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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

We have seen these a thousand times. I say bring it on. The pendulum has swung solidly into the hands of users. We have so many privacy tools to counter state surveillance these days. Any country openly conducting mass surveillance will soon see the target population wrap itself in VPNs and encrypted services. Remember when ISPs began throttling torrents? Everyone then flicked the switch and torrent traffic become encrypted. Remember the London riots, what happened to RIM shortly afterwards? Remember Lavabit? Go ahead and tap my SMS or whatsapp text messages. That's the push I need to switch the last of my friends over to Signal.

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>> We have so many privacy tools to counter state surveillance these days.

Most of the cases you hear and read about, the gov never had to break any encryption protocols to catch people doing bad things. Pedo's on TOR were busted without it. Terrorist rings have been broken up without breaking encryption protocols. There's been rumors the NSA has broken encryption on WhatsApp and Telegram but will never admit it publicly.

If you think simply having good encryption will buffer state surveillance, it won't. If the gov wants to get you they will always have a huge advantage. They never sleep and have unlimited resources. Right now, tracking a smartphone, getting the data from your provider and the profile companies like Verizon, Google and others have on you is pretty easy. They don't need to break encryption when there are so many other vectors to get at you. Just having the GPS data Google has on you is enough to give them a roadmap on your life.

Unless you're willing to be a hermit like Ted Kaczynski was for years, it will be easy for any state to surveil you. And the gov still got Ted, even after all things he did to cover his tracks and living completely off the grid.

Good post. But I believe it was his brother that recognized the hand writing. Otherwise, they probably wouldn't have got him.

Little know trivia about him - he was a suspect for years as the Zodiac Killer.

But we are not all unibombers. Any security/privacy discussion starts with the level of threat. The average person doesn't want to hide their every detail, nor do they have to. The average person probably wants something like "I don't want my government to passively scan what I read online". That's an easy hurdle. Or, "my brother is addicted to cocaine and I want to talk to him about it without AT&T reporting our conversation the police." Again, this is easy. But if you say "I'm a defense contractor currently under investigation for treason and want to I pass money/information to my handler in North Korea undetected." THAT would be a challenge. It is probably still doable, but we should not abandon the basic needs of most people simply because we cannot promise total privacy to the most difficult cases too.

(Fyi, I once talked to a defense attorney representing alleged terrorists. His clients lived overseas and the attorney was representing them in the US. That man was one of those hard privacy cases.)

If you know what you're doing it's easy. The hard part is getting from nascent to knowing what to do without inadvertently tripping wires in the process. The surveillance has a major component built around how people behave normally in normie society (specifically, communication and technology habits).

That's why it's important that software and hardware companies ship security that's secure against nation state actors by default, so that those who actually need it can blend into the masses

>Most of the cases you hear and read about, the gov never had to break any encryption protocols to catch people doing bad things.

If you had a god's view, but wanted to keep that classified, you'd construct a parallel path to obtaining the same outcome in court without tipping your hand to the god's view. Parallel Construction.

CISA can analyze flow on backbones and (I presume) the various branches of partner domestic ISP networks. It's one way they track down botnet C2 nodes. What does this mean? It means the fact you accessing a hidden service is no longer hidden from the state. While the content may be encrypted, CISA could tap on the pipe with a wrench at a known HS node and see what pipeline in the mix rings on the other end (my cute way of describing adding delays and interrupts to a stream so those show up as recognizable fingerprints to scan for elsewhere, like a cable finder/tester). Combine in some techniques on analyzing payload sizes and order, and some decent guesses of the content can be formulated.

Only way I can think to defeat the analysis is to make a mixnet which asks for a GB/month target and simply transmits either data or padding uniformly in time with all nodes it peered with (a much much smaller subset than the whole network). Padding should be multi-hop so immediate neighbor nodes can't tell what is encrypted traffic and what is encrypted padding.

Accelerationism[0] FTW.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

See China, most people are totally okay with it and VPNs are rare.

The reality is super majority of user base don’t care about data privacy or what government can see as long as it doesn’t affect their day to day lives. There was a big outrage when WhatsApp changed their privacy policy, everyone is still using it. Supermajority of people who live in China are not using any of the western social media. Or how nobody cares when there’s a breach of personal data, and it gets leaked online. Again, unless it affects them directly, it really doesn’t matter. We (people in tech and tech-adjacent fields) are in an extremely fringe bubble. And I can’t really blame them, after all who has time to think about all the second order effects of different policy changes.

>Again, unless it affects them directly, it really doesn’t matter.

It does affect them directly, doesn't anyone know why they're broke all the time (aside from inflation)? Is it possible all that harmless telemetry for harmless marketing purposes actually isn't so harmless, and Terminator is inducing you to buy products you like but really don't need more than the savings you're splurging with? No, can't be!

If people woke up to how insideously manipulated they are at large... oh man!

Yeah, but it really doesn't matter. Majority of my friends are not in tech space, and not a single one would care about it. It's similar to how I don't care about some sports team winning the championship, or Taylor Swift, or a relationship between two reality TV stars. You can call those "superfluous interests", but those people would say the same about our interests. And since things you've mentioned doesn't negatively affect the things they care about, it just... doesn't matter to them. I wouldn't even call it an abnormal behaviour, since a person can only think about so many things during the day.

But "our interests" in observing the use of psychological trickery through memes and celebrity pawns to subtly nudge group actions and [the holy grail:] individual actions. Sports wins don't have the influence Meta's data pipeline has on individuals' lives! It's huge and insidious, 1984 is now literally becoming possible! It does negatively affect them. Now special interest politics can better out maneuver said people's interests and intentions even more effectively, now that personal and cohort profiles exist and updated in realtime!

No, we are cooked if we do not spread persuit of privacy like a religion! The individual cede to the group, and the group to the regal classes.

> 1984 is now literally becoming possible!

I assume you are refering to the automatic music writing machine the proles are fed with? LLMs seem to be capable of that now.

(1984 is a low tech society and have been possible since the 50s, except for that machine.)

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