The IT Nerd

There’s a pair of legal related news items that relates to smartphone users that piqued my interest, and it should pique your interest as well. Let’s start with one aimed at Apple iPhone X users. In what may be a first, the FBI has “forced” a suspect to unlock his iPhone X using Face ID:

Agents in Columbus, Ohio entered the home of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, who was suspected of child abuse, according to court documents spotted by Forbes. With a search warrant in hand, they forced him to put his face on front of the device to unlock it. They were then able to freely search for his photos, chats and any other potential evidence. The FBI started investigating Michalski after discovering his ad on Craigslist titled “taboo.” Later, they discovered emails in which he discussed incest and sex with minors with another defendant, William Weekly.

Once you get past the creep factor, let’s just consider this. This really isn’t any different than cops “forcing” (I put the quotes in as the FBI got a warrant to do this) someone to unlock their phone via a fingerprint. Thus one could argue that there is nothing new here. But it is worth noting if you have Apple’s coolest phone in your possession when the cops pay you a visit.

The next piece of legal news come from New Zealand where travelers who refuse to hand over their phone or laptop passwords to Customs officials can now be slapped with a $5000 fine:

The Customs and Excise Act 2018 — which comes into effect today — sets guidelines around how Customs can carry out “digital strip-searches.” Previously, Customs could stop anyone at the border and demand to see their electronic devices. However, the law did not specify that people had to also provide a password. The updated law makes clear that travelers must provide access — whether that be a password, pin-code or fingerprint — but officials would need to have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. “It is a file-by-file [search] on your phone. We’re not going into ‘the cloud.’ We’ll examine your phone while it’s on flight mode,” Customs spokesperson Terry Brown said. If people refused to comply, they could be fined up to $5000 and their device would be seized and forensically searched. Mr Brown said the law struck the “delicate balance” between a person’s right to privacy and Customs’ law enforcement responsibilities. “I personally have an e-device and it maintains all my records — banking data, et cetera, et cetera — so we understand the importance and significance of it.”

Now I’ve written about New Zealand before on a similar topic. Thus this doesn’t shock me. And realistically customs in any can demand to poke around your suitcase, frisk you or whatever as long as they have reasonable grounds….. Assuming of course you’re going to someplace where that applies. If you’re going to some repressive backwater where due process doesn’t exist then it sucks to be you. But I digress. Assuming that due process is being followed, then this isn’t a big deal as they searched roughly 540 electronic devices at New Zealand airports in 2017. You have to imagine that there are millions of travellers that go to that country which makes that number a drop in the bucket. However, if New Zealand uses this to go “hog wild” to search anything and everything they can get their hands on, that’s a problem. Hopefully someone is keeping an eye on this to see what happens next.

Polar is a company that makes fitness gear like fitness trackers, heart rate monitors and the like. They also make an app that allows you to compile the data from their gear called Polar Flow. But Polar Flow has one extra feature” that is likely to make a lot of people nervous right now, the location data of people such as spies and military personnel was accidentally exposed to the planet. Here’s the details:

For most users who set their activity tracking records to public, posting their workouts on Polar’s so-called Explore map is a feature and not a privacy issue. But even with profiles set to private, a user’s fitness activity can reveal where a person lives.

An exposed location of anyone working at a government or military installation can quickly become a national security risk.

Well, that’s an oops moment. This is pretty similar to what happened to Strava not too long ago. And it’s not just GPS info. It’s info that could also allow someone to identify you. Which of course isn’t good. After the company was told about this, the company took the relevant functionality off line. Then they put out this statement…. Which was kind of strange to me when I first read it:

In a statement sent by Polar chief strategy officer Marco Suvilaakso, the company said it “recently learned that public location data shared by customers via the Explore feature in Flow could provide insight into potentially sensitive locations.”

The company denied a leak or a breach of its systems.

“Currently the vast majority of Polar customers maintain the default private profiles and private sessions data settings, and are not affected in any way by this case,” said the statement. “While the decision to opt-in and share training sessions and GPS location data is the choice and responsibility of the customer, we are aware that potentially sensitive locations are appearing in public data, and have made the decision to temporarily suspend the Explore API.”

Well, if this isn’t a leak of some sort, I don’t know what qualifies. Thus this is a strange response from the company.

This is the bottom line that you have to keep in mind when you use these sorts of apps. They collect a ton of data on you. Thus you have to be 100% comfortable with the fact that this data could get exposed at some point and someone could learn a lot about you.

There’s a popular extension called Stylish which was once a great way to remove annoying features from websites—trending topics on Facebook, say, or that annoying bar that follows you as you scroll on Medium. To do this Stylish, the browser extension, needs access to every website you visit. But it also trolls and steals your browser history. In short, it’s spyware. And here’s what  Robert Heaton has to say about it on his personal blog:

Unfortunately, since January 2017, Stylish has been augmented with bonus spyware that records every single website that I and its 2 million other users visit. Stylish sends our complete browsing activity back to its servers, together with a unique identifier. This allows it’s new owner, SimilarWeb, to connect all of an individual’s actions into a single profile. And for users like me who have created a Stylish account on userstyles.org, this unique identifier can easily be linked to a login cookie. This means that not only does SimilarWeb own a copy of our complete browsing histories, they also own enough other data to theoretically tie these histories to email addresses and real-world identities.

As a result, Firefox has taken steps to ban the extension from its addons site and prompt all users to disable it. Google has done the same thing. Now the data that this addon shares is anonymized, but that’s still scary.

I try not to use browser add ons as I am always afraid of this sort of thing happening. Now it looks like my paranoia isn’t paranoia after all.

You’ve likely never heard of a company called LocationSmart. But I will let security researcher Brian Krebs tell you why you should care:

On May 10, The New York Times broke the news that a different cell phone location tracking company called Securus Technologies had been selling or giving away location data on customers of virtually any major mobile network provider to a sheriff’s office in Mississippi County, Mo.

On May 15, ZDnet.com ran a piece saying that Securus was getting its data through an intermediary — Carlsbad, CA-based LocationSmart.

Wednesday afternoon Motherboard published another bombshell: A hacker had broken into the servers of Securus and stolen 2,800 usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and hashed passwords of authorized Securus users. Most of the stolen credentials reportedly belonged to law enforcement officers across the country — stretching from 2011 up to this year.

None of that is good. But it actually gets worse. Apparently the LocationSmart website had a bug in its website that allowed anyone to see where a person is located without obtaining their consent:

LocationSmart’s demo is a free service that allows anyone to see the approximate location of their own mobile phone, just by entering their name, email address and phone number into a form on the site. LocationSmart then texts the phone number supplied by the user and requests permission to ping that device’s nearest cellular network tower.

Once that consent is obtained, LocationSmart texts the subscriber their approximate longitude and latitude, plotting the coordinates on a Google Street View map. [It also potentially collects and stores a great deal of technical data about your mobile device. For example, according to their privacy policy that information “may include, but is not limited to, device latitude/longitude, accuracy, heading, speed, and altitude, cell tower, Wi-Fi access point, or IP address information”].

But according to Xiao, a PhD candidate at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, this same service failed to perform basic checks to prevent anonymous and unauthorized queries. Translation: Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how Web sites work could abuse the LocationSmart demo site to figure out how to conduct mobile number location lookups at will, all without ever having to supply a password or other credentials.

“I stumbled upon this almost by accident, and it wasn’t terribly hard to do,” Xiao said. “This is something anyone could discover with minimal effort. And the gist of it is I can track most peoples’ cell phone without their consent.”

Well, that’s very disturbing. This demo software was promptly taken offline when the story broke. But there’s a larger issue here. Which is the security of your data and what you should expect in terms of privacy. A US senator is poking around the edges of this, but this requires a more stringent response. As in the four telcos and all of the companies above need to come in front of congress to answer some tough questions about this.

The recent mass shooting in a Texas church has been making headlines since Sunday. But related to that is a problem that law enforcement has faced before. The inability to unlock the shooter’s phone to get to critical data that could help in their investigation. News.com has the details on this:

An official said at a press conference Tuesday that the FBI is unable to open the phone of Devin Patrick Kelley, who killed 26 people and injured 20 more at a Texas church on Sunday. 

The phone is encrypted, meaning the information inside is unreadable without a passcode. The FBI didn’t say what kind of phone the shooter used.

“With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryptions, law enforcement — whether at a state, local or federal level — is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” said Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge.

This is the same sort of situation that the FBI found itself in with the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, which in turn led to a protracted legal battle with Apple. But in the end they unlocked the phone with the help of a third party. Not only that, but apparently the FBI has been unable to get into thousands of phones which is making it difficult for them to investigate crimes.

Now I have to admit that I struggle with this. On one hand, I see the need for law enforcement to have the ability to get into phones to help them to put bad guys in jail. But at the same time, I don’t think that anyone should have a free pass to look at anything on a phone. Nor should Apple, Google or anyone else build backdoors into their phones for law enforcement. It’s a tricky balance I admit and I am not sure how you get the balance right. But hopefully there’s reasonable discussion about this that leads to that balance.