Re: [sudo-discuss] Breaking: Oakland to lead country in, diverting anti-terror funding to ubiquitous warrantless surveillance

Hi Shawn- Re. "slut-shame": I was merely expressing envious admiration at the proclaimed prowess of anyone who says they need GPS and on-the-fly email to get laid, because they must have an outstandingly busy "social calendar." Sorry I misunderestimated an admittedly inept attempt at a light-hearted and encouraging comment;-) Re. Panasonic GPS etc.: It maintains a list of places I've programmed into it. Mostly client sites, no exciting social calendar or anything. But it doesn't transmit either, or connect to the internet. So if someone wants to get at what's in it, they have to obtain it first, and it's not in the vehicle unless I'm using it (primarily because I don't want my windows smashed for a device that can be sold for a crack rock or three). LPRs: I've been contemplating solutions to those, but they're a lower priority until or unless they get commercialized, at which point I'll go on the warpath. The first time I drive past an an electronic billboard that suddenly flashes "Hey G, we know you're shopping for a toaster-oven, here's a great deal..." I'll pull over and spraypaint obscenities across it. FasTrak: Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, and neither should anyone else who values their freedom of association. I recognized that as a surveillance device when it first came out; keyword "bumper beeper" for the oldschool version. BTW, did you know that SF Muni buses not only record video of the passengers, but also AUDIO? First time I saw that notification on the side of a Muni bus was the last time I rode Muni. House bugged: Probability asymptotically approaching zero, for reasons that needn't be discussed in public. Car bugged: Nope, ditto. I don't worry about LE and the TLAs, for various reasons including that we have recourse at the voting booth. (Yes, the faith some of us have in elections is touching, too...) I do worry about the unregulated private sector, particularly the Bigs, and as I said, anyone who believes it's only about "personalized advertising" is welcome to contact me to buy a bridge I have for sale cheap. Misuse of terminology: You say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe, you say fell-lay-tio, and I say fell-lah-toe;-) The point stands that what Google and Facebook do is basically the same thing as a roving wiretap: tracking persons and their communications across multiple devices and locations. While we're at it, do you know how small a sample of text is needed to get author attribution? Just say Twitter... details in person. And voiceprint attribution was 99.96% accurate as of 1962 (published); fast-forward at the speed of Moore's law, draw your own conclusions, and more details in person. Consumer cellphone detectors: I should have specified, "a cellphone detector that you or someone else in the community has verified works properly." Many are the devices that claim to work, and many are the spam five-star reviews; the S/N ratio for consumer devices and random electronics is nasty so I don't bother to keep track of them. I was involved with crypto a decade before Cypherpunk, and involved in Cypherpunk too. (A couple of sentences redacted here.) More details in person, including what the best physical RNG is and according to who. Agreed, Goolag's voice rec happens on the server side, which also enables "flexible" control of keyword lists. How the device behaves in normal use is one thing. How it could behave under various other circumstances remains to be seen and tested. For example use GPS output to determine when person is in an "interesting" place, trigger device at preset incoming audio volume level, etc. More easily, activate when device owned by person A comes within X distance of device owned by person B. Etc. I've never tried meth either, but one doesn't need to, in order to conclude it's bad for one's wetware. Good to hear we agree that Goolag Glass is a one-way mirror, but I do not trust it to only activate when people wink-nudge it. Same case as "smart"phones: selective activation by triggering criteria. Looking forward to ways to thwart it. Agreed it's reasonable to assume people around me carry "smart"phones. I try to be aware of devices in my environment, and I don't hesitate to request devices-off for certain conversations in certain surroundings. There was a time when most cellphone batteries were far more easily removable, and people routinely removed them before they started private F2F conversations. Since "9/11 constant-contact syndrome" has set in with a vengeance ("someone I love might call me when they're about to die") it's harder to get people to unhook even briefly. Weird. The time will eventually come when "second-hand surveillance" is recognized as being every bit as obnoxious to non-consenting parties as second-hand smoke is to nonsmokers. That or the future looks like Brave New World, "predict & control" via consumer lifestyle. Ask people in the (whatever relevant earlier era) what they'd think about thermonuclear weapons, climate change, drug-resistant bacteria, etc. We're still fighting over teaching evolution in public schools. Heath Robinson is as near to your keyboard as consumer cellphone detectors are to mine, but here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Robinson As I said, if you needed an ad-hom to use on me, "chasing squirrels while believing he's the reincarnation of Heath Robinson" would do nicely;-) Read the link and unpack the suggested ad-hom, and you'll probably agree it's well-compressed and works on multiple levels. One thing though. Comparisons with Ted Kaczynski really are highly objectionable, seeing as he's a domestic terrorist & multiple-murderer. I read his "manifesto" back when the FBI were pleading with every lefty in the Bay Area for help catching him. I found it to be a tangled mess of nonsense, fit for inclusion in an anthology of post-modernist horse shit. Come to think of it, comparisons with post-modernists are highly objectionable too... So let's not go using comparisons to terrorists, or calling each other post-modernists, OK? Especially when there are plenty of symbolic furry animals and creators of deliberate absurdity to use for comparisons instead, and cheeky comments about social calendars and so on. In any case we have more in common cause than we have opposing each other. My central point here has always been that unregulated private-sector surveillance is more dangerous to civil liberties than the TLAs, by a decent handful of decimal places. We can agree to disagree about that, and let history be the judge. Cheers- -G ===== On 13-10-16-Wed 1:53 PM, Shawn Lesniak wrote: