Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Anonymity from a state level actor would be pretty hard.

I'd say "totally impractical/impossible for regular individuals".

As James Mickens so eloquently put it:

If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. -- https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Some of us enjoy cosplaying extreme privacy nuts, or engaging in recreational paranoia. But don't for a minute kid yourself into believing you stand a chance against the NSA (or your jurisdiction's equivalent).

One cannot remain private or anonymous from a state-level adversary indefinitely but throwing your hands up and dismissing it as impossible is also a fallacy. Details are sporadic for easy reasons but quite a few whistle-blowers and other controversial figures have managed to keep themselves anonymous and disappear in a controlled-exit without any obvious retribution. Probably the best case outcome.

As funny as this is, you (not you, the person in the example) broke the anonimity when you chose to be an antagonist yourself (and drawing attention in the process).

The best way to be anonymous to those agencies is to be irrelevant to them

Then you just become training data for their threat algo.

> The best way to be anonymous to those agencies is to be irrelevant to them

And to make sure that everybody who has the same name as you also stays irrelevant to them... And that nobody ever uses your name as an alias and does anything "relevant" to them.

"“A senior administration official who spoke on condition he not be identified said Kennedy was stopped because the name ‘T. Kennedy’ has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects.” A number of media outlets carried the same version of the story.

Of course, “Ted” Kennedy’s real first name is Edward, and would appear as such on any ticket or identification documents, so why the senator’s name should set off alarms, even if a ‘T. Kennedy’ appeared on a “no fly” list, is a mystery that has not been explained.

The New York Times reports a different story: “The alias used by the suspected terrorist on the watch list was Edward Kennedy, said David Smith, a spokesman for the senator, who uses his full name, with a middle initial, of Edward M. Kennedy.”"

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/08/kenn-a21.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com