[vorpalhex]

You are sending letters to your friend and getting their replies back in the mail.

You know your government delivers your letters and they could open them and read them, but you trust your government to keep your info private and use this power well.

The current regulation would mean any government can peek at your letters, and even if they got caught peeking or letting their friends read your letters, your mail carrier can't do anything. They aren't even allowed to ban the other governments friend from reading your mail.

If you had a friend who tried to help you write in secret code to avoid these other governments or strangers from reading your mail, they would be risking jail time.

Not only do you have to trust your government, but you must trust every government in the EU and if they get caught misbehaving, nobody can do anything about it.

(Practically, any government can MITM any ssl connection and read or alter things at will.)

[stinos]

Thanks, but I wasn't actually looking for an analogy. I'm trying to understand things like how the government (or whatever actor) would gain access to browser history via a MITM attack for instance.

[judge2020]

They wouldn't gain access to previous browser history, but as soon as they issue a certificate for a website they can get ISPs to use that certificate for MITM.

[vorpalhex]

Any MITM attack is always going to be going forward, not in reverse, at least to capture authentication sessions (and then you can root around in someone's account).

1. Compromised WiFi networks ("McDonald's Free Wifi")

2. BGP Hijacks (these tend to get noticed)

3. Malware running a local proxy (Malware can try to inject it's own cert into the store too but that cert would be compromised by CT/AV/etc. A proxy with a valid gov cert would be much harder to detect.)

4. Compromised cell sites (stingray type devices)

5. Mistyped urls, often in combo with spear phishing.