Hacker News Reader

Comment by abigail95 | Hacker News Reader

It's so dumb - think about the signals you are sending out just by having such a device. Let alone trusting someone else to harden it for you.

Think about Monero - it's a lot more suspicious to be dealing with that than regular bitcoin.

For privacy advocates it's fine, you aren't doing anything wrong by using e2e and monero, any govt looking at you won't be able to get past reasonable suspicion.

But if you're a criminal you're basically glowing in the dark by doing this stuff. Regular phones are also encrypted! Facetime is e2e? What was the point of the "AN0M" phones. What did they give you except a supply chain risk and a 100x SIGINT interest factor than a normal person.

View on HN

I simultaneously agree with you (tor being another prime example of this -- they may not be able to see which tor sites you're visiting [unless they control the exit node] but they sure as hell can see you're using tor), and also think that at some level, the "what have YOU got to hide?" attitude is purposefully encouraged by the intelligence agencies as a way to slowly erode privacy expectations. "Good people don't need an expectation of privacy" is the start of a really dark path.

People will willfully and joyfully will vote for a would-be dictator, so I don’t privacy is really the main thing that brings us on a really dark path. There are far bigger fish to fry to protecting our basic rights and values.

The balance between privacy and the authority is just that. We outsourced the rule of law to the state in order to have a fair and just society. Ipso facto the government should be fair and just to have the right to invade some amount of privacy in order to keep a society free, fair and just.

That’s why the judicial branch exist: to see if what the government (or anyone) did was playing by the rules.

Which brings us back to politics being a danger to a society if people vote in unjust or unfair people.

I don't think this is what the GP was arguing. They were not discussing whether what the court system did was right and justified, nor whether people who know they have done nothing wrong/illegal should be expected not to use privacy technology.

Instead, they were pointing out that it's hard to imagine why the people who knew they were engaging in criminal activity and were hoping to hide it thought it would be a good idea to have specialized equipment/services rather than blending in the crowd with normal phones and apps.

> Let alone trusting someone else to harden it for you.

At some point you have to trust others in order to take advantage of network effects, and network effects are exactly what these crooks were seeking to manage. The criminals in this case wanted secure, supported hardware in order to conduct operations and logistics across a range of countries.

My point is they left the massive network of regular people using regular encryption and privacy protections for an uncommon and bespoke solution. In doing so they grouped themselves, basically megaphoning to the police that there was a 10,000x higher likelihood that they were involved in criminal activity.

> exactly what these crooks were seeking to manage

Use iMessage and Facetime without iCloud. Like, to be targeted by Pegasus they have to know who you are, and each time you infect a new target, you risk the exploit being discovered and patched.

Just be buying these "hardened" deviced, police identified criminal cells they didn't even know existed.

They pay thousands for a bespoke solution that puts them 3 OPSEC steps backwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com