Surveillance is never just about privacy. It has always been, still is, and always will be about power. It doesn't matter whether it's Big Bro or your ex-boyfriend who is surveilling you. They have exactly as much power over you as they know about your life.
Equality of power is only possible when all parties know roughly the same amount about one another.
I listened to this on air today. Man was it disheartening. These conpanies make you check a box that says "I won't use this for domestic spying", I think thats it. Above it is noted some mods are required, but a controlling person can easily gain access to the phone. Physical security is a major flaw, especially for someone you trust. You can turn on the microphone, listen in on calls, block people from calling the phone, and even download an manage the stolen ip on a handy dashboard. Pretty appalling.
Physical access to anything pretty much means game over, at least for consumer electronics. Thats one of the prices we pay for convenience and useful features. I wonder if it can be changed?
Chromebooks are relatively hard to get control off. Physical access makes it possible, of course, but you still need to do more than just install an app.
This is why the 'nothing to hide' argument irks me so much. It implicitly accepts the asymmetry. If everyone had equal information, then it would be a very different environment.
Yeah, the "nothing to hide" mentality really boils down to "I'm okay with letting other people have all sorts of power over me."
The usual assumption is that those other people will not exercise their power in unpleasant ways, even when you are completely at their mercy. It's slave mentality at its finest. The Founding Fathers would have been ashamed.
I was sitting in a cafe in Ogilive Station in Chicago a few months ago, and one of the guys at an adjacent table was telling a story. His girlfriend left, took the kids, and didn't tell him where they had gone.
But, he says triumphantly, "the bitch forgot I work for AT&T."
He the describes, with pride, the look on her face as he showed up at her new house.
(I just started working at Google, and getting at any user data, eg for debugging of a complicated problem, is the single biggest pile of paperwork they make you do. Even anonymized logs.)
Not the OP, and it's not about AT&T, but I once knew a HR person who worked for a big and world-renowned telecom company in my (East-European) country. At some point she started to suspect her then-boyfriend of cheating on her, and to convince herself she "nicely asked" one of her IT colleagues at her job to look through the SMS messages of her boyfriend stored in the company's systems (because, presumably, she couldn't lay her hands on her boyfriend's phone directly). Said IT guy did just that, i.e. informed my former acquaintance of the SMS messages on her boyfriend's phone.
I used to work for a large midwestern wireless company and since it was "family owned" there were a ton of lax rules about stuff.
People would go through users telephone logs, listen to their voicemails and read their SMS messages. If you had the right access, it was a wide open system with little or no safeguards on it. I think back on it now and am appalled, but at the time it was a kind of running joke to the guys in tech support.
Some years ago I was working contract for a large employer. Among other systems I had access to was the LDAP database (effectively: the full company directory).
My contract agency requested that I provide them with a company directory. I found the least helpful way to comply with that I could, with minimal information. Though thinking back on this, I 1) probably shouldn't even have done that, 2) should have refused the request, and 3) should have reported the request to the client.
And that's one of the, generally, more upstanding contract shops I've dealt with (still have occasional relations though no further gigs to date).
Dealing with ethics in the heat of it, especially where an engineering mindset tends to "this is a problem I should figure out how to solve" can be ... interesting.
More to the point: confidentiality of customer data is at best a secondary concern, and often not at all, until it becomes "a problem" (lawsuit, news scandal).
More story time.
I worked for a firm providing services to a large revolving consumer credit organization. These companies are essentially two things: a really impressive transactions processing network (the volume of traffic they handle is immense), and branding.
Think of all the credit card commercials you've seen. That's the branding side at work.
As a contractor of theirs, there was a requirement to go through their data security training.
And while, yes, PII (personally identifiable information) was a concern, the vast bulk of the message, and emphatically highest concern, was with the brand, business plans, and similar information. That is, a company with vast holdings of personal information (described by a military acquaintance with intelligence ties in the late 1990s as "more than we've got" from the perspective of the TLAs, though that status may have since changed), was more concerned with how its trademarks and marketing campaigns were protected was ... revealing.
Gotta focus on them core competencies. Identical services don't market themselves, someone has got to spend a lot of money to convince people of their uniqueness, and that makes security secondary.
And some of them rely on the goodwill / honesty of the employees that have access to said sensitive data. Might not be the best way to go around it, but it does happen.
I used to work for a company contracted to a major US Telecom to provide certain SMS related network services. There were basically zero protections on user data. Anyone who wanted to could watch the stream of SMSs go by.
The subscriber <-> circuit <-> address mapping seems like it would be pretty essential to most of AT&T's field operations.
I would expect better controls against wiretapping, reading texts, accessing smartphone location data, etc. but identifying which physical circuit is serving a customer (and, consequently, where that customer lives) would seem to be a pretty basic bread-and-butter operation for AT&T. Not really a place where you could afford to go through a bunch of paperwork or an approval process.
After the fact however, it should be easy. Did the person with the phone call to open a ticket? Were there any tickets? Who accessed the information....
The data's already there to run that sort of analysis. Unless they for some ... very difficult to imagine... reason don't log the actions of their own staff.
Nothing your post gives a reason as to why she left with the children without saying.
Might that not be a disgusting thing to do to a father?
Assuming there was no violence in the relationship I have no problem with the father using all and any means to find his kids.
That's not the tone that the parent poster was responding to. It was the tone that implied that this was some sort of dead-beat, abusive husband/father.
On the AT&T part though, I agree fully. Individuals should not have access to that sort of information.
It's viscerally disturbing because you are completely powerless against someone like that. You may have changed everything about your life to get away, but just by wanting something as simple and commonplace as a phone, you make yourself vulnerable to him again.
It's like being a fugitive. They have your credit cards. They have your bank accounts. They have people watching everyone you might make contact with. You'd better believe they have your phones. They can cut the power to your house; they can force your alarm company to disarm your security system, they can break down any physical security you have, no matter how strong. They have bigger guns than you, more of them, more people to fire them, and more time. You're going to lose.
We barely trust government with that kind of power, and government in theory has internal controls. Can you imagine being an ex of someone with that kind of power and an anger problem?
This guy's story hit me on roughly the same level as the fact that BTK worked for ADT, installing alarm systems for people who were afraid of BTK.
Whether or not this guy was actually abusive is immaterial; it's the fact that his job at a telecom makes him impossible to hide from.
Why can't somebody be satisfied both with getting back his children and with sticking it to the person who took them in the first place? I think most people would gain some degree of satisfaction from seeing the person who kidnapped their children brought low.
(Admittedly, this is not the narrative I think is more likely, but it doesn't seem like all that remote a possibility either. Vengeful feelings are ugly, whether we consider them justified or not.)
Sure, absolutely that's the sort of thing you would get satisfaction from.
But when you're relating the story to others, are you going to describe that satisfaction at seeing "the bitch" brought low? Or are you going to describe the relief from having your children back? People tend to relate portions of a story which they consider to be important; if this guy is describing to his friend the satisfied feeling of getting one up on her, then that sends some pretty heavy signals about why he broke the law and company policy to find her.
Well, maybe. Which part of the story is important is largely a matter of context. If the topic of discussion were his children, yeah, changing the subject to how he got one over on his wife would be kind of disturbing. If the topic were his wife, expressing satisfaction at how he got one over on her when she was at her most "evil" seems pretty normal.
Isn't this what the police are for? If she just up and left, they didn't get a divorce and he should have certain rights to contact with his kids. Even if they got a divorce he'd probably still have certain rights established when custody was worked out.
You would think that, hey. But I've been recently reading up about the subject, and it seems that father's rights when it comes to children and their custody is wildly skewed in favor of the mother. Look online and you'll find countless stories about perfectly reasonable fathers not getting custody, while they claim the mother is bad (Crazy,addict,something).
While this may have been true 10-15 years ago (I speak from experience and have been through this horrible system) things are starting to turn around.
For instance, 10 years ago when the court determined support, it only looked at what the Father's income was. In some state's, it's a percentage of up to 40% of your income if you got a judge that didn't like you. This means if you're 22 and working at Pizza Hut making $8/hour and the judge says for child support you have to have 40% of your wages garnished to pay support would put you well under the poverty line. This is regardless of whether your girlfriend had a cushy corporate gig making $60K a year with full benefits.
Nowadays, there's been a big push for father's rights and father's rights attorneys are becoming a lot more common. The courts are starting to change course on a lot of previous frameworks. For instance, just on the income issue alone, most courts now look at both parents income when deciding child support. What if your girlfriend isn't working? Too bad, the court now takes into account if you have a college degree and basically assigns you a "potential income" based on previous work history and educational background to come to an estimated income.
It's a lot fairer, but there were some really long, painful years being an unwed father and having to pay support.
Stalking and harassment, on the other hand, will surely be greatly in his favour if he ever has to go to court to get custody or visitation rights. Or if she decides to make a complaint about him.
Actually, the father being the kind of person to use his job to stalk his ex sounds like good enough reason to leave, and save any other sentients from him in the process.
If my wife took off with my kid, I'd use any means at my disposal to find them - in spite of the fact that I'd never dream of doing that in any other circumstance.
>> The repeated use of "his kids" and "my kids" (in cases where the poster is imagining being in his situation) in this thread is quite fascinating.
I think you read too much into it. Consider the context. I am talking about the what-if "me". When I talk about myself and branch off to talking about my kid, it's usually going to be "my kid" or "my son" (as here).
If I'm in a discussion where I'm talking about the unit "us" as parents, it is "our kid" or "our son", and it's the same if my wife and I are discussing our son. (Seriously - that 'our son' wasn't contrived, it's all about the context. I'm talking here about both of us, so I automatically wrote "our son")
And when the kid in question pisses me off, it's definitely "do you know what your son did?" ;)
Let's rephrase this, using only the same information from the original comment:
> The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate his own kidnapped children sounds like good enough reason to leave
LaGrange is right about one thing: your description of the children as "his own" is unwarranted.
Let's assume, though it's not stated outright, that the kids are biologically theirs. The story uses the word "girlfriend". So they weren't married. So legally, the kids were actually hers; he has no leg to stand on.
If you'd said "their kids" I wouldn't have objected -- maybe LaGrange wouldn't either -- but there's no way it's right to refer to these kids as "his".
That's because the only way they're not jumping to conclusions is in word - assumption that it's the guy's kid (sure, possible) is one, but I really don't believe there's no ill will in the entire "desperate father whose evil partner took his children, and couldn't get the police to do anything about it. Also probably starving, cold, and he got stung by bees a lot. And the coffee was awful." narrative. The abuse of position (there, have a word other than privilege, are you people allergic or something?), the slurs , the suggestion they weren't actually married and the rather proud attitude all suggest that the guy wasn't exactly a nice person caught in an awful situation.
EDIT: Sure, it's possible it was just his way of dealing with stress, he might have had parental rights, police ignored the "OMG my wife went crazy" narrative for the first time in recorded history (go look hyperbole on wikipedia before you nitpick), the coffee was really awful and the bees really stung him, but it's definitely less likely, and it's hard to believe someone brings that up in this thread for any reason other than the one they ascribe to SJWs.
> The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate and kidnap children sounds like good enough reason to leave
FTFY. Seriously, there are legal mechanisms for such situations, if you seriously think he was not the abuser there. Though I suspect you're just an MRA troll.
Quote from the post we're talking about: "His girlfriend left, took the kids, and didn't tell him where they had gone."
We simply have no information to make the sorts of conclusions you are making. You are making assumptions based on what appears to be your views on the matter. As further evidenced by you bringing in Mens Rights Activism with your comment about the parent poster being an "MRA troll", for no reason. Or perhaps you're just trying to taint the discussion by making it about womens/mens rights. When it could just simply be either an abusive stalker boyfriend or a crazy girlfriend that kidnapped kids.
You're still making big assumptions based on your opinion of a person or specific action. We still don't know if the guy was abusive or not. And until we do, it's just as reasonable to think that he used other means to solve his problem because he was desperate/determined or maybe he was in fear of his children's lives, etc.
Even the wording you chose to use now, "abusing privilege", is loaded with negative connotations.
Worse. I bet this wording was on purpose, but the important word is not "abusing", it's "privilege". The SJW flamebait word.
@LaGrange, I don't know why you assume the man here was the evil actor. There wasn't enough information in this story that would justify this inference, and re-iterating this stupid meme that it's always men that are at fault is not helping anyone.
Describing the girlfriend as "the bitch" and proudly remembering the look on her face when he tracked her down, as opposed to e.g. talking about how happy he was to see his kids and describing the happy look on their faces is an indicator that it's more about a power struggle with the woman and not about finding his children.
And just an FYI: privilege is still a word, and it still gets used in conversations? Do you jump on sysadmins when they talk about "privileged processes" and complain that they're using "SJW flamebait" language?
> And just an FYI: privilege is still a word, and it still gets used in conversations? Do you jump on sysadmins when they talk about "privileged processes" and complain that they're using "SJW flamebait" language?
Like every other word, this one has to be understood in context in which it is placed. Within the context of this thread, world "privileged" stood out as something placed there to invoke associations with the wider SJW narrative. If I "jump on" someone for something, I do it for ideas presented, not for words used.
Yes, I'm the SJW. And I think that flame bait was a dude going off with "hey, maybe the abuse was totally justified". Pretending that there isn't enough information where the dude straight out admitted he abused his privileged situation (literally, in this case) is completely ridiculous, but hey, not surprising from someone who thinks "social justice warrior" is an insult.
Let me go out and just say this, because it needs to be said. If my son (and yes I do have one) was in some sort of trouble, or danger, or perhaps taken from me for whatever reason, and by someone I don't trust to take care of him... Then you can bet your bones I'll "abuse" my "privileged position" in order to rectify the situation and bring him home safely.
Not because I'm some sort of abusive father, or asshole that wants to stalk people. But because I want to protect my son. There you go, a perfectly valid and simple reason for a normal, non-abusive person to break rules in order to do good.
Evidence of what? A father wanting to know where his kids were taken to? Or an abuser stalking his girlfriend. From the 'evidence' presented, it could be either one.
For all you know he did this in cooperation with police and HR. You leap to conclusions with zero supporting information.
Well, I have never dealt with this situation in my life, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that when you go to the police, they don't say "well, since you work at AT&T, you snooping is probably the best solution we have".
I think we're pretty fucking sure he didn't do this with the police and HR.
If someone took my children away from me without any opportunity to see them again I'd call them considerably worse than that.
Context is king, we need not assume anything about the relationship in the anecdote. It's completely irrelevant to the fact that AT&T failed in it's data protection requirements.
What the hell? "The kids" are suddenly now "his kids"? And the woman is described as "his girlfriend", meaning they weren't married, meaning even if he's the biological father, he has no rights to them. If he's not going to take on the responsibilities of getting married, he's in no position to complain when she leaves!
-- Anyway, I didn't say his used of "bitch" proved anything. But I've seen enough people in abusive relationships to know that it's a clue. The fact that he would illegally (and surely, contrary to company policy) abuse his position as an AT&T employee to stalk her further clarifies the picture.
The use of 'his' here is pretty suspicious. The original story says 'the' kids. We don't know whether they're her kids from another relationship, kids they had together, or his kids from a previous relationship. They could be adopted.
But NATURALLY, they're his kids because it was unspecified and you identify with the father, and because them being his kids makes her a bitch. Now it's internally consistent!
BetaBoston had a related story looking at technical assistance to victims of domestic abuse.
http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes...
I think this link has been posted on HN previously but I can't find it. Apologies for not crediting the person who posted it.
This is one of the most powerful examples I like to use when defending the importance of online privacy and anonymity. Victims of domestic abuse have just as much right to use the internet as anyone else, and their lives could be in danger if their privacy/security is compromised.
From the article : “The question I always asked was how does someone end up in that situation?” her best friend said. “And the answer — from having witnessed it — is, gradually.”
Just like every privacy issue, every human rights abuse, abuse of power etc - when things happen gradually, most people don't notice, and when they notice, it is too late.
It's interesting that spying on a spouse is considered abuse but doing the same thing to children is not. My ex-wife and her boyfriend would do this to my teenage sons - track them with the GPS on their phones, block phone use for most of the day, record and read all messages they sent and received on their computer to a thumb drive. Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades. I don't know where I'm going with this... Oh yeah. My ex-wife is a nasty, brutish, turd of a person.
> Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades.
The paranoid in me wonders if they had a second set of "clean" phones that they could use to arrange their mischief.
The not-yet-a-parent in me hopes that they did, especially since they seemed to be doing fine otherwise.
More likely they'll be passed out on their dorm floor within 15 minutes of arriving at college. I met a lot of people in undergrad with overbearing parents who partied way too hard - some of whom failed out.
1. Who's responsible for actions that affect other people?
1a - If kids misbehave badly enough, can't the parents get in trouble instead / as well?
1b - But, aren't married couples (sometimes?) responsible for eachother's debts?
.
2. Who's responsible if [the person being watched] gets hurt?
2a - Parents are definitely responsible for keeping kids safe, and I've heard they can sometime get in trouble for not watching closely enough even if nothing happens.
2b - Married people tend to be adults, and considered responsible for their own safety and wellbeing.
.
I'm guessing the different standards have something to do with (2).
You simply can't have it all; you can't raise children in a free-flowing environment where they can explore and learn from the consequences of their own actions, and throw parents in jail for hypothetical things that could have gone wrong because they weren't being helicopter parents. Which is damn near legally mandated now. Or at least, what is legally mandated would have been considered helicopter parenting when I grew up.
I say this without comment as to the right balance for society. I just wish there was one that I could rely on it.
The relationship between two equals (as in a marriage) is a different dynamic than that of one between a parent and a child. A spouse is an adult who can take care of himself, while a child needs guidance to avoid dangerous situations. It's not tyranny, it's parenting.
mSpy[0] is the software that is featured in this story. For iOS, jailbreaking is required. For Android, some features (Instant messenger tracking and Keylogging) require rooting the phone.
Also, Windows phones are not supported yet, so go for one of those if you happen to have a psychotic partner.
Assuming your device is jailbreakable, the problem is that your phone is vulnerable to jailbreaking, whether you've decided to jailbreak it or not. In the relevant scenario (the one described in the article, with "a few minutes alone with the smartphone of the person being stalked" and the passcode), if the victim hasn't already chosen to jailbreak the phone, the stalker can easily jailbreak it and install the spyware.
As it happens, I've had direct personal experience with the shelter organization named in this article.
Several years ago I met a woman, through a friend. We ended up married not too long after.
Just over a month into that, she was acting increasingly erratically, creating fights, attacking me, and disappeared one day with no information as to where she'd gone or why. Turns out she'd gone to a shelter, Next Door. She contacted me (via phone and email from there.
It turns out there's a provision of immigration law, called an I-360 petition, that's part of the Violence Against Women Act (though both the act and petition apply to all genders) in which an abused spouse of a permanent resident can claim citizenship status. The claims of the alleged victim are taken prima facie (on their face) to be true. It's quite the law.
I visited Next Door, by appointment, having been the victim of abuse myself in this case, both for information on where I could turn, and on what they knew about the I-360 process and how I might protect my own interests (another long story). I met with the director, Kathleen Krenek, and one of the senior support staff, I'd have to check my notes, but she doesn't appear to be on the organization's web page presently. They were markedly less than supportive. I made absolutely clear that I wasn't seeking information on my ex.
AT&T employees weren't required to spill this information to my ex. Next Door informed her themselves, as noted in court testimony.
The outcome of the family law case was annulment of marriage on the basis of fraud.
My ex remains in the US, presumably by way of her fraudulent VAWA petition. Apparently the ICE haven't bothered requesting or reading the annulment decision, or the Court's finding of my ex as "less than credible".
It's been five years since the last court date and decision, but this still burns pretty deep. I absolutely didn't consider myself MRA before this (anything but), and find a hell of a lot in the movement that's pretty objectionable, but there's an absolute truth that the system frequently presumes a role and guilt on men, termed "the abuser" in the relevant VAWA statute, despite the fact that there's no actual proof involved.
One thing I did learn is that the process is ugly, extremely expensive, soul-sucking, and needlessly confrontational in far too many ways. Human relationship are like that, and it's not until you've seen them go south, and encountered the reasons and deceptions revealed, that you really get a full understanding of this.
I find the concept of "digital detox" in this situation to be interesting. The Hacker News reader in me wants to say, "But you're missing an opportunity to watch the watcher." I understand most abuse shelters aren't going to be equipped to help teach users how to, for example, monitor and modify the network traffic of background apps on their phone. Or more simply: factory reset the phone before entering the shelter, then turn off mobile networks and GPS and only use the shelter's WiFi.
I think it could be an empowering thing for people - to see that they can fight back against their abuser technically in certain circumstances.
This makes me think about every time I call tech support and end up bitching them out. Usually the first thing any customer support does is get all of your personal info like address and stuff. So in essence, by the time they have pissed me off and I have told them they live a worthless existence where toilet paper has more of a use than they do,and that they are friggin idiots, they are sitting there google mapping my house and plotting revenge. Thankfully, phone rage seems to subsist quickly. But I have said some stuff to customer support and then thought twice about how much information that person knows about me when in essence I know nothing about them.
Lol, I wish I could, but I guess when it comes to customer support, having had comcast in the past, I prejudge the situation based on my previous dealings with customer support.
My latest customer support story is from Friday. I had purchased $3000 worth of equipment from Best Buy and it was going to take a week to get there. I ordered it on a Saturday and then called the following friday to see what the status was and if I could plan to pick it up the next day, since best buy is 1+hr drive for me, I wanted to plan ahead. Customer support told me that for sure the equipment wouldn't be there by the next day because it hadn't even shipped yet. And additionally they couldn't tell me when it would ship or cancel my order. I didn't inquire about canceling either, this was just what they said.
I bitched the lady out because thats not answer you give to a customer that just dropped $3000 + my other purchased which are 1000's as well. . . 15 minutes later I get an email telling me my stuff is shipped. 2 hours later I get an email saying my stuff is at the store. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but maybe I ended up getting my stuff on time because I did. I'll go with the latter. I fucking hate all customer supports, even the good ones.
"I bitched the lady out because thats not answer you give to a customer that just dropped $3000"
Was it her fault? Did she make the policy? You can be certain that she wasn't able to get it magically shipped, you'd be surprised at how little authority people int hat position actually have (for the most part they get to follow scripts, and that's basically it.)
If your stuff arrived on time, it would have anyway. That means you abused some poor woman with no more control than you had and likely ruined her day - but hey, I'm sure it made you feel better and much more in control.
" I fucking hate all customer supports, even the good ones."
THe best part is that this guarantees you likely never have a good customer support experience. And you'll continue to blame it on everyone else.
While I agree that one shouldn't abuse these people, the corporations deliberately set it up so that they're the only agents that can be communicated with. There is literally no one else who will bother listening to you, and the only ones who will listen are the ones that have no responsibility or power.
I think people who treat others like dirt are jerks, but the true blame lies at the feet of those who set up the system.
This! I dont feel like I spend a lot of money so I can treat you like shit. I feel like I spend a lot of money so you can at least be able to get me a tracking number. You people that feel like you can't have an opinion once you have spent your money must be working for corporate america. If they are going to wine and dine you before you purchase it, they can at least be kind to your face post purchase, especially if the item is not there but your money is gone.
Funny how not too long ago the top story all day was the aol/tech crunch guy's audio from comcast support. I consider that to be bitching out customer support for what its worth, thats as aggressive as I get as well. But I'll take the downvotes from the hypocrites that apparently treat customer support agents like kittens.
Surveillance is never just about privacy. It has always been, still is, and always will be about power. It doesn't matter whether it's Big Bro or your ex-boyfriend who is surveilling you. They have exactly as much power over you as they know about your life.
Equality of power is only possible when all parties know roughly the same amount about one another.