Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • April 8, 2022 7:08 PM

@ Ted, ALL,

How do we know when this product crosses a line and becomes too dangerous?

Like all tracking systems it crossed the line into being a stalker tool the moment it became used. There are way more tracking systems out there than you realise and our more modern culture would colapse back getting on for a century if we removed them.

Remember,

“Tracking IS stalking”

The only question left open is,

“Who gets to see the data, when, and how much harm they can do with it”.

This means you should be asking about the “Reporting mechanisms”.

That is at the foundation levels,

1, Communications
2, Storage
3, Processing

Think of the information flows and how you reduce the potential for “harm”.

For instance removing real-time communications from the device makes it less usefull for “harm”. That is you could not actively “target” who you are tracking with a drone strike if they are “unpredictable”.

Removing storage as well means that you can not easily find who you are tracking by their predictability and so ambush them.

More complex to explain is processing of information when there is neither communications or storage of location data of who you are tracking.

The simplest is by other information sources. Every action the person takes effects the environment they are in. If they generate “signals above the noise” then they can be tracked.

Even if they do not generate signals above the noise others they are associated with might, thus say two known associates meeting up may well indicate where the person who you are tracking might be as a third member of the meetup.

But the hardest to explain is tracking by absence of signals. If it’s known where the person is not, then it could indicate where the person is.

In the UK public area CCTV is rampent. If you know the person you are tracking is not at a location they were previously at they must have moved or be moving to some other location. If they do not appear on the CCTV footage, then they must have traveled via some uncovered path. In the UK in many places,such paths are getting close to non-existant.

Obviously such checking takes a lot of resources or “processing” if such resources are unavailable then this “track the hole” methods will not work.

Clive Robinson • April 11, 2022 6:21 AM

@ Steve,

One wonders how many of those above dismissing the story or saying “it’s been going on forever” are female.

Stalking is just a varient on “man hunting” or tracking and has been going on since mankind domesticated creatures to help them to hunt prey.

If you check what goes on you will actually find in the US the biggest non authorised “man hunting” / “stalking” is carried out by marketers and debt collectors.

With by far the worst enabling agents being “Credit Checking Agencies” and more recently the likes of “Google” and other “social media”. Every non cash transaction tracks you, and some cash transactions –new bills– do as well.

Then there is OnStar and similar installed in your car by those who sell/lease vehicles to you. Trafic cameras and Automatic Number Plate readers. Phones, computers and any communications through a third party such as postal services.

So prior to these “tags”, anyone could with a little knowledge track you through your earning, spending and posessions like vehicles and mobile phones… Remember the “We Kill by Meta-data” scandle?

To actually use Samsung’s, Apple’s or Tile’s trackers, you have to actually know the physical location of the target at some point and physically “hang it on” the target… Which is a massive down side.

And it is the “physical action” that is making this “Scary Scary News” thus making “click-bait” to get “eye-balls” thus marketing income.

You have to remember,

“Any and all technology and items that can be picked up will at some point be used in violent crime, simply because they are available.”

They do not have to be appropriate or suitable, just available…

Modern life is unfortunately predicated around two things,

1, Pigeon holing.
2, Fixing the holes location.

Blaim bureaucrats for this, they love the idea that you are “A number not a name” thus they can track you where every you go so you are forced to “Render unto Ceaser” or worse. A lot worse these days, and it’s not just money or power behind it but increasingly control, the ultimate goal of psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists.

Where ever thugs have started playing at being in charge, there has been a bureaucracy formed to ensure wealth etc flowed to the center.

The story of “The Baby Jeasus” is an abject lesson in bureaucratic behaviour from a couple of thousand years back, the Chinese have stories and actuall physical evidence going back another two thousand years before that. Likewise the Phoenicians and clay tablets, Myans with knots in string, the list looks endless.

So yes tracking / stalking / manhunting has been going on for what feels like “forever” and is so ubiquitous most do not realise just how entwined it is with their every day existance.

It’s only when you say “enough is enough” and try opting out, that you find out not just how entwined, but how much push back will be directed towards you, in increasingly venomous and vicious ways.

Cats do not like the prey they toy with to escape, and they are as nothing compared to bureaucrats backed by legislators directed by those that believe they are entitled in some manner.

Clive Robinson • April 11, 2022 9:33 PM

@ Steve,

I’ll be honest and say I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me above — color me dense.

No, it’s a “nudge” to think further, to try to reason out what has happened, why, and perhaps stop it happening again.

You understand the bulk of the issue with,

I am aware that stalking, etc., has been going on for a long time and, in some senses, we’re all being stalked by technology.

But… You make an incorrect assumption or two with,

However, this new technology seems to me to add an entirely new dimension to the problem: cheap, easy, and surruptitious remote tracking of an individual by another individual for what are nefarious purposes (I find it unlikely that they could be benevolent though I suppose there are exceptions to everything).

Because,

1, It’s not new, it’s fourty plus years old technology wise.

2, It’s not cheap, consider the entire technology cost of the mobile phone industry that is essential to it’s operation.

3, Further it’s not particularly covert or surreptitious, certainly no more so than tracking devices I was designing back in the late 1970’s and onwards.

4, The tracking is not in the main nefarious, but is in fact essential to the way mobile phone networks and similar work and have done for well into five decades of usage now.

You kind of understand this on one level, but I suspect not others with,

While this might’ve been possible with a certain amount of expertise and effort prior to the AirTag, this puts it on a retail basis.

The main purpose of these tags is indeed to “track objects” that have been tagged.

In of it’s self this is something we’ve done one way or another for thousands of years, which came to be called “stock control” and more recently has involved RFID tags.

If I said there is no difference base technology wise between the RFID devices in your wallet, passport etc and these tags then your first reaction is probably to say no…

But that is because you are thinking over all and socially, not as parts and technologically.

What has changed is firstly,

1, The person with the “stock gun” is now anyone with a mobile phone in their pocket.

2, The “stock gun” was not “universally networked” mobile phones are.

3, The Bluetooth technology of these tags rather than NFC technology of RFIDs was not designed to work the way it currently does.

That is Bluetooth was designed as a communications protocol for “user wireless IO devices”. As such it has a much greater range, than NFC, upto a hundred meters or so rather than one or two at most of the original NFC RFIDs.

However this left a gap in the middle, that technologists driven by marketing people were keen to fill for the purposes of making profit. So both Bluetooth and NFC RFID “expanded into the gap”. In the case of Bluetooth it was via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol enhancements.

All that has in reality happened is,

1, BLE has become ubiquitous in mobile phones.
2, A technology gap has been filled and become available.
3, Someone saw a market in tracking and “croud sourced” what is now “Tile”
4, Others seeking profit have jumped into the “Tile” market.

The fact these tags have made visable the 24×365.25 tracking every powered up mobile phone does of the person who is carrying it and have been doing so four fourty plus years has made some think…

As I keep pointing out such technology has no concept of “good or bad” all it does is give function.

It is others who put that function to some use, these are what the legal nicety of “any person legal or natural” with agency, then acts as a “Directing mind”.

This agency of action is almost certainly seen as “good” by the “Directing mind” thus they do it.

However “good or bad” is just a point of view and importantly made by an observer, who might or might not be in “possession, recognition, and cognition of the facts”.

It is a journalists job to earn money for their employer by attracting readers, thus advertisers etc. If they decide to abuse their readers by misrepresenting facts, then we can have decades of inappropriate activities carried out in society.

For instance, “The war on terror” and “death by vehicles”.

It is known that some “Directing minds” with agency, use vehicles for what most would see as “crime” and that includes wilfully injuring or killing others. Or following others around prior to kidnapping, etc.

Yet do we hear an outcry about this large “crime by vehicle” problem?

No not at all… So ask why?

What is different between what is no more than a glorified RFID tag and a method of transportation?

In base technical function, human perceptions and the reality of human actions.

Remember whilst thinking about this that many if not all modern cars are “tracking devices” as well and in that respect not realy any different to mobile phones.

But what of the “War on Terror” what movment of money has that caused from the pockets of the citizens to the massive profits of just a few.

What has that achieved for the citizens?

Now compare it to what could have been achieved in improving vehicle safety thus saving lives and injury for just 1% of those “war on terror” profits…

In reality all that has happened with these tags is that they have made tracking technology more easily accessed by the masses, mostly for what observers would consider “good”.

A very tiny few have used these tags for what observers consider “bad”, and in fact represent a very tiny fraction of exactly the same crimes carried out every day by others using technology for “bad”.

But journalists have a new toy in their box and like any bored dog are chewing it over. When added to the profit potential of propaganda by FUD or “Think of the Children” rhetoric it becomes a heady concoction to create a faux scandle.

The reality of life is,

People commit what other people observe as crimes all of the time.
Their choice of “force multiplier” is what they have to hand. So anything that can in any way be used for crime will at some point be used for crime.

People have been murdered with weapons made from paper and water. Are we going to get up in arms about the availability of paper and water and what a tiny tiny few do with them?

Probably not, neither is “new” and they are poth still considered essential to society and the lives of those in it.

Any journalist trying to FUD-Up paper and water as weapons of murder, injury, destruction, harm, etc, is going to get ignored by most. For the simple reason most people have a much greater,

“Possession, recognition, and cognition of the facts.”

With regards paper and water…