Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2020 3:13 PM

@ gordo,

With regards the snippit from the article,

…they showed promise in finding suspects as well as witnesses…

If you go fishing to put food on the table, do you care it it’s a “chub or a trout”?

People should realy understand the point that as far as the police are concerned, a witness is just a name on the suspect list they are building.

If there are no names above yours or you look easy to convict then you are the person they will work to convict even if you are innocent, and they will care not a jot.

That is they will look for evidence to find you guilty not innocent, any evidence they get that says you are potentially innocent will get ignored, lost in the paperwork and unlikely to be disclosed to a defence team. After all,

Why leave ammunition for the enemy?

It’s all wrapped up in a nicety called “confirmation bias” and it is endemic in every police investigation. It’s the “I know it’s him” or “It has to be him” thought that leads down a slippery slope to the many wrongfull convictions we see.

I’ve warned about both the use of mobile phone location data for exactly this purpose, and the confirmation bias in investigations a number of times on this blog in the past.

As @Wu Jin Han noted in yesterday’s thread[1]

Stasi colonel Wolfgang Schmidt’s forecast[2], “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used… The only way to protect people’s privacy is to not allow government to collect their information in the first place.”

A valid observation, it is after all from someone who should know, Wolfgang was afterall at the heart of what went on in East Germany under Erich and Margot Honecker. But he is also one of that group who feel no guilt, no remorse and think they should be honoured for the work they did[3] and still call those they abused “criminals”.

It raises the question of just how many more their are like him and his colleagues in western government agencies be they IC, LEA or the myriad of “arms length contractors” brought in, not just to make a few ex-government employees and the MIC extreamly wealthy, but also to give those politicians they sponsor via party kickbacks “deniability”…

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/modern_mass_sur.html#c6804902

[2] Wolgang made some other observations,

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=4087

[3] Wolfgang’s, grossness and compleat lack of remorse as with his colleagues shows up here,

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-lives-of-others-out-of-the-shadows-430755.html

It is this “we were doing our jobs” mentality of their behavioirs that you find in nearly all who have committed atrocities of one form or another. In the UK we see it with Met Police under cover officers their views are in effect covered by perhaps the scariest sentence I know,

For the greater good

It is far worse than “Only following orders”, because those that are giving the orders are the ones that use it to excuse all.

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2020 4:35 PM

@ All,

A little peace of advice.

For your own sanity get into the habit of not using your phone as a “dog leash” around your neck to others needs, you are not a slave to their egos, grow a set and enjoy the freedom.

Thus you should note,

You are not your phone and your phone won’t get upset if you leave it on it’s own.

That is it’s location does not have to be your location, even part of the time.

Importantly because turning modern phones off is in effect an illusion (soft buttons folks). The chances are at some point some form of application etc will get on your phone just to keep location data as it has value, even if not being transmitted in real time (the same applies to “airctaft mode” etc).

So make yourself less of a target in a safe way rather than a suspicious way,

1, Get into the habit of turning your phone off when you use the likes of “public transport” or walking in the street. Which are the times you are most likely to encounter criminality. Because you won’t be tempted to use it, as it won’t go off unexpectedly thus making you a target for mugging and the like. If you have one of those RF wallets drop it in as that will reduce the chance of tracking data being kept. The fact you have turned the phone off gets registered with the network provider anyway, hence your habit becomes an established fact of historical depth.

2, When at the office or at home during the day, don’t turn the phone off, put it in “silent mode” and lock it in your draw when you go out for lunch etc. As far as I’m aware putting the phone into silent mode does not get sent to the service provider. However the likes of Google, Apple and those who develop Apps, may well get informed. Thus currently you will look like you are at your desk, even though you are doing a little lunchtime activity. Also get into the habit with “meetings” and the like it reduces the chance of “blue-jacking” and it’s more modern “built in” (Apple) techniques.

3, Unless putting your phone on charge at night turn it off and leave it in another room not your bedroom (most of us make noises in our more “private moments” that we would rather keep to ourselves).

These all give a level of “deniability by track record”. That is you have a “green habit” to avoid wasting the battery[1] etc. Thus holes in tracking data or not having the “dog leash” hanging around your neck 24×365.25 is not seen as a change of behaviour thus “suspicious”.

But more important it cuts down your location data a great deal, especially that which can be used by the authorities or your employers or others with potential ill intent towards you. Even if it is just attempts to profit from your secret habit of visiting expensive chocolatiers, loitering outside “Tiffany’s” for breakfast or similar totaly harmless but nevertheless private moments.

[1] The life of a modern phone providing it does not get stolen or you sit on it or droo it etc is dictated by “Battery life”. As most batteries are chemical they have a finite life based on how many times the chemical bonds are made or broken. Thus the more you use the battery the shorter it’s life. Importantly there is a very nonlinear relationship with depth of discharge abd life expectancy especially with lithium batteries[2] that is a life of 10,000 cycles for 10% max discharge drops to maybe a 1000 cycles at 75% discharge. Thus charging your phone and leaving it on the charging cable whilst you use it will give you a much longer battery life, if thr design engineers were doing their job properly.

[2] Lithium batteries also have an issue with temprature especially LiPo’s if you charge a cold phone you shorten the life of the battery. If you try charging at the freezing point of water or less, you will take 10-50% of the battery life in one go, so don’t do it. That is if you’ve been out in the cold and come into the warm your phone will still be cold for an hour or so…

Clive Robinson • January 29, 2020 1:29 AM

@ vas pup,

Just curious what is corruption force for such transformation:

For Corps, it’s the free market mantra espoused as,

Money left on the table.

For Politicos it’s the lack of tax income to bribe voters with thus,

We must promise more but pay less.

Which when you consider the following,

1, The Corps deliver data en mass at cents or less an individual.

2, The Cops and judicial process make criminals at $100,000’s each.

From a politicians point of view a big chunk of change can be taken away from the Cops if investigations are done on data from Corps. It’s why Geof Thiel’s Palantir exists, they claim to take all that data mine it and save police forces millions in investigation costs.

For individual cops it means they in effect get set quotas to push X number of crimes into convictions in Y time. With each year X goes up and Y goes down. That’s why every witness is a suspect unless they can finger someone else. So guilty untill they prove themselves innocent.

Politicians care not a jot for wrongfull convictions just the conviction rate, because of the “tough on crime” mantra.

There are only three ways to get convictions up for a given cost to the tax payer,

1, Create more criminals.
2, Go for easy convictions.
3, Cut process costs.

Cuts in social spending and reduction in job numbers or jobs that pay living wages does the first on the list.

Locking up the poor, low waged, poorly educated or disabled takes care of the second.

These two politicians have been doing for years along with Gerrymandering and the like.

But now the Big Corps are providing data on everyone who leaks it and most haemorrhage it by the bucket load daily. Your criminal score will be created just like your credit score. You put a list of “witness names in” along with the crime type and victim details and out pops the name of the most likely criminal from their score…

No real need to investigate because “the computer says”, and Cops find themselves low waged as data entry clerks or unemployed to keep the first option on the list going.

All of which makes politicians happy, because it won’t go wrong on their watch… But doubly so now because the money diverted from Cops to Corps means that their is large “kick back” potential into politicians campaign funds.

After all a US President costs about $1,000,000/day every day of a four year term in visable campaign funds alone these days. So with all those hopefulls three or four times that visable and only the devil knows in “dark money” funding[1]. But each candidate must get to a point where they are “credible” thus they have to spend spend spend on the way up the greasy pole. Nobody has that kind of personal wealth so they are very much dependent on “donations” which means they are “on the hook” not to those citizens who vote for them, but those unseen faces that pay for them… The monies involved are now comfortably in the trillions bracket[1] and are essentially an unfillable pit worse than the defence budget that supports around 9 million people.

Thus those three options will continue to get worse day by day, to ensure money goes the politicians way, with the voters having little or no say…

[1] An overview of how money pays for US politics,

https://www.thoughtco.com/who-funds-political-campaigns-3367629