[wladimir]

What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your calls, mails, visited sites, google searches, for any time in the future to look at at their leisure.

It always reminds me of a shocking fact in Dutch history: In the Netherlands, the Germans managed to exterminate a relatively large proportion of the Jews. The main reason was that before the war, the Dutch authorities had required citizens to register their religion so that church taxes could be distributed among the various religious organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance)

And this looks so quaint now. We can only imagine what potentially damning information a totalitarian government can now find about every citizen retroactively.

Digital networks are increasingly an intermediate in every little communication and transaction between people. And with the internet of things, in everything we do, in the future maybe even inside our bodies (what's after Google Glass?).

We really need a way to prevent rampant data collection, otherwise the internet is a large threat to civilization. I didn't go into technology to facilitate some 1984-ish world government :(

[vixen99]

And of course the prime example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Putting aside questions about IBM's complicity, it's certain that Jews were indeed identified and recorded in their millions using the Hollerith punched card technology.

[mpyne]

So is your plan to move technology back in time to 1938 so that people can't be tracked automatically?

Given that I don't see that as being feasible we should ask ourselves instead what can be done to avoid a homicidal state, even under the assumption that they have more computing power available than in your iPhone.

[grinich]

OTR encryption is pretty good in this regard.

"If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised."

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

[Spearchucker]

It's also a poster child of secure F/OSS comms - easy to get the source code, and crazy difficult to have a secure conversation with a verified buddy.

There's no obvious getting started guide, no plain English explanation stating that Pidgin must be installed first, nothing about configuring for first use, and nothing about starting a verified conversation.

[greyman]

What about metadata? Can I also hide that it is me who does crypto-chatting?

[mkup]

So, maybe new encrypted chat app should expand encrypted text by 1000x or 10000x (add random garbage)?

If the government has a very big disk, then let's fill that very big disk with tons of crap.

[jlgaddis]

Unfortunately, I don't think that's a solution. Which of the following is more likely?

NSA: "We're at 95% utilization of our storage. We better delete some old stuff so we have room for new data."

-- OR --

NSA: "Hey Congress, encryption usage has skyrocketed! We need more money to buy more storage to save all this encrypted data we're capturing!"