If you are at least somewhat privacy minded person, you might have entered debates with
other people about how businesses and governments are tracking everything online and are profiling
our habits for future use.
You perhaps even suggested several steps you
took to protect yourself and that your fellas could do it too.
But then you realized you were just asking them to do something, which is always a no
go when it comes to protecting your rights.
The usual answers then go something like “Oh sure it’s horrible, but what they can do
with all that information right?
Sure if I can’t imagine a malicious intent of constant surveillance, there must be none.
Right?”
Or “I don’t care if they see my email or Facebook messages.
I have nothing to hide.”
Or the resigned one that says “Your encrypted messages can be intercepted anyway so what’s
the point.
Everybody spies on you.
THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES.
So why bother?”
And there is the security guy that wants to turn his country into a giant prison.
“But look at all the attacks they’ve prevented by watching us all.
Look at them!
You see that?
No you don’t!
‘Cause they didn’t happen.
Am I right?
We are safe now!
Edward Snowden is a traitor!”
The last stage of infection is the worst and there is not much help that can be done beyond this stage.
“But hey I trust my government”.
If you get any of these reactions it might have been because you didn’t manage to get
your message across.
It’s obvious that a phrase like “the government collects all your metadata” has smaller impact
than something like “listen, what you do now might be okay today, but at any point
in the future, there’s always something about you that will become a problem later
on.
And someone might be holding just the right information to do with you whatever they wish.”
By the way if you are knew to privacy, you can check out my online privacy tutorial that
I customized based on how serious anybody wants to take it – from two click installs
of some essential software, to deep privacy configuration and switching to encryption.
Link will be in the description!
Ok, back to the topic.
Nobody cares about privacy.
Just like no one cares about my channel.
Not even my subscribers watch my videos.
Seriously 6k people clicked on my videos and I have only 46 subs.
I even lost one sub as soon as I uploaded a video.
Obviously there are some people that are vigilant about their rights, digital or real-life.
And most people might feel a bit of concern when they realize the government can see their genitals.
But when it comes to actually making some steps, even as simple as installing uBlock
origin and Privacy Badger on your Firefox, that’s when we are losing battle.
But I have had pretty long history of activism, mostly environmental.
And while you can find people nodding to your arguments, god forbid asking them to take
action (unless it directly impacts their lives right now).
There are things I have learned over a decade now that I think could well apply to privacy
activism as well.
Take my advice as you will.
In any case I am trying to at least throw some ideas about how we can succeed more in
getting our message across.
Advice #1 Don’t be like vegans.
I’ve learned this on day one when I was fighting for protection of my local environment.
Fight for one cause at a time.
Don’t expect people to turn full Richard Stallman after you had a conversation with
them.
And please, for the love of FOSS, don’t pretend to be a better person because you
don’t use Google or Facebook.
This is what so many vegans do – they treat everyone else like garbage because they eat
chicken.
This can deligitimize the whole movement.
If you are privacy activist and see an asshole like this, don’t align yourself with unless
they cool their head.
Advice #2 Don’t expect everybody to be uniformly informed
Time is scarce.
Thus each human activity is subjected to trade-offs between constantly choosing one activity over
others.
This is so basic, but ignored too many times in today’s conversations.
People have different priorities and rightfully so.
Some people have multiple jobs and struggle live salary to salary.
They’ve got enough of their daily struggles and they don’t have any energy left to pay
attention to other stuff.
Which leads to my third advice.
Advice #3 Legal battle is more important than user awareness
Even if we persuade all people to VPN-up, use encrypted services, and ditch big brother
altogether, we still lose because the legal loopholes will still be there to prevent such
a scenario from taking place.
Digital communication needs to be protected the same way as physical – you don’t expect
your delivery service to open up your sent packages and read your letters to analyze
what ads they can throw to your face next time you order.
Your domestic communication should be treated as domestic, irrespective of how it channels
through the global internet newtork, or whether data centers have been moved abroad without
your knowledge.
Your private emails and messages should be private and not even providers of those services
should be allowed to attempt to access them and capitalize on their content.
Physical residence over technical liability.
No warrant should grant permission to violate rights of non-targets.
It’s more important to win these fights than to persuade your neighbor.
Advice #4 Filter out conspiracies All we know about the government spying is
what we learned from the leaks.
None of those suggests secret world meetings of lizard people doing orgies with devil.
What we do know is enough.
The NSA is tracking every cellphone on the planet.
All online communication is collected in bulk.
All that’s collected is stored indefinitely, targeting people without warrants.
There is no need to add up anything to this.
Speculations are okay, as long as they are within reasonable limit and not presented
as facts.
But additional unproven conspiracy theories just deligitimize all the effort of those
who try to point to the already proven existing problems.
We don’t have time to waste for conspiracy theories.
Advice #5 The liberty argument works People have to realize, and fail to do so,
that when the government collects everything, they really do have everything.
People might trust their government now, but they can’t rule out that the power will
always attempt to turn against them.
The system is rigged in favor of big interests, mega lobby, and influential groups today.
How can you guarantee that it won’t fall into the wrong hands like it has done so many
times in history?
Every government activity we accept today sets precedence for future to build blocks
upon blocks of abuse on top of it.
We really are approaching a state where it won’t be possible at all to live without
having the prying eyes on you every second of your life wherever you are.
This all got of hand not because the government is trying to protect our lives, but simply
because of the pure nature of bureaucratic politics.
The biggest police apparatus is being built by the world’s greatest democracy.
Advice #6 Learn and explain bureaucratic politics Every branch of government
everywhere in the world competes for public resources.
If health care gets more attention, that means department of defense is left with a smaller
piece of cake.
But defense is always stronger than anything else – it’s got oil industry behind it,
because military tech eats children off the roads.
It’s backed up by the military industrial complex, because those deals are always worth
billions.
And it’s got the strongest emotional blackmail – we need to do this because you are in
danger.
You don’t want to be danger, right?
Trust us we’ll protect you… by holding a gun pointed to your head.
The intelligence branch is defense department.
Both military and civilian agencies operate under single chain of command.
Its overall budget exceeds the entire defense budget of Russia, France, or United Kingdom.
They are so powerful that they can literally devote more resources into cyber offense than
anyone else combined.
If the NSA wanted they could literally shut down the entire world over Internet.
(Which they haven’t done because it would destroy themselves in the process.
Real bad guys never want to destroy the world.
They want to rule it.)
So I think these are my top ideas that I would focus on when communicating the amendment of
privacy to other people.
But you might have ones I haven’t mentioned.
It would be great if you could share them in the comments.
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