Edward Snowden

Winston Marshall had to leave Mumford and Sons to be able to stand up for himself. For anyone willing to throw away a life's worth of investment into their career in order to speak their mind, that's a good piece of advice. For everyone else, apologize.

That is horrible advice.

It is the goal of conditioning of any autocratic state.
You censor yourself so the state / party / activists dont
even have to act to ensure that dissidence and subversion does not occur.

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/on-censorship-pt-1

>""It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear, and every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.

Indeed as John Stuart Mill said: if all of society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person it would be most important, in fact it would become even more important, that that one heretic be heard because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view."

-Christopher Hitchens

Quoting from Edward Snowden: "I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they, like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them."

Reference: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

So the details really don't matter as much as the fact that this creates a huge precedent. And, quoting Snowden again, "There is no fundamental technological limit to how far the precedent Apple is establishing can be pushed, meaning the only restraint is Apple’s all-too-flexible company policy, something governments understand all too well." (emphasis mine)

So I might read through that PDF, I might even understand it, but what it can't dissuade me from is a persuasion that yes, governments can and will take advantage of this turn of events, and no, there is no technological or legal barrier that can keep them from doing so once this is in place.

again the scanning is implemented on the phone. That's what matters for me. I have some code on my device that works as snitch against me. That might just be a feeling and irrational, yet I really don't want that.

I know how it works. I don't use google photos. I don't WANT to use icloud ... Maybe I'm just too stupid, yet I enabled iCloud several times by accident due to updates/new devices.
That won't happen with my grapheneOS nexus5 :)

If you care about privacy and security, you need to leave iOS as quickly as you can ...
2 days ago:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gan4/apple-still-investigating-unpatched-and-public-iphone-vulnerabilities

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

> The agents said the Israelis’ technology, which helped carriers troubleshoot their customers’ smartphones by sending them an SMS link that enabled the carrier to access the phone remotely, could be useful for saving people’s lives.

A decade later:

> Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-pegasus-spyware-found-jamal-khashoggi-fiancee-phone/
[2] https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal

Here's an example of purple prose that has nothing to do with the complexity of cybersecurity, from his first post on Substack (https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask):

> Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms.

I read the blog post, but not the URL (Do browsers show the full URL any more?). I scrolled directly down to the content. I didn't realize he was the author.

He's a surprisingly insightful author, then.

The first post in the series (this is the second) makes it clear that this is part of his personal story:

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1