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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.

Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".

Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.

I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.

The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.

Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.

I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.

My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.

My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.

The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.

(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)

In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.

  1. I'm aware this argument is cited derisively by other security professionals, but that doesn't make them correct. Ticking time bomb plots are a real thing.

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

I am not saying this. I think the grand majority of people who use (e.g.) Signal are unremarkable and having completely mundane conversations. The reason more people aren't burned by Signal is that it's not too inconvenient. If your phone dies you lose all of your chat history with everyone (since no cloud backups). People survive that okay, it turns out. But the flip-side of the normalization of Signal is that there also bad people using it for crime and law enforcement is 100% powerless to do anything about it.

The Qanon-adjacent part is believing your mundane unremarkable life is so important that you must use Signal and that this meaningfully protects you from The Powers Whom are Unspecified, which is Important.

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

What additional argument is needed here? The no privacy status quo has existed for decades for billions of people and the only people that are for the worse for it are stupid criminals who send CSAM over Facebook in the clear and have been busted for it, and also a few freak headlines where normies are also swept up in abuses?

I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:

  1. A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.

  2. There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.

And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?

Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.

I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.

If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.

Let me present you an alternate vision of dystopia.

https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94878?context=8#context

We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built darknet markets (DNMs) so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cypherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.

Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.

Perhaps my view on this is informed by being very close to the production of the tools that could create this dystopia, but the creation of a completely lawless criminal state that law enforcement is permanently locked out of meeting technocapitalist incentives is a possibility that is too casually dismissed.

There's still a lot of room for an underworld Jeff Bezos to pick up a trillion dollars.