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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

The final defense is always to change the government (one way or another). When we need to resort to technical mean we have lost.

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Change the governance. Both red, blue and the corporate sides are supportive of this.

Would-be revolutionaries need secure, reliable comms even more than the average person.

PGP

Good for protecting the message itself, but it does nothing for metadata. These days the metadata is what kills you. (Who talks to whom, when, and how often reveals enough to press the drone missile button, apparently.)

OpenPGP + SMTP as a starting point as email can reach many and Thunderbird makes OpenPGP happy clicky simple. The body includes instructions for the E2EE chat servers to use. Metadata trail ends there. Other circles of friends are joined in by other means. E2EE ejabberd (OTR+PGP+OMEMO) servers switched up after everyone is on the first outer layer of chat servers. Old servers are wiped. Of course all of this assumes nobody is silly enough to use a cell phone or all of this is futile. Everyone is using a laptop they paid cash for and a clean install of a generic minimal install of Linux and Coreboot running a script to make everything ephemeral and the OS nearly immutable. No security distros as they have all been infiltrated, just a vanilla simple Linux and a script.

what...?

PGP is not a very effective software suite for encrypting actual messages people want to send to other people, because it's a decades-old tool designed for email workflows that arguably never worked particularly well and is not well-suited to how people want to communicate today. Chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp that include end to end encryption as a matter of course are encrypting far more messages between humans than PGP for emails ever did.

that would be illegal in this hypothetical future

comms, travel, banking. Exactly why all the privatization of this stuff has top priority for the current administration. They're making their own government.

True, I always wonder how that would actually play out.

The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.

>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The opposite is true.

By this you mean that the first line of defense should be to change the government, correct? If so, I'm pretty sure you're right. Technical solutions to social/governmental problems seem like they're making those problems worse due to actively rechanneling energy that could be used for awareness/activism into technical workarounds.

voting is just a suggestion from a slave to the master

I completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

Which technology caused the French revolution?

The printing press and the guillotine.

Before that they didn't know how to kill people?

Yes. Before that they didn't know how to kill people.

So the guillotine (15th century [1]) and printing press (invented in 1440) [2] precipitated the French Revolution (1789)[3]?

It’s a theory for sure.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

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