text every single time the card is used, which is nice both for fraud detection and for remembering how much money you're spending on recurring subscriptions. I think other card issuers offer this feature now but Chase was the first of my cards to implement that. They were also the first to send me a chip-style card, almost a year before the requirement became effective.
All credit card issuers in the US are required to reimburse you for unauthorized charges. The law states you're liable for up to $50 but in practice I've never heard of a card issuer sticking the customer with any charge at all, if you dispute a (legitimately) fraudulent charge, they just remove it from your statement. Not sure how things work in Thailand. Anecdotally, I've never seen a bogus charge on my Chase Freedom card, but I don't know whether that's because they've prevented things from going through or whether nobody's tried.
I was finally talked into getting an iphone when it was time to upgrade. So far I don't have any problems with the phone itself... but one BIG noticeable difference is every few weeks after using my new phone I get random calls from phone scammers/telemarketers.
Did you install the LinkedIn app on that phone?
O say does that surveillance camera yet gaze,
O'er the land of police,
And the home of the 'fraid.
The real heavy hitters have to be tethering, but there are normal use cases that can consume 23GB a month on the phone itself. Streaming practically anything adds up faster than you might notice.
Let's look at Spotify. They stream at 160kbps (72MB/hr) when you choose high quality, and paid Spotify users get a 320kbps (144MB/hr) option. Suppose you routinely leave Spotify streaming throughout your 8 hour workday; I know people who do this. Over the course of a month, 4 x 40-hour weeks, the 160kbps stream will use up 11.5 gigs of data. Interestingly enough, that means the 320kbps stream will use up... 23 gigs! Anyway, that's just listening to background noise while you're at work.
Now add in a month's worth of checking emails, random brief web surfing sessions, watching some funny YouTube clips here and there, checking in with a couple of games, poking around at a sports scoreboard app full of refreshy ajaxy bandwidth-hungry gadgets, posting a dozen 2MB photos to Facebook and Instagram every day, watching your local TV news livestream during your lunch break and/or the train ride home, and all the other shit people like doing on their phone. It adds up. You and I might not use our phones like that, but look around. Millions of people do.
23 gigs isn't the enormous quantity of data that it once was, especially when we're being constantly bombarded with advertisements telling us to consume even more.