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After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone.
[Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google.
“This strikes me as a potentially more fruitful avenue of investigation than using brute force to enter the phones,” he said.
Add pharmacies to the list of industries that are giving private data to the police without a warrant.
There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance:
According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.
The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus:
This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.
A 404 Media investigation has found that criminals have managed to tap into that data supply chain, in some cases by stealing former law enforcement officer’s identities, and are selling unfettered access to their criminal cohorts online. The tool 404 Media tested has also been used to gather information on high profile targets such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and even President Joe Biden, seemingly without restriction. 404 Media verified that although not always sensitive, at least some of that data is accurate.
Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products, including radios, sold by Motorola, Airbus, and more. Crucially, TETRA is not open-source. Instead, it relies on what the researchers describe in their presentation slides as “secret, proprietary cryptography,” meaning it is typically difficult for outside experts to verify how secure the standard really is.
The researchers said they worked around this limitation by purchasing a TETRA-powered radio from eBay. In order to then access the cryptographic component of the radio itself, Wetzels said the team found a vulnerability in an interface of the radio.
[…]
Most interestingly is the researchers’ findings of what they describe as the backdoor in TEA1. Ordinarily, radios using TEA1 used a key of 80-bits. But Wetzels said the team found a “secret reduction step” which dramatically lowers the amount of entropy the initial key offered. An attacker who followed this step would then be able to decrypt intercepted traffic with consumer-level hardware and a cheap software defined radio dongle.
Looks like the encryption algorithm was intentionally weakened by intelligence agencies to facilitate easy eavesdropping.
Specifically on the researchers’ claims of a backdoor in TEA1, Boyer added “At this time, we would like to point out that the research findings do not relate to any backdoors. The TETRA security standards have been specified together with national security agencies and are designed for and subject to export control regulations which determine the strength of the encryption.”
And I would like to point out that that’s the very definition of a backdoor.
Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea.
Details of the security analysis. Another news article.
The details are scant—the article is based on a “heavily redacted” contract—but the New York subway authority is using an “AI system” to detect people who don’t pay the subway fare.
Joana Flores, an MTA spokesperson, said the AI system doesn’t flag fare evaders to New York police, but she declined to comment on whether that policy could change. A police spokesperson declined to comment.
If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.
Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.
All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive on the way to work, and what you’re allowed to say or do online—if you’re in any situation that might have legal implications, you’re told exactly what to do, in real time.
Imagine that the computer system formulating these personal legal directives at mass scale is so complex that no one can explain how it reasons or works. But if you ignore a directive, the system will know, and it’ll be used as evidence in the prosecution that’s sure to follow.
This future may not be far off—automatic detection of lawbreaking is nothing new. Speed cameras and traffic-light cameras have been around for years. These systems automatically issue citations to the car’s owner based on the license plate. In such cases, the defendant is presumed guilty unless they prove otherwise, by naming and notifying the driver.
In New York, AI systems equipped with facial recognition technology are being used by businesses to identify shoplifters. Similar AI-powered systems are being used by retailers in Australia and the United Kingdom to identify shoplifters and provide real-time tailored alerts to employees or security personnel. China is experimenting with even more powerful forms of automated legal enforcement and targeted surveillance.
Breathalyzers are another example of automatic detection. They estimate blood alcohol content by calculating the number of alcohol molecules in the breath via an electrochemical reaction or infrared analysis (they’re basically computers with fuel cells or spectrometers attached). And they’re not without controversy: Courts across the country have found serious flaws and technical deficiencies with Breathalyzer devices and the software that powers them. Despite this, criminal defendants struggle to obtain access to devices or their software source code, with Breathalyzer companies and courts often refusing to grant such access. In the few cases where courts have actually ordered such disclosures, that has usually followed costly legal battles spanning many years.
AI is about to make this issue much more complicated, and could drastically expand the types of laws that can be enforced in this manner. Some legal scholars predict that computationally personalized law and its automated enforcement are the future of law. These would be administered by what Anthony Casey and Anthony Niblett call “microdirectives,” which provide individualized instructions for legal compliance in a particular scenario.
Made possible by advances in surveillance, communications technologies, and big-data analytics, microdirectives will be a new and predominant form of law shaped largely by machines. They are “micro” because they are not impersonal general rules or standards, but tailored to one specific circumstance. And they are “directives” because they prescribe action or inaction required by law.
A Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice is a present-day example of a microdirective. The DMCA’s enforcement is almost fully automated, with copyright “bots” constantly scanning the internet for copyright-infringing material, and automatically sending literally hundreds of millions of DMCA takedown notices daily to platforms and users. A DMCA takedown notice is tailored to the recipient’s specific legal circumstances. It also directs action—remove the targeted content or prove that it’s not infringing—based on the law.
It’s easy to see how the AI systems being deployed by retailers to identify shoplifters could be redesigned to employ microdirectives. In addition to alerting business owners, the systems could also send alerts to the identified persons themselves, with tailored legal directions or notices.
A future where AIs interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom. Forget about software transparency—well-resourced AI firms, like Breathalyzer companies today, would no doubt ferociously guard their systems for competitive reasons. These systems would likely be so complex that even their designers would not be able to explain how the AIs interpret and apply the law—something we’re already seeing with today’s deep learning neural network systems, which are unable to explain their reasoning.
Even the law itself could become hopelessly vast and opaque. Legal microdirectives sent en masse for countless scenarios, each representing authoritative legal findings formulated by opaque computational processes, could create an expansive and increasingly complex body of law that would grow ad infinitum.
And this brings us to the heart of the issue: If you’re accused by a computer, are you entitled to review that computer’s inner workings and potentially challenge its accuracy in court? What does cross-examination look like when the prosecutor’s witness is a computer? How could you possibly access, analyze, and understand all microdirectives relevant to your case in order to challenge the AI’s legal interpretation? How could courts hope to ensure equal application of the law? Like the man from the country in Franz Kafka’s parable in The Trial, you’d die waiting for access to the law, because the law is limitless and incomprehensible.
This system would present an unprecedented threat to freedom. Ubiquitous AI-powered surveillance in society will be necessary to enable such automated enforcement. On top of that, research—including empirical studies conducted by one of us (Penney)—has shown that personalized legal threats or commands that originate from sources of authority—state or corporate—can have powerful chilling effects on people’s willingness to speak or act freely. Imagine receiving very specific legal instructions from law enforcement about what to say or do in a situation: Would you feel you had a choice to act freely?
This is a vision of AI’s invasive and Byzantine law of the future that chills to the bone. It would be unlike any other law system we’ve seen before in human history, and far more dangerous for our freedoms. Indeed, some legal scholars argue that this future would effectively be the death of law.
Yet it is not a future we must endure. Proposed bans on surveillance technology like facial recognition systems can be expanded to cover those enabling invasive automated legal enforcement. Laws can mandate interpretability and explainability for AI systems to ensure everyone can understand and explain how the systems operate. If a system is too complex, maybe it shouldn’t be deployed in legal contexts. Enforcement by personalized legal processes needs to be highly regulated to ensure oversight, and should be employed only where chilling effects are less likely, like in benign government administration or regulatory contexts where fundamental rights and freedoms are not at risk.
AI will inevitably change the course of law. It already has. But we don’t have to accept its most extreme and maximal instantiations, either today or tomorrow.
This essay was written with Jon Penney, and previously appeared on Slate.com.
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:
While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.
“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”
[…]
While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.
In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.
The New York Times has a long article on the investigative techniques used to identify the person who stabbed and killed four University of Idaho students.
Pay attention to the techniques:
The case has shown the degree to which law enforcement investigators have come to rely on the digital footprints that ordinary Americans leave in nearly every facet of their lives. Online shopping, car sales, carrying a cellphone, drives along city streets and amateur genealogy all played roles in an investigation that was solved, in the end, as much through technology as traditional sleuthing.
[…]
At that point, investigators decided to try genetic genealogy, a method that until now has been used primarily to solve cold cases, not active murder investigations. Among the growing number of genealogy websites that help people trace their ancestors and relatives via their own DNA, some allow users to select an option that permits law enforcement to compare crime scene DNA samples against the websites’ data.
A distant cousin who has opted into the system can help investigators building a family tree from crime scene DNA to triangulate and identify a potential perpetrator of a crime.
[…]
On Dec. 23, investigators sought and received Mr. Kohberger’s cellphone records. The results added more to their suspicions: His phone was moving around in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, but was disconnected from cell networks - perhaps turned off—in the two hours around when the killings occurred.
Genesis Market is shut down:
Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan was, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.
But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems.
The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Slashdot story.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.