3 ms·

I think it's important to distinguish mass surveillance from targeted surveillance. They present very different threat models. I need a general-purpose chat to

I think it's important to distinguish mass surveillance from targeted surveillance. They present very different threat models. I need a general-purpose chat tool for use with friends, family, and business contacts. Protection from targeted surveillance by a state actor (or someone with equivalent resources) is neither a priority nor realistic today in light of my other requirements. I'm okay with using a separate tool if I ever need that kind of special-purpose protection. Roughly stated, the goal is to regain the convenience of older tools like talk, ytalk, irc, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk, without being inaccessible to swaths of the computer-using population, and without exposing us all to mass surveillance any more than necessary. Matrix succeeds at this admirably, and continues to get better at it over time. (You might want to look at their in-progress P2P work.) Briar fails unless you only talk to people using smartphones. MoxieTalk fails because it exposes people to mass surveillance. In multiple ways. Over and over again. (Also, I've never seen a good linux client for it.) I acknowledge that both those tools look very useful for certain purposes, and I have a good deal of respect for Moxie because of his contributions to the crypto/comms community, but neither tool does what I need.

maqp 6y ago
"I think it's important to distinguish mass surveillance from targeted surveillance. They present very different threat models." Targeted attacks against centralized points that enable wide-scale surveillance are mass surveillance. Imagine NSA would claim "A fiber optic splitter in the bottom of the ocean is a targeted attack against one device (repeater), or one inch segment of glass wire, it's not mass surveillance". It's vital that we define targeted surveillance as something where the target is a single entity. Hacking Moxie's phone is targeted surveillance. Hacking Signal server is not. Hacking every visitor of a CP site is mass surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unprecedented-and-illegal-hacking-operation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unp... "You might want to look at their in-progress P2P work." It will be a nice to have sure, but I think P2P should work exclusively via Tor if you want to hide metadata. wrt that, you might find my work interesting https://github.com/maqp/tfc https://github.com/maqp/tfc "Briar fails unless you only talk to people using smartphones." A picture is worth a thousand words https://twitter.com/Amlk_B/status/1286642831239647232/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Amlk_B/status/1286642831239647232/photo/... "MoxieTalk fails because it exposes people to mass surveillance." Jabs like these aren't really appreciated. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

maqp 6y ago

"I think it's important to distinguish mass surveillance from targeted surveillance. They present very different threat models." Targeted attacks against centralized points that enable wide-scale surveillance are mass surveillance. Imagine NSA would claim "A fiber optic splitter in the bottom of the ocean is a targeted attack against one device (repeater), or one inch segment of glass wire, it's not mass surveillance". It's vital that we define targeted surveillance as something where the target is a single entity. Hacking Moxie's phone is targeted surveillance. Hacking Signal server is not. Hacking every visitor of a CP site is mass surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unprecedented-and-illegal-hacking-operation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unp... "You might want to look at their in-progress P2P work." It will be a nice to have sure, but I think P2P should work exclusively via Tor if you want to hide metadata. wrt that, you might find my work interesting https://github.com/maqp/tfc https://github.com/maqp/tfc "Briar fails unless you only talk to people using smartphones." A picture is worth a thousand words https://twitter.com/Amlk_B/status/1286642831239647232/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Amlk_B/status/1286642831239647232/photo/... "MoxieTalk fails because it exposes people to mass surveillance." Jabs like these aren't really appreciated. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.