Financial Times journo's private messages quoted to her at China visa renewal

If you're in a situation where throwaway-hardware makes sense, you'll care how the throwing-away is actually done.

While not throwaway hardware, the company I work for destroys hard drives and other persistent memory devices before discarding computers. If the persistent memory device cannot be easily and reliably destroyed, the whole device is.

I bet journalists with sensitive information are far more thorough.

everything is net booted, with no HDDs (at least that was the plan, it wasnt my project)

destruction is rather fun actually, after wiping, memory/disk is removed and taken apart manually. lots of magnets to play with.

Yo seem to assume that everyone working at a news outlet is a journalist. IT, legal, finance, HR, facilities, production, sales, marketing, distribution...

Your kind words of encouragement are most appreciated

I'm not a journo. More importantly the browser I was using didn't have a working spell check. This all compounds the obvious, which is; I can't spell for shit, and my proof reading is also notably weak.

Hopefully we will start looking beyond how something is said. What is said is more important.

Do you think Chinese residents have an expectation that snail mail is private from the government?

> but I have an expectation that it is private

Regardless of what your expectations are, it's not private. Just because you expect something to be private does not mean that it actually is.

She's a tech journalist covering China. She knows WeChat is monitored. This was more of a confirmation of how blatant it is.

I live in the US and have had snail mail opened without my permission and forwarded to me at the post office before. Once they put a sticker on it, once they didn't even bother. So, no, your snail mail isn't private at all. Government is free to open it and examine it any time they want. Legally the inspector is only supposed to open discount classes of mail, which is about half of them, to make sure you aren't lying to ship something cheaper, but in practice they are free to open anything and do.

From what I've heard it's pretty common for controversial private messages to simply disappear from one's inbox.

Maybe something deeply cultural in this. An American couple I knew went to China back in the 90s, to teach English. They discovered all they had to do to request say, more towels was to mention it aloud in their room. Must have put a bit of a damper on their love life.

They are not “private messages” if they are sent though a medium where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. I’d even argue if there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, one should not bet one’s life on anything they send being private.

It’s gotten to the point where if a message I send touches the internet in any way I consider its privacy compromised.

Plausible deniability is kind of bullshit in this and similar cases - sure, one can't prove that the message was from her, there are all kinds of possibilities, but the authorities can reasonably assume (especially combined with an interrogation results and possible other circumstantial evidence) what was the likely sender, and that's completely sufficient for them, they don't need to prove anything. Just as in this article - no proof is provided (nor will ever be), and a reasonable assumption alone is enough to reject or evict a foreigner or detain and punish a local.

I.e. plausible denial is essentially based on the hope that the opponent will follow some high standard about what constitutes evidence/proof and what is the level of plausibility. In a good legal/political environment you don't really need plausible deniability that much, and in a bad legal/political environment plausible deniability won't save you from harm; your plausible denials can simply be ignored.

E.g. in the Signal standard "plausible denial" means that the message might have been spoofed by your recipient as it involves a shared secret that's not solely available to you - but it's not particularly likely (without extra evidence, motivation, etc) and not really that plausible. A good lawyer in USA might succeed using it as an argument to prevent a conviction, but any totalitarian regime will simply disbelieve it and declare it not sufficiently plausible; they are not really looking for solid proof of wrongdoing, hints of wrongdoing are good enough.

> Signal doesn’t allow third parties to build the source

No. Signal is GPLv3.

They don't allow third parties to distribute modified binaries that connect to their servers. You can argue if that is a good idea, but don't misrepresent the situation.

One that’s open source, on servers and devices only you and your correspondents control. Or you could speak face to face.

I recommend matrix[1] which has a fairly nice set of clients in Riot[2]. It's better than OTR in that it supports e2e group chat and multiple devices.

[1] https://matrix.org [2] https://riot.im

But no software can help you with the age-old problem of human error (aka PEBCAK):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/31/this-is-over-p...

I much like Keybase.io

Grandparent was clearly making a statement about WeChat private messages not being private. That's how I took it anyways.

1. Stop using a service known to be controlled by the Chinese government for journalistic endeavors.

2. Ensure your journalism is helping to improve the world and not enabling oppression.