[HN Gopher] Documents reveal scale of US Government's cell phone...
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Documents reveal scale of US Government's cell phone location data
tracking
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-07-18 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| lrvick wrote:
| Among the many reasons I choose not to own a cell phone.
| tomohawk wrote:
| When it came out that government was looking at all of the data
| on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https.
| Everyone got involved.
|
| Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones
| to be anonymous?
|
| Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens
| to have voice communications built in?
| salawat wrote:
| In order for info to get from _here_ to _there_ :
|
| The phone network requires a geophysical route/medium across
| which to shluff a packet. Said packet is destined for an
| endpoint. Said endpoint is associated with a payer. Said payer,
| in order to pay, is virtually guaranteed to have had to do KYC
| at some point.
|
| Ergo, if you can call, you can be tracked with only knowledge
| of the endpoint, and the topology of the networking medium.
|
| Nature of the beast I'm afraid. Your forebearers wanted this.
| Are you not pleased? Does this mot make you feel safe? They
| worked very hard on it... For your safety, you see!
| gruez wrote:
| It's literally not possible because the mobile network needs to
| know where your phone is so it can route packets to the tower
| that you're connected.
| slackfan wrote:
| The Federal Government purges data that was non-encrypted after
| a number of years.
|
| The Federal Government retains a copy of all https-encrypted
| communications indefinitely on the understanding that the
| encryption may be broken at some point.
|
| The push to HTTPS was gleefully supported by the US federal
| government. HTTPS is not a panacea, and is generally useless
| for most non-sales applications.
| mjparrott wrote:
| A large portion of the market for anonymous phones are for
| illegal purposes. For any company doing this at scale, they are
| inevitably confronted with this fact and can get in a lot of
| trouble if they are proven to be knowingly supporting crime
| groups/individuals.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies,
| not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report:
|
| > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public
| the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S.
| Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have
| provided us to date."
|
| The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good
| fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those
| fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20
| years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through
| Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after
| the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to
| Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins).
|
| Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole
| PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha
| Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that.
|
| https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley
|
| It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our
| politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at
| China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.
| tremon wrote:
| _It 's not quite China yet_
|
| What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that
| China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that
| the Chinese government has easier access to commercially
| collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more
| overtly than the US?
| ok_dad wrote:
| Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to
| suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and
| storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been
| installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am
| pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for
| it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a
| datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and
| opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have
| taken some time.
|
| So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data
| collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass
| a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this
| data using computer systems they had been planning for years,
| and used those attacks as a pretext?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube
| alone creates too much data for them to process and handle.
|
| They must be storing either a subset or only partial
| metadata.
| flerchin wrote:
| If I have no choice about the ubiquitous surveillance, I'd at
| least like some positives like stopping the school shootings.
|
| As it is, they're watching, but clearly not doing anything
| useful.
| g8oz wrote:
| I'm wondering when citizen vigilante groups will start buying
| location data from these brokers to solve crimes.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| More like malicious criminal organizations that want to ensure
| you pay off your gambling debts
| corrral wrote:
| Or foreign governments or corporations (think: taking down a
| competitor or extorting business favors) for blackmail
| purposes.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were
| paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our
| lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I
| should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a
| surveillance state
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I've worked for the Federal Government and for a variety of ad-
| tech companies. I am still _much_ more terrified of "big tech"
| (and small tech) than "big government".
|
| When I worked for the government I wanted to scrape some
| publicly available data from the web. Because the data involved
| information about people I had to write up a document
| explaining exactly what I was using the data for, exactly what
| information I would be collecting and why it was necessary,
| explain where the data was to be stored, and most importantly
| specify exactly how long I needed the data and when and how it
| would be safely removed. This had to be approved by a privacy
| officer.
|
| I was shocked, because this is data that I, as a private
| citizen, could easily scrape. I asked why I had to do something
| so involved for a project I could easily do in my spare time.
| The answer I got was this: Because the government has extra
| authority they also have extra responsibility. As government
| employees we have more power to impact people's lives so it is
| our responsibility to be very explicit is what we do and why we
| are doing in.
|
| In ad-tech there are oceans of data that are _not_ publicly
| available, and in the US virtually zero restriction who looks
| at that data and what they can do with it. I 've watched people
| move around town via trackers when the use they web, seen where
| they got coffee and seen which doctor they go to. I used this
| information to demonstrate to the legal team at previous
| company to care about user privacy. They were shocked but in
| the end made no real policy decision. Some of the big players
| likely have tighter security but only for business/PR reasons.
| I can assure you that a random data engineer at a mid-sized
| tech company has far more access to your personal secrets than
| an FBI agent.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there are agencies in the government that
| have more surveillance power than they should and it is ripe
| for abuse. But don't think "it's not big tech", especially
| since there is a ultimately a thin line between big tech and
| big govt.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| The government is humongous. It would be naive to think all
| of government worked that way. There are certainly parts of
| the government that essentially answer to no one. There are
| trillion dollar black holes that still can't be explained.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > Because the data involved information about people I had to
| write up a document explaining exactly what I was using the
| data for, exactly what information I would be collecting and
| why it was necessary, explain where the data was to be
| stored, and most importantly specify exactly how long I
| needed the data and when and how it would be safely removed.
|
| This just sounds like a design doc, which I do regardless of
| if it has to get reviewed by a privacy team or I'm doing
| anything sensitive. Maybe it's because I've worked for mostly
| google & ex-googler run companies, but this is just standard
| practice for me.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I'll agree with you that big tech is largely just an
| extension of big government. But I fear the government more
| than a large corporation because the government is the only
| agency with the authority to use lethal force.
|
| That being said my understanding is that there were
| organizations that have ties back to 3 letter agencies that
| helped put up capital for several of the big tech companies
| back in the day.
| slackfan wrote:
| To quote the late Steve Jobs: "Government is the biggest
| monopoly of them all".
|
| Considering most data collection firms will happily sell to the
| feds, it's really not that much of a difference in the end.
| freeAgent wrote:
| I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that there's not
| much difference between "Big Tech" and "Big Government." As
| this article makes clear, they have a symbiotic relationship
| with each other. Big Tech makes money from Big Government,
| which uses Big Tech to get around restrictions on what it's
| allowed to do on its own.
| api wrote:
| One thing I'd love to know is whether there is an upside and if
| so how much.
|
| How many kidnapping victims get found or violent plots foiled
| by this tech vs old school police work?
|
| Of course I suspect this info would be hard to get. Authorities
| would likely cook the books to make these things look more
| valuable than they really are.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
| 01100011 wrote:
| We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it
| about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are.
| Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not
| much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I
| just got tired of losing sleep over it.
| neilalexander wrote:
| Making a fuss just isn't enough when the majority of people
| still want the devices that are being used to spy on them.
| Retric wrote:
| The difference is surveillance states have historically
| leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It's wildly
| different knowing your friends, family, even children are
| being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may
| not have happened at which point you just disappear like many
| people you never heard from again.
|
| It's actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don't
| evoke.
| asdff wrote:
| People with a bag of weed in their pocket in middle america
| probably feel the same way
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Not if they're white and middle class
| Mo3 wrote:
| Damn, even most of what we know is already a decade old
| information. I wouldn't be surprised if the intelligence
| agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few
| years.
|
| I also suspect there will be a point in the future where
| they'll break encryption and we won't find out until years
| later.. they already started looking into building a quantum
| computer in 2014, and I'd bet it's not necessarily for morally
| acceptable research.
| gruez wrote:
| >I wouldn't be surprised if the intelligence agencies had
| much more crazy new projects going on the last few years.
|
| except this isn't even from "the intelligence agencies", it's
| from data brokers:
|
| >The bulk of the data that CBP obtained came from its
| contract with Venntel, a location data broker that aggregates
| and sells information quietly siphoned from smartphone apps
| Mo3 wrote:
| What I meant is, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual
| intelligence agencies themselves had much more crazy
| projects going on.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if the intelligence agencies had
| much more crazy new projects going on the last few years.
|
| You mean like flying surveillance helicopters with really,
| really nice gear in them over major cities for days/weeks?
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| s/helicopters/planes
| sva_ wrote:
| I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is
| it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in
| climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of
| the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial
| materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't
| yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the
| results of technological achievements we consume?
|
| Looking back at some of the European revolutions, it doesn't seem
| like so much is missing to cause an urge to revolt in people. So
| what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| People have no intuition for what is technically possible or
| its implications in cases like this, including most people in
| tech. So they fallback to mentally modeling these cases in
| terms of things they are familiar with, without any sense of
| the inadequacies of the model. You can tell people these facts
| all day but they don't grok it, really, and it would be hard
| work to _try_ to grok it, which few people have either time or
| inclination for. They may feel uneasy about it in some abstract
| sense but as far as they are concerned it doesn 't affect them
| in a material way.
|
| Humans make decisions based things they can imagine and
| effectively reason about. Humans struggle to incorporate
| elementary probability theory into their reasoning; anything
| that requires complex systems thinking, which these kinds of
| topics do, is only going to be practically accessible to a
| small percentage of the population.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full"
|
| Among sociologists and political theorists, this is known as an
| "embourgeoisement thesis".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things?
|
| There are many reasons for this. It's partly due to the
| illusion that the current internet culture has created that
| expressing one's voice on a social media platform is an
| effective form of protest. It is not. How many change.org
| petitions are people going to sign until they realize that it
| means absolutely nothing?
|
| I think this one of the biggest and least-discussed erosions of
| public discourse and assembly. By fostering an online
| conversation at the expense of an in-person one, we wind up
| shouting into the abyss instead of at the people who deserve to
| feel the pressure.
| conception wrote:
| >we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes
|
| I think it's this plus we have no time and the time we have is
| preyed upon. So, you're fed and more or less comfy, but you're
| also stressed and tired about that next paycheck. And if you
| don't get that next paycheck, then you will no longer be fed
| and more or less comfy.
| rglover wrote:
| > So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to
| happen?
|
| It's not so much an "allow" as it is a "what's the
| alternative?" The problem at this point is so deeply rooted (in
| the form of life-long politicians and bureaucrats), the only
| solution is a full-blown reset. Unfortunately, there's no way
| to do that without violent revolution. Considering the scale
| and diversity of thought in the U.S., doing that effectively
| with the least amount of damage is next to impossible (too many
| loose cannons with mental issues). It also requires violence,
| which, if you take a non-aggression stance on problem solving
| (my own POV) then it's a stalemate.
|
| At this point, the only "fix" seems to be atrophy and
| circumvention. Atrophy in the sense that you just let it all
| run its course and meet its eventual demise (anticipating pain
| and suffering as the system collapses) and circumvention in the
| sense that you look for ways to excuse yourself from it.
|
| Earlier revolutions happened as part of much smaller
| civilizations (exactly why the American Revolution was possible
| --far less variables and far more homogenous thinking among the
| dissenting class). In a country of 300M+ people, any
| "revolution" is likely to dissolve into chaos no matter how
| well-organized or how principled its ideology.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and
| live in climate-controlled homes?
|
| Why would it need to be more? People feel no need to fear their
| government when they are content.
| asdff wrote:
| I think the problems affecting the system are just too
| widespread and bespoke for the individual to resolve. To
| actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you
| probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or
| someone with a similar resume. That limits the amount of the
| population that is even capable of comprehending the news to a
| small sliver. Extend that to any field: biology, law, physics,
| economics, etc. Popular science reporting is terrible because
| the writers and the readers both lack sufficient debth to put
| things in context. Earnest law reporting is going to take a law
| degree as well as a stack of books to put things in their
| actual context. Economics is even worse; they say a grand
| unifying theory of economics is impossible because of the time
| it takes to study all its various schools of economic theory
| means it cannot be done in a single human lifetime.
|
| The great danger of having the knowledge of all things in our
| society be limited to a handful of siloed specialists is that
| it leaves a lot of room for placing opinion, biased, or slanted
| reporting to the same weight as the actual facts, since no one
| is qualified to see what is true and what isn't. It allows
| people who have no experience on a given issue to be in control
| of its outcomes, which invites graft sooner than learned
| experience.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| > To actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you
| probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or
| someone with a similar resume.
|
| I think it is much more severe than that. To understand the
| full scope you'd be labeled a conspiracy theorist.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| People would rather point at other countries and virtue signal
| about how bad they are rather than care about what's happening
| in their own country.
|
| Couple that with brain dead nationalism about how the US is the
| best despite the fact that we're very much behind in many areas
| and it's not surprising that so many Americans blindly allow
| their own government to do so many outrageous things.
| newsclues wrote:
| Identity politics is a distraction from class struggle.
|
| Marxist theory acknowledges that capitalism provides too much
| to the proletariat to desire revolution, thus the focus on
| destroying capitalism and society.
| openfuture wrote:
| To answer your question you only need to investigate under
| which conditions coercion succeeds in changing behaviour.
|
| I believe that we can dismantle the current world order by
| providing a more persuasive alternative. Legitimacy is not
| absolute, but rather relative, and currently the things built
| on coercion are more legitimate, that is not a law of physics
| (thankfully it seems to be the other way around actually).
| nixpulvis wrote:
| We need to demand more options on technology platforms! We cannot
| impose effective consumer pressure when we are forced to choose
| between two locked down App Stores which make it impossible to
| categorically prevent these kinds of malicious actions.
|
| How long do you think it would take for a "Little Snitch"-like
| application to pop up that firewalls location API access if the
| platforms were more open?
| ramoz wrote:
| It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that
| virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that
| leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a
| circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of
| life without any PII.
|
| I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance
| problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved,
| where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling
| offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee
| surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is
| important for stability.
|
| All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded
| as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather
| murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a
| network of data providers & downstream businesses.
|
| Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission
| specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking
| capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed
| adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are
| cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they
| learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.
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