Defense, intelligence, policing, all these things exist in order to uphold the constitution, protect the "American ideals", etc. Many of his statements pretty directly show that he doesn't care about the collateral damage to innocent people's privacy or any founding principles, he just wants his mission to be unhindered. It's the same mentality behind police forces wanting to make their job less dangerous and more straightforward, by escalating use of force and trampling rights.
With this hypocrisy, as has come many times before (congress shocked and demanding privacy when the CIA spies on them, for instance)... I can only shake my head. Come on.
Encryption is our webcam tape.
There's been numerous times where I've joined meetings and someone gets caught with a goofy face or working from home in their PJs because they mis-clicked something on a crappy e-meeting UI.
Such a telling statement. It's my belief that this man does not adequately comprehend the magnitude of the issues at hand. General Hayden, on the other hand, is a man whom I believe to actually understand the technology that he was charged with professional addressing.
Granted, just that feature was 6 times the volume of a modern webcam and probably three times the cost, but it did perfectly address people's discomfort with the eye staring at them.
For some reason, the ear listening to them doesn't seem to evoke the same reaction. I don't know anyone that tries to deafen their microphone.
Regarding webcam, led is OK, but it shouldn't be driven by some firmware, it should be a simple circuit - when there is a voltage on the camera Vdd, the led is on. I don't know how it is with the newest macbooks and if the led is still hackable.
You have to trust that the software you have on your device isn't using the microphone and camera without your permission.
Despite what you read on Hacker News no amount of encryption or software trickery is going to stop this.
OTOH, carrying around a microphone connected to the Internet which can be remotely enabled at any time without leaving any real trace (battery use/network use is the only real sign, although even that could be covered up to a great degree -- there is probably a way to do either low-fidelity or infrequent audio pickup, maybe keyed on location and charger state, and on-device pre-processing) -- people do this all the time Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet.
Plus, of course, there's the fact that no modern desktop OS is particularly secure -- either you give up auto-updates and likely fall to bugs, or use auto-updates and are at risk to your OS vendor or anyone who can compel him. So sensors attached to it, as well as stuff processed on it, is also at risk. You can somewhat mitigate this through a large combination of other protections, but it's almost impossible for a single user single machine to solve that problem.
I'd love a custom run of Dell Chromebook 13 or Lenovo Thinkpad 13 Chrome Edition with no built-in mic/camera, and an EPROM vs. EEPROM, and some special case features. Would be willing to commit to buy 10k units at ~$800/unit retail in 8-16GB x 32GB config.
And there's (tens of) thousands of people smarter than you telling you how wrong you are about encryption, yet you're ignoring them.
What would be terrifying would be if someone could figure out how to do this attack via software compromise of some hardware sensor system already present throughout the environment; say, a way to repurpose a wifi chipset to pick up nth-order harmonics off a keyboard bus or something. Then, remote-root of some lesser machine could be used to spy on a hardened machine.
Have you heard of this?
Video demonstration https://youtu.be/ZZ5HS8GWIec?t=1m45s
If someone hacks into my computer and takes videos of me in the buff (or worse, in an intimate situation) and posts them online, I have no remedy. The Rubicon has been crossed. The ship has sailed. The cat is out of the bag. You get the point.
Spare me the lecture about nudity and sex being a stupid taboo. If the world was how I wanted it to be, a lot of things would be different. You have to deal with the reality you live in.
"IN THE AGE of surveillance paranoia, most smartphone users know better than to give a random app or website permission to use their device’s microphone. But researchers have found there’s another, little-considered sensor in modern phones that can also listen in on their conversations. And it doesn’t even need to ask."
They aren't particularly interested in the 'big picture'. They may say they are, they may think they are, but on a practical, day-to-day basis, it's irrelevant. They know the mission of their organizational unit, they know the goals that need to be accomplished to achieve that mission, they know the metrics they need to hit to advance within that organization, and they are adept at focusing their full attention and energy on whatever task is in front them that leads directly to those ends. It's a personality type that thrives in large organizations - government, private, whatever - and to a certain extent its necessary to make large organizations work, but the risk is that you end up with people wielding significant power who behave like wind-up dolls.
Personally I'd prefer to buy off-the-shelf hardware and just snip the mic and camera.
Another aspect to consider are devices used by children. Tape should be pretty much requisite.
I had read that they didn't even have SSL on the box for some time after it was up and running.
If needed for a function, a USB camera and/or microphone is applied for through various chains of approval, and plug-in pull-put tracked.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ..."
Sorry man, you were instituted to serve me, at my consent and pleasure, not the other way around. You have the make the case to me to do what you want, not the other way around.
I checked and my new(ish) XPS 13 does have a tiny light when you use it as does my ASUS 2-in-1.
So I'm at 50-50 in my collection. I asked my girlfriend and she doesn't recall there being a light on her Toshiba laptop and she does Skype with it semi-regularly.
I'd love it if you might share what he mentioned about the email scandal, as it's one of the few current political events that I haven't followed in great detail.
The commenter you're replying to would be better off giving his money to a company that puts privacy (and FOSS) above all else, instead of trying to bribe a lost cause (let's not forget about the 3 times Lenovo has been caught with nasty factory-installed malware on their consumer laptops).
Here's the Librem laptop homepage: https://puri.sm/products/
Snowden?
If this was 20 years ago, headline would read: "The FBI Director Puts Electric Tape Over His Blinking VCR Clock"
So it's here.
This is really the one.
It seems like the country is in a crisis of metrics. Nobody trusts anybody to do their job anymore so everything has to have a surrounding bureaucracy with the stated purpose of keeping everybody honest but having the actual consequence of setting many misguided and contradictory rules and then strictly enforcing an arbitrary subset of them.
The people who succeed are then the people best able to game the bureaucracy rather than the people who are honest and good at their jobs.
That is basically how the Soviet Union fell. Something has got to change if we don't want to be next.
Uncrackable encryption, on the other hand, blocks all possible avenues of surveiling the desired communications. That isn't a bad thing, but it is different than placing tape over a webcam. I am definitely a proponent of government-proof encryption technologies, but grasping at straws trying to call this guy a hypocrite seems like a wasted effort to me.
The reason I was given for the tape when asked was interesting, since they obviously didn't care about the microphone. Supposedly it was possible for the camera to capture people in the facility in the background and through glass that could be matched with facial recognition. The very fact that certain people were seen inside their facility could be sufficient to expose secrets they wanted to protect. Audio, on the other hand, just captures ambient noise in quarantined spaces which isn't that interesting since the discussion is not classified. In that sense, the camera has much greater range than the microphone. Which makes some sense.
But surely the Director of the FBI would know this.
And yet somehow, I manage
He really doesn't understand the actual underlying argument, which is the technical and mathematical fact that a system will either be unreadable by global 3rd parties, or will be readable by global 3rd parties.* It truly is either fully secure from both criminals and government, or it is open for criminals and government to have unchecked free access to our data.
The guy studied chemistry. It's not a "conversation" whether or not particular chemical reactions occur under particular conditions, but fact. Similarly, this is not a "conversation", but fact:
The reality we are faced with is that this easily accessed global communication network carries and connects to basically everything private and public, and all our knowledge of encryption leaves us without a viable "government only" access tool to data.
Any conversation needs to start from the recognition of that technical reality, not before. Comey is tossing this impossible request over the wall to tech companies, completely acknowledging he has no idea how any of that works but that they'll "figure it out", and views that as the way forward.
[* = This is considering that breaches of a mandated government-only back-door to encryption will inevitably happen, be it a leak of keys, attacks on the algorithms, or international information politics weakening the system as a whole. The precedents for these scenarios are plenty.]
So, yes, the audio thing is something to worry about.
It's not dumb to take whatever precautions you can.
And people do worry about having their pictures taken. Remember the scandal when a school took pictures of children undressed at home with their laptops' cameras?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
We can speculate about whether the tech exists, but read their guide to securing your Red Hat box and decide for yourself how good they are at publishing defense against attacks they won't tell you about: https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf
They aren't idiots for realizing that humans are, above all else, sexual animals.
So, OEM buys 10k units, chooses a few samples and tests them. Then he sends all the units on to his logistics warehouse to fulfill customer orders. The shipment from the testing facility to the warehouse is an interesting target now. Alternatively, the outgoing orders from that logistics warehouse.
An induvidual customer buying one laptop is no closer to his goal of ensuring no outside party tampered with it.
> published specs
I'm curious how published specs help a regular user verify his laptop does not contain manufacturing backdoors.
I've seen many suggestions for hardware integrity, but none of them enables the end user to verify that his hardware exactly matches with the published schematics/ASIC masks. They all simplify the problem description to only reach part of the way, requiring trust on part of the end user in all the later links in the chain. Or they just assume that the customer is buying 10k units - which does nothing to help individual end-users.
I'm sure putting tape over the camera isn't the only security precaution the director of the FBI has taken.
Most people would settle for a physical switch, that is, a switch in hardware.
Personally, I am not worried about quite sophisticated attackers. When securing my house I'm worried about run-of-the-mill burglars, and this is like that.
Like okay, they have to do deal with classified material and sensitive things - but there is a time and place for that and I trust the FBI director doesn't use his personal laptop for work.
He should be basically streaming his video camera on the internet for everyone to see - b/c the people that want to see it probably will
Recently, I have got back to feature phone after decade long struggle with several smartphones, keeping all on my desk for app development purpose only. I hope Comey would follow me. If not doing it now. ;)
Not necessarily. Maybe an adversary having naked pictures of you (or seeing your affair, or whatever) causes you more (financial?) trouble than what is on the bank account.
But, since even Windows desktop edition has Cortana these days, I'm afraid mic will be harder to disable in newer machines.
Actually, that's given me a great idea to secure my phone from hackers. Stand over it naked and waggle my sack about - that's one camera they'll never ever hack again lol
I'm no way trying to defend his agency's actions on encryption - it's chilling and probably one of the most important and defining issues of the information age. Only adding this to point out that people are complex and not black and white and their motives and beliefs and actions can sometimes be in conflict and cognitively dissonant.
1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...
A quick search on security.stackexchange reveals similar info.
And teenagers?
There is no mention in the article of the "Lower Merion School District" case where school officials were spying on teenagers through their webcams in their rooms.
Call me old fashioned, but I think that's an important case for the general public to know about when discussing webcam privacy...
Rdl specified Dell or Lenovo also for the reason that the supply chain for those two ecosystems are well-developed enough that providing customer support won't be a huge hassle.
AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.
Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI
And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-961237-0403-QuickCam-Messenge...
10+ years ago they basically defined what a webcam is (search "webcam icon" and observe the symbology --- appropriately eyeball-shaped), and they don't have any indicators.
But if you do indeed manage to not carry a mobile phone at all, yep, you are safe.
"iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED"
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...
They eventually quit (now we can use Lync to do video calls, even) but a lot of people now put little sliding windows over their cameras (you can get them at conferences these days, branded with the Splunk logo or whoever's giving them out)
Well, I'm not sure if my comment about "the worst kinds of cops" is necessarily hyperbolic or even emotional, but I can see how it does make having 'purely rational discourse' more difficult. Surely, a singular focus and unwillingness to consider the validity of alternative perspectives is not unique to some members of the law enforcement community, but I think that the shorthand I employed does cut to the core of my understanding of Comey; He doesn't understand this issue as well as the technology experts who, virtually uniformly, disagree with his position on crypto.
[0] Hayden did rebuff that characterization, though I think the public forum might have had something to do with it.
I have no personal information on it
and you bet I have tape over the camera. Not just because of security, but many communications apps simply turn it on by default when you start a session... Lync, WebEx, Hangouts etc...
With people like this, I'd just really like to get them alone in a room, off the record, and probe their beliefs, motivations, why they did things, etc.
I wonder what it was like to work with Comey at Bridgewater Associates.
You can use the reflection in the eye as keylogger for, say, PIN entry dialogs.
My contract expires in two weeks, I am not going to renew it.
If he worries someone is watching him through his webcam I wonder how he feels about the microphone? Does he talk about top secret things in front of laptops?
For an OS, I run Whonix and have it configured so the system wipes the memory and shuts down immediately if anything foreign is attached or removed from USB.
Since I don't use any eSata or Firewire devices, if those ports exist I epoxy over them. There are too many ways to dump memory with direct DMA access.
If you were serious about a custom run of security-focused laptops, I think you would have a market for them. Dell and Lenovo just subcontract with manufacturers in China and it wouldn't be too difficult to contact one and give them the specs and do a custom run of laptops. Considering putting actual hardware switches for both the Wifi and Bluetooth.
I would certainly buy one!
Step 1: Find someone using encryption
Step 2: ???? pretty easy to create a virus or something ????
Step 3: Access encrypted information.
Why dig a well when water evaporates into the air? Because pragmatically the amount of water over time matters and what could be described in an incredibly naive way as an absolute suddenly becomes a very different scenario when looking at reality.
The NSA has tapped fiber backbones, encryption would stop them from getting information from that source.
If you think there is already no privacy, post your full name, address and a picture of yourself in the shower, I'll leave it up to you whether you want to encrypt it or not.
(Also the fact that anyone is able to store crypto-currencies pokes an immediate hole in your theory)
I know that this reduces the strength of my argument to essentially "nuh-uh!" ... sorry. But I will tell you that, when he says (in that keynote address) that he is willing to explore the possibility that he could be wrong - I believe that he is being completely honest.
As to your description of his "singular focus and unwillingness to consider the validity of alternative perspectives" - that just doesn't seem accurate at all; it describes neither this speech nor his observable approach at large. It does, however, remind me of a funny pinterest picture/quote:
"Once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive. 'Look at this bitch, eating those crackers like she owns the place'. "
I have been following this surveillance and privacy debate. I understand that encryption cannot go both ways. We cannot create back doors that are only available to the good guys. Add to this that the 'good' guys are known to abuse power.
But I also cannot deny that at certain times there are legitimate reasons for law enforcement. What solution, maybe political if not technical, can we adopt to meet the legitimate demands of law enforcement?
You need encryption for the same reason you need locks. Locks are not the only trick to provide you security but they are pretty much a very necessary tool. Without solid encryption you can't have a lot of the good things on the internet: online banking, online shopping, filling taxes online,...
> it is still pretty easy to create a virus or something that access the data at the moment it is used
It is not so much anymore. Viruses are getting quite harder to make, even for Microsoft Windows. And, even if you were right, you still need encryption for people that are smart enough to avoid viruses.
But, politically, nothing can be done because encryption and decryption is purely technical -- there is no middle ground that I see.
From a technical perspective.., the solution is also just to give the keys away. Theoretically we could give all the private keys to "just one government agency" so that no middleman (e.g. a CDN, etc) can decrypt the data, but this still 100% trusts the government with all the data.
One big problem is how to distinguish "legitimate" from not. In ideal conditions you'd have a court order to do so. But what good is a court order in places where it is very hard to know the difference between a gangster and a police officer (e.g.: Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, ...)? How do you protect the "solution" from the bad guys when you are not sure who the good guys and the bad guys are?
I'm actually OK with the idea of sending my full name, address and a picture of myself in the shower to the NSA, CIA, SIS or similar, to be included in one of their databases. Because that's what we're talking about, privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies searching for criminals, spies, terrorists etc. To suggest that posting such information publicly is exactly the same as it existing in these agency databases is pretty disingenuous.
I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.
There's nothing new about this, btw. The US government doesn't care about protecting the elusive "American ideals" or your freedoms and it has been that way for decades if not hundreds of years. There's nothing idealistic about the way a government operates, regardless of country.
On some ThinkPad models, there is a chip associated with the LAN management engine (AMT) that should be disabled as well. This isn't the Management Engine controller itself, only has a power management role for AMT & WoL that cannot normally be disabled.
My ThinkPad has a physical switch for Wifi and Bluetooth, although apparently that is only window dressing and can be bypassed with a BIOS setting (& configuration tool from Lenovo)
What do you think of having a hardware firewall processor for the Wifi and Ethernet interfaces on security focused laptops?
I'd even try it myself, but I don't have a facebook account, or any devices with "personal assistant" apps for that matter. For the obvious reasons.
Excuse me, but you are made to believe that they exist in order to uphold the constitution and yada yada.
One of the first times I heard him speak was in late 2014 and he was essentially arguing for all the same things that he argues now: "I don't know how the tech community is going to do it, but they're smart, and they can build in secure access for law enforcement". He still completely ignores the national security implications of such a precedent, and he also ignores the fact that, over and over again, crypto experts are telling him that the community has enough trouble building secure systems at the moment, and adding access to third parties is likely to exponentially weaken system security.
The FTC just made an announcement about SilverPush, an example of such software:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-i...
They'll voluntarily make their own jobs more difficult if it makes the project better, even in ways that only others skilled in their craft would notice. They'll actually fight management for more hours, more money, better tools, different processes, etc. so they can get it right. Management's role isn't to force them to do their jobs, but to restrain them from going overboard.
Of course, this requires that they feel respected, sufficiently autonomous, and compensated fairly. And that they like what they're doing, at least a little bit. You get this routinely from theater professionals. Warehouse stock pickers, not so much.
Quantitative metrics and "goals" are a form of coercion that management deploys against its enemies to extract performance from people who fundamentally don't want to do a good job. In this kind of situation, we've taken to threatening to cut off their access to food and medicine and send armed men to seize their homes and cars (no, the layer of indirection between employers and lenders doesn't really matter). People like to eat, so they play along. And in rote jobs that only exist because they aren't cost-effective to automate yet, maybe that's the only way to do it.
You're not guaranteed a work environment where craftsmen are intrinsically motivated just by foregoing metrics, but as soon as your introduce "goals" (i.e. threats) a good chunk of people who would otherwise be on your side have instantly switched to searching for the minimum effort they can get away with until their either retire or find job that respects them.
Even if people still somehow feel respected, hitting/optimizing the metrics probably means doing the job sub-optimally, and that takes its toll - even if you personally decide not to play the wrongheaded metrics game, others in the organization will, and that creates conflicts (that you usually lose) where there should have been cooperation.
The Wire is essentially a show about this, and how it creates institutional dysfunction that breaks cities. "The fury of a bureaucrat who wants to do their job but can't because they've been fucked over."
Again, I'm honestly asking because I don't know. Large human organizations seem to repeatably converge on similar design patterns, but if there's a better way, I want to know it.
On one hand, you want to (in my world) empower developers and let them take ownership of ... whatever. On the other hand, you want to learn, as a group how to do better. On the gripping hand, you want to be able to tell the customers (and investors) what to expect and when.
It seems as if you can do the combination of #1 & #3, somehow, without tracking what you are doing and how you are doing it, but that #2 requires us to baseline what we are doing and try to brainstorm about what we can try in an attempt to, as a functional group, do better.
In your world, measurement is "bad" for an individual's autonomy. And it may well be. How does an organization accomplish goal #2 (and #3) along with #1?
Anecdotally, I found that the self-directed process improvement (PSP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_software_process) helped a great deal. I didn't go overboard with formalism, just jotted myself some notes along the way during the week that I spent 20 minutes compiling on Friday, but I found that I had to record what I was doing to even know what I was doing. And that's just me. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I really didn't know. And my own estimates of what I was doing were ... surprisingly off.
We are about one month into a three-month experiment where we are asking people to track time on their activities (mix of IT and developers). For some, it is a struggle with all the complaints when you try to make a small group "corporate". For others, they are having huge revelations of where their time is going that (I think) has been valuable.
What I've been trying to communicate is that the time tracking data has nothing to do with the individual, and is not being used as a measure of performance (it really isn't, and it isn't on anyones performance plans). What it IS being used for is a way for us to communicate with senior leadership to better demonstrate our value to the organization (in terms they are more familiar with). Basically, the "IT needs to better speak to the business" conversation that's been going on for ~15 years or so now. I suppose you could also tie it into the topic of when a startup grows beyond x people, with x in the range of 30-50 people.
It isn't actually the measurement itself. It's when the metrics end up tied to rewards and penalties that people start to game them. [1]
What you could do is measure things and then, when unit 15 is above average and unit 9 is below average, figure out why and let everybody know what works and what doesn't.
Which also has the side benefit of improving your metrics. Because if you see that unit 15 has the best numbers and you treat this as an undifferentiated "unit 15 is better and we don't know why but let's reward them" metric, you can miss things like, unit 15's district has a higher population density and they're actually below average after you take that into account.
Investigating the sources of success and failure without assigning personal consequences to them allows people to be honest about why they succeeded or failed. And then if anybody has actually found the secret to success you can share it with everyone else.
[1] Although you do have to be careful not to make "collecting metrics" a thing that eats half of each employee's work time.
That's key. You never get them right the first time, so improving your tracker is even more important than improving the tracked.
But yes the question is whether or not that actually exists.
On the other hand, with an external webcam, I can simply disconnect it. If you have a laptop built into a laptop that is not so easy to do. At least, you have to trust the laptop's manufacturer to do that, while a builtin plastic cover is so simple one does need to "trust" it; at the same time, you can't retrofit it on a laptop... :(
