Brave New World

[T]he New York Times reported earlier this month that a company called Securus Technologies was offering a service that allowed users to track people’s whereabouts in real time, using data obtained from the wireless companies through a pair of intermediaries. The Times reported that a Missouri sheriff had been using the service to keep tabs on 11 people, including fellow officers and a judge, without their knowledge and without a warrant. He’s now facing state and federal charges.

That’s just the beginning. Motherboard reported last week that Securus had been hacked, with the credentials of 2,800 authorized users stolen, most or all of them presumably working in law enforcement or at prisons. (Securus’ main business involves helping prisons crack down on inmates’ cellphone use.) It’s a safe bet that some of those users had access to the same location-tracking tools that the Missouri sheriff abused.

[...]

The big U.S. wireless carriers—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—were all working with LocationSmart, sending their users’ location data to the firm so that it could triangulate their whereabouts more precisely using multiple providers’ cell towers. It seems no one can opt out of this form of tracking, because the carriers rely on it to provide their service.

It gets worse. A Carnegie Mellon researcher poking around on LocationSmart’s website found that he could use a free trial service to instantly pinpoint the location of, well, just about anyone with a mobile phone and wireless service from one of those major carriers. He did this without any permission or credentials, let alone a warrant.

[...]

LocationSmart subsequently shut down the service and told security blogger Brian Krebs that the vulnerability had not been exploited before Robert Xiao, the Carnegie Mellon researcher, did so.

  Slate

Riiiiiiiight.

[T]he wireless companies are still doing it, and as of Monday, Ars Technica has reported that not one had expressly pledged to stop working with LocationSmart.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the tech-savvy Oregon Democrat, has reacted furiously, sending a May 8 letter to the FCC demanding an investigation of Securus and letters to the wireless carriers calling on them to secure users’ location data.

[...]

The threats to Americans’ security are grave—a hacker could have used this site to know when you were in your house so they would know when to rob it. A predator could have tracked your child’s cell phone to know when they were alone. The dangers from LocationSmart and other companies are limitless. If the FCC refuses to act after this revelation then future crimes against Americans will be [on] the commissioners’ heads.

[...]

The FCC told Ars Technica on Friday afternoon that it’s taking preliminary steps to look into the matter. That’s all the action we’ve seen so far from the government.

The reaction from the mainstream media and the public has been as muted as the reaction to Cambridge Analytica was explosive. Even tech sites have devoted relatively little coverage to the story.

[...]

Privacy abuses and slip-ups by major tech companies have become so numerous, and the prospect of containing them seems so hopeless, that the public and much of the media have become nearly numb to them.

We're becoming numb to every kind of abuse we're experiencing. Half of it we don't even understand.  It's beyond obvious that if not for whistleblowers and the ACLU, we'd already be slaves to a fascist autocracy.  Almost there anyway.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.