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horoscope_slump | 6 days ago

First, I think we can learn some stuff from looking at how the US government actually operated its known honeypots to evaluate the likelihood of Cape being a honeypot.

First, when it ran Anom, it went out of its way not to collect data on persons inside the United States. U.S. Anom users never had any of their data captured by the FBI because it raised profound 4th Amendment concerns. Cape is operating in the U.S. and is seeking U.S. users. Typical U.S. honeypots are generally targeted abroad.

Second, the U.S. government has historically not used former military officers with ties to defense contractors as the people that built and operated the honeypots. With Anom, they co-opted trusted members of the secure phone community. The very fact that the company is very open about its founders is a pretty good sign that they are probably not a honeypot because they would not make a very good honeypot for the truly criminal element.

Third, Cape is incorporated in the United States and seeking U.S. users. In the process, it's making some fairly aggressive claims in its privacy policy and terms of service about its products that would subject them to breach of contract and fraud claims if in fact they were secretly not doing those things.

Fourth, the legacy telecoms have a long history of selling your data, secretly cooperating in national security programs of questionable legality, etc. It seems like Cape can't possible a worse option than the status quo.

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hrimfaxi|6 days ago

1. Citation needed. People in the US were arrested under this operation though they were foreign nationals.

2. History matters until it doesn't. There was a time when the US did not perform science experiments on unsuspecting populations, too. The government does not get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to "past performance is not indicative of future performance".

3. We have seen sitting presidents pardon people for crimes they have yet to commit.

4. "Not worse" is not a selling point.