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> Despite this, it hasn't been abused nearly as much as it could be.

Yes, because a few decades ago a total surveilance of a population would have needed a signifikant part of the population to do the surveilance or base your surveilance on statistical chance. If you ever get the chancs to inform yourself about the way the GDR/Stasi watched its citizens before the fall of the Berlin Wall, go for it.

I previously described the recent technological advances as a shift of the above-mentioned ratio: Never in history could a dictator know more of the communications of all his citizens with less people being in on it. Never before in history could a dictator pretend the populus was on his side with less people then now.

These changed ratios already altered the face of politics, and I am pretty sure this wasn't it.

And for your grandma example: Metadata isn't encrypted nearly anywhere. If your grandmas network looks as if she makes a special, explosive kind of dough (or this ever gets mentioned anywhere), the timing of your message and whom you are sending it to might be enough for them to send you to a secret prison without due process. Correctness of such accusations is only a requirement when you don't have absolute powers and dictators will always find someone to blame, otherwise they would look weak.

>Never in history could a dictator know more of the communications of all his citizens

One must be incredibly naive to think only dictators have this capability and not democratically elected governments. Just start a protest and find out just how quickly the government unlocks Godlike surveillance capabilities to be used against you. Hell, even a Tweet might do in places like UK or Germany.

They don't even have to send the police to the streets to beat you up or throw you in a van like in the USSR, they can just debank you like the trucker protestors in Canada and the problem solves itself peacefully.

You are unfavourably reading things into my comment I did not say. Please consider this section of the HN guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

If someone uses a specific term (dictator), that does not automatically impyly they think the broader term (any government) doesn't apply. If I say "all dogs do eventually die" that does not imply I think that all other animals are immortal. This is basic logic.

And btw. I agree with your statements about democratically elected governments not being immune to abuse of surveilance power.

the post office scans the exterior, not the contents. That is a significant difference.

~98% of SMTP is encrypted. https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview

Intercepting USPS mail and telephone calls are both serious federal crimes.

This isn't really a great analogy.

If the post office (or somebody else) reads your mail that's a federal crime.

Your analogy is moot.

The post office and even the ISP are not as big as Google and don't have nearly as much control and data on everybody worldwide.

Even though the post office can scan your mail, they don't keep a copy of all of it. They can't retroactively scan all of your communications years later. This is an enormous differencs in practice.

The same goes for intercepting SMS: unless someone has been targeting you for years, your past messages are safe.

Also ripping up envelopes and reading them in way that the receiver wont notice don't scale very well.

> Despite this, it hasn't been abused nearly as much as it could be

How would you classify submarines parked next to fiber optic cables slurping up data?

I hope you have a reference as to how an optic fiber cable can be tapped like that. I also hope you've seen how heavily jacketed these cables are. The cables are so sensitive to mechanical disturbances (but without interference to communication) that it can often sense itself getting shifted around. Tapping it will require a lot more than that. How do you avoid such tip offs?

And as far as I know, emails are not E2E encrypted, but they are almost always encrypted in transit. Why go through all the trouble just to get encrypted data?

Now I concede that all those things (OFC, TLS) may have vulnerabilities that can theoretically be exploited. But do you send such valuable information over the internet that it's worth their cost and effort to retrieve it? And if your answer is yes by some chance, would you transmit it without taking adequate security measures?

In comparison, Google and the others have billions of emails simply sitting unencrypted in their storage, ready for access at zero cost. I can't see your argument contradicting the information security risk posed by these companies.

>I hope you have a reference as to how an optic fiber cable can be tapped like that. I also hope you've seen how heavily jacketed these cables are.

LMGTFY [1][2]. I'm wondering at which point will we reach that utopic nirvana when HN and internet users in general will take the initiative and 30 seconds of their time to google something they find perplexing/unreal instead of going like "uhm, source?".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-sub-...

> I'm wondering at which point will we reach that utopic nirvana when HN and internet users in general will be able to google something they find perplexing/unreal before asking others to do it for them.

Look. Perhaps you should use a bit more discretion before you decide to come out all guns blazing on sarcasm and condescendation. I have some professional experience in the field - and it tells me there are many inconsistencies in your argument. And yes, I did 'the google' before typing the previous reply. I could of course be just ignorant about the latest achievements. But that's where references matter. That's all I asked for.

So here is the problem. Operation Ivy Bell happened in mid 1960s to mid 1970s. If you knew the communication infrastructure of that time, you would have realized that it was distinctly NOT optic fiber. Those came much later. But what really confirmed that doubt is that they used the induction principle of a transformer to tap the cable. That won't work on optic fibers. That's not how the EM field propagates in an OFC - they're more similar to waveguides than telephone cables.

And this distinction certainly matters here. Today's world is certainly not the same as in 60s. The sort of high-volume communication didn't exist back then. Neither did the ability to listen to or manipulate so many people all at once. Today's dangers - like the one with email messages - didn't exist back then. Back then 'cable' leaks like this used to happen. But have you heard of anything similar to Hillary's email leak or the Halloween mails?

>I have some professional experience in the field [...] That won't work on optic fibers.

I'm not a professional in this field like you, but even I know that undersea fiber optic cables have actively powered repeaters/amplifiers spread across their length, so it's logical to assume those amplifiers, with their 16kW power source, generate quite some EMF at repeater points that could be picked up via side channel analysis by sophisticated and well funded state actors like US submarines equipped with dedicated surveillance equipment, as we can infer from the Snowden NSA leaks.

I did consider the possibility of tapping signals using the EMI from the repeaters and amplifier pumping lasers. But an OFC carries an incredible amount of data over several individual fibers. And each individual fiber carries several channels using multiplexing (WDM). I don't think that their timing is synchronized either. In short, I find it hard to believe that these signals can be practically tapped from the EMI from the supporting systems. Of course, I could be completely wrong. I wouldn't mind being proven with any sort of relevant literature.