Comment by cygnus_velum@lemmy.world on France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people

A bill that would allow police in France to spy on suspects by remotely activating cameras, microphone including GPS of their phones has been passed.

How is this even feasible on Android or iPhones? Are they going to force everyone to download Team Viewer or something?

Oh my sweet summer child

While this news article is, apparently, not trustworthy, in general, France could demand every phone sold in the country include some kind of spyware. Many sellers already add a lot of programs by default anyway, so this would be how I image it might be implemented.

Given that 7 people were recently arrested for using privacy respecting tools like the Signal messenger and Protonmail, removing that bloatware/spyware might then be cause enough to arrest you. After all, only terrorists want to have privacy, right?

Everyone causally saying the government can just do it with Pegasus is ignoring the fact that Pegasus itself is an exploit. It is a hack, to breach your personal device. If I used the same methods to get into a bank’s systems it would be a violation of the law. Same if I created this software and gave it to you for the same purpose. Ask yourselves why it would be permissible to sell this software then commercially? And, why is it permissible for the government to use it to hack your own devices. Let’s not just brush over this discussion like it’s nothing.

Nobody ignores the fact that government is doing something illegal when the conversation about their rampant spying happens. You may just be late to the party. We all know it’s illegal, unethical, and immoral. It basically comes down to this:

What are you going to do about it?

We’re living in objectively dystopian times. Our government does illegal shit literally all the time and gets away with it.

What are you going to do about it?

The very least people can do is talk about it and acknowledge it’s bad.

Acceptance and normalization support the other side.

My generation has talked it to death. It’s pretty agreed upon that we’re being fucked and have very little power to stop it. Eventually you don’t have time to rehash all the heinous shit that happens because you realize there’s a constant deluge of it. Has nothing to do with “supporting the other side” lol. If reality has got you feeling insane, well, you’re on the right track.

We have everything we need to stop it, we’re just spun and poorly organized (by design).

Wonder if Google, Apple, or SoC makera are asked or secretly mandated to leave certain backdoors in. I know mobile providers have quite a bit they can see on their end.

It’s a good thing we’re always presented with two choices for everything, like mobile OS’s, to control our choices like we’re toddlers.

Mobile operators have baseband which is why we have modem isolation. And some of us can see quite a bit on our end, too.

Well crap, we’re fucked then?

Title then link

We are just as fucked as we’ve always been. Hackers use zero-day vulnerabilities. Can’t do too much about that. Any device is hackable. That became clear after Snowden, and the USA hacking irans centrifuge.

Weren’t Iran’s centrifuges only hacked because they used off-the-shelf parts made in the U.S.?

I don’t know that part would have made much difference, they were already air gapped and the NSA probably could have figured out just about any centrifuge: The hard part was delivering the payload, which was apparently delivered via a rubber ducky left in a parking lot.

We dropped a USB stick in the parking lot and they plugged the virus into the system lol

Goddamn that’s scary

The US hacking Iran’s centrifuges would have been preventable though with careful device management as far as I understand. The worm they used, Stuxnet, didn’t come from nowhere. It either came from a USB that hadn’t been properly sanitized or their systems were connected to an external, unprotected network when they definitely should have been isolated. That’s a preventable virus and unrelated to conversations about backdoors being built into technology for governments to access.

Yup. If you can’t hack over the network, you can hack them into psychologically creating a vulnerability

People are pretty much always the weakest link when it comes to security.

Can’t we even avoid that by using lineage or graphene? We’re really fucked unless we are like cybersec experts…

How do you get Pegasus onto LineageOS or GrapheneOS? Especially on hardware with modem isolation?

From the Guardian article somebody else linked:

One of the most significant challenges that Pegasus presents to journalists and human rights defenders is the fact that the software exploits undiscovered vulnerabilities, meaning even the most security-conscious mobile phone user cannot prevent an attack.

TIme to find out what the vulnerabilieties are and EXPOSE them in a OPEN repository.

This isn’t even wrong. What is the attack vector? They send a magic message that 0wns Signal, and then cleans up? At scale? With nobody noticing? This doesn’t happen.

A few comments, they don’t need to have a Signal vulnerability, just an OS vulnerability since that would allow access to decrypted Signal messages. In the past, there have been zero click SMS and iMessage vulnerabilities. There have also been web vulnerabilities.

The attacks are not sent at scale to avoid detection. They are used on specific dissidents and journalists.

You need to exploit an OS vulnerability or use suitable baseband processor as a backdoor, facilitated by the cellular operator. To exploit the OS or an a service on it you need a network connection. You can’t inject through an ad if there is no browser or email if there is no client.

Yes, you can spearphish but this can’t mass-target French mobile users as the article seems to claim. France isn’t North Korea, not just yet.

On lineageos also just pegasus. Only thing that makes it better than stock android is that you have more chances for security patches. Dumno about graphene, it has some additional protections, but still susceptible to some vulnerabilities of android.

Same way you do with everything else: Exploits.

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France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people(gazettengr.com)

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