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Exclusive: Feds Demand Apple And Google Hand Over Names Of 10,000+ Users Of A Gun Scope App

Own a rifle? Got a scope to go with it? The U.S. government might soon know who you are, where you live and how to reach you.

That’s because the government wants Apple and Google to hand over names, phone numbers and other identifying data of at least 10,000 users of a single gun scope app, Forbes has discovered. It’s an unprecedented move: Never before has a case been disclosed in which American investigators demanded personal data of users of a single app from Apple and Google. And never has an order been made public where the feds have asked the Silicon Valley giants for info on so many thousands of people in one go.

According to an application for a court order filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on September 5, investigators want information on users of Obsidian 4, a tool used to control rifle scopes made by night-vision specialist American Technologies Network Corp. The app allows gun owners to get a live stream, take video and calibrate their gun scope from an Android or iPhone device. According to the Google Play page for Obsidian 4, it has more than 10,000 downloads. Apple doesn’t provide download numbers, so it’s unclear how many iPhone owners could be swept up in this latest government data grab.

If the court approves the demand, and Apple and Google decide to hand over the information, it could include data on thousands of people who have nothing to do with the crimes being investigated, privacy activists warned. Edin Omanovic, lead on Privacy International's State Surveillance program, said it would set a dangerous precedent and scoop up “huge amounts of innocent people’s personal data.”

“Such orders need to be based on suspicion and be particularized—this is neither,” Omanovic added.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/09/06/exclusive-feds-demand-apple-and-google-hand-over-names-of-10000-users-of-a-gun-scope-app/#4bf4c5ca2423

Also,
Exclusive: ATN gun scope maker responds about feds demanding its app user data from Apple and Google

The Department of Justice did not contact rifle scope manufacturer American Technologies Network Corp. (ATN) before filing a court order on Thursday demanding Apple and Google turn over user data from ATN’s mobile app.

Following initial reporting on the government demand from Apple and Google of user data for the Obsidian 4 app, ATN stated on Friday that they were not aware of the government’s request for information from the tech giants until a Forbes article broke the story. ATN advised they would not be turning over user information to the DOJ unless required by law.

“ATN has not been contacted by the Department of Justice, Apple, or Google,” the company said in a statement to American Military News on Friday.

“ATN will protect its customers and their identifying data to the absolute extent possible under U.S. law. And, it will not provide any information regarding the identity of our customers to any third party unless specifically required by law,” the statement continued.

The turnover of data could affect up to 10,000 app users who have downloaded the app through the Apple Store and Google Play.

The Obsidian 4 app allows its users to pair their phone with their rifle scopes, helping users calibrate their scopes and allowing them to take video and live streams.

Initial reporting of the DOJ information request, indicated the court order was later sealed from public viewing.

Before the court documents were sealed, Forbes reported that part of the court order alleges the company’s scopes have been found in shipments to Hong Kong, Canada and The Netherlands but have not had the necessary import licenses required by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation.

A report published by the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium also claims the scopes in question had made it into the hands of Taliban fighters.

“The manner in which the ATN Obsidian 4 application is paired with this scope manufactured by Company A supports the conclusion that the information requested herein will assist the government in identifying networks engaged in the unlawful export of this rifle scope,” part of the order reportedly read.

The DOJ’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement department is apparently seeking the data to find end users connected to the shipments of rifle scopes that violated the arms export laws.

Though the import of their products is facing government scrutiny, ATN itself is not under investigation for the alleged export violations.

  The government’s requests for app user information sparked backlash from privacy advocates who warned the court order is overly broad and threatens to gather data from innocent users.

Tor Ekeland, a privacy lawyer, said the DOJ order amounted to a “fishing expedition.”

Ekeland warned the government may begin with a focus on one specific case but eventually use the overturned data to pursue other cases against unrelated app users.

Does anyone wonder what, and who, the government might target with their next fishing expedition? How secure is your baby monitoring hardware and software? Your GPS device? Your vehicle?

We have the dreaded Polycom 4xx phones and equally dreaded Plantronics headsets.

It's all neatly integrated with the PC, Outlook, Skype, VOIP etc. Make a call from the computer mouse / screen and use the headset, or even handset on the phone. Set up favorite contacts in skype and they are the contacts on the tiny screen of your phone desk set. Just as Outlook and Skype show green, yellow, red or blank indicators of whether someone is present, away from desk for xx minutes, in a meeting or not logged in, the phone screen shows these same colors around the icon of each person on the directory listing on the desk set's screen.

When it all works it's neat.

Sometimes you have to log your phone in to your corporate account. Using the phone's ten key pad. This is a horrible life altering experience suitable only as an enhanced interrogation technique.

But there is the BToE (better together over ethernet) software you can add to the computer so that the computer logs the phone into the account of whoever is using the computer. Nifty. But this software is hard to find. Even for IT departments apparently. But with sufficient Google-fu and multiple tries, I found it.

Last I would mention that both the Polycom and Plantronics units each come with an AC adapter. Similar looking barrel connectors from the AC adapter to the respective desk units. But one unit is 9 volts and the other (phone) is 48 volts. I'm just waiting until someone, in one of the numerous offices in US / Canada, who happens to use this particular equipment, mixes up which power supply goes with which unit.

When I started writing this, I experienced a power flicker. Maybe use a battery-backed power strip so you don't get a taste of Afghanistan. Keep in mind that the shape of the official USB-C power supply is awkward and could take up more than one outlet on a strip.

Overall, Pi4 4GB with Raspbian works well as a desktop. Performance is reasonable and compares well to my 2011 laptop. RAM usage of Raspbian is very low. You may want to tweak it to use more of your RAM to reduce activity on the microSD card.

Ethernet and USB boot aren't available yet, but you don't necessarily need an SSD for boot/files. I'm using cheap 32 GB microSD cards, not the ones with A1 or A2 "Application class" IOPS, and it works great most of the time. The speed of the microSD interface was doubled, so that helps. Some things may suck. For example, I tried to download a 1 GB file from Mega, and it was in the ballpark of 100 times slower than the HDD laptop for no apparent reason. I don't know if that is a problem with sustained speeds or the browser-based encryption scheme Mega uses not being accelerated correctly.

I used the Pi4 in open air for a while, but switched to a Kodi FLIRC case. Temperatures now stay around 48-52°C during light use, or closer to 55°C under heavier use. It will never throttle in this case unless I start to look at overclocking it.

One person I gave a Pi4 to can't display video with LibreELEC even though it works fine on the displays I tested. However, LibreELEC for Pi4 is an alpha version and hasn't been updated since July 25. Kodi (Debian) within Raspbian does work, although it crashes when I exit it.

I have LibreELEC running on a Pi4 2GB and it is pretty snappy. Here is a short review of LibreELEC on Pi4. The 1GB model should be fine for LibreELEC, 2GB is regarded as a better choice than 1GB for 4K resolution, while 4GB is probably completely unnecessary.

In Chromium on Raspbian, video playback is still done using the CPU AFAIK, which will be fixed later. Aside from complaints others have had about video playback, I think I've noticed a weird lack of picture quality at 720p on YouTube, which I'm hoping will go away once hardware acceleration is switched on. I have seen some screen tearing, for which there is an explanation. I also hear weird clickiness/pops on some audio playback over headphones, but I need to pin down the cause.

I am looking into RetroPie for another user I am gifting a Pi4 to. No officially working version for Pi4 is available yet, but the expectation is that the newest consoles that Pi4 could emulate with acceptable performance are Nintendo 64, PS1, etc. N64 is probably a milestone in terms of emulation desirability. People are already testing GameCube on Pi4, but with generally bad performance. Part of the puzzle is that Pi4 supports OpenGL ES 3.0, up from 2.0 of the Pi3B+. But OpenGL ES 3.2 or Vulkan support will be needed to get performance closer to competing ARM platforms like the Nvidia Shield TV and add more graphics features that something like Dolphin would need. Improving the graphics driver is on the Pi Foundation agenda, with OpenGL ES 3.1 being worked on, but who knows when that will be done.

One interesting note is that contrary to initial announcements, Pi4 has LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM, not LPDDR4-2400. That fact was corrected on this page after yours truly pointed it out. Bragging aside, that incorrect info was copied endlessly by news outlets reporting the announcement. Wikipedia also has the incorrect speed. So yeah, that's pretty silly. The memory speed is up massively from previous gen, which was LPDDR2-800 (overclocked to 900 MHz), AFAIK.

Since the Raspberry Pi forums hates wishlists, I'll put one here for fun. My assumption is that Pi5 would come out in 2022, Pi6 in 2025:

802.11ax support: This standard offers a number of improvements over 802.11ac. I think it uses some spectrum closer to 1 GHz (an expanded 2.4 GHz band), which should improve range and wall penetration.

Better/actual Bluetooth 5 support: The Pi3B+ and Pi4B both use the same wireless chip. Bluetooth 5 "support" can be added to the older model with a firmware update. But it does not support the new BT5 modes which allow doubled speed at short range or quadrupled range at 1/8 speed. This is a problem with many more products than the Pi, because the Bluetooth SIG sucks and labels too many features as optional. It makes the USB standards look sane. They also need to adopt Opus.

Displays: Without overclocking, you are limited to a 4K display @ 60 Hz and a 4K display @ 30 Hz at the same time. Obviously, that could be improved. Given that Broadcom's SoC GPUs appear to be aimed primarily at TVs, it's inevitable that a future iteration of Pi will get the 8K display support that almost nobody needs.

Codecs: AV1 hardware decoding support would be great for the next iteration. It's unfortunate that there is basically zero support for AV1 in 2019 consumer products, but the situation could be improved by 2022. Maybe AV2 support is on the table (before Google switched to AV1, they were planning on releasing VP10 and future versions at an aggressive 18 month pace). H.266 could also be a thing at that point, although I'd rather see MPEG get brutalized in the market. There are concerns that patent trolling will slow down AV1 adoption or kill it, so expect that to happen in the worst timeline.

eMMC storage: I don't care, but a lot of people seem to. I have no problem swapping microSD cards (don't sneeze), and if I wanted better I would use an attached SSD which are getting very cheap. The Compute Module versions do have eMMC.

Memory: 4 GB is very adequate, but any desktop-oriented system could benefit from more (including to the the point of universal memory where your storage = RAM and you have hundreds of gigabytes of it). Word is that 64-bit Raspbian will likely be released before a Pi5. Pi4's SoC can technically address up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 memory. State-of-the-art is currently 12 GB LPDDR(4X|5), with 16 GB expected next year. We may finally be at a point where memory prices continue to decline instead of shooting back up. If there is any change at all from this generation, I would expect to see Pi5 with 2/4/8 GB versions. 2 GB would be adequate for many use cases, but 8 GB as a flagship would be nice. I doubt they would bother with a 6 GB model. Also, rumors of a Pi4 8GB were denied and attributed to a misprint in the user manual.

Better performance, but with lower heat: I think the Pi Foundation has heard enough complaints by now to understand that the heat issue is a bad meme for them, and there needs to be a reversal from using more power at higher heat every generation. Worst of all is that the official plastic case will cause the SoC to throttle under light/normal use. Now that Cortex-A72 cores are in use, any successor core designs used should allow higher performance with better efficiency (although they might want to skip A73: "In reviews, the Cortex-A73 showed improved integer instructions per clock (IPC), though lower floating point IPC, relative to the Cortex-A72."). There's also many nodes under "28nm". People seem to think that it will be stuck on "28nm" for a decade but I think "20nm" and "14nm" are possible (GlobalFoundries is stuck at "14nm" and a Chinese foundry is going to be at "14nm" soon, so there will be a lot of competition on that node). More efficient FinFETs could also be available.

Every iteration of Pi (2/3/4) has delivered massively improved performance over previous models. That might slow down for version 5... unless they bump up the core count. 6 or 8 cores may be coming. I'm not sure if a die shrink is needed first. I doubt that a future Pi will adopt big.LITTLE, but maybe it should. Maybe that is a way to ensure compatibility with older models, if done right.

3DSoC: This DARPA/SkyWater Technology Foundry project has the potential to increase performance to/beyond current HEDT levels while lowering power consumption back to Raspberry Pi Zero levels. It *could* revolutionize personal computing and create a situation where almost all people would be satisifed using a Pi or other single board computer at all times. While 3DSoC would be able to use larger, older nodes like "90nm", costs for "90nm" 3DSoC are projected to be comparable to conventional "7nm". If this does materialize on schedule, Pi Foundation and Broadcom will have to respond eventually or they risk being rendered utterly obsolete by faster-moving competitors. There have been plenty of Pi clones, but nothing 3+ orders of magnitude faster in the same footprint.

Kobo: Kobo debuts Libra H2O e-reader, updates software with more tools for readers

Kobo’s new Libra H20 is like a cheaper Kindle Oasis

Amazon: Amazon Kindle Oasis 2019 Review – It Could Replace Paper

Bonus thing: Acer Unveils Predator PowerGem: Claims Thermal Pad Boosts CPU Performance by Over 12%

San Francisco board labels NRA a 'domestic terrorist organization'

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association (NRA) a "domestic terrorist organization" following the shooting in Gilroy, Calif., where four people, including the gunman, were killed.

The resolution, which local Fox affiliate KTVU reported passed on Tuesday, declares the gun rights group to be a terrorist organization and calls on other cities and government entities to make similar declarations. The resolution itself has no legal weight.

The resolution argues that the group "musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence."

New research from Belgium provides evidence that deficits in emotion understanding and emotion management are related to right-wing and prejudiced attitudes.

The researchers found that individuals with weaker emotional abilities -- particularly emotional understanding and management -- tended to score higher on a measure of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.

Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality trait that describes the tendency to submit to political authority and be hostile towards other groups, while social dominance orientation is a measure of a person's preference for inequality among social groups.

"The results of this study were univocal. People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality -- the two basic dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology -- show lower levels of emotional abilities..."

Those with lower emotional and cognitive abilities were also more likely to agree with blatantly prejudiced statements such as "The White race is superior to all other races."

"Of course, caution should be exercised in the interpretation of such results... One cannot discredit any ideology on the basis of such results as those presently obtained. Only in a distant future we will be able to look back upon our times, and then we can maybe judge which ideologies were the best. Cognitively and emotionally smart people can make wrong decisions as well."

Well, yeah, you do have to be a bit of a sociopath to think like a "right winger". Empathy is an anathema. Besides, emotion is a woman's thing, right? But which direction will evolution take us?

I think I may just have earned my RYA Dinghy Sailing Level 2 badge. Can I call myself Captain now?

Update: I have in my hand a piece of paper.

Conversion therapy group founder comes out as gay, apologizes

The founder of one of the nation’s largest conversion therapy programs, who spent decades leading the organization, now says he is gay, apologizing for his role in the practice.

McKrae Game, who founded and led Hope for Wholeness in South Carolina, publicly announced he was gay in early June, more than two years after the organization’s board of directors abruptly fired him.

In a Facebook post last week, Game, 51, said he was “wrong,” adding: “Please forgive me.”

“I certainly regret where I caused harm,” he wrote. “Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful."

Also at NBC.