zlacker

>>wut42+(OP)
Im increasingly coming to the opinion that anonymity isnt guaranteed so you should assume everyone knows what you do.m and who you are. So you should probably just use your real name and do way less online.

Havent fully swallowed this pill but its feeling inevitable.

>>noneth+M6
We're on a tech forum known to have some of the best and brightest and visited by tech giants. If anyone can solve this problem, it is us. If we are the ones giving up, then who is there to make things right?

As I see it, our only choice is to make privacy and anonymity trivial. Not for techies, but for our tech illiterate grandparents. Push hard for tools like Signal where people can get encryption without having to think about encryption. People want privacy and security but they just don't know how or don't understand what leaks data. But there's the clear irony that the sector __we__ are critical to is the one who is creating this problem.

I'm not ready to swallow that pill. I'm unconvinced we have to. Clearly __we__ can do something about this. Even if that is refusing to build such things, let alone build defenses. Apathy is no different than supporting these authoritarian takeover, because that's what it is. Authoritarian creep.

>>godels+Ta
Any truly reliable privacy and anonymity tool that isn't created by the government will probably be made illegal by the government. Failing that, using it will make you a target of the government's security apparatus. If you create a cryptocurrency that can't be traced[0] or an anonymous marketplace where people can buy and sell anything they want[1], you're going to end up on the wrong end of US government trade sanctions or US drug laws. Running a Tor exit node gets your IP address blocked by much of the internet and can even get you a visit from the FBI[2]. Tor itself only exists because it was created by the US Navy as a tool for dissidents in dictatorships to be able to access the internet.

The only way to solve the problem would be to elect politicians who would either dismantle most of the surveillance system or address crime and terrorism so decisively that there was no longer any plausible threat to justify continuing to maintain a mass surveillance apparatus in which case it would (hopefully) eventually wither away as part of budget cuts once politicians forget why it was even "necessary" in the first place. There is no solution to political problems without obtaining and using political power to solve them.

The strategy of eliminating the system's justification isn't foolproof though because the bureaucracy that runs the military draft (Selective Service) somehow still exists even though the draft was ended around half a century ago and is almost certainly never coming back. Politicians only noticed it existed a few years ago long enough to debate whether to extend the wrong of registration for it to include women in addition to men. The eventual decision was to leave the status quo intact[3]. The sensible option of abolishing that relic of a past rights violation rather than continuing to waste money on maintaining the bureaucracy was not seriously considered. That means the direct route is almost certainly the better approach.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/10/github_tornado_cookie...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/rjgq8s/ok_so_what_has_...

[3]: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/ndaa-women-draft-dr...