Are our prisons meaningfully different from "reeducation camps"? Are they any less biased, brutal, or damaging?
You can argue that prisoners in the US are "criminals", but states can call whoever they want a criminal.
(The legacy of colonialism in many larger European countries is ... pretty dark. France, Belgium, UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, ...)
The neat thing about mobile phones is that such a bugging capability comes built-in. The police should certainly be allowed to use this in the course of investigative duties.
Lots of things sound reasonable which are not. One must consider the downside, particularly the downside of abuse of power.
So your comparison of this limited additional capability to "allow police to enter anyone's home at any time" is not relevant. And trying to draw a parallel to "let the police shoot a fleeing suspect" is absurd.
So why not actually use the possible up sides of these dangerous immoral systems?
These patriot act type laws are just there to normalize their spying crimes in your eyes. Also to make people self censor themselves from criticizing their government.
No they don't prevent any sort of attacks because the attackers wouldn't be stupid enough to talk over their personal phones.
Let that sink in. They take away your privacy while not preventing any big attacks.
This is already common practice among some communities.
(You can simply break the circuit with a piece of paper between the battery terminal and phone contact for convenience.)
If you look at France it's not all of France rioting (through all of France was protesting).
Instead its a specific group of people defined by at what kind of place they live in: Banlieues. This is a form of ghetto which is historically mostly populated by people which grand parents had a migration background and which due to an economical shift had en-mass lost their jobs (the grand or grand grand parents).
This people grew up as French where told all the social norms and expectations of French society etc. At the same time they are often not treated as French have close very little chances to get any job at all. Just having a address at the border of a Banlieues is enough for you not even be considered for a job.
Over the last decades this has gotten so bad that by often police isn't really present in the Ghettos at all, and if only in larger groups. At the same time this distress is frequently abused by extremists, e.g. religious ones.
But that also means that most people in Banlieues probably do not care too much about this law as it is unlikely to ever affect them anyway. At the same time it's also true the other way around, the police cares too little about the Banlieues to abuse it to target the huge majority of people there. Similar if they move against people there they know very well that this people do not have good ways to properly legally defend themself.
But who will be targeted by this are e.g. environmental activists. For example France has in the past already (many times) declared some environmental activists as domestic terrorists and used anti-terrorist laws to spy on them in various ways.
I probably are wrong in some points at least somewhat, but I think it might be still worth to consider some of the arguments.
it's not exactly the bill we needed in the middle a crisis of confidence in the police.
it's just conservatives shrugging off what is happening, and making their point
this law doesn't make sense otherwise
Famous last words.
You or your children can end up in the camps for praying in Xinjiang, it's not exactly the same thing.
No country is a saint, but you should stop with the whataboutism.
It will be abused instantly.
His sister called in a welfare check on him and suddenly I have three cops knocking at my front door. They ask for him by name, say he isn’t in trouble. I go get him; he asks “how did you know where I was?” and the cops say “we pinged your phone”. What that entails exactly I have no clue.
Later I pulled up the video of them arriving on my cameras, they didn’t approach any of my neighbors houses first. It was just right to my front door like they knew exactly where he was. Kinda spooky.
The cell phone infrastructure knows where your phone is. It has to in order for it to operate. The police routinely ask cell phone companies for locations of cell phones. Many (most?) not only won't require a warrant, but provide an official portal the police can use to conduct their queries without having to get a phone company employee to do it.
https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1430/002/
Our crook friends in Israel sell this as a service
https://privacyinternational.org/examples/3429/nso-group-off...
Remark that GPS doesn't need to be turned on. Google mapped all Wifi's and so can locate you without GPS.
This is how many criminals now get caught while on the run. It isn't magic police work but rather the personal tracking device everyone carries. Likewise some spree killers have been tracked down by geofencing phones known to be around all crime scenes and zeroing in on the one that shows up at all/most of them.
Sure, but that doesn't pass the smell test in this situation:
1. That's a lot of work, which would take a lot of time to do. For instance, does the sister know the OP's number. His full name? His first name? Are they going do all the work to piece together fragmentary information for a wellness check?
2. The technology exists and is widely deployed for the police to straightforwardly take a quick shortcut around all that work.
And most importantly:
3. The police said they took that shortcut.
Pursuant to 5 U.S.C § 2703(c), a provider “may divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service (not including the contents of communications covered by subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2)”…“to a governmental entity, if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of information relating to the emergency.”
Looking at call logs may require less.
That's why something like MDT was added to 3GPP standards and emergency calls trigger a hard GPS fix.
With the current level of oversight on the police (police of police is a meme by now), and the level of cybersecurity at the government, everyone's phones will be activated within a few months.
At least some government agent will have fun watching what ppl visit on the internet during their spare time, and can enable the camera to watch what they're doing when they review the content.
The fight against crime is ramping up !
I don't get why they don't hire back more detectives and accountants to really investigate actual evidence, instead of just listening to potential criminals for hours. They have been reducing the force for 15 years (especially the forces that investigated financial and workplace crimes)
That would be more effective.
The baseband is an opaque binary blob that operates outside of the phone's main OS, and its contents are usually considered a trade secret by the manufacturer since it handles low-level hardware interactions with the main radios/etc.
Personally, I would be surprised if those systems weren't compromised by agreement. It's already common to see criminals and dissidents get busted because they think that turning a phone off stops it from reporting location data.
That’s an incredible claim to make with no source. It seems unreasonable to suspect Apple and google would allow some chips they don’t access to battery even when powered off.
Technically he is not lying or naive, because any number, including large numbers like 66 million, can be expressed in units of dozens.
[0]: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20230705-macron-s-call-to...
he thinks he's smarter than everyone, and he therefore feels justified ramming his policies down everyone's throats.
* right now: Law Enforcement need the decision of a judge to do this (when they technically can, either using 0-day or maybe asking for the phone provider to upload a malicious app under their service app)
* after the law: Law Enforcement will be able to do THE SAME without the need for a judge under some specific (but not really restrictive, like national security) conditions
So, all in all, it will just shorten the time needed by Law Enforcement to hack some suspected citizen and it won't require a judge. Is it a shame for the democracy ? Yes, obviously. Is it a change in the way for the State to spy its people ? No, sadly.
Will there be a debate about what individual freedom may be taken of citizen in the name of national/public security ? No, obviously. And sadly.
Source: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/justice/telephones-mouch...
FWIW, France became an empire, then was restored as a monarchy, then back an empire and monarchy before it became a republic durably.
Revolution was not a series of peasants and commoner ridding themselves of their despots, it was much more dirtier, political and complex than that, which doesn't prevent to still be behind the ideals that drove the events and find it beautiful.
Not just France, continental Western Europe is gradually becoming more authoritarian and corrupt.
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2023/06/08/l-activati...
Today I read an article by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a liberal intellectual. He downplays police violence, order must be restored, how is not so important.
Isn't "order" the concern of the conservatives?
I've heard a number of times that politically left and right mean different things in Europe; is this one of those situations?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/09/bernard-henri-levy-bhl-...
I liked Lévy's insistence on human rights but he became an ideological crusader.
And though he is as bourgois as possible he advocated in his article for social reforms (but no talking about police reforms).
(and by the way: his Sartre book is great)
We tried the same in the US. Our intel agencies just lied to the judges, who mostly otherwise were hip to the con and acted as a rubber stamp.
It astounds me that this is just accepted as a practice in the US. Or am I being naive?
From my understanding airplane mode disables the sim, wifi, gps, and bluetooth entirely, but it's possible to re-enable wifi, gps, and bluetooth. It's something I got into the habit of doing because my phone searching for 4g cellular data ate into my battery.
For the microphone ... ideally build and install LineageOS yourself on an Android device. Don't trust iOS or Google's official Android builds, they have closed source software that may have France-specific backdoors.
It seems like general camera/audio recording would need a secondary exploit.
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/219230/where-is-...
calyxos.org
It isn't mere coincidence that device manufacturers have made it impossible to power off mobile phones (short of refusing to charge a device) and impossible to positively disconnect ripe-for-abuse subsystems like the microphone(s) or cameras at the same time that governments and other entities are using them as tracking devices.
I'm strongly in favor of physical switches and I detest where technology is nowadays, but it seems pretty likely to me that they removed the physical switches because:
1. It simplifies (cheapens) production costs
2. It eliminates points of failure
3. It reduces user error opportunities
4. It makes it easier to waterproof devices
5. It makes it easier to make devices smaller
And surely others that don't require a major conspiracy.
electrical tape on your camera should take care of the rest, and developer mode lets you feed the system bogus GPS data at will.
Will it become illegal to be phoneless person, or will it just make such people into an untouchable caste?
Expect the riots to end in a couple of days.
So essentially this is like getting a warrant to install a bugging device. Just that nowadays everyone carries said bugging device in the form of a smartphone and this law allows a judge to authorise turning it on (assuming it is technically possible).
Which are those, and how is France worse?
France is currently following a path close to what Hungary did before, with a steady reduction in press freedom, political freedom, and individual freedom, coupled to a progressive erosion of the rule of law (a significant recent example came from the protests regarding the pension reforms: the government started banning most protests, but the ban was almost systematically lifted by courts. Then the government took a shady approach: the protests were banned, but the official text for the ban weren't published anymore as they should, so it could not be contested in front of courts, and people who still went to the protests got arrested for “attending to a banned protest”, and detained up to 48 hours (no justification needed, no recourse) before being released with no charge).
For sure France isn't PRC, but there's a full spectrum between ideal democracies and totalitarian dystopia, and France is much closer to what's called “Illiberal democracies” than to the former.
from the wikileaks, if they can do it, they will do it.
and this bill is just a formality imo.
You'd gain nothing. What are you going to do, remove the battery for a couple hours per day?
And then if there's any crime, the police is going to immediately suspect anyone who had the battery removed from their cell phone at the time, which they can trivially detect.
1. Most native English speakers are in the US, so the accidental assumption that someone is American is more often than not correct.
2. The internal voice that reads text to me has a generic male American accent.
I feel it's significantly better to know that someone is doing the spying and all that. Why should they hide that they can spy on whoever they choose? When they don't make clear what happens, we end up in a position where everyone's uncertain. And, as history has shown, it makes things significantly more difficult.
There's no decency in that.
Probably that's why the batteries are not removable in the phones...
[0]: https://frame.work/
I just assumed that USA three letter agencies paid larger companies upfront to implement back doors; seems to fit with past form. Why would they not do that. Indeed it always struck me the debacle with Huawei where USA government smeared then to prevent their equipment being used in UK was so that USA-manufactured equipment with USA-controlled backdoors would be implemented instead ... it might only have been financial protectionism but it just seemed too big a protest.
/tinfoilwrappedforfreshness
Google long sold out, friend.
They will eventually just be heavily armored SWAT teams that just go to whatever house the AI flagged and arrest everybody.
I'm quite sure this is linked to the recent protests.
Je suis Charlie > je suis la gendarmerie > l'etat, c'est moi. Back to 1655 in three easy steps.
I find it funny that "dizaines" (tens) got translated to "dozens" (which would be "douzaines", but is rarely used except for eggs).
In this context they're largely interchangeable, but "tens" is much more clunky and probably a worse translation.
BUT that doesn't matter
it being abused against just one or two times in very important contexts (political, human right activists, etc.) can already be a major negative impact
for laws like that the "it's just a few" argument was always worthless even if true
Through there is no legal requirement for the statement to be true in any form or way. Even if they would have explicitly said less then 50 cases, it's not a constraint in the law, so it's meaningless.
Through see my other comment for why even if that statement is fully true in a linguistic sense it still is very bad.
This is a major flaw in Western democracies. A person acting for the government, making a statement that the public would see as official, should be bound by law to tell the truth; or at least not lie nor commit deception.
People like UK ex-PM Johnson are effectively committing treasonous fraud, by lying to the public, and getting off scot-free.
But spyware which can do so exists in endless amounts, including from companies focused on selling it to governments.
Hence also why in recent years physical microphone switches, or e.g. stuff like (I think it was) Apple laptops "physically" disconnecting the microphone/camera if you close the lid have been become increasingly more common and in demand. (Through the demand comes more from bad actors using it then from people being afraid the government spies on them AFIK, but technically there is 100% no difference)
Not just phones looks like.
For the very strange who accept driving the new "smartphones with wheels".
Including, note, the cars with the embedded telephone as mandated by the european union past 2018 - the e-call systems. Some articles went "there could be privacy issues, but it is a remote eventuality": now you see that someone could push as normal an eavesdropper in your car.
My memory may be failing me or confusing things so please correct me, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the baseband lives segregated (with only a narrow communication cannel, kinda as if it were a remote machine) from the remainder of the hardware, so while it could be made to run stuff itself it has no way to physically access to main cpu, ram, mic, nor cams (barring, of course, any vulnerability on the comm channel that would land an exploit in the main OS+hardware).
GPS is another matter, but then again it's baseband so it gotta communicates with towers, so that's a done deal already that does not even require baseband access.
https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...
https://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2010/06/28/a-peek-inside-the-...
---------------------
Google Play Services spyware discussion
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-insanely-better-bat...
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-disable-service-guide...
---------------------
"...the cellular carrier can send blobs of FORTH code right to the radio. The radio firmware also seems to have an IP stack (with TCP) so it can do its own interesting things (both bad and good)..." https://boston.conman.org/2013/01/22.2
"...easily spotted loads and loads of bugs, scattered all over the place, each and every one of which could lead to exploits – crashing the device, and even allowing the attacker to remotely execute code. Remember: all over the air. One of the exploits he found required nothing more but a 73 byte message to get remote code execution. Over the air..."
"... It’s kind of a sobering thought that mobile communications, the cornerstone of the modern world in both developed and developing regions, pivots around software that is of dubious quality, poorly understood, entirely proprietary, and wholly insecure by design." https://www.osnews.com/story/27416/the-second-operating-syst... (archive: https://archive.is/FOR5V)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722539
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722648
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738066
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6724034 <-- Seems to be higher risk with Qualcomm basebands where everything is integrated
-------------------
SIM card reader chips have their own operating system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_card#Design
Rooting SIM cards https://archive.is/3ZohQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722896
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6724215
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6723236
-------------------
They don't want you listening in on John Q. Senator's phone calls, but they sure do...
The scary new part is the turning on the camera/mic.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...
"They want EU rules on the use of spyware by law enforcement, which should only be authorised in exceptional cases for a pre-defined purpose and a limited time."
It would have to be after compromise, which would mean its likely only used on a very small number of cases due to the sensitivity and cost of the technology involved.
But we can't really predict the future and more loose rules could be introduced by the next government with a totally different agenda who might thank for the previous one for creating this legal framework.
Also, this section is weird too:
> They said sensitive professions, including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges and MPs, would not be legitimate targets.
Apparently software engineering is not a sensitive job.
Is it sensitive to compromise a phone, now that there is a national law allowing it, passed through a democratic process?
these times were ironic and still up to your own understanding, because nobody got what really happened then
Abusing emergency location services is a much better explanation here. They can ping the device for a short time and it'll do its best (using A-GPS and WiFi) to provide an accurate position, without involving anyone since it's fully automated. Collecting positions from a carrier's network infrastructure is a more complex and slow task in comparison.
Both left and right are contesting who can be more authoritarian these days.
You left out “republic again” between “restored as a monarchy” and ”back an empire” (and actually, even that leaves out the July Revolution which was a change between two different monarchies, and not just different monarchs, in 1830.)
I was a bit shaken. I believed what you believe before then too.
Edit: Looks like it’s LBS/LCS: https://www.telecomhall.net/t/what-is-lcs-and-lbs/6374
Phone triangulation works by getting signal strength on 3 or more towers, and getting location from that. That's how it works on WiFi as well. Access points see the clients, and each other, and if you have enough data points, you don't even have to configure the locations of the access points. Of course, the location you get back is relative to the access points and the distance between them, so systems provide a quick way to convert to distances based on one or two measurements.
So please don't think 3G is going to protect you from triangulation. It isn't. Now they're decommissioned but even hospital pagers can be triangulated (some of them aren't even 1G, though anything remotely recent is just a cell phone in disguise)
Because of the "emergency services" mandate from governments it works without the sim being registered. Phones MUST be able to immediately call emergency services so sim or no sim, they are registered on the cell phone network using the number of the cellular modem hardware in the phone, the IMEI number. Phones without a SIM or eSIM can be triangulated. Phones that have never had a sim can be triangulated. Phones that had a sim, but now don't (you keep your phone on but have taken the sim out), can be triangulated based on the phone number of the sim (by looking up the IMEI that last used that SIM, then triangulating the IMEI). These systems can track mobile phones as they move, even in places where the signal is so weak phone service doesn't work (though of course, this doesn't exactly help with accuracy)
Of course whether all this works depends on the competence of the large telcos and the police in a specific country. What I said above is what's possible, not what is actually done. What another poster said is true: telcos have internet portals, accessible to the police (and ...) where you enter some information and get location back. This is generally demanded by governments, as the telco is not allowed to know WHO gets tracked by the police in most countries. Yes, in the US telcos are allowed to know, and they can even legally refuse to track someone, but in most of the EU this is not true.
Whether airplane mode prevents your location from being monitored depends on the phone.
That was the case before 5G. They'd only have your location to within a mile or so. 5G gives them your location to within feet. It's because they need to so many more towers.
You mean, a conspiracy in the past to allow governments to sample/siphon data has been proven. That's a pretty different thing than having the entire market physically designing their product so that the government can use it to spy on people.
I don't doubt at all that the government would like companies to do that (they've already openly asked for it regarding encryption after all), but jumping to "it's a(nother) conspiracy!" when there are some pretty damn good explanations that are much closer to Occam's Razor seems irrational to me.
I don't think the tech companies deserve our trust, but I also think that if we go around seeing ghosts and conspiracies in every shadow and under every rock, it's not going to mean anything when the *next Prism happens because everyone will see "the boy who cried wolf" or say "those people always think it's a conspiracy."
Do you see the problem here?
I've seen people literally smoking joints in front of the police station.
Listening in on someone to find evidence of them doing something illegal is actual work, the odds of them doing it to everyone are rather low, I think they'd rather go watch a football game or something.
If I were buying into marketing I would not even have asked the question above in hopes of getting a hard reference to these kinds of details.
† e.g the following tidbits:
> The SEP is designed to be mutually isolated from the main CPU (AP); neither can compromise the other.
> No runtime blobs are designed to have total system access (no ME, no PSP, no TrustZone, nothing of that sort). Almost all blobs are running behind IOMMUs or similar firewalls, with the sole exception of the GPU firmware*. All code running on the main CPUs is under the control of the OS.
> AS machines use a large number of auxiliary firmware blobs, each dedicated to a specific purpose and running on a separate CPU core. This is better than having a smaller number of kitchen sink blobs (like Intel ME), since each blob can only affect a particular subsystem (e.g. display, storage, camera), which makes it harder for multiple blobs to collude in order to compromise the user in a meaningful way. For example, the blob running inside the keyboard controller has no mechanism to communicate with the blob running on the WiFi card, and thus cannot implement a keylogger surreptitiously; the blob running on the display controller similarly has no way to communicate with the network, and thus can't implement a secret screen scraper.
> From a security perspective, these machines may possibly qualify as the most secure general purpose computers available to the public which support third-party OSes, in terms of resistance to attack by non-owners. This is, of course, predicated on some level of trust in Apple, but some level of trust in the manufacturer is required for any system (there is no way to prove the non-existence of hardware backdoors on any machine, so this is not as much of a sticking point as it might initially seem).
> *it's worth pointing out that this firmware is not particularly large, is shipped in plain text and even with some symbols, does not have any functionality to talk via questionable interfaces (network, etc.), and is optional and not running when the OS boots (the OS must explicitly start it)
Which is an entirely different league than, say, Intel ME which completely owns the machine at the design level.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Apple-Platform-Secur...
You must mean the phone network, because GPS doesn't run on SS7.
In 2023 I suspect this is less and less necessary- apple silicon is very fast and a lot of voice comms goes through an app (FaceTime?) anyway but … I’m sure those capabilities are still in the baseband processor …
I'm pretty sure they have hooks into audio systems for wireless emergency alerts, but could be wrong.
And for new macs the off switch for microphone/mic if the lid is closed is hard wired using some "dump circuit logic switch" AFIK.
The problem with lights (even if hard wired) is that you might still find ways to brake them, like finding a way to fry them without braking the camera or switching on/off so fast that it isn't really visible but you still get some image/sound you might be able to post process to a point where it's usable even if not grate. You probably can prevent this with further hard wired circuits, like a hard wired "super slow de-bouncer" which in a on-1->off-2->on makes sure 2 is prevented if not at least Xs passed since 1. And which in a off-2->on-3->off cycle makes sure the LED is on for at least Ys (the camera can be switched off faster, just not on again). But I don't think apple has something like that. At that points the question is why not put in physical switches like e.g. on Framework laptops or some older ThinkPads.
A lot of firmware, and firmware signature validation, is ... not very well done.
Practically it's often not worth it (you already had root+ access. It's doable, but not simple and less uniform applicable.).
But there have been known cases of viruses tryign to persist themself in the firmware of connected devices (which in this context includes all internal devices including the motherboard).
We have already been there, it's just like good old phone calls. They can be intercepted under the proper judicial supervision.
I don't have criteria to answer if this is a necessary evil or directly a blatant totalitarian push, but one needs to consider: does the French government have a bad track record of abusing the capability of eavesdropping any phone communication? has this capability been useful for law enforcement?
> does the French government have a bad track record of abusing the capability of eavesdropping any phone communication?
I'd rather look into possible future scenarios, I don't know about past cases, but I don't really follow french politics. I know discussing politics is HN is not encouraged, so I'd just rather suggest to look up what's coming for France (and EU) if the current government fails and major powers switch. Sorry if you already know this.
> has this capability been useful for law enforcement?
In Hungary, Pegasus was used to eavesdrop on many citizens who were simply in an opposing position. Law enforcement is a good cover for data collection and of course can be effective, but we need transparency and safety to see if these tools are abused or not. There are no good answers I'm afraid.
But any surveillance capability results in “good” as well as bad actors, frustrated with the current limits, asking for just a little more formal power or finding ways to justify informal drift in practice.
The only way to stop surveillance creep is openness and clear principles more coherent than a recursive “well they have been responsible so far, so far as we know” argument.
I'm only speculating, of course.
So, if two students can achieve even 30 meters accuracy in two days, big telecom corporations will certainly do better in a few decades.
EDIT: By the way, it wasn't only triangulation but also signal strength change analysis. It wasn't as serious as it sounds, there are formulas already made for calculating that.
In the US, E911 requires all phones to be able to report their physical location. Phone companies may use this ability to respond to police location requests. I don't know one way or another, but it seems likely.
I googled it and I'm only seeing people complain about this Verizon bloatware from people who bought it through Verizon.
Google don’t index sites which contain that kind of information. :)
More seriously, I too would have bought a Fairphone (for ethical reasons) to replace the crap second-hand Android phone that I’d been using for the past 8 years. However, I recently received a gift of a new iPhone so I probably won’t be getting a new phone for another 8 years or so. The iPhone doesn’t have any bloatware and it does have lots of options for security and privacy so I’m happy to use it from that point of view. Aside from not being able to remove the battery, I don’t think the average user can do much better than that, given that they have no insight into or control over the baseband layer.
I’ve never owned a Pixel but I’d expect (hope) that one purchased directly from Google would be similar to in iPhone bought from Apple.
I just did some brief research, and it seems that it was the case prior to some point in time between 2008 and 2019, but it is now hard-wired. It is discussed near the end of https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams
The engineer quoted in the article pointed out that it may be possible (at least in 2019) to briefly turn the camera on - flashing the led too quickly for someone to see.
I didn't find a discussion of this issue in the May 2022 Apple Platform Security guide.
Sounds like an upside to me.
But the last time I read reported unhandable blabbering devoid of awareness and mental competence, attributed to a "minister of the republic", was just minutes ago. When you hear utterings like "it will save lives" - completely alien to conscience of quality of life, good reason, cleanness and propriety, rejection of absurdity, collaterals etc. - I am afraid they may actually "believe" that (or, better, just "sit on that", "hold on that", "cling to that" in some internal economy).
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/12/5g-positioning--wha...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1:
To locate a mobile telephone geographically, there are two general approaches. One is to use some form of radiolocation from the cellular network; the other is to use a Global Positioning System receiver built into the phone itself. Both approaches are described by the Radio resource location services protocol (LCS protocol).NB I worked in a such place, my phone would be in low 40-50% at the end of the work day, despite being able to endure two days easily if I would be at some other place.
The particulars and thus validity would be for a court to hash out.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English...
In other words, if you found yourself in a dark room with a thousand English speakers who all sounded like Jesse Pinkman, what country would you assume you were in?
English is the dominant second language in the world.
That's weird and pretty interesting if your own accent isn't a male American accent.
But that's my opinion.
This is a dumb observation.
US people needs to stop pretending the USA are the only place that matters on earth.
If you turn your phone off and immediately put it in a Faraday bag, how would it receive a remote command to turn on and start recording audio?
Edit: on the other hand, I'm now considering the possibility that the phone might be recording your audio even without network access and then transmit it later when you take it outside the microwave. So you'd have to be physically far away from the microwave for the microphone not to hear you, which means the microwave and faraday cages don't add anything useful.
If the population does not support the law, the government could be potentially replaced.
But the most probable conclusion is that the population at large would not care.
2-2.5+ million USD depending for a full chain with persistence (lower end of range is for iOS higher end is for Android).
That is probably the lower end of the rough cost to buy that capability which you can use as many times as you want.
https://zerodium.com/images/zerodium_prices_mobiles.png
> Is it sensitive to compromise a phone, now that there is a national law allowing it, passed through a democratic process?
The technology itself is sensitive, when you buy a full chain exploit like the ones that have the public bounty price above, if it gets burnt it's useless for everyone else who bought it after its patched.
Generally exploit brokers don't like it when you burn their exploits.
Is that a lot?
In the US the major cities have police budgets of between $200 million and $5 billion
Yeah and most didn’t have this capability generally considering both the costs and the little amount of use you'd have for it.
You'd expect something more federal like the NSA, CIA or the FBI to have this kind of capability which is why its kinda a big deal when normal cops get it.
The E911 laws, though, only require that the location information be obtained and forwarded when the call is placed.
So, I don't know. I don't know anything beyond that.
I would say most didn't have this capability because it's illegal. In France it is now legal
Last time I checked cell tower triangulation is accurate to between a few hundred and a few thousand feet. Cellular A-GPS can be good to within a few feet inside houses usually but often its within a few tens of feet in accuracy.
That was about what LTE could do. With 4G, they got it down to 20-50 meters. Now they can do much better.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many jurisdictions around the world had similar systems.
edit: Over a stolen phone, no less, not even a person being in danger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614678
Either corporations are allowed to be 'pressured' by the government or they aren't. But of course the legal system will make themselves a nice carveout for their uses like always.
if the information they gather is to be admissible in court as evidence against a person. Police do not need a warrant to save the life of a person.
Of course this applies whether it appears to have a removable "battery" or not.
That's always one of the big issues in opsec/security discussions, we can always imagine a more motivated or well funded attacker but the likelihood of those being deployed against you change with the difficulty of implementing those methods.
