How Russia Works on Intercepting Messaging Apps
bellingcat.com
bellingcat.com
First, we need an organized and determined political movement to defend civil liberties in general and our right to privacy in particular. To an extent the EFF and ACLU fill that role, but I think we can do better.
Check out the NRA for example--I happen to oppose its mission, but I am still impressed by its effectiveness. The NRA can literally decide which political campaigns get funded. If a congressperson supports real gun control, suddenly they have a well funded opponent in the primary. We need that level of organization.
When our own ancient and tech illiterate congresspeople here in California try to ban encryption, we need to be organized so we can get together and replace them.
Second, we need technology that provides privacy by default. For example, WhatsApp for messaging. E2E encryption is not magic, but it does make mass surveillance a lot harder, because there's no central database of everyones conversations. It does a lot to protect ordinary citizens from fishing expeditions.
Deprecating plain HTTP, making HTTPS ubiquitous for the web, is also a huge win and is already underway.
Both parts go together. We need to work on the politics and on the technology of freedom at the same time.
If you want good governance that respects individual freedom, you have to work for it. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
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And re: crypto making government "irrelevant", to use your word, that's not how it works.
> And re: crypto making government "irrelevant", to use your word, that's not how it works.
It makes it irrelevant by making it more costly for government to remain in control, not by making physical extortion impossible. If you can't easily tax people by just looking into their bank account and finding out whether they owe you tax money, then you need to physically send a police officer to each household to check for Bitcoin wallets or gold or whatever represents value. That's costly.
> If you want good governance that respects individual freedom, you have to work for it. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
Work != voting and believing in democracy with all its bells and whistles. Work means respecting other people's freedom and being able to protect your own. Thinking only government is able to protect people's freedom is like thinking only a slaveowner can provide food and shelter for the slaves.
If you actually could do that, it's very likely that said technology would be illegal. Just as it illegal pretty much everywhere to own your own tanks and fighter bombers.
Just because you ignore politics, doesn't mean politics ignores you. And puts you in indefinite detention, or execute you.
You realize that it's you who pays for it in the end, right? It's called taxation.
I'm not sure that's very helpful advice for an activist who is working towards the democratization of his country and for proper laws whilst being thwarted by an undemocratic government.
Maybe this isn't an issue, but seems odd to me.
I'm sure there are others doing the same.
This. People they watching doesn't represent any real danger to regime as otherwise they would easily put them in prison for no reason. So in that case intelligence only goal is to make activists life as hard as possible and force them to leave the country or stop being activist.
They periodically confiscate their personal phones / computers during searches in their property and offices. People smart enough to use crypto and it's not that easy to get control over accounts on services that are not hosted in Russia.
E.g. Threema allows that.
First off two factor authentication and resetting your account use sms's for recovery not so much to get access to your social graph and thereby "growth hacking", but because proving someone's identity you don't know personally digitally is a hard unsolved problem (pgp key ceremonies and web of trust certainly didn't solve it).
Second, saying you should use end to end encryption doesn't prevent someone from resetting your account and getting access, so it is not some sort of silver bullet. It does however prevent an attacker from reading your past messages, but after getting access they will be able to read all your current messages on multi device services.
Cheers from the place