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The problem being pointed to here is that it's not just official government accounts being hacked here. Private accounts of private citizens are being hacked f
by GVIrish 10y ago
The problem being pointed to here is that it's not just official government accounts being hacked here. Private accounts of private citizens are being hacked for political gain.
Should everyone who ever worked for the government have all of their private email and correspondence exposed? Should anyone who is connected to any political party in any way be subject to having their private digital lives splayed open for everyone to see?
I could see if someone was exposing some specific correspondence that is relevant to government wrongdoing. But what purpose does it serve to dump everything from someone's account(s) indiscriminately? Does the guy that does the trip-planning for the Secretary of State deserve that?
Going down this road, one can see how these hacks can be used to silence dissent, punish political dissidents, influence elections, and who knows what else. Maybe it is inevitable given that there are many state actors who will do whatever they want to further their goals.
But who knows, maybe stuff like this will convince the powers that be that trying to weaken or ban encrypted communications is a REALLY bad idea.
- gjolund 10y agoThey are just going to regulate encryption to ensure the masses can still be spied on while protecting their own communication. Anyone who doesn't see how we are on the path to totalitarianism is deluding themselves.
- rfrank 10y agoPrivate accounts of private citizens are viewed by the government on a daily basis. Why should I care about anyone who works for the government's privacy? This is a board that argues extremely frequently that privacy is dead and/or completely impractical in the modern age - a statement that's apparently fine to make about social media or adtech companies and their products, but upsetting when it comes to the government? We've been marching down this road for a long time now.
- tedunangst 10y agoIs the secretary of state's trip planner reading your email?
- rfrank 10y agoNope, but I'm not setting up clandestine meetings between the Secretary of State and her foundation donors, so there's that. Was that rhetorical supposed to convince me of something?
- tedunangst 10y agoYour comment seems to suggest that turnabout is fair play, but youre turning it about on a different set of people.
- rfrank 10y agoIn the same way the federal government doesn't care it involves a [exponentially larger] set of people who have nothing to do with terrorism or crime in dragnet surveillance, I don't care that a few dozen friends of one of the most corrupt politicians in history have their privacy violated.