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Comment by moistgorilla | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but laugh. I always joke with my irc buds that we are chatting in a NSA honeypot. Maybe it's actually true? lol I think I'm actually disillusioned now. Just another example of why you should never put information you wouldn't want someone to know on the internet.

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Ironically, it turns out the entire internet is an NSA honeypot.

Why else would they listen in to the majority of the Internet traffic? That's like the whole point.

iPhone phones home with its location? NSA's most likely listening.

Googled for something naughty? NSA's most likely listening.

Chatting on an open Internet Relay Chat server? Yup.

Your think Harold Finch was joking in person of interest when he said he invented social media to provide data for the machine

If there's information I don't want someone to know, I do not write it down, I do not talk about it, I do not express it in a game of charades.

And what exactly do you do when there's information that you want one person to know, or maybe two people to know?

Express it in a game of charades, obviously.

Do the Diffie dance?

Such a class of information doesn't exist. I tell them, and then I expect that anyone else who might be interested will find out. The information is no longer secure.

The key to operational security isn't that no one ever finds out; it's that no one finds out until it's too late for them to stop you. Perimeter security is a war of attrition: you will take losses and you don't get to pick them.

I have confidences I've given to friends. I don't expect them to share those secrets with others, but I'm also aware that they very well might, even accidentally. (Or the sharing got MITM'd.) Thus, instead of using shared confidences as magical shibboleths to friendship, I use them as the first step on increasing my comfort level with sharing them publicly. For instance, I was extremely ashamed of the fact that I watched porn when I was a teenager; now I can say it freely on a public forum with my name attached. There are a dozen steps of infosec stepdown that occurred as I grew up between then and now.

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