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> Maybe Signal is awesome. But privacy from law enforcement is not a killer feature. The US Government has substantial leverage over me in other ways. What abo
by CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
> Maybe Signal is awesome. But privacy from law enforcement is not a killer feature. The US Government has substantial leverage over me in other ways.
What about the UK government? The GCHQ is one of the most aggressive and sophisticated signals intelligence agencies in the world.
What about the RU government? Or the Chinese government?
The reason most security folks speak of "nation state actors" in aggregate isn't to be euphemistic (initials: NSA), it's because "the only threat you might encounter online is your local government" isn't necessarily true.
To be clear, I don't want to turn this into a political discussion. I just wanted to point out that the scope is wider than your comment implied.
- arjie 10y agoThis is true, but what are they going to do to me? The threat is not clear to me.
- lucastx 10y agoI guess there is no point in arguing if you think this way. Paraphrasing Edward Snowden, if you don't work to protect privacy because the threat to YOU is not clear, you shouldn't work to protect free speech if you're not the one being silenced. A big problem is that the threat to you exists, but is subtle: society gets worse when we allow this to happen to all those people that we would consider heroes years in the future but are deemed (sometimes by the letter of the law, sometimes not) criminals right now. Conformity for the forest by pruning the trees.
- arjie 10y agoThat's a fair argument. The bit about the free speech is a bit of a tangent, seeing as I can reasonably pick my battles, but the rest is fair.