EFF Begins Investigating Surveillance Technology Rumors At Standing Rock (eff.org) 147
Electronic Frontier Foundation has dispatched a team of technologists and lawyers to a protest site in Standing Rock, North Dakota, to investigate "several reports of potentially unlawful surveillance." An anonymous reader writes:
The EFF has "collected anecdotal evidence from water protectors about suspicious cell phone behavior, including uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely," according to a recent report. "Some water protectors also saw suspicious login attempts to their Google accounts from IP addresses originating from North Dakota's Information & Technology Department. On social media, many reported Facebook posts and messenger threads disappearing, as well as Facebook Live uploads failing to upload or, once uploaded, disappearing completely."
The EFF reports "it's been very difficult to pinpoint the true cause or causes," but they've targeted over 20 law enforcement agencies with public records requests, noting that "Of the 15 local and state agencies that have responded, 13 deny having any record at all of cell site simulator use, and two agencies -- Morton County and the North Dakota State Highway Patrol (the two agencies most visible on the ground) -- claim that they can't release records in the interest of "public safety"...
"Law enforcement agencies should not be allowed to sidestep public inquiry into the surveillance technologies they're using," EFF writes, "especially when citizens' constitutional rights are at stake... It is past time for the Department of Justice to investigate the scope of law enforcement's digital surveillance at Standing Rock and its consequences for civil liberties and freedoms in the digital world."
The EFF reports "it's been very difficult to pinpoint the true cause or causes," but they've targeted over 20 law enforcement agencies with public records requests, noting that "Of the 15 local and state agencies that have responded, 13 deny having any record at all of cell site simulator use, and two agencies -- Morton County and the North Dakota State Highway Patrol (the two agencies most visible on the ground) -- claim that they can't release records in the interest of "public safety"...
"Law enforcement agencies should not be allowed to sidestep public inquiry into the surveillance technologies they're using," EFF writes, "especially when citizens' constitutional rights are at stake... It is past time for the Department of Justice to investigate the scope of law enforcement's digital surveillance at Standing Rock and its consequences for civil liberties and freedoms in the digital world."
Who watches the watchers? (Score:5, Insightful)
The police seem to think they have limitless powers, it is disgusting. They were given extra powers to deal with the likes of ISIS, not for repressing peaceful protestors. They need to learn they work for the people and not a few company owners.
Re:Who watches the watchers? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that the authorities are hexing your field communications, bring in some radio hams with mobile gear to patch your calls through. Hams live for opportunities like this, and police are clueless about the tech they use.
Re:Who watches the watchers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Emergency agencies where I live train and use ham radio volunteers to operate communications in their mobile command centers. A ham friend of mine trains with them occasionally. The expectation is the hams will still get through if and when the standard tech fails. They don't deploy hams for normal police actions, but if there's a natural disaster or other emergency, he'll be there.
I wouldn't rely on the ignorance of others.
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I'd be surprised if you could find 10 hams who actually know enough about the communications technology to get anything through these days. They're mostly appliance operators any more, so the days of cobbling together a radio from some banana peels and discarded metal sunglasses are long gone I'm afraid. Take away their repeaters and Internet links and they are as helpless as the cops and firemen.
Re: Who watches the watchers? (Score:1)
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I dare to disagree. Sure, you can get a ham license easily without knowing the first thing about the inner workings of your toys, but true "ham street cred" is what most ham operators are after. And I can't speak for your country, in mine they are subject to a lot of regulation and it's a favorite pastime of many ham enthusiasts to sidestep it, of course this entails knowing a lot about how to tweak, build and rebuild your tools because simply buying something that boosts your performance is not an option.
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Here in the United States it seems to be a career for some "hams" to cause harmful interference to legitimate communications, especially during nets to aid victims of natural disasters or other directed nets. Lowering the barriers to entry has allowed people who have no life to make misery for the rest who have one.
Then there are those with this bunker mentality (are we calling them "preppers" now?) who put up repeaters with restrictive access so that only the chosen few (usually only the owner himself and
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That's what ham has degenerated into in the US? That's sad. It's way different over here in Europe. If there's a disaster happening anywhere you can rest assured that people will load up their trucks with their equipment and travel across the continent to be there. There's also little that's more reliable than these guys when it comes to getting information into and out of areas that have been flooded or hit by any other disaster.
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Here in the United States it seems to be a career for some "hams" to cause harmful interference to legitimate communications, especially during nets to aid victims of natural disasters or other directed nets. ...
I think you are getting "Hams" (licensed Amature Radio Operators) mixed up with CB pirates. Or maybe the CB pirates are buying illegal shortwave equipment ?
Be aware, though, that long distance means that just because you can hear them, does not necessarily mean they can hear you. ;-)
Is anyone surprised about this? (Score:5, Informative)
By now it should be public knowledge for any protester against any government that their personal communication devices and the communication itself will be always under attack. Whoever goes to such protests and especially anyone who is networking with others about it, needs to encrypt all devices and all communications. Not just at the protest itself but in their private life too. One is always under threat to get arrested. If one is arrested the cellphone is the first thing confiscated and of course tried to access. Any US protester who uses US communication services like google, whatsapp, facebook for anything is simply a dumb fool. How many NSLs have been granted wrt Standing Rock already?
Governments infiltrated protest movements 50 years ago with COINTELPRO including assaults on people, did the same in the 90s cross border in Europe, fathered children with activists even and now of course will attack all communications, in meatspace and online. Attacking communications is the first step since it's easy: they own the means of communication. Google hast to comply, since it's the law. They didn't change the amount of effort they will go to, they just changed their tactics. The amount of effort is comparable to spies going deep undercover, to live whole lives over decades to infiltrate, so eavesdropping on communication is a very small and minor step.
Re: Is anyone surprised about this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Is anyone surprised about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
That begs the question, what ARE the appropriate LEGAL actions? We're talking about warrantless surveillance using NDA's and gags to silence disclosure of their usage to the citizenry. In many cases this is almost completely unauthorized by the spirit of the law and only a very specific interpretation by a very limited few "secret" judges allow this to continue nationwide, and also in individual states and jurisdictions with state-level bullshit authorization, another layer of abstraction. Still, unless they can prove that it went on and they were monetarily damaged by it? They have no standing to even make it into any courtroom.
Imagine trying to sue the 3rd reich. It's not unlike that.
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They have, but they have to have their own geek advising them about it. You will need to sacrifice convenience and possibly even invest some money: buy a used notebook as a computer which deals with the protest using Veracrypt, leaving your normal desktop for other things. Buy a 2nd used phone (less than hundred bucks) with prepaid for the protest only and run CM on it with encryption. Don't use any western companies for messaging. If you can't use decentralized messaging, then use ones in countries like Ru
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The fact that they shouldn't be surprised doesn't negate the fact that the government shouldn't be doing it.
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It's not a surprise, just a great opportunity to research some if the tech and see if any illegal use by law enforcement can be proven.
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Proven, yes. But more importantly reverse engineered, subverted, then used against its maker.
Security isn't a one way road. If you know your communication is being tapped and your opponent does not know that you know it, it becomes a very useful tool to feed him false information.
You are assuming the encryption is secure! (Score:1)
We've got between 2 and 7 generations of CPUs with potential 'spyware' built in. ARM, Intel, AMD. While I still haven't heard of any documented example of it being used in practice, I also haven't heard of anybody setting up reciever hardware to snoop on their cellphone's cellular traffic patterns and determine if suspicious transmission patterns are happening that might indicate keys, baseband/management processor level spyware is being uploaded.
The point being: There is a lot more needed to retain any rig
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Encryption is only useful if you do not trust the communication way but can trust the parts that do the actual encryption. In this case, you cannot do that.
Call them protesters (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it is a pipe dream, but could we please get back to being a news (for nerds) site and not a political discourse site?
Re: Call them protesters (Score:4, Interesting)
And cold weather is notorious for trying to log in to your Google accounts and deleting uploads to Fcebook..
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And they like totally forgot they were hangin' with their buds at North Dakota's Information & Technology Department when they borrowed a browser and forgot their Google password...
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Pipelines are only safer then the alternatives when things like the safest route is taken. In this case the safest route was close to Bismark and the people of Bismark protested so the pipeline was moved to go under a lake instead of the shorter route under the river in what should be the natives sovereign land, at least if the American government actually followed their Constitution (in this case the treaty clause).
This is as much as what the protests are about, the American government and the oil industry
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Pipelines are only safer then the alternatives when things like the safest route is taken. In this case the safest route was close to Bismark and the people of Bismark protested so the pipeline was moved to go under a lake instead of the shorter route under the river.
Completely wrong on multiple points.
1. It wasn't the safest route,
2. the people of Bismark didn't even have a chance to complain because the early plan was killed before it even got submitted to State-level agencies.
3. It wasn't the shortest route either.
4. It's still going under the river. The 'Lake' is a manmade reservoir in which the river was just widened via a dam.
The Army Corps of Engineers nixed the idea because it made the pipeline 10 miles longer AND it make it much harder to keep the pipeline the
Re: Call them protesters (Score:5, Interesting)
I also bet it's partially due to a bit of hysteria. People have their battery drain faster than usual, apps crash, etc. all the time, but don't think too much of it. All it takes is one rumor and suddenly people are paying a lot more attention to the meaningless coincidences and trying to find something to attribute them to even if there isn't one.
I get that the government can spy on people and there is documented evidence of various agencies having and using the equipment and technology to do so, but that doesn't mean its always doing so or is in this particular case. I had assumed that the protesters were mostly hippies and the like that the government wouldn't give two shits about, but I suppose if there are some ELF-types at the protest their might be more cause for concern or the possibility where a warrant to do so could be granted and things are being done above board legally.
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If you've ever driven though parts of the mid-west there's a lot of areas with bad or no coverage depending on where you're at.
Yep. The coverage can be so bad in these sparsely populated states, the only way for government officials to communicate is to try logging in to my Gmail account while I'm passing through. Nothing to see here, people, move along.
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Whiny bitch without the balls to protest for anything has a problem with a group of protesters labeling themselves defenders of that which they're protesting for. And blames slashdot. Of course.
Get off the capitalist fainting couch (Score:2)
Uh, NO. They are literally trying to protect their watershed, thus making "water protectors" just as reasonable as calling the oil supporters "security contractors".
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Then they would have called it quits for the entire project, and spent all those billions on wind mill farms instead, when the region has no shortage of it. Any more simple questions?
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Any more simple questions?
When were you diagnosed with your mental condition?
This is what the pipelines are being built to prevent:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Anyone who supports the status quo over the much safer pipelines is for environmental damage. If you would prefer the numerous train derailments that lead to massive oil spills, then keep protesting every pipeline trying to protect the environment from oil spills, it really increases your enviro-cred!
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You speaking to your bathroom mirror?
Uh, no. Pipelines are about increasing profit margins for oil companies, not safety. Because pipelines leak [thinkprogress.org] all. the. time.
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I am sure that those leaks over time add up to the oil spills of a single train derailment, but those are easy to design for. Do you think that it is profit motive that makes them want to stop having train derailments and loss of product all. the. fucking. time? Of course, but also, pipelines leak much less than any incident on a rail line, and even a catastrophic failure of a pipeline is much less oil leaking than a single rail car of the long trains that we have moving oil now.
As I said, anyone against
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A large number of the "protestors" at standing rock are earning a wage for it. They're not protestors, they're employees.
Do you know this or are you repeating something you read on the internet?
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It's a well known fact that this entire "protest" is a diversion by the MSM to help Hitlery Clinton and Bernie Schindler... something something ...communism? And something about children with sex rings eating pizza? I mean, we all know pizza and finger jewellery are liberal conspiracies designed to turn kids gay. Then they'll be brainwashed into aborting their grandparents so the left wing Nazis win World War 2.
Ahh, so you are crazy, misinformed and believing political lies on the internetz.
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Holy...! This runs so much deeper than anyone thought.
Gotta retweet it instantly! We have confirmation!
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Very well then:
http://www.valleynewslive.com/content/misc/NoDALP-Protesters-Getting-Paid---Is-This-Proof--401507625.html
Now, get back to earning your paycheque. I thought the internet wasn't working at Standing Rock?
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Sources? What's that "sources" you're talking about, get the news out while it's hot, nobody gives a shit about "sources".
Re:Editor Duhvid (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no. The EFF's official style is to refer to themselves as "Electronic Frontier Foundation." You can see this several times in the article.
"EFF has been tracking the effects of its surveillance technologies on water protectors’ communications and movement."
"EFF sent technologists and lawyers to North Dakota to investigate."
"EFF also sent more than 20 public records requests to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies."
Some are easy to look for (Score:2)
Disappearing Facebook posts? Is their password that bad, or are they posting content that could be subject to DMCA takedown? Otherwise I'm not sure FB would cooperate.
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Yeah, it's not like Facebook has removed posts from other countries as they steamroll over their citizens. Nope. No chance.
I'd settle for taking away the concussion grenades (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, this is why you don't militarize the police. They don't have the training to use these kinds of weapons even when they're 'non-lethal'...
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The only reason she's gonna win her lawsuit is that the doctor who treated her was smart enough to save the shrapnel lodged in her arm
Citation needed; there's so much fake news going around on this topic you can't believe everything you hear. I couldn't find any reports of shrapnel from a grenade being the cause. However, there is a report of a young woman being injured by a homemade bomb [valleynewslive.com]. I also found reports that the FBI collected bits of flesh from one of the propane canister bombs, so someone was injured by it.
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And yet, all of the pictures show in-tact but charred disposable cylinders.That includes the one claimed to have bits of human flesh on it. If that is indeed human flesh, it seems far more likely that it happened right after someone said "Hey, you shouldn't throw empty tanks in a fire!". Weed or alcohol may have been involved.
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I hope you were yelling those words at the nearest mirror when writing them.
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The police claimed it was a propane tank based IED, but the fragments the surgeon preserved from her arm were from a concussion grenade.
Funny thing about the pictures of disposable bottles in your second link, they're not in fragments. Some appear to have been tossed in a campfire.
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If the surgeon served during wartime, he might need to know enough to deal with unexploded ordinance. However, more likely the surgeon just kept the fragments so they could be examined by an expert.
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Had you politely asked, I might have bothered. Since you decided to lead by calling me a liar, FOAD.
Let Google be your guide.
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OK [slashdot.org]
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Perhaps you should read up on the story a bit.
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Still waiting for a polite request.
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Would it really be that hard to ask politely? I guess it might make your liver claw it's way out through your belly button or something.
<PLONK>
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OK. [google.com] Here's [heavy.com] a few. [heavy.com]
On the other side, we have some pictures of clearly in-tact disposable propane bottles and nothing that could even potentially explode one. It's actually pretty [youtube.com] hard [youtube.com] to make such a container burst and without a strong oxidizer, good luck getting the gas to actually burn.
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Folks? Nobody, really, NOBODY gives a shit.
Either people have made up their mind about it by now. Then they have taken a side in that "battle". And no kind of evidence, real or fabricated, will sway them. They will believe whatever side they chose and will consider anything offered from the other side as propaganda.
Or they have not made up their mind about it by now. If so, then only because of apathy because they don't give a shit about which side is "right".
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It is, however, a signed statement from medical personnel who actually witnessed the dangerous mis-use of grenades and treated her on-scene (you did look at the signatures, didn't you)? As for 2, look at all of the pictures and then consider what a device like the one pictured might do if it burst while in contact with your arm.
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You clearly have chosen to trust the unsubstantiated statement of law enforcement. I provided several documents where a fair number of people say otherwise. At least the pictures in my links show something that could plausibly cause such a nasty injury. You are making the mistake of the creationists, assuming the slightest uncertainty in the opposing theory is iron clad proof of your own.
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Yes, because if it was actually a flashbang that was deliberately thrown AT someone, that would totally let law enforcement off the hook.
The one thing in common for all of those is that they cause grievous bodily harm if they go off while in contact with a person.
So if you prefer, read it as an explosive of some kind.
Then consider that a gun loaded with blanks is lethal at close range.
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At the same time, we have the opposing story that shows us a few common and obviously un-ruptured and un-modified empty propane cylinders but would have us believe that the so far non-violent protesters decided to be terrorists for a night and somehow accomplished the difficult task of getting propane cylinders to explode (it's REALLY not that easy to so) yet left no ruptured cylinders to be found.
They even went so far as to claim that a burned but in-tact cylinder was somehow involved (What, did the protes
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Read the reply to the thread starter.
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But you have not shown in the slightest that a surgeon has recovered grenade fragments from the woman's arm. Please stop parroting that claim and Gish Galloping to other factoids and theories when called on it.
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The claim is actually better substantiated than the one I was countering and the surrounding evidence lends it support.
End of the day, even if we fly there and convince the surgeon to show us the fragments, we will still be relying on his word that they came from the patient. That's life. We have to make the best judgement based on what we can get. That often involves making a judgement call about who to believe. In turn, that calls for looking at whose story best fits the facts available.
I have presented t
Re:I'd settle for taking away the concussion grena (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean you believe any horseshit the cops will throw at you, and they've thrown a lot this year. Same sheriffs department has on its most wanted list [democracynow.org] a person who disarmed an agent provocateur, not the agent who was assaulting people (pointing his AR-15).
But that's okay, just to let you know we're all friends here, I actually own some oceanfront property near the Standing Rock reservation, which I'm willing to sell you at a cut rate....
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1. Psst, the Morton County Most Wanted List is publicly available on the internet. Brennon Nastacio isn't on it. Let Google be your friend. There *is* an arrest warrant for him though because he approached a man who has a legal right to carry a firearm, threatening him with a knife.
2. Re Kyle Thompson: protesters shot flare guns at him, rammed his truck and then burned it. Certainly his truck was rammed and burned. It's just a matter of who did it.
Take a deep breath, and expose yourself to facts. Real
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Your elevator doesn't go to the top floor, does it? There hasn't been any snow here this week. Therefore, it did not snow last week.
Riiiiiiiight. A literal agent provocateur, trying to pose as an AR-15 carrying protestor has so much c
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You could try finding some actually-credible sources...
Probably a Flashbang instead of concussion grenade (Score:2)
Flashbangs can indeed injure people, and they are regularly used against protesters.
I'm guessing the protesters called them concussion grenades because that is a good description, though it means something else.
The video from the snopes article on the subject shows flashbangs being used against the crowd at about 1:13.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/... [snopes.com]
(The article doesn't indicate whether or not the accusations or rebuttals are true)
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1) Nobody has produced any evidence that a concussion grenade was used, or that the police even had them
2) Concussion grenades are designed to stun and scare the crap out of people, but not injure them. More like a very loud firecracker.
Battery life in remote areas (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery life is lower in remote areas with poor cell coverage for a number of reasons. The radios in the phones transmit at the lowest power needed to maintain a connection. Out in the boonies where the cell towers are just barely in range the phone has to use the maximum wattage which kills the battery. Data rates are usually lower as well (1X or maybe 3G)., which results in longer transmission times to send and receive data, which again kills the battery. So the battery part is no surprise to me. Poor and intermittent data connectivity can also result in applications freezing, and I had at least one older Android phone that would lock up and crash if cell service kept dropping in and out over and over. When riding in the mountains I'd have to just turn it off and only power up to use it when I needed it.
I'm certainly not saying they aren't being monitored or hacked or whatever, but a number of the things they are reporting are normal to those of us who are often out in the country where cell service is marginal.
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Came here to write this. From personal experience in search & rescue ops in BFE.
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In fact, if there were a Stingray or other Fake Cell Phone then the protestors' batteries would last longer than usual because it would be closer.
Why does Slashdot keep posting this fake news?
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What the reporters and press need is a computer lab with a testing centre.
A protected location that can create a cell tower in a lab setting and then examine the cell phones connections, data requests and telco connections.
Then take the phone to a real tower and see what data moves and to what ip ranges.
Test for telco/mil/clandestine telco level alteratio
Reminder to self. Time to donate to EFF again. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good way to contribute something to all for the holiday season.
"We're not surveilling' (Score:2)
Sure....
And then you have bad weather and the LEOs can't fly their drones and suddenly the network works.
--
BMO
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I wonder how many of those drones were pointing weapons [independent.co.uk] at the unarmed protesters. If you're going to break out the mine-resistant vehicles from the National Guard, might as well bring in your mini-Predators as well.
The very definition of fake news (Score:2)
For the facts, see this comment:
https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
Backwards (Score:3)
As others have pointed out, cell towers are few and far between in the Dakotas. When the dropped connections, battery drain, and phone crashing stops, then you'll know they've brought in the Stingray. It'll be much closer to the protesters, and provide a much more reliable signal.
The Facebook login attempts are happening the old-fashioned way, from protesters being identified by taking a photo with a zoom lens, running it through the FBI's gigantic facial recognition database, and then Googling the result. The login attempt is definitely an unconstitutional search attempt. The facial recognition database and its usage... might not be. With the Supreme Court we have had and are going to have, it's not.
Probably no Stingray though. At least not yet.
iOS 10.1 bug (Score:2)
"uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely"
This has been an much under-reported problem with the latest upgrade to iOS 10.1.
Likely a bug in the upgrade is responsible at least in iOS....
It seems like there is very little posted on it.
Here is the section in apple discussions:
https://discussions.apple.com/... [apple.com]
Forbes reported on the issue and then has reported again about the latest 10.2 upgrade making the problem worse.
Here is a report in Forbes:
http://ww [forbes.com]
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Seems like so many iPhone users either are themselves having or know about someone else having stark battery drain after upgrading to iOS 10.
None of the people I know of are anywhere near ND hahahaha
So little reporting about it..... why?
unlawful surveillance ? Not for long ... (Score:2)
If EFF shows that whatever was done was illegal, there will be a bill flying through congress soon enough to make it legal - and backdating so that the police last week did not do wrong.
Living in the future (Score:1)
Private companies doing the work... (Score:1)
Its not the feds/locals.
Private companies use tech to do the monitoring, then sell the info to the feds.
Feds never do it. Constitution is not violated.
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Should the government use a proxy to do something that would violate the Constitutional Rights of U.S. citizens if done directly by government, legal precedent holds that it is still a violation. This has come up repeatedly in the context of evidence gathering.
As far as using dirty tricks to violate the Rights to free speech and peaceable assembly(among others) I'm sure the government wouldn't hesitate.
iolo technologies LLC (Up to 40% OFF) (Score:1)
iolo technologies LLC (Up to 40% OFF) (Score:1)
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If the new definition of terrorist is that anyone is one who dares to disagree with government overstepping the privileges it was granted to better serve its citizens, then yes, I'm a terrorist. Put the label on the pile over there, I'll ignore later.
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Pointless word salad is pointless.