[zrm]

You're proposing that the penalty for being suspected of subverting the firewall is death. In those cases you're going to want a highly refined system for avoiding detection, and it's also very important that one exist, because regimes that oppressive deserve to be opposed.

Fortunately the more typical case isn't kidnapping and execution but only having your connection blocked, which creates a helpful feedback loop that enables continuous improvement in the ability of secure communications to avoid detection. Which benefits everybody, but especially those in violent authoritarian countries that need it all the more.

[mdhardeman]

No disagreement here. What's being done is despicable.

Rather than death, if we look at the history of oppressive societies, the more likely outcome is a job offer, the kind they won't let you refuse but they'll make it so you don't want to refuse anyway. They find the clever people who are working around the filters and interception and hire them to be the watchers. They get perks like time to spend on a real private connection, etc. Meanwhile they are required to contribute to making the noose ever tighter.

[cat199]

> You're proposing that the penalty for being suspected of subverting the firewall is death.

no, he's being hyperbolic to make the point that in an extreme situation, a default-deny approach could facilitate mass suppression of 'undesirable' traffic without creating an insurmountable backlog of traffic for the 'bad actor state' to review in determining what to process further.

[zrm]

> no, he's being hyperbolic to make the point that in an extreme situation, a default-deny approach could facilitate mass suppression of 'undesirable' traffic without creating an insurmountable backlog of traffic for the 'bad actor state' to review in determining what to process further.

Only it doesn't, because as soon as they allow anything, everything else starts to look enough like whatever is still allowed to make it through, because that's the only way to make it through.

Slashing away more things only increases the resources people will put behind making arbitrary traffic look like allowed traffic. It trades not having to review everything for having to fight everyone instead of only the people they want to block.

Then some people win, everyone copies the winners' methods to get through, and you're back to square one only now everything looks even more like everything else than it did before.

[mdhardeman]

You've elegantly stated my point precisely. Thank you!