-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 24/09/13 05:21, Jonathan Wilkes wrote: > Is Briar able to hide metadata that describes who is messaging > whom within the network from an attacker with a splitter on the > internet and a $50+ billion budget?
We'll see. :-) Briar moves communication off the internet wherever possible, and when communicating across the internet it uses Tor hidden services to conceal social relationships. So it may justify the attacker's budget more than current systems do. But I take your point that all digital communication is vulnerable to surveillance, and that our individual choices to communicate digitally may threaten our collective freedom. The question is, what should we do about that? Even the postal service is digitally surveilled these days - should we restrict ourselves to face-to-face conversations? What about hidden microphones - should we have all our conversations naked, inside Faraday cages? It's clear that we can't stay sane and guarantee that we're free from surveillance. So we have to make tradeoffs. I believe that P2P social networks offer a better privacy/convenience tradeoff than centralised social networks. They don't guarantee absolute privacy against an adversary with unlimited powers - nothing can. But they're less bad than current systems. > It's probably better to say that goodwill does not address such > moral hazards. People can develop and maintain friendships over > the internet, but currently doing so creates a toxic waste that > silently eats away at our collective freedom. Thanks, I understand better now what you mean by moral hazard. I don't have an answer to your question of how communication tools should explain that moral hazard to their users. I'm not sure it's even a matter of explanation - informed individual choices may still lead to collectively detrimental outcomes. Surveillance is a collective problem, and as such it requires a collective solution, which is to say a political solution. But that doesn't mean technology is irrelevant - it can contribute to a political solution in two ways. First, it can raise the cost and lower the effectiveness of surveillance, making surveillance harder to justify politically. Second, it can support political action by enabling people to speak, associate and organise, in private and in public. I think those are two reasonable goals for technologists to set themselves, as part of a broader political effort against surveillance. Cheers, Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSQZofAAoJEBEET9GfxSfMv1QIALUAunmk6oQDkToR5ryPWOQy Ip22NrEgIZw55QnzKYR/lRTJVoiRoAkakPisW7DrzVerGnyjKodsx2JRefaxKsHO JUCM/E8uGCyTxOp4macWWHDjsOtFABgoSf1sLH81TfYqIwrC52wyM2T1njEDlLrG phgdxkUHw1BX1BpVbaAhn0iSGRs/wC7j0qZ+6S3xMgPRM4pXxGLypC9WG4f1PWGS 42h+PWr02pNhPCEC+Ked3Lg+/ACHQf6atlV3gHT2NoqZy33eDbjLs6Rbo32EeLTl 3K7eC0wf11ICxh7Q+aSBNgbb+oZGDNxkxUP1IUDzmPDRTxLqLBUBnQPg7xk15YU= =t6TK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
