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You say "There are no shades of grey here" but then you contradict it by saying "You can make things harder by encrypting your traffic", so obviously you don't

You say "There are no shades of grey here" but then you contradict it by saying "You can make things harder by encrypting your traffic", so obviously you don't mean it. By dismissing the imperfect possiblities of making yourself safer, you seem to be saying "there only needs to be one gunner to shoot you when you look out the window, so either you never leave your bunker or may as well live in a war zone", while dismissing those who ask "which country is the most peaceful and stable, so that I can settle there?". People can be well aware of weak crypto, compromised CPUs, TEMPEST, Tor compromises, state actors and legal problems, and yet still choose which of those to defend against, and to what extent. In real life, people take tradeoffs, because it's almost never an all-or-nothing situation.

qayxc 6y ago
There is no place in the world that is both technologically capable of reliably hosting servers and at the same time inherently safer with regards to the privacy of your data than others. If it's not the domestic government that will raid the server or monitor traffic, it's foreign actors or (in case of monitoring) the country that packets are routed through. Yes, there are possibilities to make yourself safer, but they don't depend on where you place your data. The question wasn't "can I be safer", the question was "is there a specific place that is safer" and the answer is no, for the reasons I gave. That's not saying "encryption is useless anyway" or "you might as well give up" - no! I'm saying that if the privacy of your data depends on where your server is located, then you're doing it wrong.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  I'm not sure I'm convinced that location doesn't matter at all. The attack routes are different between countries: local culture determines attack surface inside the company, local law determines attack surface due to the local government. There are probably more factors at play due to technical reasons, like the closeness to internet exchanges and the difficulty to sniff packets in secret by foreign spies. Unless those are uniformly the same everywhere, I don't think your agrument holds.

qayxc 6y ago

There is no place in the world that is both technologically capable of reliably hosting servers and at the same time inherently safer with regards to the privacy of your data than others. If it's not the domestic government that will raid the server or monitor traffic, it's foreign actors or (in case of monitoring) the country that packets are routed through. Yes, there are possibilities to make yourself safer, but they don't depend on where you place your data. The question wasn't "can I be safer", the question was "is there a specific place that is safer" and the answer is no, for the reasons I gave. That's not saying "encryption is useless anyway" or "you might as well give up" - no! I'm saying that if the privacy of your data depends on where your server is located, then you're doing it wrong.

rhn_mk1 6y ago
I'm not sure I'm convinced that location doesn't matter at all. The attack routes are different between countries: local culture determines attack surface inside the company, local law determines attack surface due to the local government. There are probably more factors at play due to technical reasons, like the closeness to internet exchanges and the difficulty to sniff packets in secret by foreign spies. Unless those are uniformly the same everywhere, I don't think your agrument holds.