If you turn your phone off when being pulled over would it make any difference or does the spyware still do its thing?
Good luck making that stand up in court. They may as well be handing out “get-out-of-jail-free” cards.
They don’t use it as admissible evidence, they use it to find out whether someone is worth pursuing in legitimate ways that are more time and effort intensive.
That type of investigation would still require a warrant or exigent circumstances at the minimum. Otherwise it’s just fishing…which is a violation of Canada’s privacy laws. They can’t just go rooting through someone’s phone looking for a reason to pursue further investigation.
The article itself mentions how it is a loophole in the privacy laws
Aah. I missed this part on my first reading…
Once a judge approves surveillance, police have carte blanche on methods.
This would be used on suspects that they have a warrant to investigate.
How do they get it on the phone
Depends. Obviously when they say “secret spyware” that means it is, in fact, secret, and we don’t know which spyware they’re using, but as the article notes it could be Paragon Solutions.
They have a system called Graphite, but that primarily targets just instant messaging platforms. If the article is to be believed when it says it could activate your camera, that would signal to me it’s more likely something from NSO Group, like their Pegasus spyware that can also access your camera, GPS coordinates, and more.
All of these are going to be reliant on zero-day exploits, essentially exploits that aren’t known to anyone yet and are still unpatched. All exploits will be a little different, but when it comes to mobile spyware, we usually see them delivered either through texts, websites, or email.
Those attacks can either be someone just receiving the text (even if they don’t click on it, AKA a “zero click” attack), or maybe having to actually go to a particular website with the exploit baked in, or running an attachment from an email.
Joke’s on them, my phone runs GNU/Linux and has hardware kill switches for the mic/camera and for the cellular baseband which I use while at home, instead using Wi-Fi calling
What phone does that?
The “my case has a thing on it that covers the camera” phone? Idk about the mic tho
I’d assume the Pinephone (Pro).
Or purism… if they still exist or ever shippef a phone. Havent followed them in a while
I dunno, in the states they have the ‘secret service’ but I can definitely see them. Something tells me ‘secret’ things aren’t so secret…
Not buying it.
Buying what? Like you don’t believe the police can, will, or has done this?
The spyware. They’re gonna boycott it
How could they load software on the phone? They could use stingray systems possibly or any man in the middle but what if your network traffic is behind a vpn, what if your device is secured. I doubt they can simply CONTROL your device and how it operates from a distance reliably and en mass.
Zero day backdoors without any interaction from the user are proven possible. Look at Pegasus spyware. The majority of data breaches are due to zero day hacks.
