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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

If someone wants you gone and has the power to make you gone, whatever encryption you have is irrelevant. Just do enough to protect yourself from automated or low skill attacks.

I’m kind of curious though... what are you storing that would draw the attention of a nation state with the power to do this? Whatever you’re storing is not worth the anxiety of storing it.

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I know you didn’t say this explicitly - but in the interest of privacy I don’t want anyone looking at anything I own without permission. It’s as simple of that. We’ve gotten so far away from basic rights to privacy with digital devices it’s sad.

I read a great analogy - everyone knows what happens in a bathroom but you still shut the door (and usually lock it) because you want some privacy not because you have something to hide.

This...

Correct, but nobody builds bank vault doors for their bathroom. That’s my point here. This article is about how law enforcement can break down bank vault doors and everyone here is like “this makes my bathroom door irrelevant”.

Your bathroom door was already irrelevant, you just never found that out because nobody is busting down bathroom doors.

None of us here has anything actually illegal to hide IMO.

Political climate and affiliations change however. What was quite fine and protected by freedom of speech today can be declared illegal by an oppressive government tomorrow. In a situation like this you definitely don't want to have your personal data gathered as easily.

But that’s my point. If the circumstances change such that the people in power want you dead, they don’t need your hard drives. They’ll just kill you.

Only if they already know they want you dead. The whole point of this discussion is protecting your data from them so they don’t know that.

This has little, if anything, to do with protecting the data on your phone. You would have to never post any information anywhere on the Internet.

"Private" communication exists using the Internet. Sometimes your device is in custody because you are in custody for suspicions they already have. In which case, good luck. Other times your device is in custody just because you happen to be crossing a border, for example. In that case, having the device be actually locked might prevent you from being turned away at the border or even ending up in custody yourself.

> "Private" communication exists using the Internet.

Sure, but virtually nobody depends on it to protect the sort of data that you are worried about if you're worried about an oppressive regime deciding to persecute you for what you say. For example, if you're afraid something you post on HN might cause an oppressive regime to come after you, securing your phone, or for that matter your laptop or desktop, isn't going to help you at all. Same goes for pretty much any place people say things on the Internet. Unless you never say anything except in a private, locked chat room secured by unbreakable encryption, and never send any email to anyone without using PGP and without being certain that they are also taking the same precautions you are, anything you say on the Internet is out there for the finding if anyone gets interested enough in you to look.

Signal is incredibly easy to use and many people use it. It’s easy to limit sensitive things to a medium like that. It’s also easy to create profiles that are some degree of “anonymous” that you can use for semi-sensitive data.

You don’t have to resort to never using the Internet as you imply. The vast majority of things people do online are perfectly safe for you to do, even if you are a potential target of a government.

> Signal is incredibly easy to use and many people use it.

For particular kinds of communication, yes.

> It’s easy to limit sensitive things to a medium like that.

It's possible, I suppose, but I would not say it's easy. People want to do many, many different things online. Signal only facilitates a tiny fraction of them. Most people won't be willing to limit their activities online so drastically.

> The vast majority of things people do online are perfectly safe for you to do, even if you are a potential target of a government.

Either you have a particularly limited set of online activities you engage in, or you are drastically underestimating the lengths to which governments will go if they become sufficiently oppressive.

Fair enough, but that's not my point. My point was more about persecution, not outright killings. That's an extreme that many governments won't reach for, even in the third world.

>What was quite fine and protected by freedom of speech today can be declared illegal by an oppressive government tomorrow.

"declared career-ruining by Twitter" is just as likely IMO.

Whether you're the subject of a public or private witch hunt doesn't really matter if the end result is the same.

Yep, sadly you are right and that has been happening quite a bit as well.

To be fair, random assholes on Twitter are much less likely to have nation-state-level resources with which to investigate you, so the threat model is a bit different for one type of witch hunt versus the other.

>None of us here has anything actually illegal to hide IMO.

If they can break your encryption, they can add the illegal stuff that was clearly yours to begin with. Works great as a character assassination. And of course any questions about such incidents would be dismissed as conspiracy theories.

As for how society would react to such a setup? I think the guy involved in 3d printing guns gives a close enough example.

Depending on who you are or where you live, the data might simply be your existence in that place, political affiliations, sexual preference, etc.

Anne Frank had to hide in an attic to get away from those in power who wanted her dead.

Wondering how encryption helps when the gestapo simply goes door to door?

Hide the messages telling your neighbor they're on the way/the ones you received saying the same so you could get yourself in order as needed.

It forces the gestapo to go door to door (i.e., expend human resources). Many jews disappeared from western countries simply because the nazis used the civil records first -- it detailed what everyone's religion was where they lived. Who needs to go door-to-door when you can use centralized records to pinpoint exactly where you need to be?

> what are you storing that would draw the attention of a nation state with the power to do this?

The costs they're discussion (several hundred dollars to a million dollars) aren't only the province of nation states; plenty of larger criminal organizations can afford that. And the price of software & hardware generally goes down over time.

There's always an XKCD... https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

I don't think a nation-state is looking for my info and even if they are, there's nothing I can realistically do to stop them. Thee NSA (or whoever) simply has more resources than me.

So, my primary concern is protecting from ID theft and nosey police officers/TSA agents. A long passcode is mostly sufficient. Lock the device before interacting with said LEO and hope they don't decide they need the $5 wrench.

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