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Comment by j-bos | Hacker News Reader

One advantage of imperfect privacy solutions like Tor is they force authorities to invest if they want to snoop. In the before times if soneone wanted to read your mail they'd need to at least convince a judge and then spend manpower interecepting the envelopes, today they can just ping google for a bcc.

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Is that true? IIRC they still need to do the legal paperwork to get an email from google et al (FISA request?).

Yes paper work is required. I think OP is pointing out that that it doesn’t require the same amount of work it used to. Especially from law enforcement.

LE are mostly avoiding this by just buying from the same public ad network sources that everyone else does and using that as a way to avoid the paperwork, I know people get very pissy about EUs GDPR sometimes but if you want to put an end to that kind of thing you need to tackle the private sector collection problem which almost anyone can access and is comparable with mid tier nation state capabilities.

Yes mostly true, exceptions apply mostly based on jurisdictions and capabilities.

The safeguards are actually much much better than what the opinions would lead you to believe on here.

People really seem to get off on the idea that they are on the targeting list of an intel service but you actually have to put in some real work to meet that criteria. If you’re buying drugs for example even the relevant LE authorities will at most knock on your door to scare you assuming you live in an English speaking jurisdiction.

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