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from the is-Howard-Stern-listening-in-on-you? dept.
A recent techdirt article says that
Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes is taking a closer look at a decade-plus of in-car surveillance, courtesy of electronics and services manufacturers are installing in as many cars as possible.
Following the news that cops are trying to sweat down an Amazon Echo in hopes of hearing murder-related conversations, it's time to revisit the eavesdropping that's gone on for years prior to today's wealth of in-home recording devices.
One of the more recent examples can be found in a 2014 warrant that allowed New York police to trace a vehicle by demanding the satellite radio and telematics provider SiriusXM provide location information.
In this case, SiriusXM complied by turning on its "stolen vehicle recovery" mode, which allowed law enforcement to track the vehicle for ten days. SiriusXM told Forbes it only does this in response to search warrants and court orders. That may be the case for real-time tracking, but any location information captured and stored by SiriusXM can be had with nothing more than a subpoena, as this info is normally considered a third-party record.
It's not just satellite radio companies allowing cops to engage in surreptitious tracking. OnStar and other in-vehicle services have been used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on personal conversations between drivers and passengers.
In at least two cases, individuals unwittingly had their conversations listened in on by law enforcement. In 2001, OnStar competitor ATX Technologies (which later became part of Agero) was ordered to provide "roving interceptions" of a Mercedes Benz S430V. It initially complied with the order in November of that year to spy on audible communications for 30 days, but when the FBI asked for an extension in December, ATX declined, claiming it was overly burdensome.
The 2001 case didn't end well for law enforcement. It wasn't that the court had an issue with the eavesdropping, but rather that the act of listening in limited the functionality of the in-car tech, which the court found to be overly-burdensome.
[...] Law enforcement may find encryption to be slowing things down in terms of accessing cell phone contents, but everything else -- from in-car electronics to the Internet of Things -- is playing right into their hands.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @07:16PM
I think everyone likes to trot out 1984. When this is a better analogy for what our world is turning into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World [wikipedia.org] We let them do it because we want the quick cool thing.
This bit from the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_Nineteen_Eighty-Four [wikipedia.org] Sums up the difference of the two books.
If you like to trot out 1984 you really should read the mirror piece Animal Farm. Orwell liked to play with particular government orders and take them to their extremes to see why they would break or not be a good thing. I think people sort of missed his messages and grabbed onto the trappings of his stories. In 1984 he created the surveillance state as it was a quick way to create an ever reaching totalitarian state. In Animal Farm he created the natural cliques that form out of humans to show why Communism eventually leads to similar totalitarian ideals. Most science fiction is like this. You create a fantastic world that is based on cool 'ideas' that from the 1930/1940s were being created by science (hence science fiction). But the story was the important bit. The exploration of what people would do in that new world created by the science. It is like star trek. The good episodes were the ones where they did not focus on the technology but on the people and how they were affected by it. Or something like the matrix which is supposed to be about a bunch of hackers stuck in a weird world. There is maybe 3 or 4 scenes in all 3 movies where they are in front of a computer doing something. The story was not about hacking it was about the humans stuck in the computer.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, why should you care if the police are monitoring where you drive or what you talk about in your car?"
To this I would state. Why are you not following the law of the land and getting a warrant to do so?
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Friday January 20 2017, @07:30PM
From the Wiki
> Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
> Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
> equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
Pretty impressive from someone who couldn't imagine how, courtesy of the Internet, people would actually do it to themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @08:13PM
I find this puts it into perspective too https://xkcd.com/1227/ [xkcd.com]
We look upon the past and think 'how did they do it without xyz'?! When the reality is they did not even care because they did not know about it. When what we did with the internet is take the very systems they built re-imaged them and smashed them into 1 interface HTTP. With the internet we just have more immediacy of what is going on. Where as it used to take a modicum of physical work.
Take for example video games. I collect them. I have about 2500 purchased copies and about 30k in 'warez'. No way I can play all of them. Out of each generation of games there is a tiny handful that are amazing 'must play' games and a few 'hidden' treasures no one played because they just did not get sold much for whatever reason. There are however hundreds of games in each generation that are not worth playing/owning at all. We look back at say the NES and think of Zelda or Super Mario Bros most were not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @11:08PM
Are you saying Eric Bristow's Darts was not a classic? How DARE you, sir!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @11:23PM
i doubt huxley cared. he was probably just using insider knowledge(his brother or somebody was working on the shit he put in his book) to make a buck/get notoriety. maybe make himself feel better about his family being involved in the domestication of the human animal.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 20 2017, @10:02PM
Yes, obviously Brave New World has interesting comparisons with today's world too, especially the apathy which I invoked in my post. So thanks for the connection.
But a primary focus of 1984 is the surveillance state, while that's less of a focus in Brave New World. (The whole world of Brave New World is incredibly managed, of course, but the gist of the book's themes are around individualism vs. consumerism, and of course the whole worship of the Ford assembly line ideal.) The reason I brought up Orwell was to make a closer connection to the concerns of TFA, which are about invasive government surveillance. As for Animal Farm, as an allegory for the Russian Revolution (and its aftermath), I see less relevance to the present discussion... though obviously it too is a great book.
And by the way, I didn't really mean to imply that Orwell couldn't conceive of other possible dystopian developments. I was sort of riffing off of the plot of 1984 to make a point about how these stories of increasing surveillance come up almost every week... and despite that fact that many people use the phrase "Big Brother" the reaction is very different than Orwell's world... and nobody seems to care.