On Lu, 09 dec 19, 11:16:32, John Hasler wrote: > Charlie writes: > > Over many years, although, I may not ever be in possession of anything > > of interest to anyone? > > There are two distinct "security" condsiderations here that are often > munged together: > > 1) Our ethical/moral/political objections to being tracked and snooped > on. > > 2) Our actual risk of injury[1] due to security failures. > > Both are important, but the second should be addressed first. It should > be done objectively, by first constructing a threat model: who or what > could (and would) actually harm you? The data trawling activities of my > government[2] angers me but when I think about it objectively I realize > that it does me no actual harm: I'm simply not someone they care about. In my opinion that's a dangerous assumption. If you're not aware of any actual case of harm you probably didn't look close enough.
(Not trying to single out your government. Even if mine would turn out to be "better" it would likely be so only due to incompetence and/or lack of resources, not the moral or ethics of the decision makers.) > [1] Injury in a legal sense, ranging from death to loss of property to > embarrassment. > > [2] If you believe that your government doesn't do it too you are > extremely naive. With the current technology and the (increasing) willingness of ordinary people to expose so many aspects about themselves I believe the current capabilities of governments significantly surpass those of 80s totalitarian regimes. This by itself should be scary and reminds me of the "boiling frog". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog Kind regards, Andrei -- http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser
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