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Comment by bratgpttamer | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide if it would be easier to convince people of the benefit of extra steps/slow internet/privacy protections, or to reflexively engage their skepticism/critical thinking muscles upon hearing Save-The-Children-and-Stop-The-Terrorists rhetoric.

As it stands, it seems most people (of a certain race and class, anyway) feel more threatened by vague stories of child abductors in white vans at WalMart[1,2] or terrorists (c. 2000's generally) than being randomly victimized by our j̶u̶s̶t̶i̶c̶e̶ legal system.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, as they say. Abstract thought and generalization are hard, I guess.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/04/tech/facebook-white-vans/inde...

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-van-facebook-hoax/

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Similarly my social group has recently become more concerned with hate speech and foreign influence on elections too.

The story’s walls are closing in on cracking down on cryptographic guarantees of privacy, network access, and information sharing.

Tor doesn’t deliver any of those things. It’s a tool developed for spies that is mostly used to facilitate grifts and move contraband.

I’m not worried about clowns in white vans or terrorists. If you want protection from the government, you need to advocate for protection under the law. Journalists, NGO workers, etc have to figure out how to manage risk and may need to self-censor to avoid those risks. Tor won’t protect you if you irritate MBS.

I'm not sure what deliverables you're referring to, but if it's not useful for shielding one's identity from prosecutors/persecutors, why would spies, grifters, traffickers, terrorists, child abusers, and puppy-kickers make such extensive use of it?

Tor can protect your identity if nobody knows who you are.

But if a government is already crawling up your ass, it won't help much.

E.g, once you're not anonymous, anonymization tools don't help much.

If the actual police and not counter-intelligence agencies were actually intercepting all traffic, use of tor would automatically attract attention to you.

I think this is the point the OP is making - one that's been made for years: if "everyone" used Tor, simply using Tor wouldn't be a useful indicator.

This isn’t true, you’re conflating risk profiles.

There is active targeted surveillance by a nation state. Tor is not going to help you. No crypto or tech alone will help you, you’ll need to develop extreme opsec practices to stand even a remote chance against a well funded and well equipped adversary focusing on targeting you.

Then there is passive mass surveillance, i.e. the presidential surveillance program, which Tor/VPNs/HTTPS etc will absolutely help with.

Tor/VPNs/HTTPS is a pretty broad spectrum of protections. Everyone on the web now pretty much uses HTTPS all the time. Most people don't use a VPN but I imagine most HN users do or at least know how. Very few people use Tor. What benefits do VPNs bring over just HTTPS? What benefits does Tor bring over VPNs? And do any of these actually solve anything if you continue to use Google, Meta or similar services?

If you’re in the United States, a VPN can provide a lot of cover by disassociating the HTTPS packets metadata from your ip address.

I wrote a blog post on tactical privacy a while back that I think is still relevant: https://everytwoyears.org/2020/07/13/tactical-privacy.html

Thanks, the blog post is very straightforward and practical

> What benefits do VPNs bring over just HTTPS?

Doxxing/blackmail protection.

If a few people collude to secure moderator positions at different sites and each gains access to IP logs (or someone just bruteforces/exploits the site and dumps logs), anybody can be outed across those sites-- the adversary has effectively compromised the server and can map page accesses directly to your IP.

They don't break HTTPS, they break the weaker link-- the trust of the server owner.

The next step is gaining access to the VPN provider's logs (they don't keep any, right? Right?). They all keep logs. Even if they say they don't, assume they do. Nobody is held accountable for lying about it.

Again, not breaking HTTPS, but breaking the weaker link-- an unscrupulous VPN owner already exploiting the trust of you, the customer.

Tor is the only "safe" way to be anonymous, but even that is dead through fingerprinting, gatekeeping and forced Javascript enabling.

"reflexively engage their skepticism/critical thinking muscles upon hearing Save-The-Children-and-Stop-The-Terrorists rhetoric"

Not part of human nature. Save the children/Rethoric is embedded. Reflexive thinking has variying energy requirements and for most requires external kickstart, when possible at all

Forcing tor in all new network adapters is more feasible, which is saying much.

> Not part of human nature. Save the children/Rethoric is embedded.

This is ahistorical. Childrens' rights are a late-19th Century creation. We have become child worshipers, we are not naturally child worshipers.

There's a quasi-Christian doctrine that states that children are born virtually unstained, and that being unstained makes you more deserving of life. As you grow older, you are stained by the demands of the world, which makes you less deserving of life. However, the idea that a child's life is more important than an adult's life would seem moronic to people much before the 20th Century. It just takes 6 years to make a 5 year-old. It takes 51 years to make a 50 year-old. 5 year olds know almost nothing, and need to be taken care of. Every 50 year-old has a bunch of knowledge that can't be recovered, and generally can take care of themselves.

You know we used to send them into the mines... and we used to value them because of how deeply they could get their little hands into factory machinery.

I got out of academic fingerprinting research when I realized I was on the wrong side of the discussion. I’ve just never seen or heard of privacy violations that particularly bothered me.

I too have never experienced a violation of privacy which had a significant observable impact on my life. You and I have been fortunate in this respect.

Some people are literally targeted for harassment and murder because of some aspect of their identity, journalism, or activism. This isn't a hypothetical.

Here's one example from the top of my head:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/khashog...

Tl;Dr the dissident Khashoggi was infected with NSO malware before he was murdered by the Saudi government. That's a pretty clear violation of privacy in service of something I would guess you disagree with.

This story isn't an anomaly, I think if you looked into this further you would find innumerable privacy violations which bother you.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that GP doesn't care about anyone but himself.

Sure, I considered similar notions, but I edited them out because they didn't seem compatible with assuming good faith (and made it a lot easier to not include swipes).

Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you all stop talking about this journalist without mentioning his (US) government connections?

Leaves the context of the story incomplete, otherwise.

If you would like to elaborate, or if there's an article you think I should read (or podcast, video, etc), then I'm listening. I'm open to feedback but this is too vague for me to do much with.

The dude was intelligence.

Alright. I'm not gunnuh buy that without a citation. You have no obligation to provide me with one, but finding one on my own is going to be at the bottom of my priorities.

Tough nut to crack.

"Not long after the Saudi journalist was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the CIA assessed with high confidence that MBS had personally ordered the killing, but intelligence officials never spoke publicly or presented evidence."

How many journalists get their deaths investigated at all, let alone laid at the door of a...whatever you want to call their government, and what it is to the US'.

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