[liberationtech] OkayFreedom

[Eric S Johnson]

> As an example, I told you about the extreme surveillance in Belarus (if
> I recall correctly) once and until the Swedish news covered it, it
> wasn't a reality for you; merely rumors or something of the like.

The STV report added nothing to our knowledge about the BY gov't's
capabilities. It provided very "good" publicity for the help Western
companies provide less-savory governments' cybercensorship &
cybersurveillance efforts--although strictly speaking, it doesn't seem that
difficult to get analogous technology from RU or CN.

> fully grok and that are part of a bigger picture. As an example - that a
> telephone can be intercepted means that it is *insecure* by *default*

Agreed (and with many of your other assertions, none of which I stated
anything counter).

> Probably far more than we fully understand if we include the NSA
> warrantless wiretapping that is still ongoing.

I think we all assume the NSA does that. But part of my point about threat
modeling & prioritization is, the NSA isn't the primary threat for someone
in Uzbekistan.

> "99.9% of VPN users are principally looking for cybercircumvention" -
> this of course implies that my needs or my concerns don't matter, they

Not at all--I'm just stating that the number of people for whom a VPN's
primary purpose is cybersecurity (instead of cybercircumvention) is
minimal--even if that 0.1% includes you, me, everyone on this list, and many
of the people all of us are in touch with.

> threats are real, the risks for many of them are high and that spending
> a few hours everyday might be helpful. In some cases, I think it is the

Everyone agrees more education is good. An issue we have to face, though, is
that we aren't always going to be able to get everyone to do what we want
(no matter how seriously we try to convince our partners, or threaten them
with real-life scenaria, let alone hypotheticals). Hence prioritization (to
maximize the usefulness of the attention we're able to get).

> That is - by default - you assume good faith of all of the players and
> anyone who seems to state anything to the contrary is paranoid. This is

Nah. No one among us is making those assumptions. That's why it seems
counterproductive for you to make the assumption that I'm making that
assumption.

Best,
Eric