The technology that makes those passwords matter is called encryption. It’s the basic security that protects our phones from would-be creeps, but it’s also the critical layer of defense that protects our airports, hospitals, power plants, and water treatment facilities from would-be cyber attackers.
But that's not the whole story. After you input your decryption password, the files are decrypted and could theoretically be transferred to the NSA servers or something.
And not just "normal" programs or the operating system could be used to send your files to the NSA - often there is more software running on different parts of the hardware that are not under the control of the operating system.
Even if you use only android's open source code without any of the closed source google apps, there is still some proprietary code running in various parts of the hardware, for example inside the UMTS/HSDPA/LTE modem. Even worse, on many smartphones this hardware has FULL access to the memory. On these phones your modem could at any time decide to upload the content of your RAM to the NSA servers without you having any chance of knowing about it, if you don't happen to physically monitor the mobile data traffic at the time.
The only defense against that is buying a smartphone where the hardware has been proven to be physically unable to do this sort of access.
Now back to the apple iPhone: You don't even need to start thinking about this stuff in apple land. You're running a huge closed source operating system. Who knows what kind of backdoors this operating system already contains to enable the NSA, other three letter agencies or maybe anyone to access your files after you enter your decryption password.
If an American company is responsible for producing the hardware and/or software and the hardware designs and the source code are not open for anyone to inspect (and to prove that this is actually the stuff in the phones that are sold), they are forced to comply with whatever the NSA tells them to put into it and therefore their hardware and software is never 100% trustworthy, period.
HeartBeatOfTheBeastHoof and Claw 1 point on 2016-03-19 00:08:22
This leads to a whole can of worms. Imagine if the wrong hands got a hold of the technology to hack into people's cell phones.
zetacolaLoba 5 points on 2016-03-20 01:45:01
I don't want to demean the situation of the LGBTQ crowd, but I think this article is complete rubbish. As if breaches in human rights and liberties absolutely had to affect minorities to be relevant.
Terrifying real life examples abound, like the teacher who was targeted by for being gay, and later fired, after his Dropbox account was hacked and a sex video was posted on his school’s website. Or the time a Russian gay dating app was breached [...]
[...] queer and trans people would be forced into near complete isolation without the ability to connect safely through apps, online forums, and other venues that are only kept safe and private by encryption technology.
The true underlying problem, the one the article completely fails to address, is that people trust fickle technology with their personal lives a little too much. It seems very silly to me how people are quick to trust billion dollar corporations with their personal information, but only as soon as the government is involved does it become a problem. What people should understand is that it is not letting the FBI open a backdoor in their phone that will void the safety of their personal information. That safety simply isn't even there to begin with. Dropbox was hacked. That Russian dating app was hacked. Information was leaked because technology deemed trustworthy was broken. Every piece of software written in the last 3 decades was shipped by people who headed back to their family as soon as it worked "well enough". Of course everything is broken.
If you don't want your sensitive personal details to leak out and come bite you in the ass later in life, well the solution is simple : keep them off your damn mobile device. The end. An IPhone is a privilege, not a right.
FrostfedoraCaptain Esports 2 points on 2016-03-20 02:36:20
Why not trust (to a limited extent) (some) corporations? It isn't in the best interest of corporations to pointlessly piss off their customers. What is Google going to do, blackmail me about the porn I watch if I talk unfavorably about Google Chrome? If they're caught doing shit like that, it'll leak fast and damage their profits as well as put them into hot water legally. It's easier to choose a new corporation to give money to than reform an entire government. If the government is not involved, there's barely anything to worry about and I can safely know that the worst thing that happens to my data is that it's sold to advertisers so I can get better searches and ads.
When the government steps in, it gets a lot more nefarious because they have significantly more power and legal rights than a company does to fuck people over and get away with it, and more motivation to do so. Not necessarily our current administration, but a future one with more malevolent intentions and had access to a massive pool of data. I don't like to invoke Godwin's law, but this was one of the main ways the Nazis were able to find out who was of Jewish descent. Will we ever have something like the holocaust in modern day America? Probably not, but the future's unpredictable and people are surprisingly authoritarian and more than willing willing to sacrifice civil liberties if they're manipulated into being afraid. The government is also more capable than corporations when it comes to spinning propaganda to conceal and support the decisions they make.
An IPhone is a privilege, not a right.
Cellphones are so ubiquitous in society that you're almost expected to have one especially by employers.
zetacolaLoba 4 points on 2016-03-20 04:16:19
Why not trust (to a limited extent) (some) corporations?
I guess I didn't make my thoughts clear enough. My point was not really about the trust you give to the corporations themselves, but the trust you give to the products you use. I felt that what the article was trying to convey was along the lines of "if the information the government collects on people falls into the wrong hands, it could lead to disastrous consequences for some people." But corporations already collect these informations on people, and corporations aren't foolproof, the article said so itself. So really, the entire premise is just really dumb.
The focus of the article was that of safety. But people already deliberately choose not to be safe and NSA backdoors in phones really won't affect much on that front. If the article talked about breaches in civil liberties (which it does not even mentioned once), then it would have been a different story.
I don't like to invoke Godwin's law, but this was one of the main ways the Nazis were able to find out who was of Jewish descent.
Snooping on people's cellphone conversations? :P But in all seriousness, I think that proves my point a little. Gubment can do what it damn well pleases. If we get to another totalitarian regime, it won't even need backdoors in personal devices to collect data on people. Facebook and its ilk will have already done the job for them. The massive pool of data already exists and it's already vulnerable, so to me it makes no sense to think things will get worse if Uncles Sam "legitimately" gets access to it.
The government is also more capable than corporations when it comes to spinning propaganda to conceal and support the decisions they make.
Debatable, honestly. Corporations have more power than you realize.
Cellphones are so ubiquitous in society that you're almost expected to have one especially by employers.
I agree. But it still doesn't justify putting your personal information on there, especially if by doing so you potentially expose yourself to life-threatening situations. Talking about your sex life on social media or using dating apps aren't rights.
30-30amator equae 3 points on 2016-03-20 07:36:19
I´ll second that.
Why do you folks still make a distinction between government and corporations? Have you checked who funds your presidential candidates in the US, where the donations come from? Do you think all these high value donations serve a caritative purpose? No, they´re business, nothing else but that. Quid pro quo.
Corporations ARE the government.
Additionally, I as someone born in the 70s simply fail to understand the lack of a healthy portion of scepticism when it comes to social media. I guess the naiveté of today´s people towards their data would have been the GDR´s Stasi dream...you don´t have to pay lots of spies and snitches to investigate on a person, you just install some social media platform for people "to connect" and those sheeple will do the work for you, all by themselves. Where has the scepticism of the first hacker generation gone?
Usage of Facebook et al. = trading your privacy for convenience, so who´s the real fool and a-hole here? The ones running social/exhibitionism platforms or the ones who use it without any further consideration of the consequences?
I really wonder how the gay community connected in the 70s and 80s, without all these funny little apps and social media. When has it become "normal" to hand out info about your sexual preferences and other shit that´s best kept goddamn private, especially on platforms known for their practices to use and pass your info to other corporations?
The process of infantilizing continues, as it seems. The more complicated the tech gets, the more blue eyed average people seem to become. It´s like handing out loaded guns to monkeys....
George Orwell´s "1984" or Aldous Huxley´s "Brave new world": what type of dystopia describes our world of today better? Some agrue we´re leaning more to the Orwellian side, others favor Huxley´s vision. I say that it´s a mixture of both: on the surface, the masses are fed with the SOMA drug (social media, consumerism,materialism etc.), but beneath this shiny surface, Orwells Big Brother smirks at you with an eerie and evil grin.
Formerly responsible acting citizens have mutated into whiny consumers demanding a 100% safe and convenient environment. Well, it´s YOUR damn responsibility to take care of your data. If you use social media, then do it with a decent amount of scepticism. Stop demanding from others to dig you out of the shit you piled up yourself to drown in. Think before you act.
syzithryxi like cookies 1 point on 2016-03-24 00:59:51
Sheeple. I like that word.
And I agree with you much for sure - by the way, I think we're more like Brave New World. Kim Kardashian is the new Soma.
/r/zoophilia archive
(Addition of [Z] to the title by me)
But that's not the whole story. After you input your decryption password, the files are decrypted and could theoretically be transferred to the NSA servers or something.
And not just "normal" programs or the operating system could be used to send your files to the NSA - often there is more software running on different parts of the hardware that are not under the control of the operating system.
Even if you use only android's open source code without any of the closed source google apps, there is still some proprietary code running in various parts of the hardware, for example inside the UMTS/HSDPA/LTE modem. Even worse, on many smartphones this hardware has FULL access to the memory. On these phones your modem could at any time decide to upload the content of your RAM to the NSA servers without you having any chance of knowing about it, if you don't happen to physically monitor the mobile data traffic at the time.
Here is a technical overview from the Replicant project: http://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php
The only defense against that is buying a smartphone where the hardware has been proven to be physically unable to do this sort of access.
Now back to the apple iPhone: You don't even need to start thinking about this stuff in apple land. You're running a huge closed source operating system. Who knows what kind of backdoors this operating system already contains to enable the NSA, other three letter agencies or maybe anyone to access your files after you enter your decryption password.
If an American company is responsible for producing the hardware and/or software and the hardware designs and the source code are not open for anyone to inspect (and to prove that this is actually the stuff in the phones that are sold), they are forced to comply with whatever the NSA tells them to put into it and therefore their hardware and software is never 100% trustworthy, period.
</pointless rant>
Also I resubmitted this with the fixed link and deleted the original submission here: https://np.reddit.com/r/zoophilia/comments/4b0r81/if_you_care_about_lgbtqz_lives_you_should_oppose/. Sorry HeartBeatOfTheBeast. :)
This leads to a whole can of worms. Imagine if the wrong hands got a hold of the technology to hack into people's cell phones.
I don't want to demean the situation of the LGBTQ crowd, but I think this article is complete rubbish. As if breaches in human rights and liberties absolutely had to affect minorities to be relevant.
The true underlying problem, the one the article completely fails to address, is that people trust fickle technology with their personal lives a little too much. It seems very silly to me how people are quick to trust billion dollar corporations with their personal information, but only as soon as the government is involved does it become a problem. What people should understand is that it is not letting the FBI open a backdoor in their phone that will void the safety of their personal information. That safety simply isn't even there to begin with. Dropbox was hacked. That Russian dating app was hacked. Information was leaked because technology deemed trustworthy was broken. Every piece of software written in the last 3 decades was shipped by people who headed back to their family as soon as it worked "well enough". Of course everything is broken.
If you don't want your sensitive personal details to leak out and come bite you in the ass later in life, well the solution is simple : keep them off your damn mobile device. The end. An IPhone is a privilege, not a right.
Why not trust (to a limited extent) (some) corporations? It isn't in the best interest of corporations to pointlessly piss off their customers. What is Google going to do, blackmail me about the porn I watch if I talk unfavorably about Google Chrome? If they're caught doing shit like that, it'll leak fast and damage their profits as well as put them into hot water legally. It's easier to choose a new corporation to give money to than reform an entire government. If the government is not involved, there's barely anything to worry about and I can safely know that the worst thing that happens to my data is that it's sold to advertisers so I can get better searches and ads.
When the government steps in, it gets a lot more nefarious because they have significantly more power and legal rights than a company does to fuck people over and get away with it, and more motivation to do so. Not necessarily our current administration, but a future one with more malevolent intentions and had access to a massive pool of data. I don't like to invoke Godwin's law, but this was one of the main ways the Nazis were able to find out who was of Jewish descent. Will we ever have something like the holocaust in modern day America? Probably not, but the future's unpredictable and people are surprisingly authoritarian and more than willing willing to sacrifice civil liberties if they're manipulated into being afraid. The government is also more capable than corporations when it comes to spinning propaganda to conceal and support the decisions they make.
Cellphones are so ubiquitous in society that you're almost expected to have one especially by employers.
I guess I didn't make my thoughts clear enough. My point was not really about the trust you give to the corporations themselves, but the trust you give to the products you use. I felt that what the article was trying to convey was along the lines of "if the information the government collects on people falls into the wrong hands, it could lead to disastrous consequences for some people." But corporations already collect these informations on people, and corporations aren't foolproof, the article said so itself. So really, the entire premise is just really dumb.
The focus of the article was that of safety. But people already deliberately choose not to be safe and NSA backdoors in phones really won't affect much on that front. If the article talked about breaches in civil liberties (which it does not even mentioned once), then it would have been a different story.
Snooping on people's cellphone conversations? :P But in all seriousness, I think that proves my point a little. Gubment can do what it damn well pleases. If we get to another totalitarian regime, it won't even need backdoors in personal devices to collect data on people. Facebook and its ilk will have already done the job for them. The massive pool of data already exists and it's already vulnerable, so to me it makes no sense to think things will get worse if Uncles Sam "legitimately" gets access to it.
Debatable, honestly. Corporations have more power than you realize.
I agree. But it still doesn't justify putting your personal information on there, especially if by doing so you potentially expose yourself to life-threatening situations. Talking about your sex life on social media or using dating apps aren't rights.
I´ll second that.
Why do you folks still make a distinction between government and corporations? Have you checked who funds your presidential candidates in the US, where the donations come from? Do you think all these high value donations serve a caritative purpose? No, they´re business, nothing else but that. Quid pro quo. Corporations ARE the government.
Additionally, I as someone born in the 70s simply fail to understand the lack of a healthy portion of scepticism when it comes to social media. I guess the naiveté of today´s people towards their data would have been the GDR´s Stasi dream...you don´t have to pay lots of spies and snitches to investigate on a person, you just install some social media platform for people "to connect" and those sheeple will do the work for you, all by themselves. Where has the scepticism of the first hacker generation gone? Usage of Facebook et al. = trading your privacy for convenience, so who´s the real fool and a-hole here? The ones running social/exhibitionism platforms or the ones who use it without any further consideration of the consequences? I really wonder how the gay community connected in the 70s and 80s, without all these funny little apps and social media. When has it become "normal" to hand out info about your sexual preferences and other shit that´s best kept goddamn private, especially on platforms known for their practices to use and pass your info to other corporations?
The process of infantilizing continues, as it seems. The more complicated the tech gets, the more blue eyed average people seem to become. It´s like handing out loaded guns to monkeys....
George Orwell´s "1984" or Aldous Huxley´s "Brave new world": what type of dystopia describes our world of today better? Some agrue we´re leaning more to the Orwellian side, others favor Huxley´s vision. I say that it´s a mixture of both: on the surface, the masses are fed with the SOMA drug (social media, consumerism,materialism etc.), but beneath this shiny surface, Orwells Big Brother smirks at you with an eerie and evil grin.
Formerly responsible acting citizens have mutated into whiny consumers demanding a 100% safe and convenient environment. Well, it´s YOUR damn responsibility to take care of your data. If you use social media, then do it with a decent amount of scepticism. Stop demanding from others to dig you out of the shit you piled up yourself to drown in. Think before you act.
Sheeple. I like that word.
And I agree with you much for sure - by the way, I think we're more like Brave New World. Kim Kardashian is the new Soma.