The Wired Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

The Wired Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance

wired.com

75 pointsmdhb70 comments

I have bad news. There is really very, very little you can do to avoid government surveillance, and in the end it's almost entirely pointless. Between that amazing tracking device in your pocket that you feed all of your personal information to, data brokers, facial recognition, cameras everywhere, it's pretty much impossible to avoid surveillance.

That said, I think it's important that we do try at least to corrupt that data set any way we can. I've got my local member of congress (and apparently other political organizations) thinking I'm a middle aged person of color; I'm not. Always falsify your information whenever possible and feasible, including tagging other people in photos as yourself, etc.

There is no way to avoid surveillance, government or private, but we can do our best to screw with the data.

I don't understand why one wouldn't also do whatever is within their means and energy levels to avoid surveillance, as well? Have you a reason for suggesting people don't do it?

Sure, surveillance is very pervasive, and much worse than people seem to want to admit to themselves. But I don't really get why "oh well, give up" makes sense to you there, and you're so excited about providing false information. Why not both?

Going outside for a day and leaving the phone fully off in the back of a drawer is good fun for the whole family, and can be done. Getting Tails onto a USB stick is easy for many and even fun for some, and you can make copies for your friends. Getting that old brick phone out of the other drawer, getting the old charger for it, and taking that out sometimes when you only need calls, can be good fun too.

I don't get why it'd be so black and white, especially considering that's it's so empowering and interesting to learn more about privacy and get a bit more engaged, even on a small personal level.

Have you a reason for suggesting people don't do it?

If I may turn that back on you, how exactly does one avoid surveillance? Your phone is the most obvious culprit, so you'd need to get rid of that. Facial recognition software is getting better at recognizing people even if they are wearing a mask, and the cameras capturing that are everywhere; just look at traffic signals and the camera's on top.

In modern society, right now, it is pretty much unavoidable unless you got rid of most electronics and never set foot outside for many, many years.

Zero-to-one-hundred real quick there. The important thing for the general population isn't so much to go full Unabomber, live in the woods, speak to nobody, but to make tracking just a little more difficult. Mabye set Location Services (when prompted by an app) to "Only while using" instead of "Always". Use Signal (or even iMessage) instead of SMS or Facebook Messenger. Use Apple Maps (or Open Street Maps) instead of Google Maps. Click "Deny All" instead of "Allow All" when prompted for Cookies, use Apple's Private Relay, the list goes on.

The point isn't to make tracking impossible, but to make it cost more; in time, in resources, in terms of capital.

Where is the app that uses two or more comms channels with text messages (e.g. WhatsApp & Signal & iMessage) in order to send a message ? Something like a one-time pad technique, except that no single comms channel has the unencrypted message. Require that ALL channels be cracked/surveilled in order to XOR (or some other algo) them all together to crack a message.

I already had a whole paragraph, which I'll reprint for you here:

> "Going outside for a day and leaving the phone fully off in the back of a drawer is good fun for the whole family, and can be done. Getting Tails onto a USB stick is easy for many and even fun for some, and you can make copies for your friends. Getting that old brick phone out of the other drawer, getting the old charger for it, and taking that out sometimes when you only need calls, can be good fun too."

I could have continued with loads more small things "ordinary people" can do:

  - use F-droid totally, or as much as possible, instead of the "Play Store"
  - if you manage to stop using the Play Store entirely, sign out of Google entirely on your phone, nothing bad actually happens when you do
  - delete Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc etc
  - have boardgame night with friends, and have a "phone-box" ready, with rules, fully off, it goes in the back of a closet for 3hrs
  - buying a little standalone mp3 player for offline walkies with your dog (or lover)
  - use ebooks and such on airplane mode, getting books onto them by other means

Etc etc. The point isn't that everyone wants to do these things, the point is they're easy, and mostly a good laugh, and every little helps in the fight back against the normalisation of constant surveillance. So why would we ever tell anyone, "oh, it's pointless, do nothing"?

The problem is government surveillance is useful. If your car gets stolen for example a plate reader camera can help find it.

I think people know that and weight it against the trade off of decreased privacy and exploitation by corrupt government officials or other nefarious actors. To help justify that people come up with ways of gaming the systems, similar to with say people who cut coupons get that money saving rush. Essentially it's viewed as a necessary evil and folks leverage mechanism to get ahead instead of all out rejection.

> There is really very, very little you can do to avoid government surveillance, and in the end it's almost entirely pointless.

I disagree. It's true that, if you are a person of interest of any reasonably powerful government, there isn't much you can do at all.

However, the sort of surveillance most people should be concerned about is an automated one. It isn't really possible for a government to track all their citizens and flag everything, no matter what tech they use. You want to make it difficult for tooling to figure out information about you (no matter what it is) and force government to actually invest resources if they want to figure out something about you, specifically.

When it comes to the US, a lot of information is stored at the state level. That is a lack of centralization that can be exploited.

> tracking device in your pocket that you feed all of your personal information to, data brokers

Not all of them do. If you are concerned about that, some are more privacy oriented than others. 'Dumb' phones still exist - although their use probably makes you stand out already.

There is a lot people can do to limit their footprint with respect to mass surveillance, and much of it is in the article. There are now more concrete reasons average people in the USA might need to worry about that, such as helping someone from a restrictive state get an abortion.

tin foil hat, that's the only way :)

Take a page out of organized crime's book. Do not mention real names, use code words for things, refer to places or events as proxies for other things, never talk over the phone or text if you can do it in person, use intermediaries and dead drops, leave your phone at home. Don't tell any more people than you have to.

But the most useful tip: stay off their radar. If you start using a lot of encrypted solutions for things, attend meetings (that are probably surveilled), go to a protest march, etc you are now on their radar. Maybe you'll decide to do these things anyway, but just keep in mind you're making their job easier.

I was once on a jury for 6 weeks for the trial of the top members of a large multi-national drug trafficking organization in New York. A lot of that time was dedicated to hearing transcripts of the group's communication.

These guys use code words and took all sorts of precautions to try to avoid surveillance, but in the end it looked like a joke. The government knew everything they were doing, where they were, where they were going and who they were talking to. They effortlessly followed their conversations across multiple channels, knew all their signals and the secret second apartments they paid cash for and all the other games they were playing. We listened to them plotting and talking about trying to conceal what they were doing and prevent being caught for nearly a year completely unaware the government knew exactly what was going on. They came across like naive children trying to blame their stuffed toy for eating all the cookies.

Recognize though that this is selection bias. The government wouldn’t have brought the case that you sat for if they didn’t have this information and we have no idea how many investigations are thwarted by similar efforts. There could’ve been a loose thread on this one that unravelled it, like a government source.

Al Capone was the most famous person in America, and everyone knew he was a gangster. They had to get him on tax evasion. The problem isn't knowing who the gangsters are, it's bringing an air-tight case through enough incriminating evidence that can be used to convict.

That is different than staying under the radar, which is why I put that as a different paragraph. The government knew what they were doing, and were building a case, because you could see something was going on. If you're using encrypted messaging, they can see that something is going on.

You're witnessing a solved case among tens-of-thousands that never see a hearing.

That's like saying safe's don't work because you saw a broken one.

>> You're witnessing a solved case among tens-of-thousands that never see a hearing.

Some anecdotal evidence to support this.

Back in the early aughts I worked at a cellphone place. We had a Nextel repair shop. Since we were located in the downtown area, we had several government clients. One of those just happened to be the FBI.

The FBI agents were some of the most interesting people I spoke to. I got to chatting up one of their agents about surveillance and the new wave of meth dealers using rural areas for their labs. The agent straight up said its been nearly impossible for them to surveil these people because they knew they could only use a burner phone for 3 months before having to ditch it. Somehow, they had figured out the timeframe it takes for the FBI to get a warrant for their phone, send it to the carrier and then the carrier to set up a tap on the phone or get the phone records and send them back to the FBI so they could start tracing the calls.

The agent said the dealers would never destroy the phone either, they would just throw them away, or take them to the local landfill and just pitch them over the fence. The agent said they wouldn't break them so then the FBI would continue the process of getting the warrant, effectively buying them time to get a new phone and ahead of them once more.

The agent also said the gangs were setting up in rural areas now since they don't have the law enforcement necessary to go after them and rural folk are so spread out, then tend to keep to themselves more.

Keep in mind this was 20+ years ago, but even back then, the FBI was having a hard time pinning these people down by trying to leverage the data they were getting from the carriers.

The context here is protection from government surveillance...but I have had similar experience dealing with immigration and to a lesser degree taxes where less resources could have been spent.

The government has the ability to get massive amounts of data about you quite easily. What "protects" you from negative consequences of this is the processes, rules, and procedures baked into the government itself, not copying the communication style of some Hollywood mafia movie gangsters.

Go ahead and worship the cult of the omniscient government panopticon.

Even the Snowden leaks were clownshoes mysql LAMP apps that would never pass the bar at a tech company.

Where are the thermals for this system?

> naive children

Anthropological test subjects.

There was an EU/APAC “E2EE” messenger honeypot a few years ago.

Cell phone providers, internet providers, technology providers, license plate readers, ring cameras, mail package imaging, surveillance cameras, motion hunting cameras, private citizen agencies that can operate outside of law or structure, govt agencies that operate outside of law or structure, five eyes, shadow facebook networking, unlimited funds, dna gathering, thousands upon thousands of employees, including specialists who can interpret the smallest details about you and create an accurate psychological profile.

"Nowhere to run to baby. Nowhere to hide."

I always just operate under the assumption that anything digital may one day be public record, it’s actually way easier to think about.

Like that Ben Franklin(?) quote: “three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead”, if you want something to be a secret just don’t put it on a computer at all, simple and effective.

are there different styles of government surveillance for different systems of government, I wonder if there is a taxonomy.

They mention these Cell Phone message apps, which may be OK. But to me you are better off using email with gnupg if you are really scared.

Or better yet, tor or tails may be the best choice for people truly concerned. I thought it was weird they did not mention those.

Tor is mentioned. But that will probably put a big red alert on you, and is anyway too slow and too blocked for daily usage. /e/ OS, an ungoogled Android by Murena with Firefox and ublock and using website instead of apps, and Signal for all your conversation, and you're already okayish.

gnupg is a foot gun and it does not encrypt the metadata

with signal one gets e2ee and it's hard to fuck up

What metadata is exposed by GPG and not Signal?

Who is communicating with whom, when, and usually from what IP address. Signal writes about how they minimize the metadata they can access here: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

When using it over Email, all of the normal email headers are there on full display. The subject line, recipients, etc... Everything except the body is exposed.

I wouldn't count on Signal to protect you. I suspect they've been compromised for a while, but at the very least they're not trustworthy. The very first sentence of their "Signal Terms & Privacy Policy" page is a lie. It states "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." but for years now signal has been collecting and permanently storing sensitive information in the cloud (your name, phone number, photo, and most importantly a list of all your contacts). They've also refused to update their privacy policy to reflect their new data collection practices.

For an app that markets itself to whistleblowers, human rights activists, and journalists whose freedom or lives could be at risk it's inexcusable to mislead people about what data is being collected. People with so much on the line need to be able to make informed choices about their risks, but Signal's communication surrounding their data collection has been extremely evasive, confusing, and dishonest.

Further reading:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-...

https://community.signalusers.org/t/can-signal-please-update...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...

For anyone in a group that is worried of being retaliated against due to Trump: it's too late to use any tips in this article.

Even the most private among us likely have decades of data in various data centers about our typical travels, typical social circles, typical shopping practices, etc. They even mention this in the article, albeit at the very end. So, if you are the kind of person that Trump would want to remove via various means, it's likely already too late to suddenly install Signal.

A far better article for the demographic the article is supposedly written for would have focused on how to request what data various services have on you, and how to request it be cleared before January.

One could argue there's still value in building connections in apps that can't easily ban you or silence you on mention of a protest.

I agree, but I was talking about the supposed point of the article. This is taken from the first words in the article:

> Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. Here are some steps you can take to evade it.

My point was that if you're an enemy of Trump, that data is already out there. Preventing more from existing is important, sure, but I still think removing what is already out there is even more important. You can change your future behavior; it's impossible to change the past. Best you can hope for is erasing as much of it as possible.

Wired used to be a magazine I subscribed and enjoyed reading. Too bad it is now yet another partisan piece.

Government surveillance isn't ramping up under Trump. It was already here under Obama.

The concern isn't about surveillance, as much as it is about what's being done with the data being collected.

Which has been happening for decades.

I find it more troubling the relationships between the government and the media more than I do surveillance at this point. When you have news outlets publishing outright lies and propaganda to create a narrative for an election, I think that is a lot more dangerous.

Like when Democrats were touting Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris. The same person whose father they wanted to string up by his thumbs, called him a war criminal and all kinds of adjectives to describe his massive no bid contracts for Halliburton during the Iraq wars.

Trump said he's like to see what happens when she is handed a rifle and goes out and has seven or eight guns pointed at her.

This comment was then repackaged to say that Trump was endorsing the assassination of Liz Cheney. That's not misconstruing something. That's not leaving out a detail here and there. It was an outright lie and straight misinformation that was pushed all over the media for two days. Even liberal leaning outlets had to finally step in and say that, no, that's not what he said.

When you cannot trust the media any more because they are no longer one of the last checks on government overreach and influence and instead have a relationship where the government dictates to the media what they can and cannot report? That to me, is far more dangerous than surveillance.

> When you cannot trust the media any more because they are no longer one of the last checks on government overreach and influence

I'd argue you can't trust them because of the First Amendment. They have a lot of leeway to say whatever they want. Like with an individual, trust is either earned or theirs to lose.

> instead have a relationship where the government dictates to the media what they can and cannot report? That to me, is far more dangerous than surveillance.

It is very dangerous. Is this happening, though? I don't recall Biden calling for pulling news channels' permits. Did he revoke press corps passes?

>> It is very dangerous. Is this happening, though? I don't recall Biden calling for pulling news channels' permits. Did he revoke press corps passes?

So you don't remember the government going to social media platforms during Covid telling them they have to suppress information that contradicts the idea that if you get the vaccine you're 100% protected from getting or passing on the virus?

Or the 55 CIA agents who signed a letter stating the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation even though they knew it wasn't, and then directed the media to push this complete lie to the general public?

There are copious other examples, but you don't need to pull news channels permits or press passes. You just tell them what to report instead.

I remember the government asking them to do it, but have no recollection of them being required to do it.

I do, however, recall Trump pulling White House press passes and threatening to cancel broadcast licenses.

P.S. Go after Hunter all you want. Nobody cares.

I think mass government surveillance has been around since the mid-90s. In each successive administration it has been expanded. There's an excellent book called "No Place to Hide" by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. Written around 2002, it details public and private surveillance and how much of a losing battle it was for privacy. In 2002.

As for Wired, I has been a subscriber for 15 years but the magazine became 80% advertisements, 15% paid promotional articles, and 5% actual news. The online has gotten a little better but.. Matt Honan destroyed Wired.

Obama campaigned on ending domestic spying by the NSA, and even taking into account that politicians will say anything to be elected, and that Obama was a skilled orator who was saying things I wanted to hear at the time, I really believed him when it said it was a dangerous violation of our civil liberties, but as soon as he was in office he expanded their spying powers and his speeches became pro-surveillance.

At this point I'm not sure any president has the power to do anything about the NSA. Congress sure doesn't. The Director of National Intelligence outright lied to them and never saw a single consequence for it.

The post 9/11 GWOT BS was when they really integrated and formalized all of it and generally ramped it up at all levels.

It's just now tricking down to the everyman. Before it used to be they were going after the MLKs and the commie leaders. Then it was the people who pose smaller threats, infiltrating small extremist groups of all sorts of bents. Now it's trickled down even further to the random individuals who are buying shrooms and glock switches online and then getting harassed by the feds for it.

It was the Clinton administration, back in the early nineties, that was all for pushing mandatory key escrow and the use of the Clipper Chip:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

So yes, you're right, it's nothing new for Trump, but it was old news under Obama too.

the wiki page for the 2010s global surveillance disclosures cites multiple wired articles

here's some more articles to refresh your memory: https://duck.com/?q=site%3Awired.com+surveilance&df=2021-01-...

> Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies.

Obama deported over 1.18 million people during his term. Trump tried but was not able to deport as much in his first term.

It's not so easy as people think. Half of farm workers are illeagals. 40 percent of construction workers. 15% to 50% of food processing workers. All these businesses send their lobbyists screaming to Trump. Prices increase and citizen unemployment increases.

this and I’m sure they have plenty of criminals and gangs to keep them busy, I highly doubt they will be making anyone’s abuella a top priority, unless she’s a drug mule

So the thing is, if the lobbyists succeed, there will be much less deportation than promised (which, practically, ought to be OK).

We do have TASS formally claiming that they won Trump his election, just the other day, and stating that he owes Russia and will make good on his obligations. I didn't see THAT coming, but it appears to be the real website.

If the lobbyists fail and Trump does manage to deport all the workers and jail his enemies in spite of it hurting business, it might be an indication that the success of America isn't really the goal. Just saying, if Russia's not lying about owning Trump, he might be more useful to them as a wrecking ball, in a position to ruin the country and break the dollar as the world's reserve currency. This would be disastrous, but maybe Russia would like to see us experience a disaster.

Some people will find that a useful motivator to endorse crypto.

>We do have TASS formally claiming that they won Trump his election, just the other day, and stating that he owes Russia and will make good on his obligations. I didn't see THAT coming, but it appears to be the real website.

Russian propaganda designed to piss off both sides of the aisle I'm sure. There is zero evidence that Russia ever helped Trump in any election. There is however lots of evidence of meddling in favor of Democrats by Ukraine and UK leadership.

I agree wholeheartedly on your first point, but can't agree that there's zero evidence of what you said. We do seem to agree that TASS's observation was really them.

I think there are some metrics we can keep an eye on to know if Russia's claims here are true (which is hardly a given!). If it's true their motivations are clear, but there's also a motivation to make a real mess of things while both sides of the aisle fight each other as hard as feasible. Namely, if they can crash America, then America can be made poorer than Russia, and the balance of power shifts quite a lot.

For that reason, I feel like there's a motive for Russia to have done this, and I can't agree with your assertion that there's no evidence Russia ever helped Trump. I suggest that instead, both parties in the USA had reason to not publicize that reality, because it was embarrassing to them. Not even the right wing want to think they were doing the whole thing not to make America great, but to break it beyond repair. They (and we) live here.

Also, I know from working for Bernie Sanders in 2015 that the Democratic establishment is not eager to be directed by the grass roots, or to admit fault or misrepresentation on their part. I don't believe they would be eager to reveal how deep the rot went, and this reticence might have done us a great deal of harm.

Use simple common sense. If Trump owed Russia anything (what could that be? the man is a multi-billionaire!) it would be to their benefit to deny it at all costs. They know the left is paranoid over the Russiagate hoax that their own side fabricated, so they are playing into that.

Bernie Sanders was almost the victim of a Russiagate hoax himself. If he had been a more serious contender, that was the plan. They also tried to paint him as a sexist. The media was just scaling their attack proportional to the threat. The attack on Trump didn't work so they kept doubling down to the point they literally called him a Nazi. It's absolutely crazy but that does give me a glimmer of hope that our votes actually matter.

Hillary paid a FEC fine for funding the Steele Report. There was never any evidence that Trump was working with Russia but the Democrats used the "intel" as an excuse to wiretap his campaign. I saw what they did to Bernie and I thought they might have learned their lesson. But they still don't care about voters. The Democratic Party is fundamentally an elitist technocratic globalist institution that cannot be trusted with anything anymore.

Just look at all the cases brought against Trump for further evidence of corruption by Democrats. Not a single one of them had any real merit. J6 was not at all what they made it out to be. They tried to block Trump at every turn based on "insurrection" but they never prosecuted him for any crime related to that because it was not his doing at all. He will have to deal with the rot in our government pushing censorship and political prosecution, and you can bet he will be facing a flurry of lies painting him as a fascist. I hope he succeeds. Protect that dude at all costs, or we're going to be living in a real fascist regime under the deep state.

I'm not finding what you're saying to be simple common sense. I'm sorry, but I think your takes might not age well. Maybe you are mistaken.

I could be mistaken but to think that Russia would broadcast that they have something on Trump, that he owes them, defies common sense. If they really did then it would be entirely to their advantage to keep that between him and them. It is far more likely coming from the imagination of a propagandist.

You might think I'm wrong but I've been right ever since I gave up on the mainstream media. You should try looking at everything as if you've been lied to for 8 years, because you have been.

https://tass.com/politics/1870713

What "forces" do you think they are talking about? Every candidate has donors and allies who they may owe favors to. They aren't saying that he owes Russia anything. In fact I heard a different report suggesting that they expect him to be JFK'd if he tries to do everything he said he would do.

So that one is sort of propaganda, basically casting doubt on our democracy and challenging confidence in Trump. But it's not the same type of propaganda I thought we were talking about.

Guess I'm keeping you busy, at any rate! :D

Thanks for doing that.

Wasting these people's time is a small gain; having others in the community see the lies debunked is valuable.

Especially when they are openly, blatantly, clearly lying.

We've had evidence since 2016, and we keep getting more of it.

We just don't act on it.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/10/505072304...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl

[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/election-russia-influence-internet-r...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-c...

[4] https://newrepublic.com/post/188284/vladimir-putin-donald-tr...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/trump-russia...

[5a] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39931012

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/16/trump-cabine...

Best part of Trump’s win is that we can be openly suspicious of the government again without being slandered as a conspiracy theorist. All the old critiques are back in fashion: election tampering, pharma corruption, authoritarianism. Welcome back !

Except the people who were openly suspicious of government tended only to be suspicious when a "leftist" was in power. You'll notice all of the worries about election tampering just vanished as soon as Trump won, and none of the people crying about government overreach and authoritarianism seem to care about the degree of arbitrary and unchecked power Trump and Elon Musk seem to want to wield.

The upcoming administration is probably going to be neck deep in actual honest to God conspiracies and crimes and none of that lot are going to say a damn thing, but they'll probably still be harping on Hunter Biden's laptop or some other such nonsense.

> You'll notice all of the worries about election tampering just vanished as soon as Trump won

They didn't. On the right, his commanding win is seen as "evidence" that 2020 must have been illegitimate; on the left the fact that Democratic turnover cratered from 2020 is seen as "evidence" of some sort of foul play.

<meme> first time , huh?

No, plenty of people think Democrats tried to cheat in this one and failed. There are many states with no ID requirements, which is unthinkable in modern times. Let's actually secure the elections instead of making it partisan.

>they'll probably still be harping on Hunter Biden's laptop or some other such nonsense.

That is not and never was nonsense. It was censored heavily and subject to propaganda like the "51 intelligence officers" or whatever despite being totally true. That is a horrible offense against the people and heads have yet to roll for it.

This is incredibly fear-mongering and reads like hit piece on Trump while offering little actual advice. If you are only now caring about privacy you should reconsider your priorities.

They actually think using encryption, designed by the NSA, will protect them. Laughs in lavabit....

You say lavabit, but that's actually an example of them needing the private keys... so I'm not sure what you're on about there.

But regardless, I've seen this argument plenty of times. However, I don't know how much tinfoil is in that hat.

On one hand, I would not be surprised to learn that some of the encryption standards have backdoors in them. I'd mostly be interested in how they kept it secret for so long. But does it even matter? You're worried about backdoors in the algorithm for encryption when that's just a single link in the chain. To my knowledge, backdoors in various NSA encryption types have only been suggested and theorized about. However, we already have real world proof that hardware and software backdoors not only exist, but have been used. So, worrying about encryption being backdoored while chatting on a smart phone chock full of chips like the modem which has direct access to your phone's memory and has internet access doesn't make sense to me.

But on the other hand, unless you really piss off someone in the government, they are not likely going to be worried enough about you to use any of those tools. What we really need to be worried about is any aggregation of the data about you into groups. Most likely, they can already form these groups (and let's face it, likely already are) from freely available data we willingly post online. History has already shown they don't need to use their AES backdoor to discover you are likely an "undesirable" and should be deported / placed in a camp. But even if it was hard, an intern could probably slop together an AI to scan a person's online posts and develop a persona, and that's good enough.

> To my knowledge, backdoors in various NSA encryption types have only been suggested and theorized about. However, we already have real world proof that hardware and software backdoors not only exist, but have been used.

Heart bleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed

> But on the other hand, unless you really piss off someone in the government, they are not likely going to be worried enough about you to use any of those tools.

The government is made up of people, who will do illegal things, if they think they can get away with it. As there is essentially no auditing of NSA surveillance feeds (let alone other countries surveillance), so those folks can spy on almost anyone without repercussions. This all precludes the fact that most of the surveillance is actually done by private, for profit, companies that have a vested interest in keeping the surveillance beast running.

>> To my knowledge, backdoors in various NSA encryption types have only been suggested and theorized about.

Read about the Inslaw case from the 1970's.

https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/

The government essentially stole software that they built back doors into and then sold to governments on both sides of the spectrum in order to track terrorists and find out what our allies governments were doing. This was started on the DOJ side, but eventually was used in several other three letter government agencies.

Its not a leap to think if they've been doing this since the 1970's, they would be willing to do just about anything to continue to have access to developing encryption techniques. I think the Lavabit story is a great example of this.

Like you said, there hasn't been any confirmed knowledge of this, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to point to the idea that if an encryption technique is developed where the government doesn't have access, that is a problem. However, they don't have any issues with all of the other standards? Makes you wonder why - right?

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