How does mass surveillance works?

I thought “Brasil” was funny too, but it didn’t have an illness. It centered only on security and treason, I miss the Cold War.

lord Amazon has the rights’ for the 2020 simplified for Americans version of ‘utopia’ … released some week ago

antonis, you can shield your privacy. But it is never perfect. Sharing less information is good.

However to know what you can do again, you need to understand how it works. How others or advertisers collect information about you. There are many books about this. Just went to your library and search for it.

However the best way to avoid surveillance is to understand it and know what information others may collect. But this will change your self, by default.

the saddest thing is that even if you somehow managed to increase your digital security and privacy to near 100% you can never reach perfect anonymity because in the worst possible situation you are AWARE of yourself. so unless you can permanently wipe out memories you can never have true anonymity. there is still the fact that you have a piece of your memory missing that will give you away :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: it’s kinda like trauma …

I recall the view of threat to privacy during the GWOT, if the enemy (Taliban or Al-Qaeda) got your private information they would target an individual soldier with threats to his family (real or imagined). Because they got their names and addresses.

That being said, the recent news item about Iran and Russian getting voter information is kinda similar.

I understand that it is a complex problem. Dear @reC I do not mean anonymity in the Mathematical sense. This can’t be done. As you write there is a self reffering problem. I wanted to understand the basics of how these “special” equipment work. It was written that they patch the equipment of ISPs for example. However, it is well known that even individuals, not belonging to the public sector, usually rich people have such equipment. Obviously those can not patch ISP’s equipment. So there is a kind of surveillance that works independently of the ISPs.


might prove relevant to this topic …
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NSA ANT catalog - Wikipedia

@antonis, I’m sure you are still recalling: The Police - Roxanne. So and up to my understanding (not sure if this answers your questions), it is about new age of using AI: “IP telephony, for example via messenger services, is also to be intercepted with the help of „Roxanne“.

IMO, it is about powerful surveillance tool in hands of LEAs, and not about mass surveillance, as you referred to it within this thread title :slightly_smiling_face:. Anyway, this article from the Hellenic side source (December 2019) confirms my reasoning (approach) here. And, in opposite to „Alexa“, just don’t speak language that „Roxanne“ understands (VoIP) and you are good to go (Motörhead - Stay Out of Jail).

do you also speak Elephant ? :sweat_smile:

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I’m pretty sure that certain three letter agencies are using this kind of attack.

It wasn’t clear to me that this conclusion is warranted i.e. it depends on whether “our database” includes all public keys on the planet, all public keys in use specifically with ProtonMail, or something in between.

The overall topic is a bit beyond my level of knowledge but I think the conclusions are:

  • 2048 bits is not enough (use minimum 3072)
  • when generating secret keys (symmetric or asymmetric) do make sure that you have enough entropy - I use external hardware to supplement entropy
  • specifically for SSH (not directly relevant to that paper, I think) use ECDSA rather than older choices (which by now is the default anyway, I think) - more generally, keep software current and keep abreast of developments in crypto
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i believe protonm recommends that rsa 4096 bit keys should be generated on PC-desktop-class compute devices and not mobile phones :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

one thing with protonm that people aren’t aware of is that the encryption key that the contact list is protected with is SEPARATE from the other keys and i haven’t found a way to change it from 2048 to anything more secure. i’m probably too paranoid in this case but it wouldn’t hurt for them to implement an easy way for people to change it should they wish to do so …

another point. encryption keys have EXPIRATION dates and they should be manually changed together with the password/passphrase at least once/year imo.

i’ve seen that some people working in support at Purism with keys that haven’t been changed since 2016 … perhaps they don’t need to but public keys are … well … PUBLIC, so for customers peace of mind they should not neglect this aspect …

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Some good points there. Of course certificates have formal expiration dates but all crypto should be considered to have some expiration date due to ongoing developments and attempts to break. Crypto is never “set and forget”.

however it is very EASY to set and forget unless there is no automatic system in place that draws your attention when a particular secret has expired … another thing to put on your cron job i guess :wink:

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I’m not an expert, but for example: “All calls on WhatsApp are VoIP”, and this means to me that you need an App (on both sides) to establish telephone call with someone. Just in comparison, VoLTE doesn’t need an App for telephone calls and link to one of explanations is here: http://www.techadvisory.org/2020/06/volte-what-is-it-and-how-different-is-it-from-voip/.

Be the first on your block, order your copy today!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54610762

remind me again … how many Elephants are still around today ? :scream: :weary:

Why didn’t you ask that when your first brought up elephants?

Or were you just leading us on…?

who knows … i’m an old elephant myself …