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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I think you've misunderstood. The point was that there are (to simplify) two different threat models at play here: one where your most powerful adversary is somewhere between your family and domestic law enforcement, and another where you are worth $10+ million to a nation state.

99.99% of the world lives in threat model 1; our goal as security minded people is to protect these people. These people want general purpose networked computers in their pockets.

0.01% of the world lives in threat model 2; our goal is also to protect these people. But these people don't get protected while also having general purpose networked computers in their pockets.

Both groups are civilians, and both deserve security. But they also have different demands; if Apple forced Lockdown Mode's usability restrictions onto a billion people tomorrow, a large percentage of them would switch to materially less secure hardware and software vendors.

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I'm trying to paint a bigger, better picture.

From the inside of the status quo, those threat models, well-informed reasoning, the descriptions of hierarchy, and what “should” and “should not” be possible, “millions will react like this, millions will react like that” are valid and respected. From the outside, there's a tiny bit of a problem: ordinary human has no value apart from that of a cog in the machine, there is really nothing to protect, an empty place, so all those powerful words crumble like a card house in situations like these.

What I'm hinting at is that that assumption is wrong, it's a dead end from the start. Just like tribes sitting around the bonfire, and discussing legendary totem animals and gods making their life reasonable and orderly, people today are charmed by the images of events “above”. It's just a belief in the workings of “modern world”. One needs a better base to live one's own life, not an axiom that one, for all intents and purposes, doesn't matter.

Challenging this axiom is why when I think of the threat model I face traveling from place to place, I come to the inevitable conclusion that I am very likely a target of assassination attempts.

Consequently, I ensure that my motorcade of armed guards are always with me, and accept cars loaded with only the toughest reinforced glass. I am, of course, paranoid about physical proximity to strangers and that mostly incentivizes me to avoid public travel, particularly flights (though even my private jets must be carefully maintained only by my most trusted insiders lest they find themselves tumbling out the sky near Tver). When flying on particularly important trips I send a decoy plane, and I make sure that air space near me is well controlled.

Or maybe, just maybe, I don’t actually face the same threat profile as presidents, spy agency bigwigs, and leaders of paramilitary organizations, and pretending I do is an act of high fantasy that far from empowering my true human soul would be so ridiculous as to make life unlivable!

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