Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully, this comes as no more of a spoiler than revealing the Titanic sinks at the end of the movie... but, everything Mark Klein revealed in 2006 (and that Snowden revealed in 2014) is still happening daily - along with much, much worse. And just this week congress is acting to further extend the secret extra-expanded FISA powers we don't even know about.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.

View on HN

Ron Wyden is my favorite senator and a great example of why Oregon is such a based/amazing state.

He randomly let me interview him for a doc 10 or so years ago as a young filmmaker. Super nice guy. Just let me stroll into his office and chat on camera for an hour as a nobody, all because I wanted to talk about net neutrality and other issues

A true man-of-the-people, a rare find in a world of "statesmen" and "robber barons" running everything.

I hope that Oregon can continue to elect people like him when he's gone. We really are a more free state than the rest of them (see our state constitution protecting rights to profanity up to allowing being topless in public legally, as just one tiny example)

its been going on for decades... I don't know if there is an answer to this problem

Encrypt everything, all the time, everywhere, use quantum hardened encryption wherever possible.

This does not work if your communication enpoint is the same as your encryption endpoint.

Or you don't control your key material.

Or your tech supply chain.

Or leave your device unattended.

Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.

I could go on...

You may never be able to completely protect yourself, but you can make an attack much more costly. For example, I use Heads with a hardware key to defend myself from an Evil Maid.

No one said encryption was perfect, but it is how you make mass surveillance ineffective. Targeted attacks are very different than wide nets.

You raise an excellent point. I'd only counter that a number of the factors I raised are manipulated to retain mass surveillance even in the presence of mass encryption. Let's start with manipulating random number generators or controlling elliptic curve constants...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com