Could be embarrassing, depending on the photos:
Galaxy Note 8 smartphones suffering a bug that sends private photos to contacts have been revealed.
The owners of the phones with the issue report that their private gallery photos were sent over text message to seemingly random contacts from their phone’s address books.
The problem appears to lie in the Samsung default messaging app, Samsung Messages.
While some people suffered the problem with individual images being sent, some had their entire galleries sent over text message.
You have to wonder if that bug is accidentally triggering a deeply embedded program, which was designed when triggered to bang out your entire photo album to a secret Deep-State/Cabal repository. But somehow due to the bug, the wires got crossed, and it was triggered to send it out to a contact instead.
Then there was this article, based on an “official” study:
The study looked at 17,260 Android apps and specifically paid attention to the media files being sent from them. As Business Insider summarizes it, “The researchers found no instance in which these apps turned on the phone’s microphone unprompted and sent audio. But they did find that some apps were sending screen recordings and screenshots to third parties.”
Except there is one problem. I distinctly remember reading that it is impossible to tell what data many Apps harvest and send about you, because the data is encrypted within the phone, and cannot be dissected when it is sent. I remember the researcher saying there is no way to know what is being sent, and that left the issue of whether they were harvesting recordings from the microphone wide open.
Always assume everything you read is controlled these days. For all we know, this study came right out of Langley, and was simply rubber stamped by the researchers and published in a controlled journal.
As a general rule, never put anything sensitive on your phone, and if it is with you and the battery is in, assume your location is being logged, the cameras may be snapping pictures, and the microphone is transmitting every word you speak.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, preferably around your cell phone, to maximize the spread
In the past audio surveillance was extremely prohibitively work-intensive.
Audio surveillance meant that a real human needed to hear 1:1 in time what other humans say and try to find meaningful information. Even speeding up recordings up, playing them with double speed, changes not the basic fact that you needed a huge amount of personnel to go through audio surveillance.
For this reason alone, audio surveillance was scarcely done in the past, only in high-profile cases.
For every hour of audio recordings, you needed about one man-hour of an analyst listening to it, work that becomes very boring and revolting very soon (real life audio surveillance is not like in the movies – people talking about secrets, plotting, or talking about intimate details, which can cause pleasure if you listen to it, because eavesdropping can be rewarding – most people just talk nonsense and bland stuff for hours, and if you are an “audio analyst”, that soon messes with your mind. It’s like a plebs-tier soap opera, and you must listen to it attentively for 8 hours.
Usually, this job is pure pain.
Not any longer.
Speech-to-text algorithms have years ago become not as good as humans, but better.
Speech, far away from a microphone and barely or not at all intelligible by human listeners will be converted into text by speech recognition algorithms with almost 100% perfection.
Those algorithms even can do things most people feel only humans can do, for example assigning a speaker/voice to a specific human and not mixing up who is talking to whom.
This technology caused a (silent, secret) revolution is audio surveillance.
Not any longer agents/analysts sit in vans or bureaus, headphones over their ears, listening to surveillance, taking notes.
This job are doing algorithms now, in real time, and better than humans ever could.
This technology made automated mass audio surveillance possible for the first time (roughly in the late 1990s). Any telephone conversation or recordings from, say, room bugs, were instantly turned into text files, and therefore subject to automated key word/phrase screening, or more sophisticated semantic analysis (algorithms determine who talks about which topic).
In most Western countries thousands of (audio) analysts suddenly became obsolete…
This technology also made “retroactive policing” possible in an economic way.
Since the early 80s, most telephone conversations in the West, especially over country borders, were routinely recorded, in essence forever. Of course, there was much more talk than could be listened to by human analysts, so the records were tagged to a telephone number/person, later a voice print (everybody who once used the public tel. network is in a voice print database, making him identifiable through his unique voice pattern).
Agencies attempted to at least get a database of who talked when to whom and where this way;
the actual content of the conversations were 99,9%+ not accessed, because there were just not nearly enough people to listen to it and access the contents in written/text file form.
For the purpose of “retroactive policing” this was well enough;
if some serious crime happened, or somebody needed to get security screened, for example if you had a new general or high-ranking politician etc., the agencies could pull the recordings associated with those people (and their social contacts), even years or even decades in the past, listen to it and figure out if the person would be a security risk (like, talking with a friend favorably about communism in university 20 years ago, or potentially being extorsionable for illegal activity, sex crimes, whatever) – sensitive positions in intelligence or military (dealing with serious state secrets) were and are generally checked like this – way back into the past, and ongoing in the present.
This were quaint old times.
Today, the intelligence analysts, due to speech-to-text technology, can search through any recorded (all telephone calls are recorded actually) audio conversation like through recorded emails.
In the past, FBI agents listened to their audio bugs; today, this has become very rare. They just read through the transcripts, with keywords highlighted by the software.
This way, a single analyst can attend comfortably to tens of thousands of audio surveillance streams. This marked a “quantum leap” in surveillance technology.
I may add that a lower-capability, but nonetheless working version is available to everybody:
Microsoft, Google and others provide free APIs that use advanced algorithms to translate speech to text, available to everybody. This is not as sophisticated as the high-tech of the agencies,
but it still works very well.
So, even the smarter private detectives, husbands checking on their possibly cheating wives,
commercial competitors etc., all of those who in the past planted audio bugs for some reason, today can use this technology, too: It saves tremendous time, is a huge productivity boost even for the surveillance amateur; a few clicks, and your audio file becomes a keyword-searchable text, with time marks on the side, indicating when was talked what.
In terms of smart phones, this also allows for the first time an “always on” real time audio surveillance not only of telephone calls, but everything and everybody in the vicinity of the phone – modern audio codecs can computationally and memory-wise cheaply record all the time, then being translated into text, and made searchable for keywords or key topics or voice prints.
Practically this works like this:
Your phone always listens to its surroundings; if an interesting word, topic or voice is detected, something or somebody is alerted to it automatically, and can listen in – or “read in” – retroactively on the stored transcripts or real time.
Oh, another thing:
Did you play RPGs?
You then know what an automap is.
(For those not knowing about what I speak: In video games, when you explore an area, an automated map is generated, showing where you are and where you already have been.)
As we are talking about smartphones:
There is intelligence software who does just this, but in real life:
Obviously, people take their phones with them, into their flats.
Now, there are no surveillance cameras in their flats. How inconvenient!
But wait – modern phones have at least two cameras – front and back. This would give an almost 360° view…
So, we could make the phones secretly take pictures.
But when?
Again – how convenient – the phones have acceleration sensors built in. Useful for many things,
but here useful for determining when the phone is moved, that is, the perspective of the camera changes and a new picture shall be recorded.
So, we end up with a series of pictures – of the insides of a person’s home, car, bathroom whatever.
Useful for individual analysis, but worthless for automated mass surveillance.
Thank god for clever algorithms!
Software can automatically stitch together the pictures, greatly saving on the amount of memory/data, and just generate an “automap”, a virtual representation of publicly inaccessible places.
Crude versions of such software are even publicly available:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYnu4Gd0Do
https://www.gearbrain.com/stitch-together-360-degree-photos-2401647385.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2211108/Could-phones-camera-secretly-taking-pictures-right-Hackers-use-lens-steal-private-data–build-3D-model-home.html
Government agencies (or grandmaster-level burglars) who can secretly install such software on a person’s phone can get not only a free tour of their targets house’s insides, but conveniently take detailed note of burglar alarm locations, where keys or valuables are kept, where CCTV alarms are located and their POVs.
Black bag teams or sophisticated burglars must not any longer take risks by entering unknown territory – they now can know any detail of a building’s interior way before they physically enter and “work in” it.
I mean – on one hand, even today many people would call one a “conspiracy theorist” for thinking such possible; on the other hand, there is a Daily Mail article on it (for housewives and mom and dad to read) and a free app for it …
I wrote:
“Those algorithms even can do things most people feel only humans can do, for example assigning a speaker/voice to a specific human and not mixing up who is talking to whom.”
I think Iwa not clear enough here;
think about a room under audio surveillance, so a mic somewhere recording away, and, say, four people in the room, all talking to each other at the same time, for example two couples discussing.
Humans ears+brains can easily follow ONE thread of conversation out of the mix of voices.
That is already not trivial for an algorithm, but easy for humans.
But modern audio analysis algorithms can do this, too, and not only with four persons, but a whole bunch of them.
Practically, for example, the result is a font- or color-coded text as the result of the software audio-text transcript: In the text file, every speaker/human is uniquely identified by his voice print, and therefore an analyst can easily and intuitively ascribe the text to a speaker, as if he had listened in naturally.
Could your home electrical wiring in conjunction with a 5G “Smart meter” be used to record conversations?
Or is it more likely to be a weapon?
Just wondering.
Always try to stay perfectly rational.
Speech is vibration, which travels far and affects everything – a microphone, for example, is only a small bit of material that wiggles in the rhythm of sound, and translates that wiggling, that vibration into an electrical signal. But if you make a sound or speak in a room everything in it is hit by the acoustic wave and vibrates – the walls, lamps, furniture, even your own body.
There is a multitude of ways to read that vibration out remotely.
The best way, I think, to stay really secure, is to not speak things that could hurt your interests openly, anywhere (with perhaps few exceptions).
There are other ways to communicate, which are not as easy to intercept; but sound travels far and affects everything in its way.
Writing a letter, for example, can be much more difficult to covertly surveil, because the surveilling party must get look at it, get hold of it, etc.; and a letter can be burned, but spoken words can not be taken back or destroyed.
A weapon?
Maybe you should worry not too much – if a competent, resourceful attacker wants to harm you, he can, and there is not much for us average people that we can do to stop it.
Our best defense is that we are unimportant; therefore, the highest risks in our lives should be real accidents in traffic or house, and normal threats to health like obesity, cancer or heart attacks.
“Government Spooks” exist and are out there, but they could not care less for average Joes like us.
High-level spook tech is surely fascinating, but real life threats for most of us are more on the level of angry spouses, evil neighbors or drunken drivers.
Worrying to be under attack by high-level spooks makes not much sense, as we could not defend ourselves against them anyway – like being hit by lightning it would be a very low-probability event not being worth investing resources into preventing it.
The chances that we will suffer perfectly normal accidents and setbacks, like the people around us every day, are overwhelmingly larger.
This may actually be getting rolled out beyond just phone mics. There are areas where just about everything said anywhere, even in all the private homes, is picked up and put in the permanent files of everyone. People really have no grasp how far the technology has come to detect small vibrations at a distance and through obstructions, and how there are no rules holding any of it back from being used on everyone.
I predict a civil war in our lifetimes, and a full breakup of the United States federal government into at least states, and maybe even into hundreds or thousands of small regional governments, when it all comes out, which I think it inevitably will. Everybody will view the federal government’s infrastructure as intolerable.
Which is why it is important to buy a phone with a removable battery. Until they embed a mic in the battery pack along with a small flash memory. After all, any conversation with the battery out is almost assured to be “interesting” and it can be quietly transferred to the phone later for background upload.
Almost every Li-Ion battery has a monitor chip in the pack, a mems microphone can be buried in a chip and so can flash. Hmm, makes you wonder. Even if they only activated select units owned by “interesting” people it would make sense to build it into lots of battery packs. Has anyone bothered to “decap” one of those battery watchdog chips to see if has more stuff in it than it should? Can you trust the report they made if they did?
Once you go down the rabbit hole it has no bottom.
Politicians and agency people dealing with sensitive matters in Europe usually have no special customized “secured” phones; those exist, but they lag behind in tech and fashionableness, so people want to usually have the latest fancy phone without being restricted by security features.
To get around that problem little boxes, universally usable for all phones, were developed:
Those isolate any phone put in them acoustically and electromagnetically from the immediate environment.
If you watch closely or look for it on press/media pictures, for example in the UK, you can see for example cabinet members of the government putting their phones into cigar-box-sized boxes on the table. Once the phone is in and the lid closed, the phone can record secretly, but no sound can reach inside the insulating box.
Such an enclosure is not too difficult to construct, but if you need to be security-aware and have no such box lying around, the typical refrigerator will do just as well – put your phone in it, and the acoustic attenuation should be more than high enough to frustrate any recording attempts.
Because it’s a metal box, there may be an RF-shielding effect – so switch the phone off, otherwise it may attempt to reach a base station with max. power level again and again, draining the battery quickly.
Generally, with such high tech devices like smartphones it is unrealistic to completely understand and know of any of their capabilities and potential secret functions – even government-level security experts struggle with that – it’s much easier to just isolate them in a little purpose-built enclosure.
To me this smells of Rabbitry – hyper-extroverted people with no self-awareness, who simply cannot understand the concept of privacy.