Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules
The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.
More important than ever:
How to quickly disable Face ID and Touch ID on iPhone (and iPad)
House Votes to Extend—and Expand—a Major US Spy Program
Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
How Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted
The Mapping Center for Evangelism and Church Growth’s founder and president Chris Cooper suggests using the app to conduct neighborly activities such as putting on a barbecue for potential converts, but scattered throughout the app’s training and promotional videos are suggestions to undertake the controversial practice of “prayerwalking.” An idea becoming increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking involves believers flooding so-called “un-Christian” territories in order to combat “demonic strongholds.” In practice, it varies from blessing new neighbors to gathering groups to pray in front of everything from mosques to drag bars in service of “spiritual warfare.”
I don’t want to think less of these people, but they don’t make it easy.
Trump Gives CNBC a Rambling Answer on Why He Backtracked on TikTok Ban
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok while in office, pushing its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to a new owner or face being blocked from American app stores. A House committee advanced legislation last week that would similarly force TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance.
This says everything you need to know about Trump. He’ll say anything that serves him in the right now. He has no impulse control, he has no ability to think strategically, he has no long-term plan.
Banning TikTok (i.e. forcing ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell off TikTok) is the right thing to do. It’s a parasite destroying the ability of people to think critically and deeply. It has decimated the attention spans of our young people, who don’t know a world without social media. TikTok is a cancer.
And so is Facebook. Merely forcing the sale of TikTok to an American company won’t fix the problem. Letting our corporations mine the attention of our young people is better than letting China do it, but not by much.
Start treating all social media like what it is: addictive advertising.
Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies
Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.
Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers’ permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.
Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature — called OnStar Smart Driver — and that their insurance rates went up as a result.
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
Not to beat a dead horse, but this should scare the hell out of of everyone. It’s the biggest privacy story of the year.
🚨🚨🚨
Annual Reminder: 23andMe Is a Dangerous Christmas Gift That Could Have Unforeseen Impacts on Your Entire Family, Your Children, Etc.
Getting your DNA or your loved ones’ DNA sequenced means you are potentially putting people who are related to those people at risk in ways that are easily predictable, but also in ways we cannot yet predict because these databases are still relatively new. I am writing this article right now because of the hack, but my stance on this issue has been the same for years, for reasons outside of the hack.
Daring Fireball: Secretive U.S. Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of U.S. Phone Records
Friendly reminder that regular ol’ phone call or green bubble text message is being spied on.
FaceTime, FaceTime Audio, and iMessage are not — they are encrypted.
If an iPhone user needs to communicate with an Android user, download Signal.
Daring Fireball: Background Information on Hemisphere/DAS
Please no more phone calls. FaceTime Audio only.
The location tracking stuff? Sadly unavoidable (if we want to use cell phones). Cell phones cannot work without location triangulation between the nearest cell towers. If you have a cell phone, smart or dumb, your location is being tracked.
And with the legislative mandate that all cellular-capable devices be capable of making emergency calls even if they don’t have a cell account attached to them, every phone, every cellular watch, every cellular-enabled vehicle is trackable.
Privacy is dead. Computers made that all-but-inevitable. But this is not normal.
If we become accustomed to this (which we have), we will have lost something essential to the resistance of tyranny. Let’s hope our government is never run by an autocratic politician with fascist aims.
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
…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.
You’d be a fool to use anything other than FaceTime Audio, Signal, or another encrypted communication service.
No more phone calls.
Apocalypse-Proof
When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism, windowless and nearly featureless. Its only apertures are a series of ventilation hoods meant to hide microwave-satellite arrays, which communicate with ground-based relay stations and satellites in space.
Blacklight
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Unsubscribe From Everything
If, back in 2003, government surveillance had reached a point that many of us felt the need to self-censor, today it’s private citizens who are imposing the censorship regime. Online mobs savage people for making an insensitive remark, communities shun people for asking questions. The desire to speak freely and without fear is driving not only the creation of platforms like Substack, but actual migration patterns. This is what happens when surveillance and social control are pervasive enough: True enemies, like al-Qaida, are replaced by boogeymen like @TrumpDyke, and dubious figments like “disinformation” supplant real threats like terror. The zealous among us begin policing speech so the actual police don’t have to, and the press, the inevitable organ of every authoritarian regime, either turns a blind eye or actively colludes with the government and its partners to smother unsanctioned views.
We lost a lot for choosing not to have a dialogue about government overreach back in 2013, when Snowden revealed the government’s mass surveillance programs. “Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched,” he once said. “Under observation, we act less free, which means we are less free.” Maybe you hesitated to do a search on Google, or say something in an email because you thought someone might intercept it. After Snowden, writers admitted to turning down work out of the mere possibility of surveillance. The “war on terror” had a chilling effect on speech, which was bad enough. Fast forward to 2020, and scientists were voluntarily taking themselves out of the lockdown debate. If in 2013, we lost a core American value when we chose not to take up the cause of privacy, in 2020, we lost jobs and lives.
No App, No Entry
Even if you do have a smartphone, it’s not great to have it be a single point of failure. It could be lost, stolen, away from cell service, or have a low battery. Most electronic tickets and admission passes don’t seem to work with the Wallet app, and who knows whether an e-mail, app, or Web link will fail when you need it, even if it was cached. A common pattern is to take a screenshot of the barcode or QR code, but that requires more tech-savvy.
I run into this problem all the time. Rather, I watch people I love run into this problem all the time.
A very dear friend lives in an off-the-grid cabin. He’s proudly never used a computer (aside from an Apple Watch, which I set up as his phone and sole electronic device a few years back). Lately, he’s had some health concerns that require near-constant communications with doctors via MyChart… which can only be accessed by a computer or smartphone.
People like him get lost and left behind in a digital world. I say this as an evangelist of the iPhone: the pocket computer is an incredible tool — camera, GPS, offline maps, streaming music, FaceTime, plant identifier, etc. etc. — but the simple fact is that most people have no clue how to use their phones to their max potential…nor do they care to.
There’s a head-in-the-sand element to this I’ve always found frustrating. More than one friend reacts with what looks like rage when their phones (or the internet) doesn’t behave as it “should.” (And when you become known as the “tech friend,” that rage is often directed at you.) I’ve had to learn to handle those people with care and not mirror their anger back at them. Which ain’t easy, because if people just took a fucking second to learn something…
But then there’s my friend in the cabin, who abstains entirely. I cannot convey how much I admire his conviction, and how much I agree when he says that tech is going to be our downfall. “Sure,” he says, “you use it to identify that star, but everyone else uses it to get on instagram and make themselves feel like shit.” He has a point.
The world is leaving him behind, and it can’t rely on people like me to constantly bridge that gap.
VPN Relationship Map
This VPN map shows the relationships between VPN companies, their corporate owners, and paid affiliates who profit from reviewing them positively. It includes information on latest community news, ownership changes, and is updated periodically. Every proven relationship between media companies, content sites, corporate VPNs, and independent VPNs that we could find.
My VPN of choice? Disconnect. Not on this map because it’s not owned by another company nor does it collect your browsing history or any other information about you. Support them if you can.
Snowden Ten Years Later
Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like.
Cory Doctorow: The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point
You might have some swivel-eyed loons in your life. I certainly have my share. Remember that we have common ground.
When they say they don’t trust vaccines because the pharma compa nies are corrupt and their regulators are toothless, that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids, nor to cape for the regulators who let them get away with it.
Likewise, we all want to “save the children.” It’s just that some of us want to save the children from real threats who never seem to face justice – youth pastors, Catholic priests, rich people with private islands, border agencies practicing “family separation” – while swivel-eyed loons want to save kids from imaginary threats (adrenochrome-guzzling Satanists).
Remember all the things they’re right about. Lean into the common ground. Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.