In my book on “How to get your privacy back” (now that you have lost it and are not getting it back), I argue it is doable but people have to embrace ideas that on the surface seem the opposite. We need laws to protect our privacy.
I wrote an article below describing last week at the Department of Justice by AG Barr, and I was invited as Barr announced side agreements with both the UK and Australia on data sharing through the Cloud Act.
You can, and should, see most all of Barr’s speech which I iPhoned and put on the web for you. I also wrote a clarification of what I meant by a front door approach (which the DoJ, Australia, UK, seem to have adopted but not completely…and it needs to be completely adopted). I welcome dialogue about this approach.
So here are my medium articles and responses about this…all are linked off this article:
My specific law proposal is on a friends link:
This is the one that gives us some control over our privacy.
All that said, on end-to-end encryption, being a serious privacy nut, I wholly support the hope, but there a lots of ways to get at your data even with end-to-end encryption schemes.
I would rather have the law on my side than try to sidestep bad players in a lawless world. Unfortunately, adding lawless technology on top of a lawless world really has some problems of realism. Snowden’s book is a fine read in this regard.
With regard to open source end to end I like Stanford’s https://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ which keeps the code simpler, but I majorly approve of open source with open source interpreter / compilers / linkers / loaders etc, being the only way to be reasonably sure of understanding the threat model. The Brave browser will run that code.
That said, browsers are lousy places for random numbers. I suspect people should set up and use their old phones as bluetooth , near field, or hardline hardware encryption servers from which they can also send supersecure simple messages (so the plaintext never appears in a potentially rogue OS). A github site for that would be comforting. And old phone could be a nice ‘super smart ISO 7816 module.’
I do not know if this has happened yet, but an open source random number generator server on the web would be nice, perhaps seeded with an easy to publicly read and verify continuous, super high speed, random number generator like the sun.
