How dare you cite statistics and facts in a debate such as this! People might actually make a decision based on knowledge and logic instead of emotions, prejudices and FUD fed to them by politicians and their handlers.
Mail in and absentee ballots only require a witness signature if the person casting the ballot can't sign the affidavit swearing that this is their ballot. Theoretically, poll watchers could challenge any mail in or absentee ballot and demand that the signature be verified. If there is no signature, the witness could be called upon to verify the mark.
BTW, you should really read the instructions on the ballot. You could end up having an invalid ballot if you screw it up.
If you want to actually do some good and contribute something constructive, I'd suggest The Open Prosthesis Project. There's an excellent write up on the project in both the treeware and
on-line editions of Scientific American.
Might I suggest doing business with spammers a crime instead?
I wonder if some sort of Internet business license might be a way to do this. The fee would need to be something fairly nominal and just enough to fund the process. The idea would be to implement something such that payment processors would not be allowed to and/or would be under no obligation to complete transactions for anyone without said business license. If someone wants to conduct business outside of this scheme using cash, checks, etc., they do so at their own risk. A little publicity and honest merchants showing that they have said license should be sufficient to make the scheme known.
A few more details... Licenses get revoked for proved spamming. Licenses are tied to an originating domain with a DNS tie in to allow mismatches between license number and originator to be filtered. Trying to sell something using e-mail but without including the Internet business license becomes illegal and ISPs are free to trash such e-mails.
Obviously, this only would affect spam that is attempting to sell something. 419 scams, various phishing scams, etc. would still be a problem. The idea is that legitimate commercial e-mail becomes non-anonymous which doesn't hurt legitimate vendors or non-commercial e-mail. People attempting to sell stuff using spam become "visible" and subject to countermeasures.
Maybe most of my spam originated on their bot net. My dSPAM fourteen day analysis shows my incoming spam rate has dropped to less than half the level of a week ago.
Actually, I have read quite a bit about cryptanalysis. David Kahn's "The Code Breakers", Yardley's "American Black Chamber", "The Puzzle Palace", "The Ultra Americans", etc. Breaking into an unknown cipher is non-trivial. All the correspondents need to do is agree on the cipher *outside of their e-mail correspondence* (e.g., if this is Thursday then its ROT13 day). The analysis software has to first attempt to identify the cipher being used and then attempt to recover the key. The idea is that even ROT13 means the analysis software has to do some fairly hefty computing until the cipher is identified.
Having seen what kind of computing resources it takes to just analyze and classify all plain text network traffic at a moderate sized business (10,000 to 20,000 employees), I can tell you that just monitoring millions of people will take a huge amount of computing power. If the watchers are interested in only specific traffic, the task becomes feasible. If their goal is to monitor all traffic, the cost of computation means they'll need a huge amount of computing power. Throw in a little obfuscation and the task becomes incredibly difficult. Effectively, the sea of data collected puts the watchers back precisely where they are now: they can focus on just a small subset of the traffic.
I used to work for a network monitoring company that used both content and context to classify Internet traffic. Actually, it's a lot easier than even using PGP. All it takes is something as trivial as a ROT13 encryption, using a foreign language, or using code words.
Simply obscuring the message means that the analysis engine has to try to decrypt the message without knowing the encryption algorithm and the key. It may be possible to recover both but you need something like the computing power at the disposal of the NSA. Code words or foreign languages are even worse because the analysis must also be carried out in the language used in the e-mail (meaning the analysis has to be carried out in all possible languages without knowing a priori which language the e-mail was written in). As the Navaho "wind talkers" demonstrated during WWII, this can be a very effective means of obscuring a message.
I'm not saying don't worry about it. It's still offensive to even suggest that all e-mails be monitored. I'm just saying that the technical reality of attempting to capture and analyze all e-mails for suspicious content if the population being monitored is at all large is pretty daunting. We ran into all of the above problems where I worked plus some others that would take even longer to describe. Web traffic and certain other internet traffic can be easily classified. For e-mail, SMS, IM, etc., you will only catch what people leave in plain site.
To me, this ranks right up there with a politician demanding that all porn, hate speech, etc. be filtered. It only sounds like a good idea until you start to try to figure out how to do it. Then it becomes obvious that it's not technically feasible. Hopefully, the Brits will figure that out before they spend too much money on the project.
To which the proper response is, "So, what you're telling me is that this is the first public|commercial|general release. It's essentially version 1.0, if that."
I was going to ask the O.P. the following questions. How does a salesperson respond when a prospective client asks:
1) "What are the new features in this version as compared to the previous version?"
2) Or, "We want to compare the new release to the previous release. How can we get a copy of the previous release?"
3) Or, "We'd like to contact current users of the package. Can your company provide a list of current customers whom we can contact?"
4) Or, "Please provide a list of all of the service packs and patches released for the previous version, the time from when the problem was identified to when the update was made available and whether the update resolved the issue."
I could go on but I think everyone sees a pattern here. Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies. Eventually, it all unravels although current management may be under the impression that they can take the money and run before they're found out.
With an aerodynamically stable airplane, if the attitude control computer fails, it's still may be possible to fly it "by hand." With an unstable airplane, the only thing the pilot can do is punch out under the same circumstances. Fly by wire (and lots of computing power) makes it possible to control an airplane that is aerodynamically unstable; it does not require that the plane be unstable. That's a design decision. Hopefully Airbus, etc. still provide the equivalent of a turn and bank indicator, rate of climb indicator, and gyro-compass so the pilot has a chance of flying the plane even if the attitude control computer goes wonky (and a way to take the attitude control compuer off-line).
Your second example is very bogus. As an example, a flying wing such as the B-2 will make a very poor Styrofoam glider but the origins of the flying wing goes back to WWII. Quite obviously, the B-35, N9M, etc. didn't have a flight control computers but were controllable none the less. The problem with your example is that modeling things like the effect of a wing's dihedral on Styrofoam glider scales and speeds is difficult to do. This is primarily a result of the simple fact that lots of effects such as boundary layer conditions are not linear. It takes a huge amount of effort to craft an aerodynamic replica of a full size airplane that allows wind tunnel tests to be run on scale models and still get valid results. Just because a styrofoam model doesn't glide says little or nothing about the stability of the full size airplane.
Typically, recent civilian and many military aircraft are "three dimensionally stable". The only exceptions to this are stunt planes and fighter aircraft. For pretty much everything else, the airplane will not only continue to fly straight and level once trimmed but will even return to straight and level after a control is deflected. That is, push the yoke forward and the increased speed causes additional lift and the plane returns to level flight. Deflect the yoke the other direction, the rudder or the ailerons and the same sort of "counter force" does the same thing; the plane returns to level flight. It just won't necessarily be on the same course as before. This is something that is typically demonstrated to a student pilot on their first flight with an instructor.
The old inertial autopilots kept a plane on the same course based on the directional gyro, turn and bank and rate of climb devices. Good enough to give the pilot a break but they only kept the plane headed in the direction originally input. Modern autopilots tie into the global positioning system and on-board navigation computers to allow things like a great circle route to be flown under autopilot that also corrects for changes in wind.
Only a very few recent fighter planes are so unstable that they require the on-board computer to keep the plane flying. The F-117 was the first such aircraft deployed. The idea is that making a fighter plane unstable means that it has no inherent preference as to which way to fly thus making it more maneuverable. On the other hand, there is no incentive to design such instability into an airliner and lots of reasons not to (like what happens when the autopilot fails).
Here's what I said when the original article appeared. Good to know I can still diagnose software bugs; even in software I didn't have anything to do with writing.
Agree to some extent but consider NASA's "vomit comet." It's basically a commercial airliner that is flown in a parabolic arc to simulate weightlessness. Only a slight error in the arc will pin the passengers to the ceiling. My point is that the maneuvers that will result in the passengers experiencing negative G are not that extreme. Obviously, airline pilots avoid such actions but a sudden change to a steep descent is not out of the question.
If passenger electronics are to blame (still a big if), I'd bet that the electronics interfered with some of the flight attitude sensing avionics. The autopilot then suffered what is the equivalent of "electronic vertigo." The interesting trivia dealing with humans in such conditions is that most crashes that occur when a pilot who is not instrument qualified encounters instrument conditions are the result of structural damage to the plane from violent maneuvers of the pilot trusting his senses instead of the instruments. That is, they literally tear the plane they are in apart trying to fly straight and level while, in fact, maneuvering wildly. The pint is that, if the interference may have caused the autopilot to behave as if the plane was severely "out of normal" and demand a steep descent to return to a false normal.
The same way you talk to your users but you can assume they are intelligent and want to learn about computers and such. You can probably even hit them with a few advanced concepts that you normally have to "dummy down" when talking to management.:D
Being an economists means that you work in a profession where you can be wrong more frequently and be further off with your predictions that those who create the weather forecasts and still keep your job.
Actually, you can manage what you don't understand. I expect first line managers to understand what their people are working on but I only expect second line managers (one layer up from first line managers) to understand how the pieces fit together. From that layer on up to the C-level, people manage budgets and strategies. They rarely have the foggiest idea about how those strategies get implemented and it would be a waste of their time to get lost in the minutiae of the actual implementation.
The whole trick of making this work is for managers to realize what they don't know. Problems come up when people who really don't know squat try to make technical decisions that should be left to the people with the technical knowledge to make the correct decision. The most dangerous beasty in this jungle is the idiot who thinks he knows what he's doing and is unwilling to get the technical inputs he needs because he sees asking for such inputs as diminishing his "power."
I'll take the manager who can't write a line of code and knows it over the bozo who thinks he knows everything just because he can write a "Hello world" program in FORTRAN.
"Public records" wasn't the right term. What I was thinking of is the phone companies sell things like phone number lists. It wouldn't surprise me if they also sold traffic information. While it might take a court order for law enforcement to see such information, I'm guessing it can also be had by anyone willing to pay for it. Which means it not exactly private either.
My understanding is that a signal is a signal is a signal. If it's broadcast, anyone is free to capture the signal (that's kind of what broadcast means). It may be possible to split hairs and declare some specific broadcasts to be "private" (e.g., cell phone conversations) but RF gadgets are proliferating rapidly and the law changes slowly. Example: if a bar sets up it's tables with RFID readers and uses them to identify patrons when they sit down, is that legal or illegal? What if the tables are at a sidewalk cafe? Is this illegally capturing a signal? What if the patron is some paranoid like me who thinks it's horrible to have someone scan my identity when I don't give them permission? Nice and muddy, eh?
The only right to privacy that is generally recognized is if you are legally within a private home. This is just the old, "a man's home is his castle" way of looking at the world. The "right to privacy" has generally been extended to include first class mail, and land line telephone conversations where you generally have an expectation of privacy. Anything you do outside of the home is generally considered public and the government (or anyone else) can do almost anything they want to keep track of you unless you get a court order to stop them. Example: Someone with those enhanced hearing thingies they market to seniors hears you conspiring over your cell phone (conversation is in a public place and you think that no one can hear you). They didn't have to intercept the transmission in order to hear your conversation.
This isn't new. It's just that electronic gadgets make doing it a lot easier and more accurate. Prior to cell phones, law enforcement could keep you under observation without a warrant if they felt the need. The only difference now is that they might decide that tracking your cell phone's location is sufficient rather than going through the expense of actually tailing you.
I think that's correct. They really can't stop you from doing that. What they can do is encrypt the broadcast and then sue anyone who attempts to sell a decryption device. You are free to attempt to create one on your own but good luck.
Before digital satellite TV you had lots of people in rural areas using the big satellite dishes. I vaguely remember a court case where one of the networks tried to sue to make that illegal and the ruling was that it wasn't since the signal was being broadcast.
As a guess, phone records are about as well protected as say the T.J. Max customer database. Also, I was only thinking about phone number to phone number records. They yield sufficient information to do traffic analysis (who talks to who and in what sequence). Finally, I would be really surprised if the phone companies were all that careful about who has access to such data. If you consider all of the much more sensetive data that people have downloaded onto laptops that were then stolen or lost, I'd guess phone records aren't real high up there on the data loss prevention hierarchy.
I'm not saying the law doesn't need a court order to get to this data. I'm just saying that it's probably fairly easy to get to if someone really wants to.
Suggest you read the most recent issue of Scientific American. You'd be surprised what can be done with RFID chips.
It's one thing to read sufficient information to complete a sale; it's something else to just be able to track someone. Also, the "five feet" is what can be accomplished with commercial equipment. Any bets that a higher gain antenna can do better? It may not be convenient for a retail application but it probably is feasible if someone really wants to track you.
What loopholes? You're carrying around a frigging transmitter that conveniently even transmits a unique identifier. There is no expectation of privacy any more than if you're talking on an old citizen's band radio.
The only forms of communication interception that require a court order are opening and reading someone's mail (strictly snail mail) or listening in on an actual phone conversation:
- phone records are public (who called who and for how long) - e-mail is not private; never has been due to it's store and forward nature - external addresses of snail mail received
If the information is readily available, there should be no expectation of privacy. A case can even be made that *ANY* broadcast communication (cell phone, wireless home phone, bluetooth headset, etc.) is not private. If you throw it out on the air waves, there's no guarantee that someone else isn't listening; even if by accident. As a guess, the government can also legally track you without a warrant (given sufficient interest and effort) using an RFID chip in one of your credit cards.
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How dare you cite statistics and facts in a debate such as this! People might actually make a decision based on knowledge and logic instead of emotions, prejudices and FUD fed to them by politicians and their handlers.
Cheers,
Dave
Mr. Franklin once said:
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
I like his turn of phrase.
Cheers,
Dave
Mail in and absentee ballots only require a witness signature if the person casting the ballot can't sign the affidavit swearing that this is their ballot. Theoretically, poll watchers could challenge any mail in or absentee ballot and demand that the signature be verified. If there is no signature, the witness could be called upon to verify the mark.
BTW, you should really read the instructions on the ballot. You could end up having an invalid ballot if you screw it up.
Cheers,
Dave
Ah yes, but now the blue for the BSOD is "sky blue."
Cheers,
Dave
If you want to actually do some good and contribute something constructive, I'd suggest The Open Prosthesis Project. There's an excellent write up on the project in both the treeware and on-line editions of Scientific American.
Cheers,
Dave
I wonder if some sort of Internet business license might be a way to do this. The fee would need to be something fairly nominal and just enough to fund the process. The idea would be to implement something such that payment processors would not be allowed to and/or would be under no obligation to complete transactions for anyone without said business license. If someone wants to conduct business outside of this scheme using cash, checks, etc., they do so at their own risk. A little publicity and honest merchants showing that they have said license should be sufficient to make the scheme known.
A few more details... Licenses get revoked for proved spamming. Licenses are tied to an originating domain with a DNS tie in to allow mismatches between license number and originator to be filtered. Trying to sell something using e-mail but without including the Internet business license becomes illegal and ISPs are free to trash such e-mails.
Obviously, this only would affect spam that is attempting to sell something. 419 scams, various phishing scams, etc. would still be a problem. The idea is that legitimate commercial e-mail becomes non-anonymous which doesn't hurt legitimate vendors or non-commercial e-mail. People attempting to sell stuff using spam become "visible" and subject to countermeasures.
Cheers,
Dave
Maybe most of my spam originated on their bot net. My dSPAM fourteen day analysis shows my incoming spam rate has dropped to less than half the level of a week ago.
Note, I'm not complaining.
Cheers,
Dave
Are you sure you aren't a salesdrooid? Very convincing.
Recommended reading for recognizing and discounting spin, marketing hype and general bull shit.
Cheers,
Dave
Actually, I have read quite a bit about cryptanalysis. David Kahn's "The Code Breakers", Yardley's "American Black Chamber", "The Puzzle Palace", "The Ultra Americans", etc. Breaking into an unknown cipher is non-trivial. All the correspondents need to do is agree on the cipher *outside of their e-mail correspondence* (e.g., if this is Thursday then its ROT13 day). The analysis software has to first attempt to identify the cipher being used and then attempt to recover the key. The idea is that even ROT13 means the analysis software has to do some fairly hefty computing until the cipher is identified.
Having seen what kind of computing resources it takes to just analyze and classify all plain text network traffic at a moderate sized business (10,000 to 20,000 employees), I can tell you that just monitoring millions of people will take a huge amount of computing power. If the watchers are interested in only specific traffic, the task becomes feasible. If their goal is to monitor all traffic, the cost of computation means they'll need a huge amount of computing power. Throw in a little obfuscation and the task becomes incredibly difficult. Effectively, the sea of data collected puts the watchers back precisely where they are now: they can focus on just a small subset of the traffic.
Cheers,
Dave
I used to work for a network monitoring company that used both content and context to classify Internet traffic. Actually, it's a lot easier than even using PGP. All it takes is something as trivial as a ROT13 encryption, using a foreign language, or using code words.
Simply obscuring the message means that the analysis engine has to try to decrypt the message without knowing the encryption algorithm and the key. It may be possible to recover both but you need something like the computing power at the disposal of the NSA. Code words or foreign languages are even worse because the analysis must also be carried out in the language used in the e-mail (meaning the analysis has to be carried out in all possible languages without knowing a priori which language the e-mail was written in). As the Navaho "wind talkers" demonstrated during WWII, this can be a very effective means of obscuring a message.
I'm not saying don't worry about it. It's still offensive to even suggest that all e-mails be monitored. I'm just saying that the technical reality of attempting to capture and analyze all e-mails for suspicious content if the population being monitored is at all large is pretty daunting. We ran into all of the above problems where I worked plus some others that would take even longer to describe. Web traffic and certain other internet traffic can be easily classified. For e-mail, SMS, IM, etc., you will only catch what people leave in plain site.
To me, this ranks right up there with a politician demanding that all porn, hate speech, etc. be filtered. It only sounds like a good idea until you start to try to figure out how to do it. Then it becomes obvious that it's not technically feasible. Hopefully, the Brits will figure that out before they spend too much money on the project.
Cheers,
Dave
To which the proper response is, "So, what you're telling me is that this is the first public|commercial|general release. It's essentially version 1.0, if that."
Salesdroids hate people like me.
Cheers,
Dave
I was going to ask the O.P. the following questions. How does a salesperson respond when a prospective client asks:
1) "What are the new features in this version as compared to the previous version?"
2) Or, "We want to compare the new release to the previous release. How can we get a copy of the previous release?"
3) Or, "We'd like to contact current users of the package. Can your company provide a list of current customers whom we can contact?"
4) Or, "Please provide a list of all of the service packs and patches released for the previous version, the time from when the problem was identified to when the update was made available and whether the update resolved the issue."
I could go on but I think everyone sees a pattern here. Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies. Eventually, it all unravels although current management may be under the impression that they can take the money and run before they're found out.
Cheers,
Dave
With an aerodynamically stable airplane, if the attitude control computer fails, it's still may be possible to fly it "by hand." With an unstable airplane, the only thing the pilot can do is punch out under the same circumstances. Fly by wire (and lots of computing power) makes it possible to control an airplane that is aerodynamically unstable; it does not require that the plane be unstable. That's a design decision. Hopefully Airbus, etc. still provide the equivalent of a turn and bank indicator, rate of climb indicator, and gyro-compass so the pilot has a chance of flying the plane even if the attitude control computer goes wonky (and a way to take the attitude control compuer off-line).
Your second example is very bogus. As an example, a flying wing such as the B-2 will make a very poor Styrofoam glider but the origins of the flying wing goes back to WWII. Quite obviously, the B-35, N9M, etc. didn't have a flight control computers but were controllable none the less. The problem with your example is that modeling things like the effect of a wing's dihedral on Styrofoam glider scales and speeds is difficult to do. This is primarily a result of the simple fact that lots of effects such as boundary layer conditions are not linear. It takes a huge amount of effort to craft an aerodynamic replica of a full size airplane that allows wind tunnel tests to be run on scale models and still get valid results. Just because a styrofoam model doesn't glide says little or nothing about the stability of the full size airplane.
Cheers,
Dave
Typically, recent civilian and many military aircraft are "three dimensionally stable". The only exceptions to this are stunt planes and fighter aircraft. For pretty much everything else, the airplane will not only continue to fly straight and level once trimmed but will even return to straight and level after a control is deflected. That is, push the yoke forward and the increased speed causes additional lift and the plane returns to level flight. Deflect the yoke the other direction, the rudder or the ailerons and the same sort of "counter force" does the same thing; the plane returns to level flight. It just won't necessarily be on the same course as before. This is something that is typically demonstrated to a student pilot on their first flight with an instructor.
The old inertial autopilots kept a plane on the same course based on the directional gyro, turn and bank and rate of climb devices. Good enough to give the pilot a break but they only kept the plane headed in the direction originally input. Modern autopilots tie into the global positioning system and on-board navigation computers to allow things like a great circle route to be flown under autopilot that also corrects for changes in wind.
Only a very few recent fighter planes are so unstable that they require the on-board computer to keep the plane flying. The F-117 was the first such aircraft deployed. The idea is that making a fighter plane unstable means that it has no inherent preference as to which way to fly thus making it more maneuverable. On the other hand, there is no incentive to design such instability into an airliner and lots of reasons not to (like what happens when the autopilot fails).
Cheers,
Dave
Here's what I said when the original article appeared. Good to know I can still diagnose software bugs; even in software I didn't have anything to do with writing.
Cheers,
Dave
Agree to some extent but consider NASA's "vomit comet." It's basically a commercial airliner that is flown in a parabolic arc to simulate weightlessness. Only a slight error in the arc will pin the passengers to the ceiling. My point is that the maneuvers that will result in the passengers experiencing negative G are not that extreme. Obviously, airline pilots avoid such actions but a sudden change to a steep descent is not out of the question.
If passenger electronics are to blame (still a big if), I'd bet that the electronics interfered with some of the flight attitude sensing avionics. The autopilot then suffered what is the equivalent of "electronic vertigo." The interesting trivia dealing with humans in such conditions is that most crashes that occur when a pilot who is not instrument qualified encounters instrument conditions are the result of structural damage to the plane from violent maneuvers of the pilot trusting his senses instead of the instruments. That is, they literally tear the plane they are in apart trying to fly straight and level while, in fact, maneuvering wildly. The pint is that, if the interference may have caused the autopilot to behave as if the plane was severely "out of normal" and demand a steep descent to return to a false normal.
Cheers,
Dave
The same way you talk to your users but you can assume they are intelligent and want to learn about computers and such. You can probably even hit them with a few advanced concepts that you normally have to "dummy down" when talking to management. :D
Cheers,
Dave
Being an economists means that you work in a profession where you can be wrong more frequently and be further off with your predictions that those who create the weather forecasts and still keep your job.
Cheers,
Dave
Actually, you can manage what you don't understand. I expect first line managers to understand what their people are working on but I only expect second line managers (one layer up from first line managers) to understand how the pieces fit together. From that layer on up to the C-level, people manage budgets and strategies. They rarely have the foggiest idea about how those strategies get implemented and it would be a waste of their time to get lost in the minutiae of the actual implementation.
The whole trick of making this work is for managers to realize what they don't know. Problems come up when people who really don't know squat try to make technical decisions that should be left to the people with the technical knowledge to make the correct decision. The most dangerous beasty in this jungle is the idiot who thinks he knows what he's doing and is unwilling to get the technical inputs he needs because he sees asking for such inputs as diminishing his "power."
I'll take the manager who can't write a line of code and knows it over the bozo who thinks he knows everything just because he can write a "Hello world" program in FORTRAN.
Cheers,
Dave
"Public records" wasn't the right term. What I was thinking of is the phone companies sell things like phone number lists. It wouldn't surprise me if they also sold traffic information. While it might take a court order for law enforcement to see such information, I'm guessing it can also be had by anyone willing to pay for it. Which means it not exactly private either.
Cheers,
Dave
My understanding is that a signal is a signal is a signal. If it's broadcast, anyone is free to capture the signal (that's kind of what broadcast means). It may be possible to split hairs and declare some specific broadcasts to be "private" (e.g., cell phone conversations) but RF gadgets are proliferating rapidly and the law changes slowly. Example: if a bar sets up it's tables with RFID readers and uses them to identify patrons when they sit down, is that legal or illegal? What if the tables are at a sidewalk cafe? Is this illegally capturing a signal? What if the patron is some paranoid like me who thinks it's horrible to have someone scan my identity when I don't give them permission? Nice and muddy, eh?
The only right to privacy that is generally recognized is if you are legally within a private home. This is just the old, "a man's home is his castle" way of looking at the world. The "right to privacy" has generally been extended to include first class mail, and land line telephone conversations where you generally have an expectation of privacy. Anything you do outside of the home is generally considered public and the government (or anyone else) can do almost anything they want to keep track of you unless you get a court order to stop them. Example: Someone with those enhanced hearing thingies they market to seniors hears you conspiring over your cell phone (conversation is in a public place and you think that no one can hear you). They didn't have to intercept the transmission in order to hear your conversation.
This isn't new. It's just that electronic gadgets make doing it a lot easier and more accurate. Prior to cell phones, law enforcement could keep you under observation without a warrant if they felt the need. The only difference now is that they might decide that tracking your cell phone's location is sufficient rather than going through the expense of actually tailing you.
Cheers,
Dave
I think that's correct. They really can't stop you from doing that. What they can do is encrypt the broadcast and then sue anyone who attempts to sell a decryption device. You are free to attempt to create one on your own but good luck.
Before digital satellite TV you had lots of people in rural areas using the big satellite dishes. I vaguely remember a court case where one of the networks tried to sue to make that illegal and the ruling was that it wasn't since the signal was being broadcast.
Cheers,
Dave
As a guess, phone records are about as well protected as say the T.J. Max customer database. Also, I was only thinking about phone number to phone number records. They yield sufficient information to do traffic analysis (who talks to who and in what sequence). Finally, I would be really surprised if the phone companies were all that careful about who has access to such data. If you consider all of the much more sensetive data that people have downloaded onto laptops that were then stolen or lost, I'd guess phone records aren't real high up there on the data loss prevention hierarchy.
I'm not saying the law doesn't need a court order to get to this data. I'm just saying that it's probably fairly easy to get to if someone really wants to.
Cheers,
Dave
Suggest you read the most recent issue of Scientific American. You'd be surprised what can be done with RFID chips.
It's one thing to read sufficient information to complete a sale; it's something else to just be able to track someone. Also, the "five feet" is what can be accomplished with commercial equipment. Any bets that a higher gain antenna can do better? It may not be convenient for a retail application but it probably is feasible if someone really wants to track you.
Cheers,
Dave
What loopholes? You're carrying around a frigging transmitter that conveniently even transmits a unique identifier. There is no expectation of privacy any more than if you're talking on an old citizen's band radio.
The only forms of communication interception that require a court order are opening and reading someone's mail (strictly snail mail) or listening in on an actual phone conversation:
- phone records are public (who called who and for how long)
- e-mail is not private; never has been due to it's store and forward nature
- external addresses of snail mail received
If the information is readily available, there should be no expectation of privacy. A case can even be made that *ANY* broadcast communication (cell phone, wireless home phone, bluetooth headset, etc.) is not private. If you throw it out on the air waves, there's no guarantee that someone else isn't listening; even if by accident. As a guess, the government can also legally track you without a warrant (given sufficient interest and effort) using an RFID chip in one of your credit cards.
This isn't news. Get over it.
Cheers,
Dave