Fully agree. This idea that "individuals arent spied on in America" is absurdly naive and ignorant of seemingly common knowledge of past events. Furthermore it's kind of implicitly supremacist - "only those foreigners do that sort of thing".

Police regularly bust young Chinese for marijuana possession by reading their chat messages. And we are just as human and no more special than the Chinese.

A friend of mine was taken into an unmarked van and questioned after some tweets he made while at an Occupy Wall Street protest. The motives absolutely exist in the US.

Especially with the still recent insurrection/coupe attempt by a fascist leaning politician on American soil. It's actually pretty scary. Democracy is not as assured as some people seem to think and shouldn't be taken for granted.

You don't even have to get that radical with "nothing to hide".

Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt, if you could setup a webcam in their living room, or if you could just read some texts between them and a significant other. Or ask for their passwords, date of birth, SSN, credit card numbers, pets' names, and parents' names.

Simple things like this are why I talk to people via Signal and why I'll never get a Ring/Nest doorbell, or any other 3rd party owned internet connected camera.

People don't care when they are just a statistical datapoint, like sure they can see "now a million people are having sex", but nobody will act on that since it isn't interesting. Which is why people would be more fine with having a camera in every bedroom than having a camera in their bedroom specifically.

So arguing "what if I spy on YOU?" wont convince anyone. They see that as a completely different thing.

Signal is centralized and is an obvious target for surveillance so I would not even remotely rely on it.

The point of Signal is supposed to be that to the best of our knowledge, even if all its packets are run through FSB and NSA, and even if they captured all Signal employees at once and somehow forced them all to cooperate, your messages should still be safe until they manage to push an app update that compromises the app.

Of course this only helps as long as your device isn't backdoored but that is true for any app.

(I say this as someone who regularly defend Telegram here, because in my opinion I don't have to pick one or another.)

And most devices have backdoored CPUs too (Intel ME)

I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

> I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

NSA: VPN and "secure" webmail providers

CIA: They don't need fronts anymore, they have CISCO, Juniper, Netgear, etc.

many argue that silicon valley firms are de facto extension of the US government [1]. a swiss army knife (haha) in their toolkit that allows complete control over the flow of information. i mean seriously, just look at how fast the Crypto AG story was forgotten. only this Dutch article [1] and a handful of others properly dives into the profound impacts that the CIA backdoored Crypto AG devices likely had on world events in the past 50 years. [2]

so yeah if SV firms were not extensions of the US govt. (hardware firms too, not just software), they would have already been broken up years ago.

the senate hearings are just a charade used to stroke the ego's of the 'visionary' SV tech bro CEOs. they also show us how tech illiterate the working class has been made. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVfYmttcag, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9oMYL2M_tE

[2] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/cryptoleaks/2020/...

[3] https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/socialism-innovation-capitali...

I guess "Intel" is a sufficiently ironic name.

Gee, thanks for contributing to the conversation and providing a useful alternative.

The only semi-popular better option I can think of is Matrix, but getting people on Signal is already hard enough and using Matrix on a mobile device is (last I checked) far from ideal.

Security is a gradient, not an all-or-nothing. Signal is vastly better than almost every other electronic communication method.

Once its compromised there is no gradient anymore and you never know when things are compromised because three letter agencies will anyway not tell you.

Given the risk of xyz agency, there seem to be only a couple options to me:

- side-load a peer reviewed apk so you can check the sigs and make sure all crypto is being done locally (and to make sure that the implementation is solid)

- manage your own keys like you would with traditional pgp emails. Give your public to your friend. Force them to send anything sensitive using it. Maybe change to symmetric keys from asym but rotate occasionally. But you still have to trust the app you use to do this unless you want to do it manually each time.

*These don't necessarily solve the Metadata issue

> side-load a peer reviewed apk

Signal has open sourced clients with reproducible builds (on Android) and their encryption library has been reviewed by multiple 3rd parties to great acclaim.

PGP lacks forward secrecy, meaning if a key does get compromised all of your past correspondence is now also compromised.

This solution works then, right? So given this implementation (and not a play store or ios download), one should be safe from xzy snooping?

Edit: As someone that has heard of forward secrecy but not how it relates to pgp, these were helpful reads:

https://signal.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/

https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/

So what do you use instead?

It's not about what to use, it's about having expectations of zero privacy when communicating online. Expect everything to be potentially public.

I'm curious about your concerns about a Nest/Ring doorbell. Since it would presumably face a public space, if there was a privacy concern, it would seem easier for a third party to set up their own camera for surveillance. If I was worried about being watched, I would think the best strategy would be to set up vulnerable cameras on my own network, monitor them for access, and hope that someone would try to use them instead of installing their own.

>Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt

I think this is the closest analogy I've heard yet, but not in windows on suburban, tree-lined street. People walk down those streets and the windows are at eye level. Someone could accidentally see into those windows. No, I think if we consider windows in hi-rise buildings in a major city, the analogy is getting much closer. Seeing into one of those windows requires a bare minimum of intent and possibly an inexpensive tool, say binoculars or a telescope. However I would be willing to bet that a large portion of hi-rise dwellers do NOT close their blinds on the theory of "No one is looking in MY window."

Yeah. I've also heard it likened to "Who needs freedom of speech? I have nothing to say"

> "I have nothing to hide" is is gradeschool silliness to be treated with contempt every time it comes up. It needs to be ridiculed as anyone suggesting it is an idiot or just totally and knowingly dishonest.

That might be an aspirational sentiment, but given most competent adults are in the "I have nothing to hide" category, I don't think it's true at all. I don't think these people are idiots, or dishonest, just ignorant. And it's not even their fault.

Now I say most adults are in that category, but I don't have data on that. I'm going by observed behaviour. We don't see a massive push against tracking / spying and even when it's thrown in our faces (eg: Snowden, Manning) we respond with a collective shoulder shrug.

Except in that case you don't know you have to hide and 101 other things you do make you easier to track than this. And odds are you're not turning off your phone all the way every single time you change locations to start so...

I have nothing to hide is different than "I literally need to hide".

Yep "I have nothing to hide" is always completely false.

"I literally need to hide and I'm also aware of that change" might be true or might be false. You might "literally need to hide" and not know it while the so-called "nothing" you had to hide is used against you when you have done nothing morally or legally wrong.

Tangentially related to events you may not consider to be relevant now, but become so in the future is Roko's Basilisk.

Reader beware.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk

I'd call this a stupid idea, except Roko's suggestion is exactly what the "communists" did in my country when they came to power.

The 'Dirty Cop is Gonna Get You' is the 'gradeschool silliness' here. It's 1000x more likely that the criminals who did the murder want you killed because you're a witness. Witness intimidation is widespread and 'default' in some communities ('snitches get stitches'), and while the 'Dirty Cop' thing does happen in reality, it happens mostly on Netflix, and there's a difference between overzealous prosecutors/cops and 'dirty cops'.

Also consider that tech will exonerate as much as otherwise: for such and such murder, the 'background use' of the tech would be to provide you with an alibi.

Forensics have generally improved Justice I think, not the other way around.

In the end I think Apple's issue should be one of transparency and privacy and we need to push them towards that.

I wish I could live in a world where I can sustain the fantasy that power will not be abused whenever the abuser can get away with it.

The power is asymmetric. The NSA, CIA, FBI, Apple, Google, Police have a lot of power so they need to be very, very transparent in its use and oversight. You do not have that power, privacy is the only thing you can have to protect yourself from abuse.

The other point about about not having to worry about it as an individual is equally wrong. The equivalent argument is that you aren't a doctor so you don't need to worry about a purge of all doctors if one were proposed. Whereas obviously you do need to worry if anyone you care about ever gets sick. So it goes with standing up to corruption. Even if _you_ never stand up to it, your life is greatly adversely affected the harder that is for genuine heroes who make the sacrifice to do it because its the right thing.

"If you have nothing to hide you have been conned."

I suspect you live in a country with a low corruption index.