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I think it is pretty safe to assume that essentially all opponents are capable. In particular, intelligence is one of the first things dictatorships will invest
by cirosantilli 3y ago
I think it is pretty safe to assume that essentially all opponents are capable. In particular, intelligence is one of the first things dictatorships will invest in, partly to spy on their own people, which the leaders fear above all else.
The ideal communication mechanism is one that blends in with a huge number of other "legitimate" users. E.g. for Tor, it only works if many people are also using Tor for other non-spy things. I wonder why not just email.
- bombcar 3y agoI'm honestly a bit surprised that they haven't really been pushing "using Tor for piracy" to create additional cover traffic. Email has many problems but may be better than most, but you need to use something like gmail which everyone is using, and even that may be noticeable. Once they suspect you, you're pretty much done for unless you find out that you're on the list and you stop communicating outbound. It's much harder to track one-way broadcast communications (many still think that there are/were communications to spies hidden in BBC shortwave broadcasts, and numbers stations are still a thing).
- 082349872349872 3y agoSteganography-wise, timestamps of HN comments aren't part of the UI, but are delivered in the HTML: <span class="age" title="2023-06-11T12:31:28"> <a href="item?id=36280770">22 minutes ago</a> so —in principle— the minutes field could be used to provide a very low bandwidth covert channel on top of innocuous commentary. Wouldn't it be pretty difficult to pick up even an outbound one-if-by-land two-if-by-sea style communication from the general noise floor?