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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.
The steelman for this being "if technology is basically just telepathy, why should "because it's technically possible" ever be a valid argument for society to have any right to monitor the contents of the communication"? The strongest right is one you can guarantee personally, after all.
We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.
We throw, and threaten to throw, teenagers in jail all the time over this. It is probably good that they take steps to defend themselves if they're going to engage in this activity to avoid the current environment of societal overreaction; the entire point of "rights" is to limit the damage society can do when (not if) it overreacts (the flip side of the coin being "ticking time bomb plots", but I'm willing to trade the lives lost in those for the ones saved due to them not committing suicide any more over this).
The overwhelming majority of murders worldwide in the 20th century were perpetrated in an organized fashion by governments targeting their own citizens (organized mobs using simple demographic criteria make up most of the rest); the impulse to make one a harder target against those is only natural. Proponents of this approach can point to things like census records being burned to stop an angry invading force from determining which people were going to the concentration camps and which were not. The Germans are well-acquainted with this; being that they have committed the overwhelming majority of murder on the European continent in the last 100 years probably has something to do with that.
While there are a variety of reasons why this is true, men are murdered more often than women; I don't think it's more complex than that.
Sure fine whatever. But even these are not absolute, and can be pierced if justified.
By "self-produced child pornography" I did not mean teenagers recording themselves over Snapshot. I meant something more like an adult recording a child that they have prisoner in their closet that they raped periodically before murdering and disappearing them. The child is now gone without a trace but authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.
These atrocities were committed by dictatorships, yes?
When I say people with these worries are Qanon-adjacent. this is what I mean. Invocation of living in fascist Germany or the Khmer Rouge to describe the need to rigorously defend your privacy living in the United States in 2024. Yes, if you live in a totalitarian dictatorship, or one that's rapidly becoming one, sure fine privacy seems pretty important! To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late. IMO this is a persecution fear very distantly tethered to Earth.
I submit that privacy warriors are just another shade of culture warrior, and it's a kind of warfare with bipartisan appeal.
What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.
Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?
From my view everyone who raged teary-eyed against government "overreach" like the PATRIOT act or FISA has been proven wrong to date. This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.
I'll be really embarrassed if this all paved the way for a USA Patriot Points social credit system but I just don't see that taking off in the US. The notion sounds really far-fetched.
I agree that some people were overly certain about the consequences of the PATRIOT act. But I would still rage teary-eyed against government overreach even if I were merely worried it would lead to tyranny, because once the government is totalitarian it's very hard to come back from that.
Also, in that time there have been various counter-movements, such as Snowden's, that pushed back against mass surveillance. But that could have easily not happened, and plus the state has presumably hardened itself against the next Snowden since then.
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How are you going to know if the government investigated you secretly and then made some excuse about it? Look up parallel construction.
Touched on here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183560?context=8#context
I'm not denying it doesn't happen, it obviously does sometimes. So, that said, what's the argument in response? Because parallel construction could happen (and sometimes does), that means the government therefore should not have access to these tools without a court order ahead of time and if it wrecks their ability to counter terrorist plots or organized crime or handle fast-moving cases, so be it?
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