Irreal

From time to time I’ve mentioned articles that help you maintain your privacy. Some of us grumpy and misanthropic types have nothing to hide but do everything we can to maintain our privacy out of orneriness. If that sounds like you, let me recommend The Ultimate Privacy Guide.

It’s a long (almost 13,000 words) article that covers just about everything you need to know to keep your online activity as private as possible. Pretty much every expert agrees that if the NSA really wants to snoop on you in particular, there’s not much you can do except to abandon all communication technology. Fortunately, the government doesn’t have the wherewithal to give everyone that sort of individualized attention so taking steps to secure your communications makes sense.

The authors suggest that you not try to read to whole thing at once but rather that you choose the topic that you’re interested in at any particular time. Probably your best bet is to bookmark the article so that you can look up topics as you need them.

I’ve written before about the Iron Law of Data Collection, the idea that no matter the rationale given for the collection of the data or the promises made about its confidentiality there will always be mission creep that finds new uses for the data and its eventual abuse. The two links above give examples of it in action. Now, we have another example, this time from the UK.

In a sense, this is the worst betrayal of those I’ve written about. The government promises you that they have to collect your financial information in order to administer the income tax system but that that information is held in absolute confidence and will not be released outside the government¹. That promise is necessary to prevent large scale cheating and resistance to the HMRC.

The UK case is particularly troubling because the reason for breaking the promise is so venal. The HMRC is proposing the sell the information to “third parties,” including private companies. As one of the commenters said, “…it has proven there is still life in the 19th century adage ‘the political classes would sell their own grandmothers for a shilling’.”

Sadly, the Iron Law marches on. Here’s the next example of its application.

An excellent suggestion from Ryan Paul (via Jean-Philippe Paradis)

Let’s start describing NSA’s activities as “state-sponsored cyberterrorism” because that’s what the US would call it if anybody else did it.

— Ryan Paul (@segphault) April 11, 2014

Klint Finley over at Wired has an article that discusses the pros and cons of encrypting the Internet. By that he means using SSL/TLS instead of plain HTTP for every connection. It’s not a new idea. For example, the EFF has its HTTPS Everywhere program that includes a plugin for many browsers that always tries to establish an HTTPS connection even if the site defaults to HTTP.

I really like this idea, at least in principle. It makes man-in-the-middle attacks difficult if not impossible and goes a long way towards keeping the NSA’s nose out of our business. On the other hand, does it really make sense for, say, me to force HTTPS connections to Irreal? There’s certainly no first order reason to do so. There’s no sensitive data being transferred and Irreal is hardly subversive enough that anyone would worry about having the government or anyone else see what they’re reading on the site.

Of course there’s the benefit that it makes the Internet a sea of unintelligible bits and thus makes government snooping really difficult. Perhaps that’s reason enough. What do you think? Should all sites—even the innocuous like Irreal—use SSL/TLS or is the benefit not worth the cost?