Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

>She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free.

Peculiar. There's a decent chance that it wasn't related to espionage. There's also a smaller chance that it was espionage gone awry, but I highly doubt state level actors are that clumsy.

If it was espionage it was probably intentional. To what end I'm not sure. Attempts to interfere with the interview seem pointless at best, at least for the sake of interference itself. Probably some sort of psychological game or intimidation. A unit like TAO likely has encyclopedic manuals dedicated to the art of using their capability to mess with people's heads.

On the bright side, it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. State actors have the capability to do this if they want.

She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life., the psychological aspect is very troubling. A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance.

The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.

A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance.

It's the old idea of the Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham: Achieve compliance not by watching everybody all the time, but by creating a system where everybody could be watched at any time.

I like how the Panopticon concept is complemented by the Synopticon one, as in "many watches few". It's close to the "sousveillance" concept.

What may save us from a dystopic totalitarism is the freedom and agency we get through our devices and networks. Certainly software freedom, use of cryptography and uncensored, inclusive basic communications infrastructures are needed.

> ... it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit.

Yet.

As far as we know, anyways.

I guessed it was a less-competent state actor in search of some of the secrets she was brokering. Or run-of-the-mill malware.

The way TAO and FBI are structured, "messing with people's heads" is considered outside of the acceptable risk threshold. That usually means the malware would be reported and then blacklisted by anti-virus vendors. Not mention, risk blowing a criminal case. If the FBI infected her computer with malware, it would just quietly do its job.

Journalists have an incredibly difficult time avoiding spear phishing emails when their job depends on them reviewing documents sent to them . I don't envy the level of risk they take every day just checking their email.

One way to counter this attack is to have everyone broadcast a livestream, constantly. Perfect alibi.

The problem is that the attackers could just jam said stream, or otherwise render it inoperable.

That said, my own thinking along these lines is very similar to yours. Having a persistent cryptographically secure live stream would go a long way towards protecting one against a wide range of false accusations.

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