[FRIAM] Charlie Stross keynote to 34th Chaos Communcation Congress

Thu Jan 4 01:57:47 EST 2018

Steve,  

Back in the good old days, I was a acquainted with folks who were lefty activists.  One day, my wife and I were bickering over my office phone at Swarthmore and there was a click on the line.  There were rumors that our lines were tapped, so my wife, who was already pissed at me, said fiercely into the phone: "Is somebody listening to this call!?"  To our utter amazement, a voice said back, "I wasn't listening."  When the Media PA office of the FBI was broken into some years later, we all learned that the Swarthmore operator had been working for the FBI, and transcribing calls, for many years.  

Later that same year, I was visiting in New York City and called a friend to see if I might catch him for a meal.  The phone did not ring, but I was delivered into his living room, so I could hear him listening to music and moving around his apartment. He had had the misfortune to have a girlfriend "in the movement" and the FBI had wired his phone so they could dial into his apartment, at will.  Unfortunately, they had also wired it so the whole world could.  

Those WERE the days.  

Nick  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2018 9:02 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Charlie Stross keynote to 34th Chaos Communcation Congress

Eavesdropping through "benign" technology is not new of course... from using a drinking glass to focus sound waves through a wall to tapping old school phones, but the current situation is orders of magnitude crazier.   

Some of us here probably grew up on party lines where if you lifted the receiver *really carefully* when someone else was on the line you could listen in without them noticing and of course, there was an era when

*every* phone call went through a switchboard operator (or several)... I knew several women of my mother's generation who did that job at least for a few years and had some interesting stories of "who called who and when" if not some eavesdropping as well!

I worked my way through college as a Private Investigator and while I never used this trick (and would not for both ethical and legal reasons) I was aware of it and tested it on my own phones.   Tapping into an office or home phone was as easy as simply adding a parallel connection to another phone (the way multiple phones inside one house worked) and all you needed was access to the phone wires leaving the house/office.    But that just allowed you to listen in on conversations held deliberately on the phone, it was also known that some models of the old rotary dial phones did not not implement a switch for the microphone circuit when you had the phone "on the hook" so the line out was "energized" with a very weak signal all the time.  So in many homes/offices there was a "live mic" connection *outside* the home/office that could be tapped with sensitive equipment to listen in on the room. Without a repeater of some kind you had to be "close" (like those bad 70's movies with a lineman up on a pole outside your house with binoculars?).

Working at LANL inside sometimes several layers of security, I was hyper-aware of the *threat* of surveillance which included James Bond tricks like using a laser to read the modulation of sound impinging on window panes, not to mention ultra sensitive EMF detection and the use of Faraday cages to keep a hypothetical adversary from reading the operation of relays and switches (i.e. printers, keyboard, etc.) from a distance.

I know a lot of people who put tape over their laptop cameras and worry about their microphone being tapped, yet few if any of them seem as careful about their phones which they carry EVERYWHERE... In principle I want to believe that the open source nature of Android and Linux help crowdsource our security but there have been some stark examples of where obvious holes were not noticed by *anyone* (nobody was looking?).  

I admit that *I* don't vet the apps I run on my phone nearly as carefully as I should if I were worried about surveillance...   and I haven't done anything to watch for unexpected/unexplained network traffic implied..  I mostly just trust the herd to start milling and squalling to alert me if something is wrong.   I am sheeple, so are (most of) you.

The recent addition of voice recognition like SIRI, hey Google, and Alexa add a layer of  habituation to being monitored by our *devices* all of the time and I have to admit to *assuming* (because it is much scarier not to) that all the sound processing happens in the phone itself the only thing leaving the phone are high level triggers like

I recently watched "The Circle", a movie made from a Dave Egger's novel with the antagonist being a megaCorp fashioned somewhat after Google/Amazon/FaceBook/Twitter/??? all glommed together.   It was a very dystopic view (sold as a utopia) of total connectedness/surveillance/transparency... it asked some interesting questions, but also reminded me of the Spike Jones Movie a few years ago called "Her" which managed to put a more interesting/hopeful twist on this (and more acutely AI).

I think Guerin's ideas about sousveillance, with a ubiquitous authenticated pub/sub model for all signals (esp. camera) down to the pixel level is a promising way to change the paradigm in a way that adds both utility and security.

- Steve

On 1/3/18 9:30 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> Speaking of which, Renee's sister bought us an Amazon Echo for Xmas.  

> I'm already paranoid having my phone monitor audio for "OK Google".  

> To make me feel better, I leave the ProjectM live wallpaper on to 

> occupy the microphone.  I can't even imagine *wanting* Amazon to 

> listen to my house on a continual basis.  It seems they fixed the 

> physical access crack that allowed listening in: 

>  <https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-echo-wiretap-hack/> https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-echo-wiretap-hack/  But I suppose 

> more exploits are on the horizon: 

>  <https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-hacking-bluetooth.html> https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-hacking-bluetooth.html

> 

> I'm still due a free Google Home, offered with the purchase of my 

> phone.  Pfft.  I imagine claiming it and locking it inside a box with 

> some speakers constantly streaming something like Justin Beiber ... or 

> maybe Celtic Frost:  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW6RXTjm4iA> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW6RXTjm4iA

> 

> On 01/02/2018 03:48 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

>> but adding in speech patterns or even higher-level personality signatures.

> 

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