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Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

As an Aussie it's becoming increasingly clear that my wish to run my own servers in order to maintain some semblance of privacy is quite likely going to become a massive liability to my freedom, if the current state of affairs continues much longer. To be clear, by hosting a website I'm liable to "authorities" wanting to access everything anyway. By using a website in this increasingly fascist world, it becomes increasingly likely that my websites/mail servers will look "interesting", simply because I'm not "toeing the line"

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Could the answer be encrypted hird-party de-centralized mini-services being sprinkled accross various locations through-out the world? Perhaps the "authorities" would be able to crack one such mini-service, but it would never get them all due to how it limits jurisdictional access. I'm just thinking out aloud... Does things like this already exist (outside TOR nodes, of course)?

Only if it becomes ordinary to use such a service.

TOR protected the spies it was made for, only because there was a substantial amount of other, less interesting, traffic.

The mere act of straying outside the norm is what makes you vulnerable. Protecting the data itself is secondary to making the data seem uninteresting to begin with.

That's quite hard because it is lack of motivation for people to build such mini-services with risk of being sued. It is quite easy to get some illegal stuff when you host a service without review which is almost impossible for individual service provider to do.

There is one way which may reduce the risk. Build your whole system in RAM including OS. When totally power off, everything is volatilized. To lower the cost of RAM, one could just put the OS and service in RAM, but let the encrypted data in drive with key in RAM/RAM-disk.

The difficulty here is building a OS in RAM. There are some tricks but most of them need a host which may contribute to vulnerability.

Let them work hard even if you have nothing to hide. I'd refuse to disclose any private info up until the law requires me to. Intimidation is a trick they use to cut down on work.

Encrypt everything. We know they keep copies of encrypted data for a long time hoping for the day that breaking the encryption becomes easy for reading later. In the meantime, flood everything with mundane data, but encrypted. Make it expensive for them to keep it all, and the an absolute waste of time when they do get it decrypted.

Throw in some legitimate random data to really mess with them. Everybody needs some good entropy seed material.

> I'd refuse to disclose any private info up until the law requires me to.

This doesn't work as well as you'd expect.

I know Queensland law requires you to unlock your phone for a cop, or you face prison time. I'd expect there's similar laws for disclosure of encryption keys.

I don't know if I'm willing to "make it hard for them" if that means facing jail time.

This is true in relation to a search warrant afaik:

https://www.hallpayne.com.au/blog/2019/january/mobile-phone-...

>Judge North’s comments do make it clear, however, that if you answer questions where you acknowledge ownership of a mobile phone, then there is a potential for self-incrimination.

> is quite likely going to become a massive liability to my freedom

Compounding this is the advent of “hate crimes”, or rather the utterance of forbidden words. Now a days you can be hauled off in jail in many countries simply by expressing a wrong opinion, let alone hosting a service where others are allowed to do the same.

I can't possibly imagine why people might be upset by the "utterance of forbidden words" like "<insert slur>s like you deserve to be murdered by the state" and want legal protection from it.

> increasingly fascist world

You mean authoritarian world. Most people couldn’t name one tenet of fascism regarding finance, labor, etc. Fascism is financially left wing but socially right, which is the opposite of liberal capitalism—regardless of whether the capitalistic govt is authoritarian. yes I realize most people use it as a buzzword. And no I don’t want an authoritarian govt.

I urge you to read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism before dispensing with any additional wisdom on what is obviously a very nuanced topic that depends a on great deal of context.

> To be clear, by hosting a website I'm liable to "authorities" wanting to access everything anyway

In America at least, a search of this nature has to be very narrow in order to be valid, even the secret ones.

In America, the validity of a search is rarely an impediment to carrying it out.

This is from Mapp v. Ohio, an old Warren Court decision establishing the exclusionary rule. It has long since been hacked to the bone.

I so wish you were right but this is very much not correct.

If you believe this is true in practice, I've got a bridge to sell you.

In case any were curious of the origin of this phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker

Court orders are a last resort. Often, law enforcement will just ask providers to kindly share the information they want access to, and the providers comply. No warrants needed.

Sure, but asking politely is hardly the mark of tyranny, and has nothing to do with the sort of scenario I'm replying on.

"Asking politely" is a euphemism. The company has a desire to receive government contracts, or to not be subject to adverse regulations, and is thereby given the choice to submit or be the subject of retaliation.

In reality it's an end-run around the court system. If the government officially penalized them for not complying, various parties would have standing to assert their rights. So the punishment isn't officially tied to the failure to submit, but the threat is still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...

I think it is more complicated that. It's more like asking your neighbor to borrow some sugar. Nothing nefarious, but your neighbor might later ask to borrow your ratchet set. The concern is how strong is this relationship and if there is real quid pro quo going on. It gets gray real fast when you are your neighbor's boss and control his raises.

Also in this case, it's not even your sugar. You're giving out someone else's sugar, so why the hell would you care?

"Oh, your new office building looks nice. Did your construction firm get all the necessary permits? Are you sure? All of them? Oh, and I see you have a lot of new employees. A lot of them. I bet it would tie up your HR department for quite a while if the INS came by and requested documentation that all those employees are authorized to work in the US, wouldn't it?

"Anyway, I've come to ask whether you could do a favor for us."

"Say, that's a nice business you have there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."

And it's the organised crime that is associated with mafia tactics...

In Australia, you currently just have to suggest a peaceful protest for a search warrant to be issued against you. There are quite a few people who've been dragged off because of this. It's my understanding that everything is collected and analysed during these searches.

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