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Limiting Your Digital Footprints in a Surveillance State:
To protect himself and his sources from prying eyes in China, Paul Mozur, a technology reporter in Shanghai, leaves just an "innocent trace" of digital exhaust.
[...] In China, evading the watchful eyes of the government sometimes feels like an exercise in futility. The place is wired with about 200 million surveillance cameras, Beijing controls the telecom companies, and every internet company has to hand over data when the police want it. They also know where journalists live because we register our address with police. In Shanghai, the police regularly come to my apartment; once they demanded to come inside.
That said, China is big, and the government less than competent. Sometimes the police who come to my door have no idea I'm a journalist. Usually the higher-ups who deal with my visa don't know about the house visits. The lack of coordination means one of the best things to do is to try to slip through the cracks. Basically, protect yourself but also leave an innocent trace.
I use an iPhone because Apple tends to be more secure than Android. That's especially true in China, where the blocks against Google mean there are a huge number of third-party Android stores peddling all kinds of sketchy apps.
It's also important to realize that because Beijing controls the telecoms, your domestic phone number can be a liability. For secure apps like Signal, I toggle the registration lock so that if they try to mirror my phone, my account still has a layer of protection.
The author goes on to describe how he avoids the Great Firewall, deals with the police demanding to check his cell phone, guardedly uses WeChat, and addresses facial recognition sunglasses. Further, he notes that there is so much government surveillance going on:
Amusingly, even the government doesn't trust the government. In reporting on data sharing between different ministries, I've found that it's not uncommon for one part of the government to distrust another to the point it won't share data. At other times, a government branch might not even trust itself to handle data.
[...] Then again, when it comes to poor privacy protection, the United States seems to be doing its best to take on China.
That last statement is, in my opinion, quite telling. I know my online hygiene is not perfect, but I do try to limit the amount of personal information I post online. Though nearly 5 years old, now, Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere is just as applicable -- if not more so -- today. I wonder what George Orwell would have to say about surveillance in today's society?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday March 02 2019, @03:14PM (6 children)
There are smart people who work for those companies, to be sure, but there are many more smart people who don't work for those companies and who could significantly obstruct or reverse them altogether. After all, it's not like those parties have access to some kind of math & science superior to what the rest of us have; it's the same. They might at some point realize an incremental advance that gives them a short-term advantage, but it's also true that most of the time they are playing catch-up because bureaucracy and institutional inertia will always make them slower than bright, nimble adversaries.
Journalists and popular media like to build up tech into modern day wizardry, where a computer geek can rapidly type on a keyboard for twenty seconds and crack into systems that took years to build. Those of us who work in tech are more inured to that sort of flash and dazzle, but even we can get taken in to an extent; we're always looking over our shoulder wondering where our skills stand next to our peers'. So, you know, maybe it could be possible for that level of tech magic...
So, let's route around the damage of surveillance and censorship. We have the technology, but more importantly the idea has occurred to us that we can.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheFool on Saturday March 02 2019, @04:35PM (1 child)
No, but they have access to a whole lot more money. They can pay for development/hardware that the rest of us couldn't really afford on our own. It can also pay for people that specifically attack our side's goals.
Not saying we shouldn't try, but it isn't quite that simple. They make a living out of this, but we don't (and probably can't unless we can find some patrons somewhere to make up for our lack of big data to sell).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @06:51PM
we just have to develop funding systems that aren't reliant on bankster whores.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Spamalope on Saturday March 02 2019, @06:15PM (3 children)
I'm still a fan of throwing rocks into their vacuum. If they're that aggressive about capturing everything, give them lots of wrong but not obviously fake stuff. Corrupt their database in a way that could only be cleared up manually.
I wonder how hard it'd be to make a tracking cooking sharing browser plugin that randomly shares trackers from quant and such so the cookies (and flash cookies and suck) move to different systems and can't be relied on. Or a limited VPN that redirects traffic for the top 100 tracking offenders through a random peer so they can track, but the identified user is always incorrect.
But... is there a way to get significant adoption through something like 4chan where there won't be mainstream awareness? Announce through one or more mainstream news articles shortly before their SEC filings with follow up articles asking why they don't mention the impairment to the product from the degradation of their product. It'd be fun to hoist them on their own petard for stalking us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @08:06PM
Random thought, perhaps you start with the source for Privacy Badger, it already knows how to separate out trackers...
I might run a special version of PB that crossed the wires of companies that tried to track my browsing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @08:02AM
Something a bit like this exists. https://adnauseam.io/ [adnauseam.io]
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday March 03 2019, @10:02PM
Are you talking about the "my humble and honest neighbor is a pedophile" even though he isn't kind of wrong or "my cat was speeding on the M20 in a mustang" kind of wrong?
I can tell you that they probably don't give a shit with the former kind of wrong and don't be surprised when your neighbor gets SWAT-ed and they are justified by the data (wrongly or rightly)
That's why this kind of dystopian stuff is so scary.