[HN Gopher] Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing
___________________________________________________________________
Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing
Author : jdkuepper
Score : 245 points
Date : 2020-03-27 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bluetrace.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (bluetrace.io)
| tomcooks wrote:
| Can't wait to be tracked by tech developed by a governmental team
| in the name of safety. Opensource or not a leash is a leash.
| sicktime wrote:
| Can't wait to die from a new virus because of insulated Silicon
| Valley libertarian ideals.
| joeyspn wrote:
| If you believe you aren't being or can't be tracked already
| then you live in oblivion...
| ivanonymous wrote:
| I'm curious as a non-expert what's specifically worrying about
| their privacy model?
|
| My intuition is that rapid adoption of a relatively transparent
| privacy-preseving option could preempt more heavy-handed
| approaches to what could be a very valuable public health
| intervention.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Exactly. People are decrying this because it gives
| governments capabilities, as if decrying its existence
| changes that capability model or implies that in the absence
| of this tool and in a state of emergency, governments
| wouldn't be stuck trying to accomplish the same goals this
| tool enables using cruder methods that would be more
| intrusive to people's lives.
|
| It's like hating gunpowder exists because people can make
| bullets and fight wars with it.
| tomcooks wrote:
| I'd agree if remote tracking was the only option, and if
| there was a guaranteed policy against public backslash
| towards those that don't comply out of privacy reasons (which
| would skyrocket in a health hazard emergency).
|
| These privacy exceptions all affected goverments are talking
| about (Italy being a great example, viz. Veneto region
| governor asking for a change in privacy laws the other day)
| are not going to magically disappear once the coast is clear,
| just like post 9/11 emergency laws still being used in the
| US.
|
| I believe there are other ways to help people and that, if
| you are a government that claims having to resort to remote
| control its popoulation, maybe your power is either
| insufficient for your secret expansion goals or you're an
| inefficient populist.
|
| Every (western) government publicly hates the Chinese
| government but they do seem to have wet dreams about the
| population control bit, especially when backed by
| corporations.
| raynr wrote:
| "Never let a serious crisis go to waste" - Rahm Emanuel.
|
| I agree with this and your sentiment, but I think it is
| misplaced in this instance.
|
| As I understand it, the TraceTogether app collects (and stores
| locally), information on other users running the TraceTogether
| app nearby. If our government's contact tracers contact us, we
| can provide the information, and it can help in contact
| tracing. This seems to me to be at or near the minimum amount
| of information collection necessary to fulfil the function.
| Assuming voluntary widespread adoption, it is useful, and can
| be uninstalled at any time once the crisis blows over.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Honestly, as both a free software and privacy advocate...
| yeah. If contact tracing significantly improves our ability
| to eliminate the epidemic, and my current understanding is
| that it does, this seems like a pretty good implementation.
| So long as the data collection is explicitly voluntary, I'm
| asked for my permission first, and it's for an important
| cause like this one... I really don't mind!
|
| I would much rather have a system like this than to be
| indiscriminately tracked and lose more privacy potentially
| indefinitely. The tracking can't be indefinite if I'm asked
| for permission, because if I don't think there's good reason
| for it I'll just say no. And if I'm worried the app's privacy
| measures aren't good enough and it'll be abused, I'll just
| uninstall it.
|
| Consent is the key!
| samstave wrote:
| Shoot, I didnt realize that quote was attibuted to Rahm. I
| fucking hate that guy.
|
| Also - its really disturbing that a few years ago, Apple
| created an update where you cant turn off wifi or bluetooth -
| you can now only "pause it"
|
| But there has not been a look into proving that it is
| actually OFF when your little soft icon is grey...
| avianlyric wrote:
| You can still turn it off by heading to settings and
| turning it off there (both WiFi and Bluetooth).
|
| It turns the functionality off completely, and stays off
| until you manually turn it back on.
|
| In control centre it only partially turns off. But that's
| not unreasonable as many people don't understand how many
| feature rely on Bluetooth. They would probably get annoyed
| when the stop working, just because they wanted to quickly
| disconnect some headphones.
|
| Check out the bottom of this page for more:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086
| samstave wrote:
| I understand that, but I still dont trust it.
|
| I want an app that tells me EVERYTHING that my phones
| radios are doing. ALL of them, and ALL the data.
| avianlyric wrote:
| That's tricky without building a phone yourself from
| opensource hardware and software.
|
| At least with Apple, they're under so much scrutiny you
| can be fairly confident that if their software was lying
| it would quickly appear in the news.
|
| Finally the above clearly shows that your assertion you
| can't turn off the WiFi or Bluetooth radios is false
| (assuming the software isn't outright lying, if think
| that then you should have said so in your first comment).
| samstave wrote:
| No, I didnt understand that the "OFF" meant different
| things in the control panel vs the settings panel.
|
| THAT is "apple software lying"
|
| And your point is absurd "If you want a phone you can
| trust, then you need to build your own phone"
|
| Fuck that logic.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That's an old principle, and it is, unfortunately, still
| true. It all depends on where you want to put the trust
| slider, but push it far enough in the conservative
| direction and, yes, you enter "build your own machine
| from scratch" territory.
|
| How do you know the hardware you use doesn't have a
| microdot that can bypass the monitoring logic and
| physically manipulate the radio without the OS's consent?
|
| How do you know the software you're running doesn't embed
| its own bluetooth stack and use a 0-day exploit to gain
| physical control over the radio?
|
| Oh, you compiled it yourself? With whose compiler? Are
| you sure that compiler faithfully adheres to the spec of
| the language and doesn't know how to embed a bluetooth
| stack that, etc.
|
| Push the paranoia slider far enough, and you end up
| having to care about all this stuff.
| verify_sirrah wrote:
| Something like Disklabs' Faraday Bag ought to solve that
| problem.
| mshroyer wrote:
| This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side
| logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until
| it's actually needed for contact tracing.
|
| Would you suggest that we not have public health departments
| engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so,
| I'm not sure what to tell you.
|
| Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and
| accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the US, I'd much rather
| use a protocol like TraceTogether's Bluetrace that goes out of
| its way to preserve privacy, than adopt an actually-privacy-
| violating centralized approach where the government simply
| gathers everyone's location data and processes it centrally
| (Israel's approach, for example).
| monadic2 wrote:
| > Would you suggest that we not have public health
| departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the
| pandemic?
|
| Why does this imply such invasive measures?
| hw wrote:
| Would you then advocate for mandatory contact tracing in
| perpetuity, for purposes of preventing / solving crimes?
| Proziam wrote:
| > Would you suggest that we not have public health
| departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the
| pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
|
| If the result is (another) permanent loss of privacy and
| freedom akin to the PATRIOT act, then yes.
|
| Technology has immense power to do good for people, but only
| if those who deploy it do so ethically. How many governments
| around the world can we honestly predict to do so?
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or
| give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they
| are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives,
| in real danger of dying.
|
| I regret that - assuming my own ongoing case of COVID-19
| resolves without fatal complication - I'm quite likely, I
| think, to have that curiosity satisfied. I regret it
| because this isn't a cause for change of perspective which
| I would wish on anyone. But everything I'm seeing suggests
| it's a cause for change of perspective that many millions
| of people are going to have.
| Proziam wrote:
| My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term
| in spite of the short term suffering we may experience.
| You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of
| losing those rights will last forever. How many movements
| would have been impossible if a local government could
| spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm
| thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now
| during the civil rights movement, for example.
|
| I sincerely hope for your swift recovery.
| hrasyid wrote:
| > You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of
| losing those rights will last forever
|
| With an app like tracetogether, you can just uninstall it
| after the pandemic, right? No need to surrender your
| rights forever.
| Proziam wrote:
| Until the government decides that it's in the public's
| best interest that such an application be installed on
| every phone, and non-removable.
|
| We already have NSA / Tech company "collaboration" so
| this is hardly a huge step in terms of tech or privacy
| invasion. It would just be the next step.
| throwanem wrote:
| Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick
| and die once, but that lasts forever too.
| Proziam wrote:
| Put another way, would you want your children to live in
| a world where their government abused and spied on them?
| Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the
| true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own
| value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the
| freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in
| the future choose differently for themselves, that will
| be their choice when their time comes.
|
| Of course, 'you can only surrender your rights once' and
| 'you can only die once' aren't equivalent either. Once a
| nation of people surrenders their rights, nobody ever has
| those rights again (even if the loss of those rights
| costs lives). A person, or a group of people, becoming
| ill or passing away doesn't take away the lives of the
| next generation.
|
| If you think back on the experiences of the last century,
| how much harm would be done if we couldn't freely
| assemble because a government decided to intervene? We'd
| have stayed in Vietnam longer, black folks may not have
| ever won their civil rights, and its possible women would
| be unable to vote.
|
| For the record, I don't downplay the suffering of
| illness. I've lost a parent to cancer, as well as _many_
| other family members. Everyone else alive is in the same
| boat. We 're all mortal.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a
| body; pathogens multiply within societies.
|
| I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights
| once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's
| plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't
| freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but
| now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad
| to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directional
| pressure here; maintaining rights feels like fighting
| entropy).
|
| I am a parent, I want my child to live in a world where
| the government doesn't abuse and spy on them, but where
| that government is also capable of containing an
| infectious pathogen (whether natural or purpose-made)
| pretty much as soon as it registers. There is a practical
| balance to be found there.
|
| (And if we're trading imaginary worlds: I want my child
| to live in a world where _private entities_ don 't spy on
| them and sell private information, a world where adtech
| doesn't exist.)
| Proziam wrote:
| I _want_ both freedom and a competent government.
| However, there 's no need to spy on people to properly
| prepare for a pandemic. That said, given that governments
| have proven to be both incompetent _and_ evil, why should
| I want to give them more power?
|
| My comment regarding illness is only to reinforce the
| point that everyone is mortal, and the vast majority of
| us have empathy for others and value the lives of _at
| least_ one other person.
|
| > unlike life, rights can be won back
|
| This _costs_ lives. How many wars have been fought to
| overthrow evil regimes? How many journalists or 'other'
| people are killed or enslaved in the world today by evil
| regimes?
| throwanem wrote:
| It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one
| thing, I don't have children and never will.
|
| If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to _live_.
| Proziam wrote:
| I honestly wonder if more people have been killed by
| dictators and authoritarian regimes or the black plague.
| I suspect it's relatively comparable. As technology has
| progressed, I believe it's become more reasonable to fear
| man more than nature.
| seph-reed wrote:
| > I'm curious how many people who now say "give me
| privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a
| hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first
| time in their lives, in real danger of dying.
|
| The weak ones we shouldn't be prioritizing over the
| strong. Harboring weakness is just asking to be taken
| advantage of. It may seem empathetic at first, but all
| you end up doing is undermining the individuals growth
| and selling out the security of future generations. If
| you're an adult, you need to come to terms with death,
| and recognize that extending your life isn't worth
| stealing from future generations. They deserve more
| freedom than we've had. Not less.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick,
| and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract
| about coming to terms with death than to face the
| imminent possibility.
|
| _edit:_ Well, you won 't be held to it assuming we
| haven't reached a need for sufficiently severe triage, I
| suppose. Otherwise, you might get a chance to quite
| literally put your life on the line for the principle
| you've just espoused! I wish you joy of it.
| Proziam wrote:
| All the soldiers, firefighters, and doctors/nurses/EMTs
| (and many more) are putting their lives on the line for
| what they believe in. Some of them believe in the
| constitution and some of them simply desire to help their
| fellow man. Not everyone is so weak that they sell out
| others for their own benefit, and assuming the worst of
| others only serves to expose _your_ values, or lack
| thereof.
|
| > I wish you joy of it.
|
| That was straight-up evil. Whatever empathy and respect
| you may have had just went out the window. I'm almost in
| disbelief that you would edit your post just to literally
| wish someone the "joy" of having a chance to die.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Agree to disagree, because my liberty is useless without my
| life.
|
| Balance can be found. And increasingly, it looks like in
| the modern era, the balance is found in a situation where
| the PATRIOT act exists and we find a new normal around its
| existence.
|
| Which government of more than a few million people do you
| assume _doesn 't_ have a line into monitoring intra- and
| interstate digital communications in this era?
| tomcooks wrote:
| Cynical for sure, don't know about that "needlessly" given
| it's an endless fight where everytime you give up a right
| it's taken away forever. This time they give you the
| opensource bit, next time it's "a matter of emergency", then
| they stop asking and just punish you if you don't comply.
|
| >Would you suggest that we not have public health departments
| engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If
| so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
|
| I have never said that so I am not sure what to tell you. The
| only method that works is quarantine, remote control is a
| copout to address the lack of contact with the population.
| Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER
| going to go away even after the emergency is gone.
|
| > Israel's approach for example
|
| On this topic, Israel tech companies are right now sending
| out business proposals to the Italian government to try and
| implement their methods (viz. https://www.ilgazzettino.it/nor
| dest/primopiano/coronavirus_z... last thing Europe needs
| during this crysis is ANOTHER political mindset shift towards
| walls and a iron boot.
| groby_b wrote:
| "The only method that works is quarantine"
|
| Literally _nobody_ in the epi community believes that.
| Would you please state your credentials, or cite a credible
| source for that statement? (For the opposite, please do
| read takes from Trevor Bedford, Mark Lipsitch, Carl
| Bergstrom, Andy Slavitt or really pretty much anybody in
| the field)
|
| We (the US) are _currently_ in a state were suppression is
| the only prudent tool. As SK has shown, contact tracing &
| testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by
| cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
|
| Yes, there are privacy concerns. Work on them. Address
| them. But blanket statements like "only quarantine works"
| are extremely detrimental to public health efforts - the
| last thing you want is an "all or nothing" mindset
| [deleted]
| bosie wrote:
| > We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression
| is the only prudent tool
|
| How do you know that this is the current state?
|
| > As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot
| once you're not completely inundated by cases (and
| actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
|
| "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not
| possible in the US?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _How do you know that this is the current state?_
|
| Look at the number of cases and their regional
| distribution, realize that those are _tested_ cases and
| thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad
| testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least
| 10x that. Then realize you 're dealing with an
| exponential process. United States are _thoroughly
| infected_ already.
|
| > _" meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is
| not possible in the US?_
|
| Not now, but if and when the US implements proper
| suppression measures, and the number of cases goes down
| to manageable levels (while at the same time the supply
| chain of PPE catches up to demand), _then_ the supply of
| equipment will be meaningful.
| bosie wrote:
| I guess i misunderstood surpression. Thought surpression
| is the early stages and not when you have been
| thouroughly infected already.
|
| "meaningful supply" was in the context of avoiding a
| lockdown and hence i don't undrestand your answer. if you
| don't have the equipment now, how do you avoid the
| lockdown and make the levels go down without large
| quantities of dead people?
| groby_b wrote:
| I'm not an epidemiologist, or an MD, so with a large
| grain of salt:
|
| Containment: Testing & contact tracing - you try to
| contain the disease before it widely spreads. Usually one
| of the early stages of fighting.
|
| Mitigation: You can't contain any more, and you're trying
| to slow down the progress to avoid a large peak. Test &
| treat those with severe symptoms, encourage people with
| mild symptoms to stay home, encourage people to keep
| distance.
|
| Suppression: Things have hit the fan. You need to
| drastically halt the progress of the epidemic. This is
| shelter-in-place, lockdown, quarantine etc.
| #staythefuckhome has become a bit more mandatory. That's
| pretty much where we are right now. You want to
| drastically reduce the number of infections in a short
| amount of time.
|
| "Meaningful supply" was in the context of suppression
| actually taking hold. At some point, you're hopefully
| down to illness levels where containment or mitigation
| make sense again. But for that to happen, you need tests,
| you need PPE, you need infrastructure so you actually can
| contain. We're at suppression/lockdown because we failed
| at that the first time round.
|
| So, it's not about avoiding the lockdown now.
|
| The goal is lockdown now to prevent catastrophic overload
| and buy time to get supplies in place for later
| containment stages.
|
| Hope that clarifies? But, of course, containment is not
| guaranteed to work, so we might be cycling back and forth
| between those measures
|
| The report #9 from the Imperial College of London details
| the ideas behind that cycling approach:
| https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-
| college/medicine/s...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever.
|
| This is tin foil hat nonsense. The US has implemented
| martial law before. Those rights weren't taken away
| forever.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Wasn't the same said after 9/11 and the patriot act? I'd
| guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think
| several three letter agencies would use the provisions
| from the patriot act to track pretty much all
| communications? You can't just accuse people of being
| conspiracy theorists over and over again and tell them
| that this time would be different because... Reasons?
| Also, who needs martial law when you can just do the same
| with duly passed laws?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "Every time you give up a right, it's taken away forever"
| is still hyperbole.
|
| People gave up the right to fly at all after 9/11. That
| was re-instituted for almost everyone in short order.
| SahAssar wrote:
| There is no right to fly. There was a right to privacy
| (at least as argued before the supreme court) and I think
| it could be said that is revoked because of the three-
| letter-agencies data collection that was justified by
| 9/11.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to
| think several three letter agencies would use the
| provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all
| communications?
|
| It was and still is. How do you believe this nonsense?
|
| Also, several provisions from the Patriot Act haven't
| been renewed, so your example proves my point.
| GordonS wrote:
| Sorry, but we are _long_ past the point of calling out
| privacy advocates as "tinfoil hat wearers" - just look
| at everything that came out after Snowden. Beforehand,
| most people would have derided others for mentioning
| "such conspiracy nonsense" (I likely would have myself),
| and yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core,
| paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.
|
| Since 9/11 in particular, the Western world has seen
| _constant_ attempts to increase mass surveillance, lower
| the burden of proof, and dampen human rights, always in
| the name of whatever they have the public most fearful of
| at the time - drugs, terrorists, paedos, criminals, the
| Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, communists, Islam,
| foreigners taking our jobs, the boogey man _de jour_.
|
| I'm absolutely certain that we'll see politicians try to
| use coronavirus as an excuse for their Orwellian schemes.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Business as usual has come after Snowden; that's the
| reason people who have a default-antagonistic reaction to
| any new technology that could be employed by a government
| for tracking get labeled "tinfoil-hat wearers."
|
| The future of society isn't no surveillance. That's not
| tractable. Genie's out of the bottle (as this release of
| a population tracking tool as open source demonstrates).
| The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live with
| it.
| GordonS wrote:
| > Business as usual has come after Snowden
|
| I can't disagree with that; honestly, it felt like the
| media and politicians conspired to bury it. Revelation
| after revelation was made after outlets like The
| Intercept went through the evidence, yet hardly anything
| made the mainstream news, and when it did, it was
| fleeting. The CIA destroyed evidence and lied to
| congress, but there was little impact.
|
| > The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live
| with it
|
| This I disagree with. We've been shown that the
| supposedly "benevolent" Western governments of today
| can't be trusted with laws that permit over-arching mass
| surveillance and the dampening of civil liberties and
| human rights, and we've seen the inevitable creeping
| escalations - who knows what a worse government of
| tomorrow might do?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How do you propose a XXI-century technologically advanced
| society can do to ensure its biosafety? The current
| pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be
| accidental, the one after that purposeful. Advancement of
| science and technology in large parts means making more
| and more potentially destructive power available to
| individuals and small groups. Society needs a defense to
| compensate. Biology is particularly nasty here, as it's
| self-replicating.
|
| Quite honestly, I'm increasingly starting to believe that
| privacy has been on borrowed time ever since we
| discovered DNA. That doesn't mean _all_ privacy is going
| to be gone; just that to survive, societies need to learn
| how to handle pandemics very swiftly, and that seems to
| require large-scale, real-time management.
| GordonS wrote:
| > The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one
| might be accidental, the one after that purposeful
|
| Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such
| alarmism. If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated
| that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as
| the nuclear variety.
|
| > Advancement of science and technology in large parts
| means making more and more potentially destructive power
| available to individuals and small groups
|
| You are implying that _individuals_ could release a
| bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this
| is pure alarmism, and absolutely _not_ what we need right
| now. I don 't doubt that politicians will soon be making
| similar arguments in a grab for more power, but please,
| don't give them ideas!
|
| > How do you propose...
|
| I'm not in the medical field, so I don't have a proposal.
| But as a human being, I personally don't see how mass
| surveillance is the answer, especially so given we can't
| trust our governments with such tools.
|
| I don't doubt that the WHO and experts from across the
| globe will be making plans to more rapidly contain future
| outbreaks. I'm certainly interested to learn more about
| such plans when they exist though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Being honest, I don 't think there is any need for
| such alarmism._
|
| _Looks at JHU map..._ I think there is.
|
| > _If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a
| viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the
| nuclear variety._
|
| A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being
| the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone
| _including yourself_ unless others do as you wish. It 's
| a domain of mad men.
|
| > _You are implying that individuals could release a
| bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this
| is pure alarmism, and absolutely not what we need right
| now._
|
| I'm implying that small groups could do it now, and
| individuals perhaps a decade for now. Biohacking has been
| a thing for a while now, and the main limiting factor is
| still that a) most people are sane, b) this is still
| difficult and you're more likely to give yourself
| diarrhea than weaponize a pathogen.
|
| > _I don 't doubt that the WHO and experts from across
| the globe will be making plans to more rapidly contain
| future outbreaks. I'm certainly interested to learn more
| about such plans when they exist though._
|
| Contact tracing seems like a no-brainer here. Great
| payoff for relatively little effort.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't think the issue went away because anyone
| conspired to bury it. I think the issue went away
| because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the
| arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad
| power to dragnet data. They either don't get that these
| tools could be used against them by unethical government
| agents or they know that possibility exists but they
| trust the checks and balances against it and think the
| risk is outweighed by the benefit to law enforcement and
| the national intelligence community in managing the
| international threat of global terrorist activity (which,
| itself, leverages modern communications tools to
| communicate rapidly, move rapidlt, hide from law
| enforcement and military powers, etc.).
|
| 9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information
| analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but
| had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are
| extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again,
| even 20 years later.
| GordonS wrote:
| > I think the issue went away because, on average,
| Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the
| intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data
|
| It's not just the US, it's the whole of the Western
| world. The UK in particular has been very complicit with
| the US in their joint mass surveillance.
|
| The threat of terrorist activity in the west is
| vanishingly low, and IMO, is partially driven by western
| foreign policy. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the
| disgusting, utterly _horrifying_ organised torture
| program the CIA has undertaken at "black sites" has
| certainly not helped (I doubt since an organised horror
| has taken place since the Nazis).
|
| > 9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of
| information analysis; the information needed to stop it
| existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans
| are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way
| again, even 20 years later.
|
| I don't want to get deep in 9/11 in particular, but mass
| surveillance wasn't the solution - the 5-eyes' toxic,
| oil-driven relationship with Saudi Arabia was a big
| factor, and the CIA not hiding information from the FBI
| would very likely have stopped it.
|
| We've seen similar failings on a smaller scale with
| incidents in Europe, where the perpetrators were known to
| the authorities beforehand. Even where they communicated
| with each other "openly" using SMS, politicians called
| for a ban on encryption - these parasites take every
| opportunity to spread FUD and use it to their advantage.
|
| I think where we at least agree is a belief that many
| people simply don't care; they don't understand the risks
| with the current government, let alone future ones.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid
| conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.
|
| What do you believe the truth was? I replied to somebody
| else in this thread who believed the truth was far wilder
| than anything in Snowden's leaks.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is
| NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone.
|
| Wouldn't people just stop using any tracking applications
| once there is no tracking needed?
|
| The way I see it is so long as there is a pandemic we have
| no freedom anyway. It might seem like tracking your
| citizens is infringing a freedom, but if the option is
| house arrest I don't mind.
|
| Any government that would be ready to monitor everyone all
| the time for no obvious reason isn't democratic. I trust my
| government because I live in a functioning democracy. I
| wouldn't trust the Chinese government, or even the
| Hungarian one, and I'd have second thoughts about trusting
| the US govt to do the right thing. But most democracies
| should be able to use technology to provide _more_ freedom
| in this situation, not less. It's a true test of a
| democracy to do this right. But not trying of fear of a
| perpetual big brother society I think is the wrong choice.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Wouldn't people just stop using any tracking
| applications once there is no tracking needed?_
|
| There's a risk that once the capacity is tried and
| tested, governments and private companies alike will try
| to make it enticing and useful for different means. The
| role of privacy activists should be nipping all these
| follow-up ideas in the bud. Ensuring that emergency
| measures are used only during actual emergencies. But not
| fighting them in situations like this.
| Reelin wrote:
| I completely agree. To that end, it actually seems like
| fully decentralized client side contract tracking would
| be a useful technology to have a set of government
| supported open specifications for. Building the
| functionality into the OS, securely encrypting (no key
| escrow!) with a user supplied password, and requiring a
| warrant to seize (but good luck without the password)
| would proactively enable a robust response to future
| pandemics.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Israel already moved from a central system to a different
| one called Hamagen which is not centralised and keeps the
| privacy of the people. This is the one they recommend for
| Italy. It is open source so you can verify it yourself.
| https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native
| closeparen wrote:
| The point of contact tracing is to find out who to
| quarantine, so you don't have to lock down the entire
| population. It's not a "copout," it's the bread and butter
| of epidemic mitigation. It's why most of them don't get to
| this point.
| mellow2020 wrote:
| > The point of contact tracing is to find out who to
| quarantine, so you don't have to lock down the entire
| population.
|
| But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway,
| with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is
| infected.
|
| > It's why most of them don't get to this point.
|
| But we _are_ at this point already.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway,
| with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is
| infected._
|
| That's because every single Western country has fucked up
| the handling of initial stages of the pandemic. Everyone
| has seen what's going on in China and then Italy, and we
| all ended up on the spectrum of doing too little, too
| late (US in particular is leading here).
|
| "Stay at home", social distancing, closing up businesses
| - those are _suppression strategies_. They 're meant to
| shut the virus spread down. But they don't have to last
| all the way until the vaccine - if the number of cases
| and infection rate go down enough, these measures can be
| lifted - and then contact tracing can be used to do local
| quarantines and shutdowns with surgical precision,
| ensuring most people can live their daily lives as if no
| pandemic was happening.
| [deleted]
| tempestn wrote:
| That doesn't mean we have to be forever. Extreme
| distancing / lockdown will be needed to get the outbreaks
| under control, but once that point is reached, extensive
| testing and contact tracing will be needed to relax those
| measures without triggering a massive resurgence, unless
| we want to wait a year or more for a vaccine.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway,
| with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is
| infected.[..] But we are at this point already.
|
| Singapore isn't. (the government that is building this
| app). Neither is Taiwan. Through a combination of contact
| tracing, surveillance, national health databases and
| enforcing compliance of quarantined individuals by for
| example regularly checking in on them they have been able
| to both contain the spread of the disease and keep a
| reasonable amount of economic and social life intact.
|
| I will continue to be mystified by this weird and
| abstract notion of privacy that keeps others away from my
| data but results in mass lockdown, quarantines, shutdowns
| and curfews, while people in Singapore give some data to
| authorities and they can still go out and live their
| lives. I want material freedom to buy groceries and go to
| work, not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy while
| some plague wreaks havoc and I need to haul up in my
| apartment for months.
| eecc wrote:
| I find it pathetic that people wail to the high heavens
| about this abstract concept of privacy you mention and
| pensively quote Benjamin Franklin, while clicking away
| all their most intimate shit to check out some stupid
| Facebook game.
|
| Get your priorities right: "you won't believe..."
| clickbait no. Contact tracing to stop a disease that
| turns your lungs to frothy blood-juice. Fuck yes
| Reelin wrote:
| > I will continue to be mystified ... people in Singapore
| give some data to authorities and they can still go out
| and live their lives. I want material freedom ... not
| some sort of religious dogmatic privacy ...
|
| For what it's worth, I think open source, opt-in,
| decentralized, user controlled contact tracing such as
| that being discussed above is about as good a solution as
| we can hope for in such a situation.
|
| That being said, I think you've completely failed to
| understand why some people respond the way they do. Their
| concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but
| rather civil liberties in the long term. Quarantines will
| necessarily be lifted, but government surveillance has a
| nasty tendency not to go away. More generally, civil
| liberties are permanently lost with a disturbing
| consistency no matter how temporary the original intent.
|
| Nobody out there is either fully informed or perfectly
| rational, so it's important to understand the underlying
| motivations behind other's viewpoints if you want to get
| anywhere. I'm certainly dissatisfied by the incredible
| ineptitude the US has displayed, but I also value my
| civil liberties highly and wouldn't want to live in
| Taiwan. Make of that what you will.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Even without that, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all
| have a no joke civil service. Them being able to come up
| with something in the time of crisis fast is a
| consequence of that, not the other way around.
|
| Even if one or two piecemeal measures like that were to
| be implemented, it will not change the fact of terrific
| ineptitude of current, and few previous office holders.
|
| Without fixing that first, you will never get to the
| level of trust needed for the society to function, and
| not to fall apart upon first serious crisis.
|
| In comparison to East Asia, North America is a very
| uneventful place, where the apparatus of state has not
| been truly stress tested in decades. For every Katrina
| USA had, countries in Asia have like 20, and having non-
| idiots in the office is much more of an existential need.
|
| Even in a patently broken country like PRC, it's the
| response to natural disasters which is the only thing
| that really tickles the CPC when it comes to public
| anger.
| oinkl wrote:
| https://tracetogether.zendesk.com/hc/en-sg/articles/36004373...
|
| https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/common/privacystatement
|
| What data is collected? Are you able to see my personal data?
|
| The only data that we collect is your mobile number, so that
| MOH can contact you more quickly if you were in close proximity
| to a COVID-19 case.
|
| With your consent, TraceTogether exchanges Bluetooth proximity
| data with nearby phones running the same app. However, this
| data is anonymised and encrypted, and does not reveal your
| identity or the other person's identity. Also, this data is
| stored only on the user's phone. Should MOH need the data for
| contact tracing, they will seek your consent to share it with
| them.
| monadic2 wrote:
| > The only data that we collect is your mobile number,
|
| That's the definition of PII and will eventually be abused
| for purposes other than emergency contact.
| shanev wrote:
| There are several teams working on better privacy preserving
| functionality: https://github.com/covid-apps-tracker/tracing-
| apps.
|
| What would be useful is a common standard for Bluetooth
| transmission so all these apps could talk to each other.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| This is much better than tracking people via facial and video
| recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera feeds. This
| is tracking signals that an optional device optionally
| broadcasts (and has for years). You can easily avoid this
| tracking by not having your phone broadcast bluetooth or by not
| carrying a phone.
|
| Not to mention any number of actors could have already been
| tracking this signal for _years_. It 's the nature of how
| bluetooth devices broadcast their presence.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> This is much better than tracking people via facial and
| video recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera
| feeds._
|
| This would be a point if near-omnipresent camera feeds were
| reduced in favor of using this.
|
| But the much more likely outcome is that this will only end
| up increasing overall surveillance capabilities, not reign
| them in.
| monadic2 wrote:
| > This is much better than tracking people via facial and
| video recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera
| feeds.
|
| Yea, but it's much worse than non-shitty suggestions.
| Obviously if you pick the shittiest option anything will look
| good.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > You can easily avoid this tracking by not having your phone
| broadcast bluetooth or by not carrying a phone.
|
| Until government makes it mandatory.
| WaylonKenning wrote:
| We all carry around a radio that broadcasts our location. I
| guess we'll end up switching off Bluetooth except to known good
| devices, or when we intentionally want to discover what's
| around us.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't know, I'd probably turn mine on just so that I can
| get notified if I am within proximity of a high infection
| risk stranger. I would love to have that kind of
| notification.
|
| Just for now. Uninstall when the pandemic clears.
| GordonS wrote:
| I can imagine something like that could lead to people
| abusing, beating up or killing the infected. It might sound
| far-fetched, but this was happening in Kenya quite
| recently.
| dehrmann wrote:
| You sound like an American or German. Singaporeans have more
| trust of their government.
| tomcooks wrote:
| I believe you are very, very, very wrong on all 3 assumptions
| my friend.
| nailer wrote:
| What is contact tracking? The article does not tell us.
| smoe wrote:
| Once you have an identified case, you trace who they have been
| in close contact with recently and start
| contacting/testing/isolating them and trace it further from
| there
|
| E.g. In Switzerland this was done manually (by medical staff
| mostly i think) in the very beginning, but they gave up very
| quickly on it because of lack of resources.
| Cerium wrote:
| As I understand, contact tracking is recording which people
| come into proximity so that if one gets sick the task of
| contact tracing can be facilitated by the contract tracking
| data.
| Fiahil wrote:
| I just got out of a call where we arrived at the exact same
| design as a way to track down the infection spread.
|
| Thank you for posting this!
| votepaunchy wrote:
| Would like to see Apple utilize their ultrawideband chip for
| decentralized contact tracing.
| Dystopian wrote:
| I feel like this would be a lot easier and have a higher rate of
| usage/compliance if our tech companies actually worked with
| people to release or opt-into sharing this information for when
| it's necessary (information which is already secretly shared with
| governments for security).
|
| For the majority of people if they go to
| https://www.google.com/maps/timeline they'll have a tracker of
| everywhere they've visited and the time they were in each
| location.
|
| If you could take people's accounts who've been infected and give
| them the ability to opt-into sharing this information you could
| have a pretty good source of information about the locations
| where they dwelled for long periods of time and who should go
| into self-isolation.
| onion2k wrote:
| If this gets any sort of public traction it'll be built in to
| shop doorways, public transport, police cars, and street lights
| within a couple of months.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Yeah, in a new york minute. This is already built into iOS in
| their newer Find My Phone. The carriers also know who and where
| we are just need to add in covid testing data. The problem is
| that even if it is decentralized and OSS, then the average user
| can't/won't install it. If it is simple and easy (centralized),
| then it becomes a honey pot for the government.
| t0ughcritic wrote:
| Carriers know where we are, are you referring to
| triangulation?
| fierarul wrote:
| Tower info plus other sources. A while back I couldn't stop
| my iPhone from connecting to the 'free' Orange WiFi at my
| mall.
|
| Since signal is weak I enabled 'WiFi calling' which also
| shares location info with the carrier (so they know if you
| are roaming or not, presumably).
| snarf21 wrote:
| Yeah, they know what towers you are hitting.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I was under the impression many private sector companies have
| already deployed these tools.
|
| Just a matter of companies buying/implementing them.
| sjf wrote:
| Yes, visit tracking has been around for years. Here is one
| product (https://support.google.com/google-
| ads/answer/6100636?hl=en), I assume there are many more.
|
| I guess it's not more well-known because it's not in the
| stores interests to publicize it.
| flowless wrote:
| Any idea how it works? The site is not very helpful in that
| manner.
| closeparen wrote:
| Probably the same way that Google Maps traffic or "this
| restaurant is busy now" indications work.
| verify_sirrah wrote:
| Presumably using Bluetooth beacons.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy_beacon
| krcz wrote:
| You can use changing IDs and publish ID history (or ID
| generator seed) for confirmed cases.
| fuckyah wrote:
| it wont
| luminati wrote:
| There is also an app/project out of MIT called 'Private Kit',
| which is primarily designed to address the privacy issue.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-researchers-launch-
| location...
|
| [2] https://safepaths.mit.edu/
| DaniloDias wrote:
| What the hell, I hate Bluetooth now?
| k__ wrote:
| I didn't have any positive experiences with Bluetooth, it was
| always too flaky, so I didn't even activate it for years now.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Another project by a group of Czech volunteers:
|
| https://github.com/covid19cz/erouska-android
|
| https://github.com/covid19cz/erouska-ios
| Rifu wrote:
| I think in these extraordinary times, it's nice to see the
| government proactively trying to do more to counteract the worst
| pandemic the country has ever seen. As much as we might all cry
| foul over the curtailing of freedom, there is a lot to be said in
| this current environment about contact tracers immediately
| knowing who a known covid carrier has come in contact with, which
| in turn means a speedier response from the medical teams.
|
| That being said though, the app is absolute garbage on iPhone.
| Obviously not really their fault, but needing to have the app
| actively on for it to work is absolutely going to lead to people
| not bothering to turning it on.
| mshroyer wrote:
| I agree this is bad, but I don't understand why it is. Not an
| iOS developer but I was under the impression apps can run in
| the background to maintain Bluetooth connections.
|
| Assuming Apple's policies are in fact preventing them from
| running in the background, does Apple have a mechanism to grant
| them an exception for this use case? Does someone have a
| contact at Apple who could reach out to them?
| [deleted]
| mcshicks wrote:
| It's kind of far down in the page so I missed it the first time I
| scanned it.
|
| "We are working around the clock to finalise our protocol
| reference documents and reference implementation, to open source
| what we have built, so that others may deploy their own flavours
| of TraceTogether - each implementing the BlueTrace protocol. We
| appreciate your patience in the meantime."
| sly010 wrote:
| Sadly this won't happen in the US. Even if it's really private,
| people won't install it unless it's pushed down to them as an
| update from above, and no company will want to be the first to
| push it.
|
| I suspect the bigger issue is people don't want to be told by an
| app that they need to go get tested.
|
| Come to think of it, cities like New York could push it as part
| of a bigger, more comprehensive covid app...
| [deleted]
| mikebelanger wrote:
| Lots of neat descriptions on the page. Can't wait to see the
| reference documents.
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