There are many stakeholders with much to gain from the mass collection of data

Right but they need our permission because they want to hold on to power. This is what Snowden covers when he talks about cover for action w.r.t. surveillance programs. They need the anti-terror excuse. They rely on it. Where does that excuse come from? This article covers it well.

It’s not that long of a read. But I thought this was a gem worth quoting here:

One of the senators, Russ Feingold, said during the debate preceding the vote on this law [US Patriot Act]:

“There’s no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time and for any reason, if we lived in a country where the government had the right to open your mail, listen to your phone conversations or intercept your e-mail communications… the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists, than in the past. But it would not be a country we would want to live in.”

He was not listened to by his colleagues, and was the only senator not to vote for the PATRIOT Act

I should also mention he was a democrat (not relevant to the point, but noteworthy nonetheless).

This is not to dismiss what you’ve said. But the “unthinking masses uncritically accepting the convenience” will be under the influence of the idea that anti-terror justifies it. A forced-banking policy will acquire the 55-65% you mention under that premise. The convenience of electronic payment is just the lubrication that will demotivate resistance. In fact I suspect we already have a majority believing the anti-terror narrative both as justification and the effectiveness of it.

I was trying to recall where I read about that. Search is terrible. Took some digging but found it here:

https://mander.xyz/post/18090719

When “such engagement” is required to exercise human rights, I’m not as quick as you to call that optional. I expect to have all of my human rights simultaneously satisfied together in aggregate.

A mandate can be explicitly written or merely implied. If you need food to survive, for example, and a law were to say all food distributors must refuse cash, you can safely call that an implied mandate to use a bank. Or would you say they are off the hook for the human rights consequences, perhaps on the basis that people can freely refuse to buy food and opt to grow their own food?

art.4 & art.23 (employment)

Are you suggesting that the ban on cash wages is not a banking mandate because it’s an “engagement”, despite exercise of human rights articles relying on that engagement? Consider that art.4 entitles people to be free from slavery and couple that with art.23 which states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment”. In Belgium, it is illegal for an engineer to receive cash wages. But it is not illegal for a domestic worker to receive cash wages if that has been established as a common practice in that trade.

Do you see the issue? An unbanked engineer can freely refuse to work and live on welfare (if offered by their gov assuming no disqualifying requirements due to their ability to work), but then they must give up their rights under art.23. And even then, how do they get their welfare payment? See below.

art.25 (housing & social svcs)

Consider that no real estate transaction can involve cash, by law. Yet, art.25 states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services

I highlighted social services as well as housing because social services in some countries refuse to pay cash to beneficiaries. You cannot get financial aid without a bank account.

Regarding utilities, is that also what you consider to be an optional engagement? That people do not need water and power service? This may be debatable but I believe the right to housing likely includes a right to energy in regions where a box with walls+roof is insufficient to prevent freezing. I believe housing implies having a warm space. So when the energy supplier refuses cash, is that not a mandate to use a bank? If you are wondering where the gov comes into play in this case, it would be when the utility supplier refuses cash then sues the unbanked consumer in court for non-payment. When the court finds the energy contract to be “legal” and sides with the utility company, that’d essentially be a case of the gov mandating the use of banks.

It’s also worth noting that the UDHR is not limited to govs. The private sector is also bound by the UDHR.

Anyway, this is all quite far off from the original question in the OP, which remains unanswered.

(edit) And what about tax?

Some govs require taxes to be paid electronically. Tax is by definition a mandate. Both income tax and property tax must be paid electronically. There was a guy in Germany to was denied the option to pay his radio licensing fees in cash. IIUC, that’s like BBC, a mandatory tax. You could perhaps argue that income tax is optional because income is optional, and that property tax is optional because home ownership is optional, but I’m not sure the same can be said for radio fees in Germany.

There is no public ledger for cash. There is no attack surface on the devices of yourself or the other party by which your cash transaction can be compromised. There are no electronic records to exfiltrate unless one party proactively deliberately records a transaction. And if they do, there is no non-repudiation. There is no risk that any cryptanalytic advances can later expose the whole history of all cash transactions or even a chain of cash transactions. Cash transactions leave no trace unless you do them under surveillance.

I answered that same question upstream earlier today.

Ah, so I guess there would be no updates to the story. Patient walked in the end because the hospital demanded indemnity from late notifications.

There is a slight renaissance of feature phones (aka dumb phones) lately. The main drive is self-control. People trying to shake free of an addiction. Tech illiterates of course like smart phones as well but you have the security factor backwards. The smartest consumers favor feature phones precisely for their superior security.

So I believe feature phone users largely fall into the following demographics:

• social media addicts looking for escape
• tech-literate street-wise people who understand the vastness of the attack surface and risks of smartphones with knowledge about mass surveillance programs and loss of control (this demographic does their e2ee comms from a PC)
• tech illiterates

(edit) To a lesser extent:

• (policy/child protection)? I think I heard some schools (and districts thereof) are banning smartphones from very young children
• those who simply have no compelling use case
• pro-environment ethical consumers who oppose e-waste and the ecocide from the designed obsolescence that impacts all smartphones (even Fairphone needs to make progress here)
• the extreme poor. The US has a “Lifeline” program to give gratis smartphones to poor people, but I’m not sure they’re all aware of it, or whether the program keeps up with the chronic need for software updates that require hardware replacements (designed obsolescence)

Where is this? I think if he is in China or Europe he would already be excluded from society to some extent. But I don’t believe it would be a problem in the US (of course neglecting obscure cases like that of the Georgia attorney general).

There are so few of us without smartphones that are updated Google/Apple attached and subscribed that we should be collecting the stories of exclusion somewhere.

(edit) I take back what I said about the US. I just remembered a patient who was denied medical care in the US because he did not go to the Google Playstore to install the app of the hospital.

That link is unreachable from secure networks (tor). I can’t quite work out if you’re talking about a digital national passport, or a COVID “passport”. I suspect you mean the former.

I see no problem with border control forcing people to present a passport (or particular form thereof) if they have one. But a citizen is (or should be) absolutely entitled to enter their country, full stop. If they have no documentation at all, it would be an abuse of their rights to deny them entry on that basis. We might expect a citizen without docs to face a long inconvenient process to verify their citizenship, but it’d be a perverse injustice to deny them entry. IMO a passport should be a convenience, not a requirement.

I recall either Australia or NZ was refusing entry of their own well documented citizens if either they had COVID or were unvaccinated (I forgot which). Regardless of their COVID situation there is no good reason for denying a citizen entry. It dilutes the purpose and meaning of citizenship. Anyway, this is why I cannot be sure what passport you’re talking about.

I think the common term for “internet-izing” is #digitalTransformation. That’s the language used in the EU as they enact policy that ultimately cattle-herds people into a forced digital transformation. The quasi antithesis of that which wiser people support would be:

• right to be offline
• right to be analog
• right to unplug

I kind of favor right to be analog because it also somewhat implies a right to cash and to be unbanked.

Indeed in Netherlands I already encountered an e-receipt-only fiasco at a cafe. They forced me to order and pay by app as a cloud order (no cash… no paper menu either). I had a degoogled phone so I could not do Playstore and their captive portal did not work on my phone anyway. So a staff member had to lend me their phone just to be able to order. Then the order was trapped in their account. The receipt becomes more important when paying by card so I can check it against the bank statement later. They had no printer. Only e-receipts. And their app could not handle entering another email address than what the staff member already entered for their own account – assuming I were even willing to give them a (disposable) address as I oppose feeding Google on general principle and their email provider was Google. They could not handle pulling out a notebook and writing out a receipt.

Throughout the whole fiasco the staff must have been wondering “what’s wrong with this person? How can someone be walking around in public without a recent smartphone and all the Google services?” Probably wondered if I was part of an organised crime gang.

I’m also excluded from my public library’s Wi-Fi for not carrying a subscribed SMS-capable phone to get past the captive portal. So WTF, to get wi-fi service (financed with public money) you must already be equipped with tools that are generally redundant with wi-fi to begin with. They seem to be excluding the people who would need wi-fi the most from wi-fi service.

Not sure what your point is. Monero is far more traceable than cash. Any self-respecting privacy advocate would fight against the war on cash first and foremost. Anything else is less important to fight for because it’s less private. When cash is gone, gold coins will probably be more private than Monero.

If you try bringing 100k in cash to buy a car/house, there is a good chance it’ll get seized by police.

In the US debtors are /entitled/ to pay their debts using legal tender, and mortgages are not excluded AFAIK. In the UK, you can legally pay your mortgage with legal tender.

if you use a cell phone they know what store you went into. That can be combined with other metadata to know exactly what you’re doing. Carrying cash does not fix this.

You need not carry a mobile phone. I don’t. Cash is part of that equation. If I walk into an unsurveilled shop with cash, no phone, and no loyalty card to buy liquor, how does that get pinned on me?

It could become criminal in the future to not carry a smartphone (with the direction things are going in), but that’s not yet the case in most of the world.

mander.xyz has this:

mandermybrewn3sll4kptj2ubeyuiujz6felbaanzj3ympcrlykfs2id.onion

but it’s a disaster. Data loss. Posts go into a black hole. Use it on a read-only basis.

To reach the particular law office which has become a specialist in this particular case, yes you are trapped because they use MS Outlook. There is no way to exchange email with them without involving MS.

Victims can use any lawyer, but any other lawyer will need to research the case (at the victim’s cost).

Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:

• If there are several burner accounts then the admin would have to make it easy for others to create burner accounts or else it would be evident that all the burner accounts are just the admin’s, which does not solve the aggregation problem. It introduces complexities because the DNS provider and ISP would have the identity of the self-hoster. One could onion host but that greatly narrows the audience.
• It does not solve the problem for others. Everyone who has the same need would then be needlessly forced to independently solve all these same problems.
• I do not have high-speed unlimited internet, so I would have to spend more on subscription costs.

I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.

(edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is… maybe it does not work as advertised.

Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.

I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.

The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.

NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.

They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.

(edit) from the guardian page:

Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.

That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.

That story is focused on #CloudSTRIKE but the bigger more remarkable demon here is #CloudFLARE.

This story demonstrates Cloudflare acting as a proxy bully of their own customer, on behalf of CloudStrike by pushing a frivilous #DMCA take-down demand. CF took the spineless route as it sees CloudStrike as having more muscle than their customer. After CF joins the Goliath side of the David vs. Goliath battle, CF ignores Senk’s responses and keeps proxying threats.

Senk bounced from Cloudflare and went to a provider who has his back. #ArsTechnica publishes Cloudflare’s conduct. As embarrassment hits Cloudflare and David (Senk) starts winning against Goliath (CloudStrike), CF changes their tune. Suddenly they are on Senk’s side, saying “come back, we’ll protect you – we promise we didn’t get your messages”. LOL. Senk should do a parody site for Cloudflare too.

Senk’s mistake: leaving CF. He should have waited until CF actually booted him. Then that would have more thoroughly exposed CF’s shitty actions. Senk gave CF an easy out.

Interesting to note how a human on the side of civil rights who advocates decentralisation was treated with hostility by Cloudflare. Yet CF is fine with sheltering actual criminals.

Customers should take several proactive steps to protect their personal information and reduce potential risks: Be Wary of Phishing Attempts

Customers should rethink their stupid ass decision to use AT&T in the first place since it has been known for over a decade that AT&T is the most privacy abusive of all US telecoms, most notably their role in project Fairview (archive for clearnet users and wikipedia).

AT&T customers don’t give a shit about privacy. But I do have some sympathy for all the non-AT&T people who communicated with AT&T pawns.

BTW, the OP’s link avoids reclaimthenet’s shitty popup if proxied through 12ft.io:

https://12ft.io/https://reclaimthenet.org/nearly-all-at

Not sure it matters since the text is in the OP anyway… guess if someone wants to share it around.

Folks, FedEx has always been on the extreme right. Some basic facts:

• FedEx is an ALEC member (extreme right lobby and bill mill), largely as an anti-union measure
• FedEx founded by an ex military serviceman
• FedEx gives discounts for NRA membership (though I heard this was recently discontinued). NRA is obviously an extreme right org who also finances ALEC.
• During the NFL take-a-knee protest, FedEx is one of very few die-hard corps that refused to give in to the boycott. FedEx continued supporting the NFL against all the Black Lives Matter athletes taking knees and getting punished.
• FedEx ships shark fins, slave dolphins and hunting trophies. Does not give a shit about harm to animals (even when endangered) or environment.

I have been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Certainly being pro-surveillance is fitting with their history and should not be a surprise to anyone who is aware of this background.

The only moral inconsistency is that FedEx has a reputation for not snooping on your packages and seems to be favored by people shipping contraband. But to find the consistency it’s just about the bottom line. They make no money by ratting out their customers who break the law. But installing a surveillance system on their trucks is probably yielding revenue for FedEx.