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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: 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.