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The only issue with that, speaking as a US citizen living abroad, is that at some point you will likely interact with a person or service based in the US, at wh

The only issue with that, speaking as a US citizen living abroad, is that at some point you will likely interact with a person or service based in the US, at which point you can consider your communication intercepted, as it were. We're all dealing with 'unknown unknowns', that which we don't know we don't know because it's so secretive. If it were a 'known unknown' (such as "What is water made of?"), we could at least know where to go to find out such information (and actually find it out).

jaggederest 13y ago
There's no unknown unknowns in the NSA surveillance - that's for things where you don't know what the risks are. This is a case of known unknowns - you don't know if any given piece of digital information about you has been collected and investigated, but an easy way is to simply assume that it all has. Same with encryption backdoors - we know they're possible, we just don't know where they exist. What's more, we even have examples of these kind of things existing from things like the Great Firewall. Unknown unknowns would be (for example) a sufficiently general P = NP proof rendering crypto as it exists today obsolete, efficient large qubit quantum computing clusters running Shor's algorithm, or mind-reading at a distance apparatus, or genuine telepathy, or anything that's completely off the charts. Assume all the certificate authorities based in the US are compromised, all the cryptography implementations from the US are backdoored, and all the communications transiting in the US in any form are available to search by whomever you least want to see them.
- shabble 13y ago
  The problem with "assume the maximum worst everything" case is that it places constraints on you that are essentially certain to be overly broad. Building a workable threat model & defending against it isn't practical (or necessary) if you assume worst case everything. For example, have they recorded all IP traffic ever? It's possible, but absolutely overwhelmingly unlikely. But all IP traffic originating from $small_anti-US_country_x in the last year? That's a whole lot more plausible, and thus probably worthwhile to defend against. Also, does that mean non-US CAs are trustworthy? Are non-US comms also subject to tapping, modernday Ivy Bells[1] style? Also, you have no real idea of exactly if/how they're analysing their captured data in order to extract "threat metrics" or whatever. Posting in a reddit thread about kittens would seem utterly innocuous to virtually everyone; but suppose their steganography detection throws a false positive on your image and by random coincidence they also have hits from some IP once used by a 'terror organisation' in the same thread. Should threats of that nature be considered, purely because they're possible? How do you clear your name? Why won't you give up the password to the bomb plans claimed to be embedded in your image file? Is it because you're protecting other commie mutants[2]? How much paranoia is reasonable? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%...

jaggederest 13y ago

There's no unknown unknowns in the NSA surveillance - that's for things where you don't know what the risks are. This is a case of known unknowns - you don't know if any given piece of digital information about you has been collected and investigated, but an easy way is to simply assume that it all has. Same with encryption backdoors - we know they're possible, we just don't know where they exist. What's more, we even have examples of these kind of things existing from things like the Great Firewall. Unknown unknowns would be (for example) a sufficiently general P = NP proof rendering crypto as it exists today obsolete, efficient large qubit quantum computing clusters running Shor's algorithm, or mind-reading at a distance apparatus, or genuine telepathy, or anything that's completely off the charts. Assume all the certificate authorities based in the US are compromised, all the cryptography implementations from the US are backdoored, and all the communications transiting in the US in any form are available to search by whomever you least want to see them.

shabble 13y ago
The problem with "assume the maximum worst everything" case is that it places constraints on you that are essentially certain to be overly broad. Building a workable threat model & defending against it isn't practical (or necessary) if you assume worst case everything. For example, have they recorded all IP traffic ever? It's possible, but absolutely overwhelmingly unlikely. But all IP traffic originating from $small_anti-US_country_x in the last year? That's a whole lot more plausible, and thus probably worthwhile to defend against. Also, does that mean non-US CAs are trustworthy? Are non-US comms also subject to tapping, modernday Ivy Bells[1] style? Also, you have no real idea of exactly if/how they're analysing their captured data in order to extract "threat metrics" or whatever. Posting in a reddit thread about kittens would seem utterly innocuous to virtually everyone; but suppose their steganography detection throws a false positive on your image and by random coincidence they also have hits from some IP once used by a 'terror organisation' in the same thread. Should threats of that nature be considered, purely because they're possible? How do you clear your name? Why won't you give up the password to the bomb plans claimed to be embedded in your image file? Is it because you're protecting other commie mutants[2]? How much paranoia is reasonable? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%...