AlohaSafe Alert COVID Tracker

[blizzardwizard]

I can't think of a reason why the government would want to mass-stalk the population and if it really worries you, then just turn your phone off or leave it at home.

Imagine if you will a genius deaf* ghost watching over the shoulder of every single person in a country 24/7 that works directly for the state. Many would agree this is the de facto scenario globally, for each separate state at least. Even in the previously exalted "free" states of Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, England, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. As much as people in these countries, with the exception of US, may be forced to speculate how much their privacy has eroded, there are harsher regions where open speculation like that found in this very post do not occur, and thus people are made to assume the ghost and live under fear of the ghost, compelled to say nothing. In the U.S. we can speculate about more recent history, but we do have an extensive publicly documented history. Clipper chips where legal till the good guys broke it and forced 'them' to show their hand by strong arming tech giants to an unbelievable degree. If you don't believe me look up how much the courts were forcing yahoo to pay every day. Every single major tech vendor and financial institution was brought to trot by the stick and carrot of the NSA in the late noughties, In secret courts. Regardless of location stalking it's undeniable that the NSA had at one time access to a near complete communication web, as well as most transactions, plane tickets, and had access to tools to monitor the location of vehicles via cameras along interstates scanning license plates, as well as location via cell if needed. The current uncertainty has given me a bad disposition. These days the clipper chip is alive in spirit in the dedicated processor baked into modern processor dies. It has its own kernel and OS, meaning it can access ram (breaks cryptography by information gathered here without hacking your main OS) and networking hardware (can use your wifi without your main OS being hacked), sending the cryptographic key to 'them') Worst of all this spy system violates the free software agreement of its predecessor minux, failing to give credit where it's due and to release the source code under a free liscence. As others have added, there are private companies currently stalk people with phones around the grocery store with Bluetooth, google selling location data (NSA spent trillions on google data), or atleast storing it if you opt out of selling it (NSA obtained stored data through patriot act courts) combine this with the fact today/yesterday's digital world is/was utterly documented in a permanent record (everyone 24/7 over the shoulder like a ghost) and I think you can start to see how bad this sort of thing could be if people were in a place they actually had to worry about the government stalking them and popping them for nothing in the night. They are made to believe they're in a sea of cameras that recognize them and hot microphones, regardless of the truth. This was the true inspiration for Pokemon GO, in particular the CIA worked with Niantic to introduce that awful AR mode no one ever uses when catching Pokemon, because the true enemies of the CIA should really start to think they are in a see of camera owned by kids playing an app developed by that same CIA.

*While not using the microphone for zoom**, phone calls during certain eras, Skype calls during certain eras, etc, although it is 1984 ish in that at any time the ghost could gain the power of hearing through microphone access hacking, which the ghost totally knows how to do at this point, and I would argue that the ghost has been listening as much as it feels comfortable doing without another snoden
**no source for this

[Durian Fiend]

The radio (KWXX) reported today that the app would notify if you were in close proximity for fifteen minutes or more to someone who voluntarily reports contracting COVID.  So the app seems kind of useless if a few seconds could be enough to transmit the disease.

The only time I'm in close proximity to someone outside of my household for more than fifteen minutes is when I'm standing in line to pick up a package at the Post Office.

Outdoor transmission is practically unheard of. 15 minutes consecutive or cumulative is supposedly the magic number, so you safe Captn! 
It doesn't seem the tracker is useful for most citizens in Hawaii at this time, and once vaccinations are widespread it may quietly disappear. 
I'm not concerned about being "stalked" by the government.  Be my guest, if you somehow mistakenly think it's worthwhile.  That wouldn't last for long,  for sure!
  

[kalakoa]

Every cellular phone has a "baseband" which is a black box that has access to all the hardware in the phone. Government can remotely access anything at whim.

All your phone calls are "billing records" in which you have no privacy rights; these are forwarded to the government. This metadata can build a very accurate profile of your life.

At the next level, Android phones include the "google play services layer", ostensibly for compatibility, but also with full privileges on the entire phone, so able to provide services to other google apps regardless of your settings. (Disabling location/wif/bluetooth is basically "advisory".) Apple devices might actually be a better choice here.

ANPR technology is surprisingly affordable and used by all manner of skip-tracers and the like.No restrictions here, because you have little choice but to display license plates when on a public road.

Again: privacy is dead. Unfortunately, we have the surveillance-state version; the surveillance-commons would have been a far better outcome.

[blizzardwizard]

By surveillance-commons would be like that amazon doorbell service right? I might not be understanding you here.

[kalakoa]

Refers to an essay by Schneier, viz: ubiquitous surveillance isn't bad if it's also open to the public. Cameras everywhere, but anyone can watch. What we have instead is tyrannical surveillance, all the data disappears into a law enforcement enclave, and the secret police use that information as they see fit.

[TomK]

blizzardwizard - I suspect your and my definition of stalking are quite different.

[TomK]

I actually tried to read some of this nonsense from wizard. That was a bad idea.

"[...]The current uncertainty has given me a bad disposition. These days the clipper chip is alive in spirit in the dedicated processor baked into modern processor dies. It has its own kernel and OS, meaning it can access ram (breaks cryptography by information gathered here without hacking your main OS) and networking hardware (can use your wifi without your main OS being hacked), sending the cryptographic key to 'them') Worst of all this spy system violates the free software agreement of its predecessor minux, failing to give credit where it's due and to release the source code under a free license.[...]"

It's the clipper chip, mid-90s technology which is defunct. I wish conspiracy theorists were defunct as well.

[randomq]

Don't forget every printer secretly marking the time and serial number on every printout, and the USPS recording the faces of every piece of mail in perpetuity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_...ation_Code

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/mo...-mail.html

There are some points of solace for the tinfoil wearing folks though:

1. You're not that interesting, and not worth any special effort or expense by the spooks.

2. Our spooks aren't that good; they spent billions on sensors to monitor corporate and government records, and still didn't detect Russian hackers in tens of thousands of systems for over a year.

3. You can take a more active role in your defense. Use open source hardware and software, firewalls, hard switches, cryptography, and turn off your phone once in a while.

Or, you know, move into the jungle where the signals don't reach on some remote island thousands of miles from the mainland.

[blizzardwizard]

It's the clipper chip, mid-90s technology which is defunct. I wish conspiracy theorists were defunct as well.

It's not the clipper ship it is the 'spiritual' successor baked into x86 and x86_64 processors dating back to 2008. It's claimed purpose to allow virtualization solutions required by some enterprise machines running intel processers, known as intel management engine. In 2013 AMD added their own 'platform security protocol'. While some employers may leverage these technologies, very few home users will ever have a need, it yet still is loaded at boot time unless you have a soldering iron and home brew bios. You can just unplug your computer wire if you want though.
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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the ... Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to."

[kalakoa]

1. You're not that interesting, and not worth any special effort or expense by the spooks.

Generally agree, but...
You might know interesting people, or become interesting at some point in the future; no special effort/expense is required (they're recording everything) and the records are forever (so you can be investigated retroactively). The magic of "parallel construction" guarantees that you will never know how you were originally discovered.
It's not a problem unless something you're doing becomes illegal at some point in the future.

the 'spiritual' successor baked into x86 and x86_64 processors

Needs C&C from the network. Simple answer: don't use x86, at least where it touches the internets.