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Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

This is why I think technical solutions alone to privacy are mostly pointless. There’s 7 billion people in the world—at some point (if we haven’t already reached it) monitoring all of us in real-time will be trivial. Even people who live “off the grid” in a cabin in the woods will be trackable.

What’s needed is an agreement between all of us, in the form of privacy laws, that make certain uses of this data illegal.

In the future if you’re caught committing a crime by data captured in a manner illegal under these laws, it would have to be thrown out and can’t be used against you. Corps would also be banned from collecting, storing, and using personal data in an unlawful manner.

Feels like a pipe dream since there’s so much money in the industrial advertising complex, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will take achieve reasonable levels of privacy.

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> This is why I think technical solutions alone to privacy are mostly pointless.

Technical solutions to privacy are not required to be alone. They're required to be ubiquitous. If your country is an authoritarian hellhole, you encrypt everything to help you not get murdered by the secret police. If your country has strong privacy protections, you encrypt everything to help ensure that it never becomes an authoritarian hellhole, and protect you against bureaucratic failures as defense in depth.

To invade your privacy, an attacker should have to break the law and break the encryption.

Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.

Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.

Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.

Authoritarian hellholes will make something up when they don't like you, but they'll also spy on everyone to decide who they don't like. At which point anyone attempting to resist them is going to want to get extremely familiar with operational security before they get dead, and a big part of that is things like encryption and steganography.

Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.

Authoritarian hellholes don't have human rights and if they find out that you're using encryption - that's enough for them to arrest you.

Hence steganography.

Agreed that this is not a problem that can be solved via a technical solution. However, I don't think a political solution is possible either. Even in the US, police can literally get away with murder today. Why would they have any difficulty getting away with privacy violations? Big Brother is inevitable. All you can do at this point is teach children and future generations to live with the understanding that they are being monitored at all times. This isn't me trying to be edgy or cynical. The genie's out of the bottle at this point and it's just reality.

The way to fight back is ubiquitous public monitoring of the state. We should understand that the state is always watching, but the state should also be aware that all its actions will be public knowledge.

Note the increased awareness brought by widely available cameras with immediate upload capability. The commenter above implied this is dystopian, but the opposite seems to have occurred -- as the public gains the capability to surveil the state, it constrains the state.

WikiLeaks tried that, Assange is still in Belmarsh and the MSM is still largely allowing him to rot there.

This is a good point. Of course anyone who thought the MSM, or print journalism, were in business to reveal the actual truth really needs to review their history. The worst part is that Julian (whether intentionally or not) probably made that sacrifice for nothing. At least here in the US most people don't know or care. That's a shame. And an embarrassment.

I was thinking of something more communal/distributed. WikiLeaks wanted centralization.

I had a second part to my comment about how web3 was the answer, but the public have been largely convinced that it's synonymous with get rich quick schemes or a worse version of Twitter. Where is the next WikiLeaks?

He could just stop fighting the extradition unless there are concerns he wouldn’t get a fair trial in the US. I haven’t heard of such concerns and he could probably get a solid legal defense team with private donations.

If he is extradited, 100% guaranteed he will not get a fair trial by any common definition of that term.

Can you point to any trial that wasn't fair in the US in recent history?

I have no particular viewpoint regarding Assange, but depending on your understanding of "fair", there are probably many whose fairness can be questioned. Partiality of judges, imbalance of legal team budgets, etc. Look at any case brought up by a patent troll against a small/medium business.

One case that personally always bothers me was regarding the murder of Philando Castile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile#Tr...

I’ll narrow my statement down to fair for the defendant.

What's the goal of preventing use of these data? Are there alternative methods that could achieve the same goal?

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