• TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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    5 months ago

    Our local sheriff is using some spy level shit in our county that he refuses to explain.

    He keeps “happening” upon crimes just “on accident.” yesterday it was “stopped to take a pee in public park and caught a baddie” and two days before that it was “just happen to follow and pull over a guy with lots of pounds of pot hidden in the car.”

    The US police are spying on Americans phones, internet, GPS, and everything with no judicial recourse because it is corporations spying and then “giving the info” to the police for money.

    The US law enforcement has gone full STAZI but using capitalism as additional cover.

    The US is dead.

  • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    It’s always a contest between security tools and penetration tools. The problem comes when law enforcement can do this without fair protections of privacy, say if they can easily establish probable cause ( My detection dog is signalling you have illegal data on your phone ) or they are allowed to get a warrant post-hoc for an otherwise illegal search.

    …Or they do the illegal search and then engage in parallel reconstruction e.g. make a fake story about following up on an informant.

    Once the police just seize and crack your phone on a whim, then the state no longer respects your privacy and autonomy, which means you can no longer consent to be governed, rather are controlled by gunpoint (surveillance and use of force). This is one of the critical ingredients to autocratic rule, since it does a lot to neuter the capacity of discontent turning into revolt.

  • anlumo@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’m pretty sure it used to be easier with phones that didn’t have full disk encryption.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    stingrays, people.

    they sell the exploits and are all hush hush about it.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Stingrays don’t do shit for this. That’s mostly real time location data focused in by tricking your phone into reporting its location to a fake cell tower controlled by an adversary. That doesn’t get into the data in your phone, and even if someone used the fake tower to man in the middle, by default pretty much all of a phone’s Internet traffic is encrypted from the ISP.

      The world of breaking disk encryption on devices is a completely different line of technology, tools, and techniques.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        stingrays can compromise a phone through modem exploits, and pull data from there.

        though not all of them are made equal, they are an entire category of devices.

    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      IMSI catching is a different thing.

      But yes, exploits are sold by gray hats rather than by white hats and closed. The NSA is supposed to be on top of this, but instead of closing exploits, they keep them to enhance their anti-terror spying, which they then trickle out to US Law Enforcement, especially if there’s loot (liquid assets) that are easy to seize.

      Law enforcement in the US is mostly a highway robbery racket.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    5 months ago

    Easier is a very relative term. It’ll be really expensive to use a genuine zero-day to do it. Such exploits are few and far between.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      But known exploits that have been patched, but not applied because they didn’t update their phone, are plentiful enough.

      Update your phones. Reboot them regularly, too.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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        5 months ago

        This is true, but becoming an increasingly less important factor because devices now ship with automatic updates enabled by default.

        Personally, if I had to guess as someone who studies exploits for a living, I’d wager the device isn’t the most recent model and is probably a few years old, so there are likely known unpatchable bootrom or firmware bugs that can be used from their private arsenal without having to risk an actual zero day exploit.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    This is the would be assassin’s phone.

    They gave that to the NSA or FBI Counter Intel guys who are hooked in with NSA.

    Your phone is not going there.

    However I would be on the lookout for that tech coming down the pipelines.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          I did and I said that. A shitty android. If I meant to say that all android are shitty I would have just said “must’ve been an android”

          Edit" apparenyly “mist-ve” is more of a word than “must’ve” according to my keyboard.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Just two days after the attempted assassination at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it “gained access” to the shooter’s phone.

    Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones.

    The bureau famously butted heads with Apple in late 2015 after the company refused to help law enforcement get around the encryption on the San Bernardino, California shooter’s iPhone.

    Early in the following year, Apple refused a federal court order to help the FBI access the shooter’s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor for the iPhone’s encryption software.

    “The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,” Cook wrote.

    Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Pensacola shooting was one of the last times federal law enforcement agencies loudly denounced encryption.


    The original article contains 1,208 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Never keep anything on your phone that would require you to lock it.

    I’ve never locked my phone.

  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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    5 months ago

    A 2020 investigation by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization Upturn found that more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had access to mobile device forensic tools (MDTFs).

  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    For GrapheneOS full disk encryption, am I correct in understanding that the disk is encrypted when my phone is locked and decrypted when I unlock it? So I don’t need to turn it off for it to be encrypted, as long as it’s locked it’s encrypted?

    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      Good luck with that. The CFAA was written when Reagan was spooked by Wargames in 1982. If you violate any TOS of websites you use (very easy to do) it can be prosecuted as a federal felony with a maximum sentence of 25 years imprisonment.

      If the police really want you to disappear into the penal system, they’ll make it happen. And they do, routinely.