Tag Archives: surveillance

Post-Roe Privacy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/07/post-roe-privacy.html

This is an excellent essay outlining the post-Roe privacy threat model. (Summary: period tracking apps are largely a red herring.)

Taken together, this means the primary digital threat for people who take abortion pills is the actual evidence of intention stored on your phone, in the form of texts, emails, and search/web history. Cynthia Conti-Cook’s incredible article “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary details what we know now about how digital evidence has been used to prosecute women who have been pregnant. That evidence includes search engine history, as in the case of the prosecution of Latice Fisher in Mississippi. As Conti-Cook says, Ms. Fisher “conduct[ed] internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage, ‘buy abortion pills, mifepristone online, misoprostol online,’ and ‘buy misoprostol abortion pill online,’” and then purchased misoprostol online. Those searches were the evidence that she intentionally induced a miscarriage. Text messages are also often used in prosecutions, as they were in the prosecution of Purvi Patel, also discussed in Conti-Cook’s article.

These examples are why advice from reproductive access experts like Kate Bertash focuses on securing text messages (use Signal and auto-set messages to disappear) and securing search queries (use a privacy-focused web browser, and use DuckDuckGo or turn Google search history off). After someone alerts police, digital evidence has been used to corroborate or show intent. But so far, we have not seen digital evidence be a first port of call for prosecutors or cops looking for people who may have self-managed an abortion. We can be vigilant in looking for any indications that this policing practice may change, but we can also be careful to ensure we’re focusing on mitigating the risks we know are indeed already being used to prosecute abortion-seekers.

[…]

As we’ve discussed above, just tracking your period doesn’t necessarily put you at additional risk of prosecution, and would only be relevant should you both become (or be suspected of becoming) pregnant, and then become the target of an investigation. Period tracking is also extremely useful if you need to determine how pregnant you might be, especially if you need to evaluate the relative access and legal risks for your abortion options.

It’s important to remember that if an investigation occurs, information from period trackers is probably less legally relevant than other information from your phone.

See also EFF’s privacy guide for those seeking an abortion.

Ubiquitous Surveillance by ICE

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/07/ubiquitous-surveillance-by-ice.html

Report by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology published a comprehensive report on the surprising amount of mass surveillance conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has ­ without any judicial, legislative or public oversight ­ reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.

ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.

Surveillance by Driverless Car

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/surveillance-by-driverless-car.html

San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

ICE Is a Domestic Surveillance Agency

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/ice-is-a-domestic-surveillance-agency.html

Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US:

When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.

ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.

EDITED TO ADD (5/13): A news article.

Stalking with an Apple Watch

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/03/stalking-with-an-apple-watch.html

The malicious uses of these technologies are scary:

Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the woman’s passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the woman’s passenger side front car wheel and then used the Watch to track her movements. When police eventually confronted him, he admitted the Watch was his. Now, he’s reportedly being charged with attaching an electronic tracking device to the woman’s vehicle.

Using Radar to Read Body Language

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/03/using-radar-to-read-body-language.html

Yet another method of surveillance:

Radar can detect you moving closer to a computer and entering its personal space. This might mean the computer can then choose to perform certain actions, like booting up the screen without requiring you to press a button. This kind of interaction already exists in current Google Nest smart displays, though instead of radar, Google employs ultrasonic sound waves to measure a person’s distance from the device. When a Nest Hub notices you’re moving closer, it highlights current reminders, calendar events, or other important notifications.

Proximity alone isn’t enough. What if you just ended up walking past the machine and looking in a different direction? To solve this, Soli can capture greater subtleties in movements and gestures, such as body orientation, the pathway you might be taking, and the direction your head is facing — ­aided by machine learning algorithms that further refine the data. All this rich radar information helps it better guess if you are indeed about to start an interaction with the device, and what the type of engagement might be.

[…]

The ATAP team chose to use radar because it’s one of the more privacy-friendly methods of gathering rich spatial data. (It also has really low latency, works in the dark, and external factors like sound or temperature don’t affect it.) Unlike a camera, radar doesn’t capture and store distinguishable images of your body, your face, or other means of identification. “It’s more like an advanced motion sensor,” Giusti says. Soli has a detectable range of around 9 feet­ — less than most cameras­ — but multiple gadgets in your home with the Soli sensor could effectively blanket your space and create an effective mesh network for tracking your whereabouts in a home.

“Privacy-friendly” is a relative term.

These technologies are coming. They’re going to be an essential part of the Internet of Things.

Vulnerability in Stalkerware Apps

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/03/vulnerability-in-stalkerware-apps.html

TechCrunch is reporting — but not describing in detail — a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isn’t in the apps installed on the victims’ phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app collects. The article is worth reading, less for the description of the vulnerability and more for the shadowy string of companies behind these stalkerware apps.

Bypassing Apple’s AirTag Security

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/bypassing-apples-airtag-security.html

A Berlin-based company has developed an AirTag clone that bypasses Apple’s anti-stalker security systems. Source code for these AirTag clones is available online.

So now we have several problems with the system. Apple’s anti-stalker security only works with iPhones. (Apple wrote an Android app that can detect AirTags, but how many people are going to download it?) And now non-AirTags can piggyback on Apple’s system without triggering the alarms.

Apple didn’t think this through nearly as well as it claims to have. I think the general problem is one that I have written about before: designers just don’t have intimate threats in mind when building these systems.

Possible Government Surveillance of the Otter.ai Transcription App

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/possible-government-surveillance-of-the-otter-ai-transcription-app.html

A reporter interviews a Uyghur human-rights advocate, and uses the Otter.ai transcription app.

The next day, I received an odd note from Otter.ai, the automated transcription app that I had used to record the interview. It read: “Hey Phelim, to help us improve your Otter’s experience, what was the purpose of this particular recording with titled ‘Mustafa Aksu’ created at ‘2021-11-08 11:02:41’?”

Customer service or Chinese surveillance? Turns out it’s hard to tell.

The EARN IT Act Is Back

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/the-earn-it-act-is-back.html

Senators have reintroduced the EARN IT Act, requiring social media companies (among others) to administer a massive surveillance operation on their users:

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online — backups, websites, cloud photos, and more — is scanned.

Slashdot thread.

China’s Olympics App Is Horribly Insecure

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/chinas-olympics-app-is-horribly-insecure.html

China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes.

Key Findings:

  • MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
  • MY2022 is fairly straightforward about the types of data it collects from users in its public-facing documents. However, as the app collects a range of highly sensitive medical information, it is unclear with whom or which organization(s) it shares this information.
  • MY2022 includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content. The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies.
  • While the vendor did not respond to our security disclosure, we find that the app’s security deficits may not only violate Google’s Unwanted Software Policy and Apple’s App Store guidelines but also China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection, providing potential avenues for future redress.

News article:

It’s not clear whether the security flaws were intentional or not, but the report speculated that proper encryption might interfere with some of China’s ubiquitous online surveillance tools, especially systems that allow local authorities to snoop on phones using public wireless networks or internet cafes. Still, the researchers added that the flaws were probably unintentional, because the government will already be receiving data from the app, so there wouldn’t be a need to intercept the data as it was being transferred.

[…]

The app also included a list of 2,422 political keywords, described within the code as “illegalwords.txt,” that worked as a keyword censorship list, according to Citizen Lab. The researchers said the list appeared to be a latent function that the app’s chat and file transfer function was not actively using.

The US government has already advised athletes to leave their personal phones and laptops home and bring burners.

San Francisco Police Illegally Spying on Protesters

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/san-francisco-police-illegally-spying-on-protesters.html

Last summer, the San Francisco police illegally used surveillance cameras at the George Floyd protests. The EFF is suing the police:

This surveillance invaded the privacy of protesters, targeted people of color, and chills and deters participation and organizing for future protests. The SFPD also violated San Francisco’s new Surveillance Technology Ordinance. It prohibits city agencies like the SFPD from acquiring, borrowing, or using surveillance technology, without prior approval from the city’s Board of Supervisors, following an open process that includes public participation. Here, the SFPD went through no such process before spying on protesters with this network of surveillance cameras.

It’s feels like a pretty easy case. There’s a law, and the SF police didn’t follow it.

Tech billionaire Chris Larsen is on the side of the police. He thinks that the surveillance is a good thing, and wrote an op-ed defending it.

I wouldn’t be writing about this at all except that Chris is a board member of EPIC, and used his EPIC affiliation in the op-ed to bolster his own credentials. (Bizarrely, he linked to an EPIC page that directly contradicts his position.) In his op-ed, he mischaracterized the EFF’s actions and the facts of the lawsuit. It’s a mess.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit wrote a good rebuttal to Larsen’s piece. And this week, EPIC published what is effectively its own rebuttal:

One of the fundamental principles that underlies EPIC’s work (and the work of many other groups) on surveillance oversight is that individuals should have the power to decide whether surveillance tools are used in their communities and to impose limits on their use. We have fought for years to shed light on the development, procurement, and deployment of such technologies and have worked to ensure that they are subject to independent oversight through hearings, legal challenges, petitions, and other public forums. The CCOPS model, which was developed by ACLU affiliates and other coalition partners in California and implemented through the San Francisco ordinance, is a powerful mechanism to enable public oversight of dangerous surveillance tools. The access, retention, and use policies put in place by the neighborhood business associations operating these networks provide necessary, but not sufficient, protections against abuse. Strict oversight is essential to promote both privacy and community safety, which includes freedom from arbitrary police action and the freedom to assemble.

So far, EPIC has not done anything about Larsen still being on its board. (Others have criticized them for keeping him on.) I don’t know if I have an opinion on this. Larsen has done good work on financial privacy regulations, which is a good thing. But he seems to be funding all these surveillance cameras in San Francisco, which is really bad.

Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/using-foreign-nationals-to-bypass-us-surveillance-restrictions.html

Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation.

New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than previously believed.

What’s most interesting to me about this new information is how the US used the Australians to get around domestic spying laws:

For legal reasons, the FBI did not monitor outgoing messages from Anom devices determined to be inside the U.S. Instead, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) monitored them on behalf of the FBI, according to previously published court records. In those court records unsealed shortly before the announcement of the Anom operation, FBI Special Agent Nicholas Cheviron wrote that the FBI received Anom user data three times a week, which contained the messages of all of the users of Anom with some exceptions, including “the messages of approximately 15 Anom users in the U.S. sent to any other Anom device.”

[…]

Stewart Baker, partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, and Bryce Klehm, associate editor of Lawfare, previously wrote that “The ‘threat to life; standard echoes the provision of U.S. law that allows communications providers to share user data with law enforcement without legal process under 18 U.S.C. § 2702. Whether the AFP was relying on this provision of U.S. law or a more general moral imperative to take action to prevent imminent threats is not clear.” That section of law discusses the voluntary disclosure of customer communications or records.

When asked about the practice of Australian law enforcement monitoring devices inside the U.S. on behalf of the FBI, Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement “Multiple intelligence community officials have confirmed to me, in writing, that intelligence agencies cannot ask foreign partners to conduct surveillance that the U.S. would be legally prohibited from doing itself. The FBI should follow this same standard. Allegations that the FBI outsourced warrantless surveillance of Americans to a foreign government raise troubling questions about the Justice Department’s oversight of these practices.”

I and others have long suspected that the NSA uses foreign nationals to get around restrictions that prevent it from spying on Americans. It is interesting to see the FBI using the same trick.

Apple AirTags Are Being Used to Track People and Cars

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/12/apple-airtags-are-being-used-to-track-people-and-cars.html

This development suprises no one who has been paying attention:

Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices then report where an AirTag has last been seen. Unlike similar tracking products from competitors such as Tile, Apple added features to prevent abuse, including notifications like the one Ms. Estrada received and automatic beeping. (Tile plans to release a feature to prevent the tracking of people next year, a spokeswoman for that company said.)

[…]

A person who doesn’t own an iPhone might have a harder time detecting an unwanted AirTag. AirTags aren’t compatible with Android smartphones. Earlier this month, Apple released an Android app that can scan for AirTags — but you have to be vigilant enough to download it and proactively use it.

Apple declined to say if it was working with Google on technology that would allow Android phones to automatically detect its trackers.

People who said they have been tracked have called Apple’s safeguards insufficient. Ms. Estrada said she was notified four hours after her phone first noticed the rogue gadget. Others said it took days before they were made aware of an unknown AirTag. According to Apple, the timing of the alerts can vary depending on the iPhone’s operating system and location settings.

The European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/10/the-european-parliament-voted-to-ban-remote-biometric-surveillance.html

It’s not actually banned in the EU yet — the legislative process is much more complicated than that — but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance.

To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, saying citizens should only be monitored when suspected of a crime.

The parliament has also called for a ban on the use of private facial recognition databases — such as the controversial AI system created by U.S. startup Clearview (also already in use by some police forces in Europe) — and said predictive policing based on behavioural data should also be outlawed.

MEPs also want to ban social scoring systems which seek to rate the trustworthiness of citizens based on their behaviour or personality.