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The Hindenberg-Hitler Contingency
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Posted by Marbux
Mar 20, 2016 at 10:15 PM
There’s also the option of making the three-letter agencies irrelevant to your computing experience other than protecting your systems against them. The movers and shakers of the Internet community have chosen this route, building tools to encrypt everything, in part on the theory that jamming NSA’s pipes with more encrypted communications than they have processing power to decrypt is a Very Good Start.
One tool I’ve been using for some two years is HTTPS Everywhere, a browser extension from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The extension causes the browser to convert all web page requests to requests for an
https connection if one exists. https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/ The extension causes a negligible delay in processing a page request but not substantial enough to affect my work habits.
A related initiative is Let’s Encrypt, which aims to make upgrading web page servers to supply pages via https a one-click experience for webmasters, including procurement of a free ssl certificate. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/lets-encrypt-project-comes-fruition-2015-review and https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets-encrypt-clients/
Of course it isn’t just government agencies that are tracking online computer users. There’s the private sector too. Ghostery is a a nice, easy to use tracker blocker, with extensions for all major browsers, including mobile. https://www.ghostery.com/try-us/download-browser-extension/ It’s close to a one-click experience to block all known trackers, then unblock only the few you want to let through. In my case, that’s only the Disqus online comment service. Every time it blocks a tracker, it pops up a listing of all trackers blocked for the given web page. You can dismiss the pop-up by clicking on its top edge or by waiting for it to fade away a few seconds later.
And of course, there is The Onion Router (TOR) browser, which lets you operate on the Internet in a completely encrypted and decentralized environment. It is great for, inter alia, bypassing geographical restrictions management.
There are many other tools. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great resource section for minimizing your surveillance risk. https://ssd.eff.org/en
Finally, there are huge advantages to being very public about your opposition to surveillance. After all, legislative, executive branch, and judicial branch reform reacts to public opposition. The more people who are public about their opposition, the quicker we’ll achieve the reform. And retaliation for political statements is not only legally prohibited, but in many cases you can also collect damages when it occurs. There are a multitude of pending cases in the pipeline. Very significant reforms have already been achieved in the U.S. and the E.U. through litigation and it is only a matter of time before even more reforms happen. But perhaps most important, going public with your opposition can make you really like that face you see in your mirror.
Paul
Posted by Hugh
Mar 21, 2016 at 06:24 PM
Hmm.
I take an opposite view to most of those expressed above. Yes, I would be very deeply concerned about a regime change in my country that brought authoritarians to power, but I have other means such as my vote, a relatively free press and relatively easy access to my political representatives to protect myself and my family against such an eventuality. I would not depend on technical fixes.
What I have had is the experience of working in cities experiencing serious, continuing terrorist/guerrilla campaigns. I remember looking out of my window in a tall office-building on one occasion and seeing, in the medium-distance, puffs of smoke, one after another, where the bombs were going off, with fatal consequences. On another occasion, a bomb was placed in a cinema less than a hundred yards away; fortunately it failed to explode. On another, I was evacuated from a hotel shortly before it was seriously damaged by an explosion. (I should add that these were not “false-flag” campaigns.) Today, I don’t live in a big city, but close members of my family do, and only this evening I read a headline stating that the authorities there are prepared to confront up to ten simultaneous attacks, post-Paris.
If I have to lose a proportion of my freedom and privacy in the effort to prevent such attacks, I would be very happy to do so.