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[return to "A case against security nihilism"]
1. dfabul+Ng[view] [source] 2021-07-20 20:41:22
>>feross+(OP)
The article says that although "you can't have perfect security," you can make it uneconomical to hack you. It's a good point, but it's not the whole story.

The problem is that state-level actors don't just have a lot of money; they (and their decision makers) also put a much much lower value on their money than you do.

I would never think to spend a million dollars on securing my home network (including other non-dollar costs like inconveniencing myself). Let's suppose that spending $1M would force the US NSA to spend $10M to hack into my home network. The people making that decision aren't spending $10M of their own money; they're spending $10M of the government's money. The NSA doesn't care about $10M in the same way that I care about $1M.

As a result, securing yourself even against a dedicated attacker like Israel's NSO Group could cost way, way more than a simple budget analysis would imply. I'd have to make the costs of hacking me so high that someone at NSO would say "wait a minute, even we can't afford that!"

So, sure, "good enough" security is possible in principle, I think it's fair to say "You probably can't afford good-enough security against state-level actors."

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2. Quantt+Nr1[view] [source] 2021-07-21 07:53:11
>>dfabul+Ng
> The problem is that state-level actors don't just have a lot of money; they (and their decision makers) also put a much much lower value on their money than you do.

I think you have a false perception of the budgetary constraints mid-level state actors are dealing with. Most security agencies have set budgets and a large number of objectives to achieve, so they'll prioritize cost-effective solutions/cheap problems (whereby the cost is both financial and political but finances act as hard constraint). Germany actually didn't buy Pegasus largely because it was too expensive.

Without Pegasus, Morocco's security apparatus probably wouldn't have the resources otherwise to target such a wide variety of people, ranging from Macron to their own king.

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