[dendory]

It's all fine and good to point out how insecure SMS is, and various ways that 2-factor auth may have been improved, but I think the bottom line is that when your adversary is the government, police and telecom provider working together, the means you use to protect yourself are irrelevant, if they really want to bring you down, they will. The solution is in democratization and lobbying for proper laws to be passed.

[snitko]

The solution is to make it extremely difficult/costly for them. It is never democratization and lobbying, because for a person to see any kind of change in the direction he wishes, it may take years. And even then it's just asking your masters for permission. Technology gives us a quick way to bypass government, make it irrelevant.

[dcposch]

No, we need both politics and technology.

First, we need an organized and determined political movement to defend civil liberties in general and our right to privacy in particular. To an extent the EFF and ACLU fill that role, but I think we can do better.

Check out the NRA for example--I happen to oppose its mission, but I am still impressed by its effectiveness. The NRA can literally decide which political campaigns get funded. If a congressperson supports real gun control, suddenly they have a well funded opponent in the primary. We need that level of organization.

When our own ancient and tech illiterate congresspeople here in California try to ban encryption, we need to be organized so we can get together and replace them.

Second, we need technology that provides privacy by default. For example, WhatsApp for messaging. E2E encryption is not magic, but it does make mass surveillance a lot harder, because there's no central database of everyones conversations. It does a lot to protect ordinary citizens from fishing expeditions.

Deprecating plain HTTP, making HTTPS ubiquitous for the web, is also a huge win and is already underway.

Both parts go together. We need to work on the politics and on the technology of freedom at the same time.

[e12e]

> Technology gives us a quick way to bypass government, make it irrelevant.

If you actually could do that, it's very likely that said technology would be illegal. Just as it illegal pretty much everywhere to own your own tanks and fighter bombers.

Just because you ignore politics, doesn't mean politics ignores you. And puts you in indefinite detention, or execute you.

[enraged_camel]

>>The solution is to make it extremely difficult/costly for them.

You realize that it's you who pays for it in the end, right? It's called taxation.

[fauigerzigerk]

>The solution is in democratization and lobbying for proper laws to be passed

I'm not sure that's very helpful advice for an activist who is working towards the democratization of his country and for proper laws whilst being thwarted by an undemocratic government.

[frozenport]

Why are we trying to make it easier for them to bring people down? In this case they started monitoring the person, and got his contacts in under an hour. In a previous time they would have needed a team of people to find where he was staying and search his home.