Would love to distrubute zk-chain validators via self replicating router malware lol
They do but the real question is whether its appropriate to source intelligence from a place like the NSA when the outcomes are meant to be used by the police.
That's actually not that weird.
If you are a suspected criminal and a judge give a warrant targeting you specifically, it's quite natural the police can now gather information on you by any mean possible.
It's not warrant-less, it's not mass surveillance, it sounds like regular police work. Or am I missing something?
(Also doesn’t help that I hear about stories like this from people who don’t like them, so I get a potentially biased first impression).
It's not a perfect system by any means. The police can and do plant evidence. But a lot of convictions also get thrown out and this is often why obviously guilty people get off on "technicalities" because the police don't follow procedure down to the letter.
The opposite end of the spectrum, not giving the police any power to do covert surveillance at all, is effectively just giving a license to the Mafia to do whatever it wants, as anyone who just commits all of their crimes privately will get away with it as long as they can sufficiently scare or kill anyone who would otherwise have been willing to testify.
It's a tradeoff either way, and we try to let there be a middle ground, where the police can bug your house, tap your phone, hack your router, but they need a warrant that has to be granted by a completely separate branch of government that is not in the same chain of command, and they have to prove to your lawyers that they obtained all of the evidence they have against you legally.
My problem is the linked page says:
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
Copy is fine, it’s the other three which are scary. Perhaps they shouldn’t be scary, perhaps they have well-defined meanings in law I’m just not familiar with (like how “Hacker News” has nothing to do with cyber crime), but I can only respond within the limits of my knowledge, and that seems scary.
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
With the exception of the word “copy”, this makes it seem like the plan is to make it not merely possible but also legally acceptable for anyone given such a warrant to create/place that evidence (or delete things to make real data look incriminating by lack of context).
Again, I really know I can’t trust my interpretation of any legal text, all I can say is it does sound bad to an outsider like me.
It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.
> Data disruption means adding, copying, deleting or altering data held in a computer. This can only be done in order to frustrate the commission of offences or determine relevance of data. To assist disruption, a warrant can also authorise other facilitative activities, such as entering specified premises, using electronic equipment to obtain access to data, removing a computer from premises, copying data that has been obtained, and intercepting if necessary to carry out the things authorised in the warrant. A data disruption warrant also allows the officer to take actions to conceal the access and the activities, allowing the warrant to be conducted covertly.
> Data disruption warrants can be used to affect data offshore with the consent of an appropriate consenting foreign official (if the location of data is known or can be reasonably determined). They can also be issued internally in an emergency situation, and subsequently authorised by a Judge or AAT member. They can also permit the officer to seek assistance from a person with knowledge of a computer or a computer system to help in carrying out the warrant.
- https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?