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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

I see two strategies: (1) fight to restrict how much spy agencies spy. (2) fight to bolster ordinary citizens' use of technologies like encryption so that they cannot be spied upon.

I would bet that strategy (2) is the more likely one to gain traction and make a difference against the infringement of our rights as citizens.

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Going forward, option 1 is the only realistic way to ensure privacy. We leak too much data. It's not completely out of the question that in a few decades, extracting audio+video information on everyone, all the time, will be technically feasible. Add that to tracking software to monitor movements, and a state-level adversary may very well be able to know everything about you. Encryption doesn't help if they're listening to every word you speak in your house. Even today, what are the technical limitations in deploying array microphones, or laser listening devices?

(I'd say TEMPEST style attacks might exist too, but display technology advancing might put a crimp in that, maybe.)

We've seen places use MAC addresses and WiFi probes to track people. In the future, it may be possible to do active monitoring via cameras, then correlate to identity by sweeping up organic pieces and sequencing DNA. (Maybe? I don't think there's any theoretical problem here, is there? We shed hair and skin all over.) Heck, I'm a bit surprised places aren't collecting fingerprints left and right.

It does not seem like there are available countermeasures. You'd need a constant energy+matter shield everywhere you go. Instead, making surveillance tech strictly limited seems like the only real defense. (Just like nuclear defense relies heavily on restricting access.)

This is a prediction of a shitty future, but do we realistically expect tech advances to stop soon? If you went back 30 years and polled people, they'd probably think the surveillance that's done today to be inconceivable.

The problem with strategy (2) is that the government can take action to stop it. For example, in the UK it's a criminal offence to withhold encryption keys in the face of a warrant.

David Cameron also relatively recently argued that encryption should be banned or controlled to prevent anyone hiding things from the intelligence services.

Widespread deployment of encryption would probably just result in more offensive tactics from intelligence agencies.

Key disclosure laws fall into this same category. It doesn't matter if you use full-disk encryption - you have to turn over the keys when asked else you face imprisonment. TrueCrypt's plausible deniability feature was really helpful; I wish dm-crypt has something like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

And this is what happened in Canada recently:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/quebec-resident-al...

In this context hindering the use of encryption by your own citizens seems like making every other intelligence agency's job easier.

There are plenty of other options. My personal favorite is the google method - recognize that "spying" is inevitable and embrace it in order to improve your own life.

None of the spying being discussed in this thread is for your personal benefit or can be used by you at all.

That betrays a shameful lack of creativity.

Number one problem is attribution. Restricting the agencies will never be effective if you cannot know which one did something.

Option 3 would be to leave. I don't have a lot of patriotism, but I also don't know where I'd go.

Which means there's no option 3. There's really no "better place" to go. The whole world is under their control and other countries are worse.

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