Anyone using that company would, presumably, expect them to live up to their promises.
Would any phone service be able to operate separately enough from the others for this to work? I thought they were all sharing towers and stuff. And if you used this service to call somebody from Verizon, wouldn't Verizon have to get your metadata anyway?
if you used this service to call somebody from Verizon, wouldn't Verizon have to get your metadata anyway?
Yes.
I'm not saying it'd work perfectly, but maybe you could protect data relating to calls wholly within the same network? Sharing cell towers, I don't know the technicalities, but there might be something to do about it.
I'm just thinking that you'd have to avoid the other phone providers, plus I'd assume you'd have to stay away from google since their whole point is reading your shit.
maybe you could protect data relating to calls wholly within the same network?
I'm pretty sure you could do that, yes.
We really need Alex the Ranter in on this.
Ranter would be a good name for the service.
Terrorist Telephone & Telegraph. The Baby-killing Bell.
Possibly side deals with other carriers -- SecureInYourPersonsHousesPapersandEffects.com could contract with Verizon and so forth to delete metadata relating to calls from SIYPHPE.com customers promptly, and to resist producing it while it still existed? verizon would have to go along with it, and they probably wouldn't, but it's conceptually possible.
I don't know if it is possible or not, but I agree that they probably wouldn't. By going along with it, Verizon would be admitting they suck.
This was basically Skype's ethos pre-MS. There weren't really competing services, so hard to quantify how many of the tens of millions of accounts which MS purchased were on Skype because of easy privacy. So any such promise carries an "until we are bought out" qualification.
Skype is over IP, not strictly telephony, but nearly as effective in populated areas with OK reception.
So any such promise carries an "until we are bought out" qualification.
Generally (and I'm speaking as a random idiot rather than a lawyer here, someone correct me if I'm wrong) when you sign up for phone service or similar, there's a term in the contract saying the company can change the terms of service ad lib. If the contract for service expressly said that the privacy policy could only be changed by express agreement of the customer, getting bought out might shut them down, but it'd be hard for them to inconspicuously change their policies.
As a matter of current Fourth Amendment doctrine (which is completely off the rails as far as I'm concerned), I don't think this would work. The prevailing view is that when you disclose information to third parties, even under conditions intended to keep the information confidential, you assume the risk that your confidence will be betrayed, and that's enough to take you out of the Fourth Amendment. You don't have any 4th Amendment protection against government seizure of your banking records, for example, despite confidentiality obligations that would give you a strong expectation of privacy (in the general sense).
This is the business model for the earch engine duckduckgo.com. They romise not to save your serach history, and as far as I know they live with that. But they're just a search engine, not a telecom.
Telecoms being large corporatoins, they pretty much have to comply with subpoenas and warants and such to stay in business. The most they can promise is to keep your data private unless there's a court order. The current scandal is all about compliance with court orders, sso a promise wouldn't provide much protection.
Telephony over IP is technically pretty simple if the network is fast enough. Last time I looked, maybe 2 years ago, services that offered privacy also offered spoofing and silent recording of calls. Maybe a new service will pop up somewhere, but I think that basically nobody cares enough about this to lift a finger, except crooks and people obsessive enough to use VPNs or the like.
I say this because the relevant service would be super easy to set up, and I did not notice any telephone service making privacy claims that did not also offer sleazy options.
Drat. That was what I should have researched before posting -- I'm really not up on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
That's got to be come convoluted caselaw, though. If you don't have any expectation of privacy in anything another human being has laid eyes on, that's all personal correspondence and so on. Does it come down to who's trying to exercise the protection? That is, if we're having an affair, and you send me love letters that I keep in a box, you can't keep me from showing them to the police. But I can keep the police from forcing me to turn them over, despite the fact that you sent them to me so their contents have been disclosed to a third party.
If I'm right about that (and this is me spitballing rather than actually doing any proper research), then the distinction between me with a box of love letters and SIYPHPE.com with a server full of metadata seems like bullshit: SIYPHPE.com should be able to assert that "While my customers provided me with that information, while it's under my control I(the corporate person. Go with it in context.) regard it as private, and have a fourth amendment right of my own not to reveal it."
But I should go read caselaw to find out why this doesn't work.
Telecoms being large corporatoins, they pretty much have to comply with subpoenas and warants and such to stay in business. The most they can promise is to keep your data private unless there's a court order
What I'm trying to pull here is finding a way to call the metadata private, at which point a warrant, rather than an undirected court order, should be necessary. They're always going to have to turn over anything there's a proper warrant for, of course.
That is, if we're having an affair, and you send me love letters that I keep in a box, you can't keep me from showing them to the police.
Just post the letters here so that all of us, including gswift, can read/critique them.
But I can keep the police from forcing me to turn them over without a warrant, that is.
Telecoms being large corporatoins
What? Long-distance phone services are boiler room operations. I don't think there's been consolidation of bodega phone cards. Buying and running a MUX isn't that difficult or that expensive either. You wouldn't compete with the big companies on price, but this is something that's not complicated to do on a small scale.
Maybe a new service will pop up somewhere, but I think that basically nobody cares enough about this to lift a finger, except crooks and people obsessive enough to use VPNs or the like.
Or, you know, Terrorists. And if The Terrorists are using these things, then the whole purpose of having the government sniff around all the other things becomes moot.
Not a lawyer, but I play a sysadmin when I'm working, and have had to deal with LEAs in the past.
I think TT&T would run head-first in to CALEA, which requires telecoms to, basically, be surveillance-friendly, to the point of modifying equipment to provide LEAs with the ability to real-time monitor and to retain what are called Call Detail Records, the metadata that are at issue with the original Greenwald article on Verizon. This includes VOIP and data traffic.
So I'm sure TT&T could advertise whatever they want, but it wouldn't make much real-world difference in terms of what they could actually provide.
What a bleak, horrible future we live in.
23. Sure. My point is that regardless of legal issues, this is technically easy, I haven't seen it and don't think it exists, so I conclude that there's no demand.
Like email encryption-- possible with a tiny bit of effort, which basically nobody finds worthwhile.
25: That's probably what it comes down to.
18: I think the short answer is that the reasonable expectations analysis is absurd and (even more so than many other fuzzy doctrines) comes down to a judicial gut check. So the caselaw is extraordinarily frustrating. And yes, it does depend in some cases on whose 4th Amendment rights are at stake: I don't have a 4th Amendment claim against the government warrantlessly seizing the love letters I've sent you, but you most likely do. But SIYPHPE is, I assume,* going to be responding to some kind of subpoena or court order rather than a warrantless seizure, and they can try to resist that if they're so inclined, but now we're not really talking about the 4th Amendment anymore and they'd need some other justification (First Amendment?) to prevail.
*Possibly wrongly; have been largely offline the last few weeks and missed the underlying revelations in real-time, haven't quite caught up on what the government is actually doing here.
Like email encryption-- possible with a tiny bit of effort, which basically nobody finds worthwhile.
Or like TOR, perhaps, which lots of people do use and find worthwhile, because it enables the possibility of being able to order bags of weed over the internet - with being able to shield yourself from Government snooping as an added bonus.
Do you still have to get the weed or do they deliver?
I gently suggest that seeing services like TOR as widespread is delusional.
Attorneys' version of security is a block of text that requests that you delete the confidential information that was sent to your mistyped address. Documents worth many millions are sent not just unencrypted but with draft edits still in place. Those people willing to make even the smallest effort to safeguard electronic privacy are obsessive weirdos, one in ten thousand in the US.
I think maybe I see a flaw in shielding.
People order bags of weed over the internet?
As an ISP you'd have to be CALEA-compliant (RIPA III in the UK). You could just not provide telephony, and leave it up to the user to sort out their own VoIP server outside the US. But you'd have to do CALEA, and also choose to either accept DMCA takedowns or play chicken with Hollywood lawyers.
However, you certainly could make a point of being difficult. Sonic.net in California, frex, deliberately doesn't hold more than the minimum billing data so there is nothing to hand over, and has a policy of litigating all the CALEA requests, DMCA takedowns, etc they get. Last year, they went to court to obtain the right to tell one of their customers the FBI was spying on them over Wikileaks.
Also, IIRC T-Mobile USA was a holdout during the original-and-best Bush surveillance scandal, next to Qwest. They had a better defence, though - as a division of a German company that has networks in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and several other EU countries, and roaming customers, they could plead that they couldn't comply with the request without violating the laws of Germany, whose government is the biggest single shareholder.
Consider a British or German T-Mobile subscriber who goes to the States. Their phone roams onto T-Mobile USA at the airport and registers in their visitor-location register so it can receive calls. Whatever it does eventually gets logged in their national opco's systems to settle billing, make the routing work, comply with RIPA III. Therefore, T-Mo UK/NL/DE/wherever is creating personally-identifying information about this person in their home jurisdiction. If T-Mo USA then discloses information about this person to the NSA, how is T-Mo DE (or UK) not violating the very, very strict German privacy laws or the (pretty strict) UK Data Protection Act? Even if it's legal in the US, it's very illegal in both national and European terms.
Tor getting some mainstream attention via Snowden having a sticker on his computer. But yes, the numbers are exceedingly small.
I remember this coming up a few months ago; you have constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure if you host your own mail server (or whatever) in your house or on a RaspberryPi in your pocket, but not if it's in a cloud somewhere (according to Do/c S/earles), and the EFF was trying to do something about this. This seemed a moderately interesting legal absurdity at the time but is suddenly full of pertinence.
Even if it's legal in the US, it's very illegal in both national and European terms.
If they were put up against the wall, would the US government even care. They've claimed extraterritorial jurisdiction on any number of commercial issues; why not this one?
AFAIK T-Mo got away with it, and it was telling how quick that bit of the story shot out of the headlines. Everyone remembers (well, for specialised values of everyone) that the QWest CEO ended up in jail for somewhat dubious reasons but no-one remembers T-Mo. You might wonder whether the example serves to encourage the others.
But anyhow yeah Tor is a tiny, tiny absolutely minor piece of the puzzle, despite being impressively easy to use (the Onion Browser app for the iPhone is way spiffy). I think it does get more use in regimes with restrictive state firewalls/filtering.
you have constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure if you host your own mail server (or whatever) in your house or on a RaspberryPi in your pocket, but not if it's in a cloud somewhere
If you are encrypting your stored mail, even if its on a cloud, does that not indicate an expectation of privacy?
33: From the linked article:
Having picked a selection, and spent a couple of hundred pounds worth of Bitcoins - the preferred currency on Tor - "a few days later a letter arrives from Holland, flat-packed with a birthday card within it and a vacuum-packed plastic bag of coke."
That is, if we're having an affair, and you send me love letters that I keep in a box, you can't keep me from showing them to the police.
That's why I always conclude my love letters with the words "Burn this".
Tor is small, but big enough to support a self-sustaining ecosystem, and big enough to provide The Terrorists with whatever level of secrecy in communications that they need to avoid the NSA dragnet. Which means that the NSA dragnet is a huge waste of resources, because its only going to be spying on people who are A) not terrorists, or B) really dumb terrorists who would likely be caught anyway, in the course of basic police work.
Unless, of course, the purpose of the NSA dragnet isn't really to catch terrorists after all...
There's a certain species of paranoid that believes that the NSA runs most of the Tor nodes out there, and thus has much more visibility than one would like. While I see the appeal of the paranoid logic there, it seems like there are enough *different* entities (intelligence agencies of different governments, mostly) that would like to be in that position, and that are unlikely to cooperate with one another, such that the rivalries between the NSA, China, whatever is left of the KGB, and so on could make for reasonable degree of privacy.
Brennan and Marshall are both worth reading in United States v. Miller. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/425/435/case.html They got outvoted, as they had been in Smith v. Maryland. We need a judicial revolution on the scale of Brown v. Board to get rid of this cancer.
A lot of the legal justification for all the metadata searching and so on..., is based on the idea that it's already public information: once you're interacting with a phone company or an internet service, you don't have any expectation of privacy in what happens to metadata, because you've already shared it with the phone company.
is this true?
i thought it was more like: it's not your data, it's the phone company's data. they have business reasons to keep track of your calling records (to facilitate billing, infrastructure development, etc.). so when the govt asks Verizon for your call data, they're really asking Verizon for Verizon's data about you. your privacy is irrelevant, because it's Verizon's data - it's not public, and it's not yours.
Favorite tweet on this so far (From a 'Marsh Ray'): Snowden didn't "damage national security", he didn't release any actual secret data. It was just "metadata" about the collection programs.
And here's a diagram (I don't even know the context) which should make us all sleep easier (or less so if you think actual "agile force synchronization" is a part of the Government protecting you.
48: Well, yeah, that's right. What I was wondering is if your phone company could commit to treating metadata about you as their secret, and if they could protect it in their own right.
The diagram in 49 must be the work of some very highly paid contractors. The bullshit-fu is strong with that one.
48: It's both, sort of. Smith v. Maryland (the pen register case) was mostly rooted in the notion that you have to disclose the number you're dialing to the phone company in order for them to complete the call (in a way that you don't have to disclose the content of the conversation), and because everyone knows the phone company has to record that info in order to bill you. US v. Miller (the bank records case) held that account records weren't solely the customer's--not just because the bank did the work of compiling the records but because the bank was itself a party to the transactions and thus the records were as much the bank's as the customer's. Miller also held that even records produced solely by the customer (such as deposit slips) weren't protected, because of the third-party disclosure/assumption of risk of breach of confidentiality.
It's all code. "Agile Force Synchronization" is an anagram for "Chronic Floozy Tiara Engines".
Seems like there ought to be a huge difference between "the government can ask the phone company for your records based on probable cause" and "all phone company records are sent to the government, for review, storage, and analysis."
The fact that "expectation of privacy" can't be used as a defense in the first case shouldn't necessarily carry over to "we are keeping tabs on your every communication, because we can."
|| BTW, Tuff Mudder (or Tough Mudder as it's spelled over here)? Not that tough. Though the immersion in icewater was a bit of a shocker.
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55: sure, if your idea of a vacation in Italy involves fighting Marines.
||
Linked and quoted without comment:
Anyplace that sees a lot of traffic, she said, "you really have to do it, just like you're going to clean your carpets. You have a party, and you feel drained. Now we can explain it; we understand quantum physics."
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despite the fact that you sent them to me so their contents have been disclosed to a third party.
Second party, no?
That's either good or bad to hear, depending on how it goes for me. Doing my first one in two weeks, though due to annoying scheduling bs ill be doing it after a red eye flight on no sleep.
Blessing is pointless, my own inner radiance is enough. How much to curse a space, and what are the enforceable terms of the contract for the service?
While I see the appeal of the paranoid logic there, it seems like there are enough *different* entities (intelligence agencies of different governments, mostly) that would like to be in that position, and that are unlikely to cooperate with one another, such that the rivalries between the NSA, China, whatever is left of the KGB, and so on could make for reasonable degree of privacy.
Why doesn't this just imply that your tor-routed traffic is effectively going to all intelligence agencies?
58: The long arm of the law is occupying the place of the second person in this thought experiment. I(1) can keep my love letters out of the hands of Officer Krupke(2), despite the fact that they were already read (and written) by my beloved(3).
sure, if your idea of a vacation in Italy involves fighting Marines.
Just humiliating them. No Marines were harmed (just their pride) in the making of this holiday.
That strikes me as an unintuitive assignment of ordinality to persons!
59: yes, I remember you mentioning that you had one coming up a few months ago; that's why I mentioned mine. The redeye will probably make it tuffer. At mine there seemed to be quite a few people doing it while hungover (stag parties); some looked quite unwell after the first few miles.
The live electric cable obstacles in particular aren't nearly as bad as everyone fears.
That strikes me as an unintuitive assignment of ordinality to persons!
Later on in the evening we (and the marines) did end up getting slightly drunk and disordinal.
I read 59 to say that Halford was having his space cleared after a red eye.
As to 57: Woo!
57: I think I've just found my new career! Now to become slim and pixieish...
48, 50, 52: Thanks for this discussion. I keep getting hung up on the fact that, from what I can tell, Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes -- makes legal -- government retrieval of (seizure of, access to) otherwise private business records, given an appropriate court order.
I can't make out how a telephone company that makes a promise of privacy to its customers would be able to avoid compliance.
Certainly we'll see how the ACLU's nascent suit pans out in this regard.
I just finally watched Edward Snowden's video interview with Greenwald, visible here, and,
is he wearing Google glass(es)?
No. Just thick lenses making a reflection.
Are you sure? I haven't seen a lot of video of google glass(es), but there's something weird-looking about the right-hand lens --right-hand, stage left -- there.
I guess all and sundry would have said something about it by now if it were so, though.
I think that's an odd reflection or something. Google Glass in every picture I've seen has a single continuous piece that goes in a straight line from ear to ear; his glasses clearly have arms attached to the side of the frames, not in that distinctive straight line.
And as I watched Ms. Shaye spin slowly in my living room, transfixing the cat, I imagined her as a rotating drill and let out an inappropriate yawp of laughter.
Completely OT
Does anyone have experience of fun things to do in Fes, Morocco? They don't have to be very much fun to compete with the hotel basement media centre which is the only place to get a half-decent connection.
Same question for Berlin -- Buck's there all next week on a supercomputing conference, He won't have that much time to tourist around, but if there's anything particular that would be amusing, I'd pass it along to him.
Moby, there is indeed, and I have rocked it every evening. But after a while the fact that you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, becomes a little frustrating. Somewhere there are glorious palaces, or civilised placed to drink mint tea and watch the world go by. I just haven't found any truly spectacular ones yet.
Still, there is some great music here.
I suppose drinking isn't very easy in Fes, but that would be my go-to idea for Berlin.
On the other hand, if you're in the market for live quails ...
Halford,">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQUeZx82VmU">Halford, get a grip. molesting subway passengers while performing gymnastics is Crossfit, right?
The waters?
Actually, the dar al magana sounds kind of neat.
For future reference, there is a nice expat hangout called ca\fe cl\ock, run by a delightfully camp english former Maitre D at the wolseley, in one of the alleys off the main drag.
Also, Pat\ti Smith is staying at the Riad scherezhade (almost certainly google proofed by mis-spelling) so that is clearly one of the better places in the medina. Me, I'm in a place five km out of town which for that reason alone is not to recommend.
82: as I muttered in the transit lounge at Casablanca airport "I came to Casblanca for the wifi/but there is no wifi in casablanca/I was misinformed"
Also, the souk really is fun. Everything else is hidden behind faceless walls.
If you like Zoos, the Berlin Zoo is world class. The view out the dome of the Reichstag building is great, you need to reserve a spot in advance via their website though (though we did it the night before). The natural history museum is excellent but small, if you like natural history museums. (It has the world's tallest dinosaur mount, the original archaeopteryx fossil (or as they like to call it, "the Mona Lisa of fossils"), an amazing wet storage room, and a taxidermied quagga and thylacine. The memorial to the murdered jews of europe is really striking.
Berlin is also the Williamsburg of Europe, so there's lots of great hipsterish stuff to do.
82: indeed. And it has wif i (in the mountains you can only get rifi). I am there now.
in the mountains you can only get rifi
Which is an improvement on the Parisian underworld, where you get rififi.
83 is encouraging, because if there's not a dissolute expat bar in Morrocco run by a camp Englishman where one can drink oneself to death, I was going to say that there's something wrong with the world.
In Berlin, the Pergamon Museum is my favorite classical art museum I've been to, anywhere. The zoo is great. But mostly there's just an incredible amount of gorgeous new public building, so it's kind of like a spectacular architectural museum of the past 20 years, in the way Chicago is for 1920-1980 or so.
He won't have that much time to tourist around, but if there's anything particular that would be amusing, I'd pass it along to him.
He should go to the bar with the best name/decor there is, namely, Becketts Kopf.