Entries Tagged "surveillance"

Page 34 of 93

"Santa Claus and the Surveillance State"

He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.

He’s everywhere.

And that’s the whole point of the Elf on the Shelf, the bright-eyed, Kewpie-esque doll that millions of parents display around their homes in December as a reminder to children to behave. The elf, the story goes, is an agent reporting back to Santa Claus, and he’s tasked with documenting any seasonal misdeeds for his jolly boss.

The elf also, a new paper argues, promotes acceptance of a surveillance state. An excerpt from co-authors Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin:

Children…may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination, moving dolls and determining interactions with other people and other dolls.

Instead, the elf encourages children “to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures.”

Also, this.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Posted on December 25, 2014 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

The Limits of Police Subterfuge

“The next time you call for assistance because the Internet service in your home is not working, the ‘technician’ who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent. He will have secretly disconnected the service, knowing that you will naturally call for help and—­when he shows up at your door, impersonating a technician­—let him in. He will walk through each room of your house, claiming to diagnose the problem. Actually, he will be videotaping everything (and everyone) inside. He will have no reason to suspect you have broken the law, much less probable cause to obtain a search warrant. But that makes no difference, because by letting him in, you will have ‘consented’ to an intrusive search of your home.”

This chilling scenario is the first paragraph of a motion to suppress evidence gathered by the police in exactly this manner, from a hotel room. Unbelievably, this isn’t a story from some totalitarian government on the other side of an ocean. This happened in the United States, and by the FBI. Eventually—I’m sure there will be appeals—higher U.S. courts will decide whether this sort of practice is legal. If it is, the country will slide even further into a society where the police have even more unchecked power than they already possess.

The facts are these. In June, Two wealthy Macau residents stayed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The hotel suspected that they were running an illegal gambling operation out of their room. They enlisted the police and the FBI, but could not provide enough evidence for them to get a warrant. So instead they repeatedly cut the guests’ Internet connection. When the guests complained to the hotel, FBI agents wearing hidden cameras and recorders pretended to be Internet repair technicians and convinced the guests to let them in. They filmed and recorded everything under the pretense of fixing the Internet, and then used the information collected from that to get an actual search warrant. To make matters even worse, they lied to the judge about how they got their evidence.

The FBI claims that their actions are no different from any conventional sting operation. For example, an undercover policeman can legitimately look around and report on what he sees when he invited into a suspect’s home under the pretext of trying to buy drugs. But there are two very important differences: one of consent, and the other of trust. The former is easier to see in this specific instance, but the latter is much more important for society.

You can’t give consent to something you don’t know and understand. The FBI agents did not enter the hotel room under the pretext of making an illegal bet. They entered under a false pretext, and relied on that for consent of their true mission. That makes things different. The occupants of the hotel room didn’t realize who they were giving access to, and they didn’t know their intentions. The FBI knew this would be a problem. According to the New York Times, “a federal prosecutor had initially warned the agents not to use trickery because of the ‘consent issue.’ In fact, a previous ruse by agents had failed when a person in one of the rooms refused to let them in.” Claiming that a person granting an Internet technician access is consenting to a police search makes no sense, and is no different than one of those “click through” Internet license agreements that you didn’t read saying one thing and while meaning another. It’s not consent in any meaningful sense of the term.

Far more important is the matter of trust. Trust is central to how a society functions. No one, not even the most hardened survivalists who live in backwoods log cabins, can do everything by themselves. Humans need help from each other, and most of us need a lot of help from each other. And that requires trust. Many Americans’ homes, for example, are filled with systems that require outside technical expertise when they break: phone, cable, Internet, power, heat, water. Citizens need to trust each other enough to give them access to their hotel rooms, their homes, their cars, their person. Americans simply can’t live any other way.

It cannot be that every time someone allows one of those technicians into our homes they are consenting to a police search. Again from the motion to suppress: “Our lives cannot be private—­and our personal relationships intimate­—if each physical connection that links our homes to the outside world doubles as a ready-made excuse for the government to conduct a secret, suspicionless, warrantless search.” The resultant breakdown in trust would be catastrophic. People would not be able to get the assistance they need. Legitimate servicemen would find it much harder to do their job. Everyone would suffer.

It all comes back to the warrant. Through warrants, Americans legitimately grant the police an incredible level of access into our personal lives. This is a reasonable choice because the police need this access in order to solve crimes. But to protect ordinary citizens, the law requires the police to go before a neutral third party and convince them that they have a legitimate reason to demand that access. That neutral third party, a judge, then issues the warrant when he or she is convinced. This check on the police’s power is for Americans’ security, and is an important part of the Constitution.

In recent years, the FBI has been pushing the boundaries of its warrantless investigative powers in disturbing and dangerous ways. It collects phone-call records of millions of innocent people. It uses hacking tools against unknown individuals without warrants. It impersonates legitimate news sites. If the lower court sanctions this particular FBI subterfuge, the matter needs to be taken up—­and reversed­—by the Supreme Court.

This essay previously appeared in The Atlantic.

EDITED TO ADD (4/24/2015): A federal court has ruled that the FBI cannot do this.

Posted on December 18, 2014 at 6:57 AM • View Comments

Fake Cell Towers Found in Norway

In yet another example of what happens when you build an insecure communications infrastructure, fake cell phone towers have been found in Oslo. No one knows who has been using them to eavesdrop.

This is happening in the US, too. Remember the rule: we’re all using the same infrastructure, so we can either keep it insecure so we—and everyone else—can use it to spy, or we can secure it so that no one can use it to spy.

Posted on December 16, 2014 at 11:34 AM • View Comments

Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance

There’s a new international survey on Internet security and trust, of “23,376 Internet users in 24 countries,” including “Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States.” Amongst the findings, 60% of Internet users have heard of Edward Snowden, and 39% of those “have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of his revelations.”

The press is mostly spinning this as evidence that Snowden has not had an effect: “merely 39%,” “only 39%,” and so on. (Note that these articles are completely misunderstanding the data. It’s not 39% of people who are taking steps to protect their privacy post-Snowden, it’s 39% of the 60% of Internet users—which is not everybody—who have heard of him. So it’s much less than 39%.)

Even so, I disagree with the “Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users” headline. He’s having an enormous impact. I ran the actual numbers country by country, combining data on Internet penetration with data from this survey. Multiplying everything out, I calculate that 706 million people have changed their behavior on the Internet because of what the NSA and GCHQ are doing. (For example, 17% of Indonesians use the Internet, 64% of them have heard of Snowden and 62% of them have taken steps to protect their privacy, which equals 17 million people out of its total 250-million population.)

Note that the countries in this survey only cover 4.7 billion out of a total 7 billion world population. Taking the conservative estimates that 20% of the remaining population uses the Internet, 40% of them have heard of Snowden, and 25% of those have done something about it, that’s an additional 46 million people around the world.

It’s probably true that most of those people took steps that didn’t make any appreciable difference against an NSA level of surveillance, and probably not even against the even more pervasive corporate variety of surveillance. It’s probably even true that some of those people didn’t take steps at all, and just wish they did or wish they knew what to do. But it is absolutely extraordinary that 750 million people are disturbed enough about their online privacy that they will represent to a survey taker that they did something about it.

Name another news story that has caused over ten percent of the world’s population to change their behavior in the past year? Cory Doctorow is right: we have reached “peak indifference to surveillance.” From now on, this issue is going to matter more and more, and policymakers around the world need to start paying attention.

Related: a recent Pew Research Internet Project survey on Americans’ perceptions of privacy, commented on by Ben Wittes.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.

EDITED TO ADD (12/15): Reddit thread.

EDITED TO ADD (12/16): Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (1/23): This essay has been translated into German.

Posted on December 15, 2014 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

Who Might Control Your Telephone Metadata

Remember last winter when President Obama called for an end to the NSA’s telephone metadata collection program? He didn’t actually call for an end to it; he just wanted it moved from an NSA database to some commercial database. (I still think this is a bad idea, and that having the companies store it is worse than having the government store it.)

Anyway, the Director of National Intelligence solicited companies who might be interested and capable of storing all this data. Here’s the list of companies that expressed interest. Note that Oracle is on the list—the only company I’ve heard of. Also note that many of these companies are just intermediaries that register for all sorts of things.

Posted on December 12, 2014 at 9:26 AM • View Comments

NSA Hacking of Cell Phone Networks

The Intercept has published an article—based on the Snowden documents—about AURORAGOLD, an NSA surveillance operation against cell phone network operators and standards bodies worldwide. This is not a typical NSA surveillance operation where agents identify the bad guys and spy on them. This is an operation where the NSA spies on people designing and building a general communications infrastructure, looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities that will allow it to spy on the bad guys at some later date.

In that way, AURORAGOLD is similar to the NSA’s program to hack sysadmins around the world, just in case that access will be useful at some later date; and to the GCHQ’s hacking of the Belgian phone company Belgacom. In both cases, the NSA/GCHQ is finding general vulnerabilities in systems that are protecting many innocent people, and exploiting them instead of fixing them.

It is unclear from the documents exactly what cell phone vulnerabilities the NSA is exploiting. Remember that cell phone calls go through the regular phone network, and are as vulnerable there as non-cell calls. (GSM encryption only protects calls from the handset to the tower, not within the phone operators’ networks.) For the NSA to target cell phone networks particularly rather than phone networks in general means that it is interested in information specific to the cell phone network: location is the most obvious. We already know that the NSA can eavesdrop on most of the world’s cell phone networks, and that it tracks location data.

I’m not sure what to make of the NSA’s cryptanalysis efforts against GSM encryption. The GSM cellular network uses three different encryption schemes: A5/1, which has been badly broken in the academic world for over a decade (a previous Snowden document said the NSA could process A5/1 in real time—and so can everyone else); A5/2, which was designed deliberately weak and is even more easily broken; and A5/3 (aka KASUMI), which is generally believed to be secure. There are additional attacks against all A5 ciphers as they are used in the GSM system known in the academic world. Almost certainly the NSA has operationalized all of these attacks, and probably others as well. Two documents published by the Intercept mention attacks against A5/3—OPULENT PUP and WOLFRAMITE—although there is no detail, and thus no way to know how much of these attacks consist of cryptanalysis of A5/3, attacks against the GSM protocols, or attacks based on exfiltrating keys. For example, GSM carriers know their users’ A5 keys and store them in databases. It would be much easier for the NSA’s TAO group to steal those keys and use them for real-time decryption than it would be to apply mathematics and computing resources against the encrypted traffic.

The Intercept points to these documents as an example of the NSA deliberately introducing flaws into global communications standards, but I don’t really see the evidence here. Yes, the NSA is spying on industry organizations like the GSM Association in an effort to learn about new GSM standards as early as possible, but I don’t see evidence of it influencing those standards. The one relevant sentence is in a presentation about the “SIGINT Planning Cycle”: “How do we introduce vulnerabilities where they do not yet exist?” That’s pretty damning in general, but it feels more aspirational than a statement of practical intent. Already there are lots of pressures on the GSM Association to allow for “lawful surveillance” on users from countries around the world. That surveillance is generally with the assistance of the cell phone companies, which is why hacking them is such a priority. My guess is that the NSA just sits back and lets other countries weaken cell phone standards, then exploits those weaknesses.

Other countries do as well. There are many vulnerabilities in the cell phone system, and it’s folly to believe that only the NSA and GCHQ exploits them. And countries that can’t afford their own research and development organization can buy the capability from cyberweapons arms manufacturers. And remember that technology flows downhill: today’s top-secret NSA programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools.

For example, the US company Verint sells cell phone tracking systems to both corporations and governments worldwide. The company’s website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone—one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter. The company boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei, Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United States. Defentek, a company mysteriously registered in Panama, sells a system that can “locate and track any phone number in the world…undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.” It’s not an idle boast; telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated the same capability at a hacker conference in 2008. Criminals can purchase illicit products to let them do the same today.

As I keep saying, we no longer live in a world where technology allows us to separate communications we want to protect from communications we want to exploit. Assume that anything we learn about what the NSA does today is a preview of what cybercriminals are going to do in six months to two years. That the NSA chooses to exploit the vulnerabilities it finds, rather than fix them, puts us all at risk.

This essay has previously appeared on the Lawfare blog.

Posted on December 9, 2014 at 6:33 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.