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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I brought up the wholesale surveillance concern here https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

It's not a complete response to your comment though.

The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.

Scalable harassment is worrying, though I don't see how this is a function of privacy really? Like how would you solve the de-banking problem? Is the problem that it was too easy for the government to figure out who all of the protestors were and then work backwards to find their financial accounts and lock them down?

On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.

Irony of ironies, the extremely technically competent anarchist friend who had his self-hosted personal email hacked was because the attacker was an organized criminal who knew he had millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The level of sophistication deployed by the attacker was astounding, which included producing faked search warrants. The attacker also already somehow had copies of his driver's license and we have no idea how he got it. They were not successful in stealing his Bitcoin but they came very close and this criminal continues to pop up in his life from time to time using information he gathered.

See also that a Bitcoin core developer was hacked recently https://www.theblock.co/post/198688/bitcoin-developer-pgp-exploit