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The antidote to XKCD 538 can be steganography. They won't beat you with a $5 wrench if they don't suspect you of doing anything at all. End-to-end encryption can become illegal, but as long as you can run arbitrary code on your machine, you can hide and decode messages with steganography. JavaScript can do the job, so even locked down mobile devices will work if you go to CodePen, JSFiddle, JSBin, etc. Steganography isn't some magic shield to avoid surveillance though. If authorities are already monitoring you for some other reason, then they can burn a zero-day exploit and see anything you do on your device. And if your entire city is covered in cameras with facial recognition, well... you can have your secret messages but I don't know what kind of resistance you're going to be putting up. So to some degree you're right that you can't fully ignore policy and politics. Not sure how to get most of the public to care though. I get most people have more immediate concerns in there lives, and crime is a legitimate issue, but even a cursory knowledge of history will show the hell life can be under authoritarian governments. I think far too many people think "it can't happen here", which seems insane considering how often it has occurred even in liberal democracies (Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and many more.) In less liberal and less stable democracies, it has happened even more times. I'm not sure why people have some unfounded faith that their government could never become authoritarian and oppressive. I'm not saying take down every CC camera and get rid of intelligence agencies -- they are important tools for fighting crime. But there's a difference between a few traffic cameras and CC cameras in places people would presumably commit a crime, and burning targeted exploits for surveillance of truly notorious criminals, and just mass surveillance through banning end-to-end encryption. With zero-day exploits, the government is inherently limited in the surveillance they can do, so it's a limiting factor on their potential for abuse, as the more they use it, the more likely they are to be discovered and patched. But with no end-to-end encryption, the potential for abuse is limitless. |