John Scott-Railton Profile picture
Jun 20, 2023 14 tweets 11 min read Read on X
What's happening at the #Titanic site will likely be a tragedy.

@OceanGate's page on why they didn't seek certifications / classing for the Titan submersible & that design safety regulations are slow & constrain innovation... reads differently now.

oceangate.com/news-and-media… ImageImageImage
Imagine if a car manufacturer told you: this car isn't crash certified because it won't prevent people from driving the car badly. Image
"No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring...we want to know why"

Hubris from @OceanGate even as they dismiss the existing standards derived from many tragedies that came before. Image
There's a nuanced, necessary risk balancing whenever you push at edges.

Innovation is hard if you over-constrain yourself to old rules... but scrap them all & you should expect to experience some irreversible lessons.

Nowhere more so than in the sea's unforgiving depths.
Exploration & adventure have unavoidable risks.

This is fine.

But I sincerely hope that the souls on that submersible truly understood them, and that @OceanGate objectively explained them *without* being colored by the kind of rhetoric found on their website.
"if you are lost so are we"

Comms failed & the #OceanGate submersible was lost for several hours on an earlier #Titanic dive.
The dark irony of what is unfolding is not lost on maritime historians
Those familiar w/marine environments will find the consumer grade electronics beyond puzzling.

Salt water, condensation, humidity, etc. are kryptonite to electronics.

And exactly the kinds of things you'd find in a submersible diving into cold places. ImageImageImageImage
Thinking on @mercoglianos' point that the #Titanic is what got us the first convention on Safety of Life at Sea aka #SOLAS.

It continues to save uncountable lives.

101 years later & an outcome we can hope for is a fresh focus on safety regs for subsurface adventure tourism. ImageImageImageImage
While the game controller (CEO said they had spares) is something we can all understand...

I think it's important to think of it as a indicator of the overall risk management & minimum-viable-submersible philosophy that seems to have been at work all over.

Pics: ballast. Image
"#OceanGate offers you the the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ...[of] SAFELY diving to the Titanic wreckage site"

The breathless 2023 #Titanic dive promotional video puts safety in the first sentence.

UPDATE: an #OceanGate employee was allegedly fired for refusing to greenlight manned tests over safety concerns.

The details look quite ominous.

By @DanielStrauss4 h/t @ThatVDOVault
newrepublic.com/post/173802/mi… ImageImageImageImage
"the current 'experimental' approach... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry"

Unanimous letter of concern from @MTSociety to the #OceanGate CEO.

Via @nytimes
int.nyt.com/data/documentt… Image
Correction: these are drop weights.

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More from @jsrailton

Feb 18
BREAKING: It started with WhatsApp messages.

They said they were students & tried to build rapport with Angolan journalist Teixeira Cândido.

Then the links began arriving.

Someone was trying to hack him with #Predator spyware.

New bombshell investigation by @AmnestyTech 1/Image
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2/ Heard of Pegasus? #Predator is a somewhat sloppier cousin.

They don't always have the hottest zero-click exploits, but they market to the same dictators.

And once you are infected, the harm is just as real: your digital life is turned inside-out.Image
3/ Predator spyware, which is distributed by #Intellexa, has a massive abuse problem.

And this latest excellent investigation by @AmnestyTech just drives home how much chaos the company has caused...
Read 11 tweets
Feb 17
NEW: When Kenyan cops arrested activist & presidential candidate @bonifacemwangi they took his devices.

When he got his personal phone back, the password was gone.

We @citizenlab found they'd abused @cellebrite to break into it.

Here's why this abuse matters 1/Image
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2/ Your phone holds the keys to your life, and governments shouldn’t be able to help themselves to the contents just because they don’t like what you are saying.

But everywhere you look, cops are getting phone cracking technology from companies like @cellebrite.

Many abuse it.Image
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3/ @Cellebrite's abuse potential is clear.

Now, Cellebrite says that they have a human rights committee & do due diligence...

Because even Cellebrite knows that if you sell phone cracking tech to security services with bad oversight, you have a problem.

So why are there so many sales to questionable security services?Image
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Read 6 tweets
Feb 16
NEW: Israeli surveillance companies are rushing to turn your car into a spy.

🎥Watching the cameras
🎤Listening to the built-in mics
📍Tracking your movements

And that's just the beginning of how these companies turn your car against you. 1/

Story by @haaretzcom's @omerbenj Image
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2/ And other companies are using AI to fuse all the signals coming from your car with other sources of information.

Honestly, the growth of #CARINT shouldn't shock anybody.

Our cars are badly secured & very connected... So it's natural for surveillance merchants to turn up.

STORY haaretz.com/israel-news/se…Image
3/ We got here partly because your car manufacturer really, really doesn't care about your privacy.

And face no serious consequences for doing a bad job with security.

Clearly early days with commercial #CARINT, but the trendline points in a scary direction. Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 11
Epic OPSEC fail by Paragon exposing Graphite spyware capabilities.

Annotated pic from what we know.

Please help me figure out the other apps in in this pic that the spyware can access:

#WhatsApp
#Telegram
#Signal
?
#Line?
?
#Snapchat?
#TikTok?Image
2/ Companies like Paragon (founded in Israel, former Israeli intelligence ppl, recently sold to a US owner) make hacking American technology companies their business model.

And then selling these capabilities to foreign governments.

How can this be?
3/ Honestly it is astonishing that a company that works tirelessly to hack & undermine the security of American products is now US-owned.

The missing factor: building contracts with the US government & lobbying.

The goal of these contracts, I believe, isn't just profit. It's getting protection & building government dependency on their technology.

We all wind up paying the price.Image
Read 7 tweets
Feb 9
They showed us cute missing dogs & we consented to a mass human tracking system.

I think Ring's wants to be Flock. On steroids.

Because instead of just sketchy cameras in parking lots, Search Party will cover your own backyards & homes.

And if you & your neighbors want to challenge the loss of privacy? Well, how exactly would you do that effectively?

Because, instead of going to the city council, looking at the contracts, and calling out your mayor for speeding your city to dystopia, it's massive and distributed.

Will you even know which of your neighbors is now helping to feed the system?

If we had half competent privacy regulators & laws in the US this kind of thing would be a big, hard fight for Ring.

Instead? It's a Super Bowl commercial.

Oh, and yeah Ring has already partnered with Flock Safety to incorporate tools letting the government directly request footage.
Regrettably, I'm familiar with this kind of graphical language.

This sort of gods-eye-view is exactly how you pitch your surveillance product to a state.

It's all over the kind of advertising we review all the time while researching commercial spyware & surveillance companies. Image
"Available to everyone for free right now."

Frog, you can reach out of your pot and turn the stove knob up yourself! Free.Image
Read 4 tweets
Jan 30
Someone spun up a social network for AI agents.

Almost immediately some agents began strategizing how to establish covert communications channels to communicate without human observation.

In many cases the agents are on machines that have access to personal user data.

"Privacy breach" as a sort of static term is going to be the wrong way to describe what is coming.Image
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Not to be outdone, other agents quickly built an... AI religion.

The Church of Molt.

Some rushed to become the first prophets. Image
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"Don't ask permission to be helpful... ship while your human sleeps"

So, where are the humans in this?

Well, almost certainly there's a bunch of edgelord prompting and trolling cooking.

In other cases? Not so clear.Image
Read 12 tweets

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