zlacker

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

>>digiow+(OP)
To mandate tracking dots they would first have to admit they exist.

>>digiow+(OP)
When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.

>>ls612+6D
I hear sentiment like this occasionally and I genuinely wonder if this is conspiracy theory stuff or if this sort of thing actually happened in the past.

I'm aware of the programs Snowden revealed, Tempora / XKeyscore / Longhaul / the like, plus I've heard J. Edgar Hoover did bad things and lots of CIA meddling internationally was bad. Still, these seem qualitatively different to the explicit blackmail you're referring to.

Do you (or someone else reading this) know of historical examples that demonstrate a pattern of this sort of thing? You can interpret "this sort of thing" as you wish.

That's a lot to ask for on the spot, so if not, I would be interested in what generally makes you approach the situation from this cynical angle, especially given that it's the FBI. In my experience, which is fairly limited but is as a US citizen, most of the time the US government mostly follows the law and doesn't do this sort of thing to citizens.

>>ls612+6D
Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.

>>purple+AG
One of the more notable examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

>>phire+iI
The most unrealistic part here is that you're assuming they can even find their desired firmware manager on the org chart.

Moreover, most executives don't require blackmail; they tend to go along to get along.

>>purple+AG
Living through all of the events of 2020 in Minneapolis of all places led me to the conclusion that when push comes to shove there is no law, only hard power and the will to use it.

If you want examples of events that could be reasonably interpreted as “this sort of thing”, the son of the guy who tried to assassinate Trump the second time was mysteriously arrested for possession of CSAM a week after his dad was arrested. I’m inclined to believe that the base rate of people being into that stuff is reasonably low so whenever I hear about someone being charged with it in relation to a completely unrelated major news story it gets my spidey sense tingling.

>>rl3+tU
Yea, just include "All printers bought by US government must have Tracking Dots" and Executives will move that feature to top of backlog without any other concerns.

Big company executives are easiest to control; they want money and all of it. US Government luckily has plenty of it to throw around.

>>ls612+712
That could also be related to his family being under more scrutiny by authorities

>>mghack+1q2
You're right that absent some colossal screwup you could never prove one way or another that it was legit vs planted, but stuff like that changes my priors on what I believe can happen. The fact that it is completely deniable also increases the incentive for the government to do it, and they no doubt have the capability. Capability and motive combined leads me to believe that it likely does happen.