I see value in this piece, but I still think it's overly negative. Nation states with almost unlimited surveillance capabilities is worrisome and do not mean to slight that, but it's operating on leaky bucket model.
A bucket leaks if it has a single small hole somewhere below the waterline. Security of computer systems is sometimes thought about along the same lines in that attackers only need to find a single vulnerability but defenders need to protect against them all. But this ignores resource constraints. Your defenses only need to be strong enough to deter potential attackers, to be too difficult to bother with, to be too costly to breach. There are targets that are "too" valuable to derive protection from this.
The bucket thinking also abstracts out the value of privacy. It's not merely hiding things-it's also about intimacy, avoiding abuses of state power and so on. That's what is lost with bucket thinking.
Moonside wrote
I see value in this piece, but I still think it's overly negative. Nation states with almost unlimited surveillance capabilities is worrisome and do not mean to slight that, but it's operating on leaky bucket model.
A bucket leaks if it has a single small hole somewhere below the waterline. Security of computer systems is sometimes thought about along the same lines in that attackers only need to find a single vulnerability but defenders need to protect against them all. But this ignores resource constraints. Your defenses only need to be strong enough to deter potential attackers, to be too difficult to bother with, to be too costly to breach. There are targets that are "too" valuable to derive protection from this.
The bucket thinking also abstracts out the value of privacy. It's not merely hiding things-it's also about intimacy, avoiding abuses of state power and so on. That's what is lost with bucket thinking.