[stalfie]

You know, security is a nebulous concept until it suddenly isn't. I live in a country neighboring Russia. Russian infiltration, sabotage, and perhaps large scale political assassination by means of autonomous drones (like the ukrainian operation "spiderweb"), is a very real and frankly not entirely unrealistic worry of mine. This is in addition to the unfortunate reality of hybrid warfare, where an uneducated populace that gets their news from TikTok is a very real security risk, which has almost already crashed immature European democracies. And arguably it has already succeeded in crashing the US.

In practice, encrypted messaging, and more broadly the unregulated, anonymous nature of the internet is THE technology that enables this. Ukrainian refugees are essentially indistinguishable in practice from Russian operatives and pose a very real security risk. The loss of the US as a reliable ally, which in practice is the new reality, is felt here in a very real way.

I think this point is largely missed by hacker news. I am legitimately afraid that Russia might assassinate elected leaders and invade, and embroil my own country in a war that might lead to my death. And to be honest my worries are a bit overblown in my particular case, it is very unrealistic that this will happen to my particular country, but if I were to live in Poland they wouldn't be.

I raise this point in response to your quotation marks around "security". European countries have very real, and very pressing security concerns.

[anonymousiam]

Thanks for the excellent reply/comment. Having supported the US IC for the majority of my career, I'm quite aware of the threats to/from, and the behaviors of nation states.

It's easy to justify snooping. The issue (for me) is when the snooping unjustifiably infringes on my personal privacy. Governments will argue that they don't know that I'm not a threat, so they must surveil me. Unfortunately, those who are doing the surveilling can also be a threat to the people, even when the people are behaving completely in compliance with the law. You need only look at some of the recent revelations in the US press for examples.

Knowledge is power, and power corrupts.