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The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance (www.wired.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

So how ai generated is wired these days?
NEVER trust any guide that is about "protecting yourself from government surveillance". Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to

SIgnal: Signal is only as secure as every user in the chat. Yes, it is MUCH better than using something like imessage. But if they are beating your buddy with a baseball bat it doesn't really matter if your message expired or not
FDE: Yes, that is a good idea. But understand that "oh, I forgot my password" doesn't work when you have been declared to have no civil rights because you look foreign.
Get a NAS: A good idea, in general. But maybe understand that means you have a big ol' box of incriminating info in your house that is available to whoever has a crowbar.
Use Tor: HA! First, it is only a matter of time until Tor is attacked and likely large numbers of users are brought up on CSAM charges. But also? Understand what a compromised endpoint is and maybe look up what governments tend to be associated with those.
Get a VPN and turn off your GPS: Yeah. it is a real good thing that our devices don't all connect to cell towers where they can easily be tracked from.
Get certain crypto but carry a lot of cash: Yeah... how AI generated was this article?

If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can't even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to "They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won't kill me afterward".

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If you arent an actual journalist who is being personally, specifically hunted then you probably don't need to take the same precautions as one.

And yea, the guide boils down to "none of these things are 100% safe but they are realistic things you can do that can offer more protection than not doing them."

Your skimming of the article missed how they do indeed talk about the shortcomings of every suggestion they have. For example, the article also does indeed talk about how you can turn off gps but your phone will still ping towers revealing your location, and goes on to say that you can put your phone in a faraday bag but that isnt practical for most people but is indeed an option if you want to do it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Lol you think the feds won't notice that a person of interest's phone went dark for the first time in 5 years?

Everyone gets this wrong. If you want to hide, hide inside your established patterns of life. You want to do shit across state line for a weekend? Don't turn off your phone, have your friend carry it around while you are gone.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don't get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.

Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn't take much effort to detect.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:

In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).

For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.

[–] ayyy 2 points 2 weeks ago

Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

Those reasons aren’t obvious to me at all. Can you expand on this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What exactly does Signal have to offer if one already uses iMessage with contact key verification?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Not all people are rich enough to have iPhones. And if you really want privacy, you wouldn't go for one anyway, instead choosing Graphene/Divest/Lineage. Not to mention iMessage is fully closed-source so you cannot even trust it to do what it does. I have issues wirh Signal, but at least I would take it over iMessage any day.