blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!She cheerfully shared her opinion that...
She cheerfully shared her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth.
Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind...
Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.
A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve...
A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse this disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
I think everybody has had this kind of experience...
I think averybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.
That was how you knew you could trust each other...
That is how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crime.
I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS...
I took along a chep laptop running TAILS, which is a LINUX-based “amnesiac” operating system - meaning it forgets everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof”, or disguise, the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way associable with mine. Useful enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.
It as in fact slightly better...
It was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.
These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion...
These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion if a media campaign, were shocking demonstraions of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim cedit.
Kids used to be able to go online...
Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is the only environment in which you can grow up - by which I mean that the early Internet’s disassociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiflty punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.
I'd briefly jam a network...
I’d briefly jam a network, causing its legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their “authentication packets”, which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on just like any other “authorized” user.