5 ms·
> What was stopping them before? That's the question we should all be asking. Mallory has always been out there. NSA is certainly a member of Mallory, but is
by mpyne 13y ago
> What was stopping them before?
That's the question we should all be asking.
Mallory has always been out there. NSA is certainly a member of Mallory, but is not the only member.
So while it's nice that NSA is bringing attention to the idea of securing your communications, it shouldn't have had to come to this. It's been recommend practice for years now to use TLS for everything unless there were good reasons not to, to the point that it's baked-in to SPDY.
- diminoten 13y agoThe good news in all of this is that people are realizing that it's not that hard to be more secure with their data. The information is getting out there about how to be secure, at least. Maybe not against the NSA, but against your everyday problems people are going to be better prepared.
- vidarh 13y agoIt takes some getting used to even the idea that something like reading or editing an encyclopaedia might be activity that we should care all that much about securing. (This whether or not your goal with TLS for it is securing that site or increasing the overall volume of encrypted data)
- mpyne 13y agoWhy would it take some time? It's the exact same logic as 'privacy is important even if I have done nothing wrong' that we keep pointing out in response to those who say that "you have nothing to fear unless you have something to hide".
- diminoten 13y agoBecause it's not true that everything we do has to be private. It just doesn't mesh with how people think of privacy.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoWe tend to expect online privacy to match our physical understanding of it. If I went to the library and used the card catalog to locate articles about pressure cookers and backpacks in an encyclopedia, I wouldn't expect the librarians to tell the police, and I wouldn't expect the police to come and knock on my door to ask me about it.
- diminoten 13y agoInterestingly enough, that's an incorrect expectation[0], which makes it a great example of how poorly understood privacy rights actually are, both in physical space and the virtual space. [0] http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=ifissues&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=21662 http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=ifissues&Template=/C...
- foobarbazqux 13y agoOur expectations of the physical world derive from our experience of the physical world; they're valid notions in that sense. How would the FBI monitor me using a card catalog and getting a book off the shelf? With a camera? If it was a camera, it's still not what we expect from the physical world, because we don't physically expect that we are being watched unless there are actually eyes staring at us. If there was an FBI agent watching me look up things from a card catalog, and another one watching me read the books, this would match my physical understanding of a lack of privacy.
- diminoten 13y agoI talk about this a bit in another comment; the analogy is breaking down because we're equating active surveillance (guys in suits watching you) with passive data collection (cameras in the library that catch you carrying around a book on pressure cookers). In a public library, it is not a reasonable person's expectation that the books that person is selecting are not going to be seen by others in the library. A reasonable person would not expect privacy in a public library, because it is, by definition, public. Facebook isn't public, though. Expectations of privacy change here, and that's where we get into murky waters - we have no meatspace equivalent to Facebook or Google, so we don't really know what to expect.