In an age where printed periodicals were delivered by subscription, the subscriber information was available (and yes, often tracked by local and federal law enforcement), but not the specifics of what articles were read.
Today, with Web-based document delivery and Javascript instrumentation, the specifics of who reads what articles, time on page, sections read, interactions, shares, and more, are available not just to the publishere but advertisers, any entities hacking into or accessing their systems, app developers, and more.
And, yes, law enforcement, whether under warrant, subpoena, or ... other methods.
Someone usually will have archived the article there.
If you feel a bit more ambitious you could make a bot that runs on a vps somewhere and automatically scrapes news articles.
Otherwise you could use a privacy hardened firefox version along with some kinda proxy.
I would say you could rent your own vps, use a vpn service that maintains their own servers, use a decentralized vpn (these are a new development) or just use someone else’s wifi that you don’t also use with your „real“ identity.
Opsec can be hard to maintain but boy is doing so fun.
Archive.is runs Tor through a Cloudfront captcha which fails consistently in my experience.
I was thinking along the lines that evidence already exists that would provide much the same value as the access logs might, but the access logs would either provide cover for introducing that evidence, or provide the value without disclosing other surveillance methods.
Either of those prospects is troubling.
Chief value of (public/general) VPNs seems to be 1) accessing region-zoned content or 2) protection against local-segment interception.
The benefit of 2) is balanced against the fairly strong probability that the VPN provider itself is heavily surveilled or actively aiding in monitoring activities.
Just tried it now and works for me.
It is an annoying captcha, it had something like five steps to complete, but I've seen worse. I'd rather this captcha than the one that Roblox uses.
Still, everybody on the street could see what we read while carrying the paper home. That can easily be dozens or hundreds of people. In some sense the periodic subscription via snail mail is in some sense the most private form. Sure, in the Web everything is tracked but in the average case literally nobody is aware of what we read. The worst case scenario can be quite bad though...
I agree that turning on JavaScript with Tor is risky from a security viewpoint. It significantly increases the risk that your real identity may be unmasked.
Yes, I read it on my iPad through an app, but it simply renders a PDF of the actual physical newspaper and its layout.
So there's no way to fit dynamic ads, JavaScript nuggets, etc. They can't really determine what article I read.
I think that should really be the norm for electronic newspapers. How is it in other parts of the world?
They‘re like tor where anyone can run their own node, but unlike tor there is a financial incentive to run them because they come with built in payment processing solutions via cryptocurrencies.
Some people are skeptical of cryptocurrencies but I consider this to be an excellent use case:
Securing coordination between actors that don’t necessarily trust each other through market incentives.
This would incentivize people to run their own nodes and it would be less like tor where most exit nodes are allegedly run by intelligence agencies.
The subpoena, and USA Today's response [1] paints a picture of an incompetent and/or inexperienced FBI agent, who is unaware of existing Justice department guidelines specifically prohibiting her from serving such a subpoena.
Reading between the lines, citing "other methods" is the FBI's way of quietly withdrawing a subpoena that should never have been served.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.231...
> "The subpoena is being withdrawn because intervening investigative developments have rendered it unnecessary," an FBI spokesperson said.
I think this is nothing like a "mea culpa", but instead has absolutely everything to do with managing the establishment of precedents to work in the favor of the FBI whenever possible.