Comment by fc417fc802
1 month ago
> any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing
It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell.
Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things is often to place legal limits on collection, retention, and sale.
Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
> Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.
> Legal limits on national security agencies
You're not talking about what they're talking about. They're talking about limiting corporate data collection. If companies don't build this into routers, then 99% of routers won't be collecting this data, and foreign spies won't have any data to steal.
They will classify the data as necessary for business purposes and collect it under a different name. They will be obligated to pass full take information if necessary, and it will be tapped at any point by employees who are given NSLs and asked/told to do things under penalty of law where applicable, and on threat of arrest or dismissal if not, or by federal agents themselves or their deputies or other approved third parties. Your modem may be intercepted in the mail and reflashed if necessary or over the wire, and that functionality is part of the operating standards of the modems. You could find a way to secure this on your own maybe, which is perhaps just another signal which flips a bit somewhere and may be logged. You can’t close Pandora’s box. It doesn’t matter if Comcast has the WiFi data to sell because they will have access to the information due to how the WiFi signals propagate. It’s diagnostic data. It’s the signals themselves. So all this is perhaps a misdirect, as any third party in range of the WiFi network can likely do the same thing passively, so it is a moot point. The data being gathered and sold should be legislated, but I don’t think that it will affect any of the actual concerns raised, because feds will still legally do whatever they are authorized to do, the justification and doctrine may not be public information. You probably won’t know, so you won’t object. Third parties who lack principles will gather the data regardless of legality. I don’t know how you could even legislate against passive monitoring unless you could demonstrate intent to harm or violate FCC regulations and applicable laws about harming people or computer systems like CFAA, which is a whole other issue.
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