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Not choosing US-based hosting providers is sound advice for various reasons, if not only for the reason that the US has invented crimes that do not exist in oth

Not choosing US-based hosting providers is sound advice for various reasons, if not only for the reason that the US has invented crimes that do not exist in other countries or the sentences for existing crimes are 10 x higher than anywhere else. (I do not want to defend criminals but some of those "crimes" also affect people who e.g. write p2p programs or decompilers. You get what I mean.) As for the value of encryption to keep governments from snooping -- no way, that's not going to work ever. Endpoint security is a joke, PC and mobile phone are insecure on all levels, from applications over OS to firmware and microcode. And if Snowden's educational slide show leaks have shown anything, then certainly that the guys at NSA know what they are doing in terms of side-channel attacks. Government snooping and privacy decay is a social and political problem and should primarily be addressed at that level.

mindslight 10y ago
> Government snooping and privacy decay is a social and political problem and should primarily be addressed at that level. Please don't attempt to bolster support for one approach by discouraging another. There is no "primarily". None of the approaches have worked so far, so it's premature to say that fewer approaches are necessary. Personally, I don't see how the NSA (never mind Google) would ever be politically prevented from most mechanisms of surveillance. To the extent that political power could be used to categorically end surveillance, it can just be used to constrain the application of surveillance. We can encourage people to value privacy, but it's another thing to convince them to completely dismantle the capabilities against everyone, including say child pornographers. But I'll still applaud you for trying.
- chii 10y ago
  A social mechanism can work to prevent privacy invasion. It requires that societal attitude change. Imagine how big a scandal it would be to have bribery or corruption in the govt'. If we give these privacy issues the same weight, then problems can get fixed
  - mindslight 10y ago
    My point is you've got to overcome the attraction to "only processed by a computer or under lawful process". For example, NSA surveillance has no direct effects on the average US citizen. It is a setup for bad things to happen, has possible political meta-effects, and is a worrying trend. But if the process is successfully constrained by law, then to your average person it represents a capability rather than a vulnerability. This has little to do with your average person not understanding technology, but instead with their feeling safe as part of a majority.

mindslight 10y ago

> Government snooping and privacy decay is a social and political problem and should primarily be addressed at that level. Please don't attempt to bolster support for one approach by discouraging another. There is no "primarily". None of the approaches have worked so far, so it's premature to say that fewer approaches are necessary. Personally, I don't see how the NSA (never mind Google) would ever be politically prevented from most mechanisms of surveillance. To the extent that political power could be used to categorically end surveillance, it can just be used to constrain the application of surveillance. We can encourage people to value privacy, but it's another thing to convince them to completely dismantle the capabilities against everyone, including say child pornographers. But I'll still applaud you for trying.

chii 10y ago
A social mechanism can work to prevent privacy invasion. It requires that societal attitude change. Imagine how big a scandal it would be to have bribery or corruption in the govt'. If we give these privacy issues the same weight, then problems can get fixed
- mindslight 10y ago
  My point is you've got to overcome the attraction to "only processed by a computer or under lawful process". For example, NSA surveillance has no direct effects on the average US citizen. It is a setup for bad things to happen, has possible political meta-effects, and is a worrying trend. But if the process is successfully constrained by law, then to your average person it represents a capability rather than a vulnerability. This has little to do with your average person not understanding technology, but instead with their feeling safe as part of a majority.