5 ms·

The lengths that the "good guys" will go to in order to spy on the "bad guys" and how they'll be lying into their graves about it. You can't trust a single wor

by titzer 3y ago

The lengths that the "good guys" will go to in order to spy on the "bad guys" and how they'll be lying into their graves about it. You can't trust a single word intelligence agencies say. We have no idea what they are collecting, how it is stored, indexed, searched, or used, or how long. They actively deny operations they are currently engaged in, i.e. they lie, at the highest levels. There are only technical limitations imposed by computational resources. Which aren't really limitations when they have effectively infinite funding at this point. They've infiltrated hardware; inserted backdoors, not just at telcos, but into privately-developed and owned locations. They consider encryption to be a stumbling block and are willing to intervene to weaken it to serve their purposes. Absolutely shitbirds, all. I don't care what their ends are, their means are to create a digital dystopia that simply cannot be trusted. They basically broke tech; usurped it to serve the power structure. And so many people and companies went along with, are going along with, and are enriching themselves by doing so. This future sucks. I hate my own devices.

digging 3y ago
> This future sucks. I hate my own devices. Installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel was the closest I'm come to feeling like having an actual PDA I could trust and living in a cool future. But of course it's still on Google hardware, so it's not trustworthy. And it still requires apps, some of which are not trustworthy. And, worst of all, I still have to communicate with other people on their phones, which voids most privacy efforts. I don't even give new friends my real phone number because I can't trust their contacts list not to be shared with everybody who wants to buy it.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  It also, no doubt, relies on a Google-signed blob to enforce Secure Boot that is signed by Google. Where do you think that "This device has secure boot disabled" or "This device is running a custom image..." (can't remember exact terminology) warning comes from... So, in theory, Google could make a signed blob that unlocked secure boot if the government really wanted it anyway.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > in theory, Google could make a signed blob that unlocked secure boot if the government really wanted it anyway Iff the design is secure with regards to storing the secret used to unlock user data, then Google signing a blob to unlock signed boot for a new arbitrary image still wouldn't allow that new image to spill existing user data. (I have no idea if this is actually the case though)
    - digging 3y ago
      Gosh I hope that's the case, because this is all too arcane for me.
- tortoise_in 3y ago
  You can't become early man.
- sushisource 3y ago
  The thing I've never really understood about this is... to what end? I get that, on a philosophical level, it sucks that in theory your privacy can be violated and that choice has been taken from you. But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it? Don't get me wrong, it's not to say we shouldn't advocate for govt. orgs not doing this sort of thing - but I also don't know why you'd spend so much time and mental energy trying to avoid a theoretical bogeyman.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it? Because, one day, you will make a mistake or say something wrong. And then they will correlate this wirh all the information they have about you. Remember NKVD ? Remember STASI ? Remember Gestapo ? Remember CIA ?
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      Currently in the United States, several people who organized a bail fund for protesters are sitting in jail on terrorism charges. In the 50s, people who organized civil rights bail funds were called in front of the Anti-American Activities Committee to be blacklisted from their careers and communities. If anything, privacy is incredibly important because the powers at be continue to prove they will use state-sanctioned violence against people who protest these systems. We like to tell ourselves its only those other bad countries, but rights in the US are just as delicate. Enough money or power behind a charge and you have to real ability to uphold your rights.
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      I always wonder about consequences for today's children. One can't take away those things from them as all friends use it, but who knows who might have all the information about them in 50 years time, for whatever purpose. All the information on who they are friends with, where they hang out, maybe even contents of images or text messages, the searches they did on the net. In a period of the life where the try out many things and often are curious. And then combined with details about their whole life and career.
- gsatic 3y ago
  This sounds like too much work. Just use the phone of the old lady across the street.
legitster 3y ago
This kind of defeatist, "They Live", everyone-is-lying all of the time mentality ignores the huge privacy gains the internet has achieved since basically just being an open message relay between hubs. And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.
- njarboe 3y ago
  As Snowden said himself: "Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016 It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  The NSA has no jurisdiction on American soil, so making cases is basically a moot point for PRISM anyway. PRISM will allow the government to extrajudicially kill you if you join a terrorist group (or a group the government considers one), and the fact that it exists and Russian officials have been caught using Windows XP is probably why Ukraine has outperformed expectations so much. The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
  - titzer 3y ago
    > probably tossed in the garbage. I doubt that. The best we can hope for is that such information is compressed and moved to long-term storage or pointers to it are lost. More likely the only protection it really endures is that it is being obscured by the massive influx of new data; i.e. buried under an endlessly silting riverbed of new data. > and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals Check up on China[1]. They've massively stepped up the surveillance to the point where it's actively intervening on people's behavior to make them act "better" and discourage such bad things as....playing loud music on trains. They are barreling towards a dystopia where they can digitally un-person you for wrongdoing and wrongthink. Right now it's just the soft whips of not being to buy a train ticket or fly, but it will absolutely reach into every aspect citizen's lives, from charging different prices to determining where you can live and whether you pay fines or go to jail. China has a long tradition of un-personing politic dissidents, including jailing and killing them. The future looks horrifying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20(Chinese,the%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=T....
alfalfasprout 3y ago
Encryption, etc. also merely pose inconveniences. At the end of the day, you don't need quantum computers to get access to whatever data you want. It's much easier to bribe+blackmail+threaten someone to get access to data. Or to buy zero days to access a victim's phone and go from there. Or to insert hardware backdoors and compromise a system at a fundamental level. Or install rootkits.
- willis936 3y ago
  Those are techniques organized criminals might use. Nation states need not bother. They just do whatever they want, including inserting MITM boxes in telcos. It is safe to assume that no asymmetrically encrypted traffic in the past decade has not been stored and decoded. It's a reasonably safe assumption that all symmetrically encrypted traffic has been stored if not also outright decoded.
  - pdabbadabba 3y ago
    How much storage would this require? I'm not exactly soothed by the thought that the limiting factor here might be the cost of storage but...maybe it helps a little?
    - willis936 3y ago
      I bet you could get a lot of storage for 1 Bn USD. We don't know how much is in the black budget, but we do have a ten year old datapoint from the Snowden leak. There were many billions of USD dedicated to the dragnet. There is no reason to think it hasn't stayed the same or gotten larger. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black...
    - alfalfasprout 3y ago
      Most content isn't all that high entropy I would imagine. So it would compress well. I'd assume a lot of stuff isn't stored either.

by titzer 3y ago

digging 3y ago

> This future sucks. I hate my own devices. Installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel was the closest I'm come to feeling like having an actual PDA I could trust and living in a cool future. But of course it's still on Google hardware, so it's not trustworthy. And it still requires apps, some of which are not trustworthy. And, worst of all, I still have to communicate with other people on their phones, which voids most privacy efforts. I don't even give new friends my real phone number because I can't trust their contacts list not to be shared with everybody who wants to buy it.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
It also, no doubt, relies on a Google-signed blob to enforce Secure Boot that is signed by Google. Where do you think that "This device has secure boot disabled" or "This device is running a custom image..." (can't remember exact terminology) warning comes from... So, in theory, Google could make a signed blob that unlocked secure boot if the government really wanted it anyway.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > in theory, Google could make a signed blob that unlocked secure boot if the government really wanted it anyway Iff the design is secure with regards to storing the secret used to unlock user data, then Google signing a blob to unlock signed boot for a new arbitrary image still wouldn't allow that new image to spill existing user data. (I have no idea if this is actually the case though)
  - digging 3y ago
    Gosh I hope that's the case, because this is all too arcane for me.
tortoise_in 3y ago
You can't become early man.
sushisource 3y ago
The thing I've never really understood about this is... to what end? I get that, on a philosophical level, it sucks that in theory your privacy can be violated and that choice has been taken from you. But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it? Don't get me wrong, it's not to say we shouldn't advocate for govt. orgs not doing this sort of thing - but I also don't know why you'd spend so much time and mental energy trying to avoid a theoretical bogeyman.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it? Because, one day, you will make a mistake or say something wrong. And then they will correlate this wirh all the information they have about you. Remember NKVD ? Remember STASI ? Remember Gestapo ? Remember CIA ?
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Currently in the United States, several people who organized a bail fund for protesters are sitting in jail on terrorism charges. In the 50s, people who organized civil rights bail funds were called in front of the Anti-American Activities Committee to be blacklisted from their careers and communities. If anything, privacy is incredibly important because the powers at be continue to prove they will use state-sanctioned violence against people who protest these systems. We like to tell ourselves its only those other bad countries, but rights in the US are just as delicate. Enough money or power behind a charge and you have to real ability to uphold your rights.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    I always wonder about consequences for today's children. One can't take away those things from them as all friends use it, but who knows who might have all the information about them in 50 years time, for whatever purpose. All the information on who they are friends with, where they hang out, maybe even contents of images or text messages, the searches they did on the net. In a period of the life where the try out many things and often are curious. And then combined with details about their whole life and career.
gsatic 3y ago
This sounds like too much work. Just use the phone of the old lady across the street.

legitster 3y ago

This kind of defeatist, "They Live", everyone-is-lying all of the time mentality ignores the huge privacy gains the internet has achieved since basically just being an open message relay between hubs. And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.

njarboe 3y ago
As Snowden said himself: "Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016 It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
FormerBandmate 3y ago
The NSA has no jurisdiction on American soil, so making cases is basically a moot point for PRISM anyway. PRISM will allow the government to extrajudicially kill you if you join a terrorist group (or a group the government considers one), and the fact that it exists and Russian officials have been caught using Windows XP is probably why Ukraine has outperformed expectations so much. The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
- titzer 3y ago
  > probably tossed in the garbage. I doubt that. The best we can hope for is that such information is compressed and moved to long-term storage or pointers to it are lost. More likely the only protection it really endures is that it is being obscured by the massive influx of new data; i.e. buried under an endlessly silting riverbed of new data. > and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals Check up on China[1]. They've massively stepped up the surveillance to the point where it's actively intervening on people's behavior to make them act "better" and discourage such bad things as....playing loud music on trains. They are barreling towards a dystopia where they can digitally un-person you for wrongdoing and wrongthink. Right now it's just the soft whips of not being to buy a train ticket or fly, but it will absolutely reach into every aspect citizen's lives, from charging different prices to determining where you can live and whether you pay fines or go to jail. China has a long tradition of un-personing politic dissidents, including jailing and killing them. The future looks horrifying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20(Chinese,the%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=T....

alfalfasprout 3y ago

Encryption, etc. also merely pose inconveniences. At the end of the day, you don't need quantum computers to get access to whatever data you want. It's much easier to bribe+blackmail+threaten someone to get access to data. Or to buy zero days to access a victim's phone and go from there. Or to insert hardware backdoors and compromise a system at a fundamental level. Or install rootkits.

willis936 3y ago
Those are techniques organized criminals might use. Nation states need not bother. They just do whatever they want, including inserting MITM boxes in telcos. It is safe to assume that no asymmetrically encrypted traffic in the past decade has not been stored and decoded. It's a reasonably safe assumption that all symmetrically encrypted traffic has been stored if not also outright decoded.
- pdabbadabba 3y ago
  How much storage would this require? I'm not exactly soothed by the thought that the limiting factor here might be the cost of storage but...maybe it helps a little?
  - willis936 3y ago
    I bet you could get a lot of storage for 1 Bn USD. We don't know how much is in the black budget, but we do have a ten year old datapoint from the Snowden leak. There were many billions of USD dedicated to the dragnet. There is no reason to think it hasn't stayed the same or gotten larger. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black...
  - alfalfasprout 3y ago
    Most content isn't all that high entropy I would imagine. So it would compress well. I'd assume a lot of stuff isn't stored either.