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Your contact is in a besieged city 100 miles away. They have WhatsApp or Signal and want to send you a message. Are you suggesting the journalist shouldn't have

by SamBam 5y ago

Your contact is in a besieged city 100 miles away. They have WhatsApp or Signal and want to send you a message. Are you suggesting the journalist shouldn't have a smartphone that contact could contact you on?

kkfx 5y ago
If my contact is besieged in an enemy land where if intercept might suffer bad outcomes I hope for him/her he DROP and hammer-smash his/shes phone time ago. If talking is possible BUT certain topics are taboo then a FLOSS desktop, possibly a VERY OLD one (classic bios, no frill), and some stenography trick, something simple, like abusing zip/gif file format to add extra encrypted information inside, might be used. DEFINITIVELY NOT via a proprietary service. A thing, that's NOT a personal attack nor something else but here is HN, so a place whose users typically are tech savvy humans: did you really imaging a smartphone as the best/the goto tool to communicate under a dictatorship/secret investigations etc? I'm curious because or you are secretly working for NSA and similar or... I can't imaging how you can be a (stereo)typical HN user. Supposing I'm a whistleblower communicate with a journalist, well the first mean I choose is passing something physically via trustable third parties, plural in the sense that one should contact another not much linked/unlinked to me who do the same, to make unlikely some small surveillance notice something strange. They just should know they do something "a bit secret" for me without knowing the rest. If he/she have a public GNUPG key I can use it to cipher what I pass but, unfortunately, that's unlikely for most journalist, they simply do not know tech enough. After the first contact I'll try to find a common ground to let him/her understand that I'm not joking and similarly that he/she is interested in doing that. I'll then teach how to use FLOSS tools on a third party computer, with a live USB key, running from ram. I'll keep changing at random the means of communication etc. If I live under a dictatorship and I'm involved in Resistant activities the last thing I want is hi tech gears around, at least they do my best to appear using and liking them, doing the opposite, trying to be double face. I'll do my best to organize coms via ephemeral/disposable tools, something low tech as possible and hard to massively track. If I'm a journalist, trapped behind enemy lines, I try to document as much as possible with some kind of deniable encryption, something like not so innocent and badly hidden while the real things are well deeply covered and try to keep a profile as low as possible, including NEVER communicate directly with the other side of the front. If you imaging going to war with a smartphone in your pocket I sincerely advise you to avoid that at all: you'll be a dead man in a far shorter period of time than normal...
- ephbit 5y ago
  Doesn't the mere situation of crisis/chaos/war in Ukraine with sooo many things being coordinated by either side of the conflict impose a severe bandwith limitation ... such that the ressources (time/hands) have to be carefully allocated ... so that things like tediously going after private communications that might prove useful are just too tedious to actually do?

by SamBam 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

If my contact is besieged in an enemy land where if intercept might suffer bad outcomes I hope for him/her he DROP and hammer-smash his/shes phone time ago. If talking is possible BUT certain topics are taboo then a FLOSS desktop, possibly a VERY OLD one (classic bios, no frill), and some stenography trick, something simple, like abusing zip/gif file format to add extra encrypted information inside, might be used. DEFINITIVELY NOT via a proprietary service. A thing, that's NOT a personal attack nor something else but here is HN, so a place whose users typically are tech savvy humans: did you really imaging a smartphone as the best/the goto tool to communicate under a dictatorship/secret investigations etc? I'm curious because or you are secretly working for NSA and similar or... I can't imaging how you can be a (stereo)typical HN user. Supposing I'm a whistleblower communicate with a journalist, well the first mean I choose is passing something physically via trustable third parties, plural in the sense that one should contact another not much linked/unlinked to me who do the same, to make unlikely some small surveillance notice something strange. They just should know they do something "a bit secret" for me without knowing the rest. If he/she have a public GNUPG key I can use it to cipher what I pass but, unfortunately, that's unlikely for most journalist, they simply do not know tech enough. After the first contact I'll try to find a common ground to let him/her understand that I'm not joking and similarly that he/she is interested in doing that. I'll then teach how to use FLOSS tools on a third party computer, with a live USB key, running from ram. I'll keep changing at random the means of communication etc. If I live under a dictatorship and I'm involved in Resistant activities the last thing I want is hi tech gears around, at least they do my best to appear using and liking them, doing the opposite, trying to be double face. I'll do my best to organize coms via ephemeral/disposable tools, something low tech as possible and hard to massively track. If I'm a journalist, trapped behind enemy lines, I try to document as much as possible with some kind of deniable encryption, something like not so innocent and badly hidden while the real things are well deeply covered and try to keep a profile as low as possible, including NEVER communicate directly with the other side of the front. If you imaging going to war with a smartphone in your pocket I sincerely advise you to avoid that at all: you'll be a dead man in a far shorter period of time than normal...

ephbit 5y ago
Doesn't the mere situation of crisis/chaos/war in Ukraine with sooo many things being coordinated by either side of the conflict impose a severe bandwith limitation ... such that the ressources (time/hands) have to be carefully allocated ... so that things like tediously going after private communications that might prove useful are just too tedious to actually do?