Any way you look at it or regardless of what excuses are offered, these forced alerts are wrong. From an ethical perspective, the government has no rights to notify me about anything that I do not want to be notified about. And I don’t care what the stakes are. They have no rights to any back-channels in to any technology that I possess, simply because they have the capabilities to do it and that I can’t stop them. The next things you will see are far worse. A gps built in to your car could report speeding infractions to traffic enforcement’s, who issue you a ticket every time you speed. The government could routinely scan every banking transaction you make, searching for suspicious activity. It could get far worse than that.
All governments need to stay the hell out of my phone unless I consent to let them be there. It’s all about boundaries and principles.
To me it is a bit strange with “presidential alerts”. In Sweden there is Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (official name in English) which is a rescue service. I got in touch with it as there was a (slight) water pollution in our area and my phone received a SMS warning to drink tap water without cooking it. The warning was withdrawn rapidly and I think they only wanted to test the system.
I can see no problem with those warnings because it is not the government but the (very independent) rescue service sending warning messages (not political propaganda). But then again USA is very different from Europe.
I just have a hard time believing people’s complaints about Presidential Alerts aren’t politically driven by hatred for President Trump. I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of those complaining haven’t turned off AMBER alerts or severe weather alerts. To my knowledge there’s only been one use of the system when it was initially tested anyway.
From a security perspective, sure, I get the concern that it could be a backdoor you can’t disable. Its implementation needs to be thoroughly audited.
From an ethical perspective, it doesn’t seem any different from someone sending you a text or calling you, which you already can’t stop. The SMS system as a whole needs to be reworked, but that’s a different issue from these alerts.
@szopin
It’s a surveillance issue, thus a security and privacy issue. I had a problem with then and do now. No one cares about what color of the crayon-box a person is when it comes to issues like this. Stupid comes in all colors. Now back to the privacy concerns of such Alerts. It should be left up to the individual to opt in. If people believe it’s of value then great, they will have it on. Others do not. No one has the right to decide for them. Like any choice, those people chose to accept the consequences of those choices. However it is something I never liked or wanted. If it’s a requirement then it’s not much Purism can do about it, however I am sure there has to be away to address the privacy issue.
It’s only an ethical to everyone if they agree with your assumptions about government. Dude you’re injecting politics where they don’t belong. You could have just asked if you could turn off alerts.
If I recall correctly, these alerts are usally send out over a specific protocol vastly different to SMS (Not sure as I’m in the UK we have no such system).
The protocol is enabled by default in most modern smart phones but can be disabled as well.
If this is the case and it is already being done I see no reason Purism can’t do it.
Yes, there most certainly is the prospect for this. In fact, it was a large factor in the design of the L5. Pretty much every phone you get these days has the modem integrated on the same silicon as the CPU and they communicate via a shared memory interface. Very fast, very low power… but potentially very destructive. There is no real information about which parts of the system such a modem can access on its own - whether the memory controller only allows access between the two components in a narrow window, or whether the modem can just see, read and write to everything.
It used to be the case (2013 or thereabouts, Samsung’s last iteration of this was the Galaxy S4) that modems were a whole separate chip from the CPU, soldered on to the board. Some of them would also have had a shared memory device to communicate, others would have used something called HSIC (basically hard-wired USB). Better, but not perfect - because the modem also had direct access to the sound chip (greatly simplifies the software for the OS when you want to make phonecalls, very bad if someone takes over the modem and uses it to eavesdrop) and to the GPS chip (useful if you dial 112 with both legs broken and want them to know where to find you, not useful if someone’s trying to hunt you down and getting the modem to send its position ever so often).
The Librem 5 has its modem as a completely separate, removable package (one of the M.2 cards) and is connected via USB only. It doesn’t have access to any other part of the system except by asking (this includes sound - the OS needs to explicitly route audio over the USB connection). This means that to gain some control over the system, there will need to be a vulnerability in the kernel drivers for the modem which can be remotely exploited, or perhaps in the SMS receiving software. Both of these things are something that we have control over and can fix.
Actually, I started hating the Presidential alerts when Obama was President. I don’t mind them so much now that Trump is President. But that is beside the point. The point is that the Government has decided to use my hardware in a way that I do not consent to and on top of that, they’ve made a concious choice to force the matter against my will. This isn’t like a safety issue on a given model of automobile or a Surgeon General’s warning about smoking. It’s more of a case of the government feeling entitled to use my property against my will because they can. Whether or not it’s for my own good isn’t the issue since it’s not their job to decide for me against my will, what is good for me. By what authority should they be able to do this?
Legally, this is not that different from broadcast TV being required to display emergency alerts, which the US has had for a long time. The difference is that instead of a TV, it is a cell phone. I know that you carry one in your pocket, and the other sits at home, but they are both wireless receivers that are capable of saving lives by keeping the public informed. The FCC manages the wireless spectrum and can impose conditions on the usage of that spectrum, such FM radio stations announcing their ID every so often, and requiring that they carry emergency alerts. Cell phones use licensed spectrum, so they must comply with the regulations of the spectrum that they use. Sometimes, these regulations impose restrictions on the user’s behavior. For example, in CB radio, it is illegal for you to talk in code words that a reasonable person might not know.
It is only called “presidential alerts” because “executive branch alerts” does not have the same ring to it. The executive branch in the US is tasked with handling emergencies because congress is too slow to. In practice, this is no different than civil alerts in other countries. The US just names it after the public office in charge of approving it.
“Governments don’t have rights only individuals do”
This isn’t just talking about rights, you’re also brining in the theory of Indivualism and in effect radical libertarianism.
I fully support FLOSS but I’m no longer either of those things, therefore it’s not always on topic. You’re over politicising something for no real reason, you just come off as angry (I’m not saying you are but your message read this way) and it simply creates devision.
We can talk about digital rights and related matters of course, I just think this isn’t the place to discuss wider politics.
I can’t speak for the vast majority, but for myself, I was against it when it was instituted during the Obama regime, and I’m still against it. It doesn’t matter who the president is, initiation of force is wrong.
Yep, exertion of power in a private space is violation of privacy and private property. If state wants to make public alert system it has plenty of space and possibilities to do that. In all (normal) countries it is done via loud-speaker and radio/tv broadcast based notification system. which is not prone to any mistakes/abuse/malfunction of course, but it does respect your privacy and does not abuse your property.
I’m certainly an individualist, even if I’m not really sure what a radical libertarian is. But for me, it’s philosophy, not politics, and digital rights is just a re-branding of speech and property rights. In my mind, I just can’t grok FLOSS without liberty – if I pull that thread, the whole thing unravels.
I intended no anger or intolerance in my post, sincerely. Maybe it’s the way my avatar is clinching that cigar, which is barely visible after the forum cropped it.
Dude it wasn’t on topic or necessary in this post. You’re just shoehorning your ideology as always relevant here. But not everyone here is a libertarian. Consider it a courtesy to not be overtly political in a tech forum. Can we go down the rabbit hole of “everything is political”? Yeah, but why on a tech forum?
I’d like to remind everyone in here, if you have a baseband your location is known while it is connected to cell towers, they don’t need an alert system to track you just saying. They will just demand the data via the FISA court in the USA.
