Why "Nothing to Hide" misrepresents online privacy

Why "Nothing to Hide" misrepresents online privacy.

-- Tom

 

Thanks for the share. I'm in the 'Nothing to hide camp' as regards the government's knowing the ins and outs of my cyber life. I really don't care. It's going to happen whether we like it or not, we can go the great extremes to try and stop the snooping, but it's everywhere!

As is pointed out in the article there's cctv almost everywhere now, People pay their bills, do their banking and shopping online. I just let all this government snooping pass me by, because when push comes to shove it's going to happen in some part of our life whether we like it or not, so worrying about it really is pointless.

Please note this is my personal thoughts on the subjects , and it's also how I plan to handle all this snooping. Maybe my opinion will change in time, but as of right now I'm really not concerned about what information governments know about me.

 

I find it sad that there is the necessity of articles explaining why people should care about their privacy and why they should worry about secret mass surveillance and information processing.

 

What's really sad is that people can't look back at recent history and see what other surveillance states evolved into. The US is not the first to use terrorism as justification for mass surveillance. Several nations have gone down this road in the last 100 years. There's people alive now who have seen it firsthand. The "secret" aspect of this mass surveillance is rapidly eroding. When the surveillance goes from "secret" to obvious, this will be a police state, and it will be far too late to do anything about it.

 

There's nothing we can do about it anyway. I'd love to think there was but there simply isn't. What can we do? Protest? no one will listen, use encryption and vpns and the like? they'll get a court order and force you to decrypt or force the vpn provider to hand over you date. Truth is it's already too late. We're being monitored in every aspect of our life and we can't do anything about it.

 

Of course there are things people can do, but they aren't usually easy or straightforward. One such example is email encryption: everyone knows that it makes communication safer, but very few are using it, because of convenience reasons.

 

And what do you think will happen if the government want to look at your encrypted emails? They'll get a court order and force you to decrypt them that's what.

 

In this case you are a specific target and your adversary is the government. In this situation, you have little chances to win. Note though, that in the situation I explained in my post, you are not a specific target.

 

Then I'll have to agree with your first post, yes there are things we can do to make their snooping more difficult, but a majority of people won't bother due to convenience.

 

I think the general idea is to minimize your footprint regardless - and, of course, don't do anything stupid!

-- Tom

 

Precisely... it shouldn't be needed to explain that. But even the lack of History knowledge doesn't justify it.

"I have nothing to hide, so no problem!"

Well, imagine, that from now on, "in face of exceptional circumstances and to assure public order, president Whoever have now full legislative powers, and is mandate will be extended during the necessary time to assure internal security... there should be no perturbation to the public order and those who, by any mean, promote or participate in it, is considered a criminal and a traitor to our country, and will be persecuted in the full extent of the law..."

Don't agree with that? Want to manifest? Well, bad luck!
You should have thought about that before saying: "no problem in building a massive surveillance and data gathering system, after all i have nothing to hide..."

 

"First they came for ZeroDay, but I wasn't ZeroDay, so I said nothing"

Imagine if Hitler had PRISM...

Wake up world.


PD

 

Except for the available technology, the rest is a repeating story. Part of Hitlers rise to power included a war on terrorism, including a speech that's chillingly similar to one we heard after 9-11. The whole world knows where that road lead.

If we say there's nothing we can do about it, we're condemning ourselves and much of this world to the same fate. The technological solutions are there and are being developed. Most of us can't code them but we can help test and deploy decentralized alternatives that are immune to "kill switches". If only 1% takes any action, they end up on watch lists or worse. If it becomes 20, 30, or 50%, everything changes. The powers that be can't jail or execute half of the nation without causing a huge backlash.

What we need to do in masse is demand the government answer the same question. If you have nothing to hide, why are these courts and laws secret? Not rhetoric, real answers. If they won't answer, why should we?

 

The Holocaust relied on Hollerith punch-card machines from IBM Germany.
-http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/IBM.html

 

Yes, but that's only if the provider have their jurisdiction in the "wrong" country, otherwise a court order can not force the provider to decrypt the content. It's big differencies between different countries.

 

There is no way anyone could stop snopping by the government. Everything you do on the internet is being watched. i personally don't see anything wrong with that. There are bad guys on the internet (primarily blackhat hackers) who might steal you stuff, so these survellience cameras on the internet help track these guys down.

The best you can do is maintain different identities on the internet for anonymity. I have a facebook identity where I chat with my IRL friends. However my facebook account doesn't publicly have any personal info. I don't post my school's i've attended/are attending, where I live, how old I am, what's my job record, and whatnot on facebook. I might make some public announcements about "hey i am working on this assignment in school right now; does anyone want to help me out on it?".

But overall i have high privacy settings on facebook. i have various anonymous identities on the internet. ComputersRock is one of them. I have other accounts on the internet. I am not telling them what they are. You try to find them out yourself. Just don't give out personal info (like your age, race, nationality, where you live and what not) in your anonymous identities. For example, do you know what race and nationality I am? Probably not and since I am posting this message with Tor, I am completely anonymous. Tor + not revealing personal info = complete anonymity on the Internet.

 

And I thought that believing in "nothing to hide" concept was bad... Now I hear that surveillance is good... I wonder what's next?

 

big brother loves you.

 

Hi ComputersRock,

Quite simply put, you are not as anonymous as you believe. In the same way that students at university when they submit a paper, it is checked for originality to see if it was copied from anywhere else. In other words, what we write is checked for patterns and then entered into databases that represent what we have written on the Internet from whereever we have accounts - accumulatively. And that may all be checked to see if there are matches from elsewhere on the Internet for correlations to other accounts.

And just because you think you are anonymous on the Internet and maybe you have the hubris or naivety to think that you are by what precautions you have taken make it so - it, sadly, does not. For example, you might want to use a smart spell checker to correct your grammer in your posts before you post them in order to make it just a little bit harder for Big Brother to match your style of writing text - or, even in the paranoid sense - consider posting less to reduce your footprint - just saying.

And don't forget, unless you control the exit node on Tor, and have signed into Wilders Security Forums (or have a cookie on your computer that allows you in), then it is not safe to assume you are as anonymous as you think since it is entirely possible that when you signed in to Wilders using Tor, the operators of the Tor exit node may have been snooping on the traffic with WireShark and already know your password which corresponds to your account name ComputersRock.

-- Tom

 

-http://www.hacking-tutorial.com/hacking-tutorial/how-to-sniff-http-post-password-via-network-using-wireshark-network-analyzer/-

The longest password in the world won't help.

PD

 

It is far more likely that the data stream will be physically intercepted by a dedicated hardware data capture device posted at your ISP with direct real time decrypt + decode dedicated hardware...

Even more likely if your ISP is also your telco provider as they also have direct access to the port masters whereby your phone lines receive their DsL interfaces.

Check your friends from Cisco and other enterprise type offering for such type products sold exclusively to big Comm companies.
check this out just for fun: https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-11599

The use of wire shark is highly unlikely except for the odd inept hacker as it requires to be installed on the "machine" or in between it and the router/bridge/switch and this is relatively easy to identify, thus making it relatively unlikely...

 

Just some links for those who want to dig a little deeper:

• For an outline of Daniel Solove's argument without necessarily buying his book, download his paper, "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy", on SSRN. Incidentally his work has been the most downloaded paper on SSRN for as long as I can remember, though I assume interest has increased somewhat in recent weeks.
• I also recommend 'Censorship V3.1' (SSRN) by Derek Bambauer which is a good accompaniment to 'Nothing to hide'.
• Finally the Info/Law blog is a fantastic resource for anything related to information law.

Enjoy!

 

I put that up as an example that logging in to an http site with a user/pass, can be intercepted by even the most rudimentary neophyte (thereby de-anonymizing you somewhat, as related to Tom's post). We obviously all assume here, that more sophisticated attacks are being used against us. Thanks for the additional detail though, I like learning about what exists at the ISP/Telco level.

PD