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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

    > most people wouldn't understand the full implication

So attack that. Tell a story. What does this allow the government to do? Could a jealous ex-lover who works for the government read their ex's messages? Could the local mayor find out if you've got a medical problem? Get an illustrator to draw these up as little comics. Make images that people can understand.

This is a great example: http://www.wordstream.com/images/what-is-net-neutrality-isp-...

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Keep the government out of our dick picks!

John Oliver: Government Surveillance https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=1518

Keep our dick pics out of government databases, you mean? I never took a dick pic which included governmental staff, but maybe I'm weird like that...

Ha! This is great. Might consider putting together something similar. Thanks.

Thanks. That's a solid idea.

I created the above image. Just to give you an idea of how important it is to make sure that the message is easy to absorb, a few years ago this made it into the WCIT leaks:

http://files.wcitleaks.org/public/WCIT12%20-%20ITRs%20and%20...

Check out the fifth to last page, which is basically identical to what I created, if presented a bit worse. Did anyone give a shit? Nope.

Is that a genuine logo of the fucking ITU, the international body probably most obliged to prevent this kind of shit globally, and was this put together by a "senior staff member of the ITU" rather than /u/quink on reddit? Yup.

Did anything of that presentation make it to the media or public discussion? Nope. Meanwhile, my PNG has been posted here on HN 6 years after I first created it.

Let me know if you need my help, but I'm not at all sure how to best broadcast that message. Keeping away the MITM (who is here employed by an "elected" government with executive powers and "judicial oversight" acting "in the interest of public security" rather than a bogeyman or a corporation) is harder than protecting the ability to consume. Maybe the answer lies in making people afraid for their money.

Anyone with access to the private key for the certificate, which includes anyone with access to the multitude of servers that relay traffic for the entire country, could technically drain everyone's bank accounts and give away your shares at their discretion, if you've ever used online banking or trading in Kazakhstan. A single bad memory or whatever bug in some software somewhere and the number that's the private key is in the open.

In all honesty, make investors and bankers afraid and any government will shut up. As for ordinary lives of people, PRISM has shown us that they don't really care about this security stuff.

Thanks so much for your offer to help - as soon as I figure out the best course of action I might contact you. The fact that they took the page down gives some hope - maybe they're not as reckless and understand that the public won't be happy about this. We'll see what happens next.

>In all honesty, make investors and bankers afraid and any government will shut up. This is a great idea in general, but it requires a strong corporate/investor establishment that is independent from the government. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, 90% of the Kazakh Forbes list are either 1) straight up politicians, 2) politicians' close relatives (offspring and in-laws), 3) those, whose involvement with government is "open secret" (e.g. someone rumored as being a president's personal banker), or 4) those doing in oil and gas, heavily regulated industries where government's cooperation is required to make it work. :(

Anyways, thanks for all the insight!

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