Stop Thinking That Tech Hacks Are the Solution to Our Surveillance Woes

Disagree completely. Technological solutions are the only feasible ones because the majority of the population is absolutely fine with the status quo.

In a democracy, complacency guarantees that nothing will change and in fact will likely get worse.

For those of us to whom privacy actually matters, we need to recognize that we are in the vast minority, and as such, our voice will be completely incapable of effecting political change. Technological tools then become our only option.

Then there's the issue that even IF political action had a chance, it would still be ineffective. Case in point: voting for "the other guy" HAS ALREADY FAILED everyone who actually bought Obama's lies about reducing the police state.

A few notes,

- Technology solutions can't get very far. At some point they will be attacked by legislation at a level that renders them unusable. (e.g. encryption of such and such becomes illegal)

- Technology solutions inevitably create an arms-race so the surveillance state keeps growing bigger and bigger. And also creates the mindset that we can do nothing but to continue looking for better technical solutions. Eventually we forget why we are doing all of this in the first place, when politicians are supposed to be our employees who are supposed to serve us and act on our behalf.

- For as long as the majority of people don't understand the value and importance of privacy we're going to continue to see these issues. When people buy the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, it's not going to change.

- People only start to care when they feel sufficiently threatened, and in this case they don't understand the threat, until it's far too late, and then it suddenly clicks for the average Joe, years after many people have been warning them in advance but they dismissed them as crazy people

- You can see examples of the point above all throughout the history. A minority keep warning people about a certain point, the majority doesn't feel it's important and continues to ignore it until it's too late, now everyone understand the mess they are in and at this point usually revolution and civil wars start. Then after lots of suffering they all vow to never repeat what they did, and to do something to never end up in that situation again, then they forget, and rinse and repeat.

To the author of the article I say, "can't we have better legislation /and/ tech hacks?"

I don't think anyone would disagree with the idea that we can't solve the surveillance problems just through technology alone (apart from maybe some of the more naive HN members). But since we are partly in this mess because of technology, I don't think it's too radical to suggest that we can in part help get ourselves out of it using technology as well. To suggest that the tech community are a bunch of introverts, unconcerned with "the plight of the majority" sounds kinda dull to me, and certainly unoriginal.

It seems to me the article takes the same approach to prevent someone from stealing your car. You can take certain measures like locking your doors and installing a car alarm which will thwart most thieves who are looking for an easy mark. However, if a professional car thief wants to steal your car, guess what? They're going to steal your car.

In a sense, it makes it harder for government to eavesdrop on you, but if they really want to get your information, they can.

All your doing by using these tools is making your private information harder to get at. Which I don't think is a bad thing. Outside of the government, these tool will do wonders to thwart identity thieves and other malicious hackers from getting at your information so it's not completely worthless to use them.

The problem is that you can't effectively enforce legislation against it. Even if we were to crack down on the surveillance apparatus that we can see, unlike analogous physical action electronic interception is practical with a tiny amount of equipment. Until you're ready to hand inspect every foot of communication line (which are almost always underground or undersea), and evaluate every switch on them down to the silicon, there's no point in attacking the problem with laws. A law can stop a large government program, but every 18 months the problem gets twice as easy for a smaller group to tackle.

You can't legislate that people be nice to each other, and you can't legislate that people not copy bits.

Yeah, let's burn our bras, I mean smartphones.

Or donate money to whatever -- so far that hasn't worked. I doubt EFF with a 10x increase in budget could accomplish 10x objectives. Even if they could, that wouldn't give us 10x freedom.

But I'm often wrong about these things.

Once, in the murky past, I used to tell people "changing the world" isn't the point of activism -- it's "changing ourselves."

Defeatism. Mass surveillance can be blinded. High-intensity efforts at cracking encrypted communications and storage don't scale up.

Mass surveillance is only worthwhile if you have comprehensive visibility into potential high-value targets. If the 20% of people who are actually doing something more meaningful than cat videos routinely use encryption, then mass surveillance only gets you cat videos.

Tech hacks are part of the solution. They are not the only part, of course, but tech solutions help to ensure that the other part of the solution, politics, does not fail. It is not hard for laws to change; it is hard for technology to be replaced, especially when it is standardized and widely used. If the law forbids the government from reading our emails without a warrant, then the email system should be designed to support the law -- e.g. by encrypting messages.

J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance mania was pretty low-tech by today's standards. As was the Stasi. These were clearly political problems first and foremost.

Maybe technology can help, but, it shouldn't be overvalued.

I would really like to see a place where possible solutions are actually being discussed, voted on and worked out, like I tried to say here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935

It kind of really sucks that we're still discussing that we should be discussing solutions.

I've been saying this forever. This is a political problem.

Tech hacks aren't necessarily bad, but they can only go so far and all have major problems. There tends to be a trade-off between security and usability, which turns most users off from using things like darkets and meshnets. In addition, I'm not familiar with any meshnet that could stand up to a determined assault from a well-equipped foe. Any Internet-based meshnet is vulnerable to filtering at the ISP level, and any truly wireless decentralized meshnet is vulnerable to jamming, detection and confiscation, etc. All meshnet protocols I'm familiar with have denial of service vulnerabilities as well.

Ultimately I think only a two-pronged approach can work. Tech hacks can make it a little harder to implement a universal total surveillance state, but only political action can solve the political problems that lead to its creation.

I disagree.

I think the only way to effectively prevent anyone from picking their nose into your letters is protecting the letter by various means, not telling others that they must behave so and really not read what you wrote there. Sure, protecting against powerful TLAs is not easy, but certainly not impossible (always keeping in mind there's no absolutely perfect solutions and everything could eventually wear out). If the otherwise would be the case, many countries won't be so upset with strong crypto.

I also believe that laws that try to "protect" privacy are actually worsening the situation, not improving it. That's because they make false beliefs with general population that one's communications are secure, even though in practice they're frequently as secure as an unsealed postcard.

Is not a solution, is a temporary mitigation.

Even if democracy seem that lost its meaning in US (either by power grabbing or media controlling population) the political way must kept to be tried.

But while that is in the works (and will take time, is not that they will admit that they are wrong, they know they are, they must be forced to change their ways by international and national pressure), some technical hacks could help. And at the very least, if popular enough, is another way to tell the government that the country don't like what they are doing.

For sub-humans outside of US the encryption is the only solution. Political solution would be declaration of war to USA, which is not very practical.

I only trust the mathematical proof that I am not spied on and here is why: There is always something missing in those articles. It is always about American gov spying on American people ! What about allies spying on americans and american gov on allies ? It is a world wide problem with intricacies of local laws and loopholes.

The political solution is impossible to obtain, it can at best mitigate one of those.

The drive to try to solve the problem with tech is simply more emblematic of the actual problem: nobody's willing to do the hard and undesirable work of pushing for policy change, or even becoming policy makers themselves.

It's a pity that even while we watch our grandest creation crumble at the hands of overeager, underqualified career politicians, we can't be persuaded to kill the beast from the inside.

Any of us is educated enough and capable of working in congress. I mean, Christ, Michelle Bachmann was a running mate for president.

I don't think so. Laws change all the time, and a society's fears and priorities change over time too. Technology both gives us the ability to archive and analyze communications forever, and to provably protect (encrypt) them forever. Laws only give us the ability to protect our communication as long as the complex web of human desires and emotions allows it.

I'm with the spirit of this argument. This won't be won by some subset of very smart people fighting the powers that be. The governments of the world are hiring very smart people too. I hate to say it, but this needs a political solution.