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by anepoitilivam 21 days ago
"Fbi, nsa,.." - I dont care much about their acronyms or the organizational structure

"Still struggling to legally acquire information.."

I dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest. Now whether it was acquired "legally" i dont know, but when they choose people to murder abroad, I dont think that matters much.

1 comments

> I dont care much about their acronyms or the organizational structure

So I call bullshit on your argument.

> dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest.

I do. Perhaps I am there. Perhaps I'm not. Perhaps my name is there, but the data is wrong and/or misleading. I'm not going to deny USA's alphabet boys abilities, but I'm not going to glaze them either.

Nor I'm going to ignore that I might also be on the PRC's databases as well. They might not bombing people yet, but foreign policy can change easily.

I'm simply going to do my best to protect my privacy, not pretend that either of these regimes wouldn't kill me if they find it convenient.

That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally. PRC has an entire legal apparatus for doing this domestically.

Just because i call them collectively KGB - since the essence is precisely that - you "call bullshit on my argument"?

Though you are right I guess in what regards the legal apparatus of PRC.

But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative (though this is eventually what you become when your mouth is being consistently shut with a big fat lap).

As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.

> Just because i call them collectively KGB - since the essence is precisely that - you "call bullshit on my argument"?

Yes, because it means you don't have a good idea of the claims being presented. Perhaps there's a point in there, but you should think it through rather than just allowing it to remain nebulous as suggested in "I dont care much about their [...] organizational structure". Organizational structures matter, they make certain corporate actions easier and others more expensive.

> But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative

I appreciate the change in tone, but I have to ask whether that's really the case, as you're being ambiguous with the suppression methodology. There's quite a gap between "flagged into oblivion in a site" and "arrested for a year for posting anti-government opinions". Given the initial comments on your profile, you haven't done any favors in keeping downvotes and flags away. Not just provocations, but also gratuitous accusations. I try to avoid those because all they do is give ammo to the enemy.

> As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.

That's a oversimplified view about privacy. Every piece of information about a person, when enough is collected, can be used to identidy them. Collecting said information, specially when the infrastructure for that is not trivially available (as is the case in the USA in comparison to the PRC) is easier than done. When was the last time someone got identified by law enforcement in the US via their internet traffic? You are better off worrying about GDID in Windows.

A similar story goes for Tor. For starters, it was developed by US Navy, not the intelligence/law enforcement agencies. Second, the protocol is open and publicly being developed, so even if the NSA added a backdoor, it can be caught and removed. Finally, Tor is not the only option, see I2P for an example.

"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."

You think so?

I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.

Now try doing that in mainland China. Ask yourself why there isn't a strong active anarchist presence in the PRC despite their population in comparison to the US. If the actions you do actually are enough to cause the US domestic forces to go after you, rest assured, PRC domestic ones would already have got you.

It's true that the US may be more of a immediate threat to those in its territories, but to compare it to KGB is to either massively oversell US domestic forces abilities or undersell KGB's. Even in the closest cases of political executions, extrajudicial murders through abuses of force and qualified immunity, as seen in the recent ICE shootings, they still caused a lot of national instability, even within the right wing. Similar happenings in the USSR didn't come close in reactions.