[Cryptography] Ranking what draws surveillance attention

[Ray Dillinger]

On 1/26/26 12:22 PM, Douglas Lucas wrote:
> Hi cryptography list,
>
> This is another enduser-generated question, as I'm a freelance int'l.
> investigative journalist, not a cryptographer. As far as I know, there's
> no great way to make a ranking that thoroughly accounts for all
> pertinent environmental factors, all pertinent changes in social
> systems, and so on, but I'm still wondering if hypothetical rankings can
> be discussed. Rankings of what kind of internet transmissions draw
> attention from threat actors (whether governments, organized crime,
> rival activists, or a rando with a gadget hoping to swip SSN numbers or
> something as a small-time crook)......

Something that must be remembered is that all serious (state level) 
adversaries are definitely monitoring this mailing list. Some machine 
somewhere in the basement of at least one datacenter in every major 
country is harvesting every word we post here for analysis, indexing, 
tagging, and flagging, for later searches and retrievals each of which 
will be done by some randomly selected bureaucratic nebbish whose name 
we shall never learn.  And hundreds of commercial and government 
entities are harvesting all of it as training material for their LLMs or 
other AI, which will cheerfully summarize each of our opinions on any 
topic for anyone who asks.

By posting to cryptography at metzdowd, all of us (including you) put 
ourselves on the list of people who will draw attention from any 
surveillance state we have exposure to. China and Russia are the biggest 
foreign concerns. Their attention may or may not rise to the level of 
our awareness, and may or may not result in any mistreatment or any 
important information being compromised. But if any of us go to those 
places, local police and other intelligence officers will definitely 
know that we're nearby and know where we're staying.

This warning doesn't affect you. As an investigative journalist whose 
byline is on a lot of political articles, particularly articles about 
civil rights, violations of the constitution by the current 
administration, unlawful treatment of indigenous people, and Kremlin 
interference in the 2016 election, you're definitely already on those lists.

So posting here is completely harmless to you, although it's harmless 
for an unpleasant reason.

[ If not interested in USA politics, this is where you should stop 
reading. ]

We must also be aware that the USA is increasingly authoritarian, and 
already has most of the trappings of a surveillance state in motion. 
Every agency that DOGE interfered with had all of its data collected and 
"organized" by a bunch of hired guns who had no idea what the data meant 
and no idea about the constitutional responsibilities and limits that 
those agencies were subject to. Those guys only knew what they were told 
to do, and apparently did it. They were supposedly there "to save money" 
but wound up, very predictably, costing drastically more than they 
saved. It's my opinion that collecting that data was in fact the primary 
purpose of DOGE, that the people who organized this exercise already 
knew how much it would cost, and that the executive branch got a good 
return on its investment. Of course it's always a good return if one is 
able to reap the rewards from investing other people's money.

And as taxpayers, that was our money.  So was all the money that 
disappeared due to grift and corruption in the process. I think the 
creating vast and chaotic movements of  money administered by people who 
didn't have a very firm idea of what was supposed to be done with it was 
the secondary purpose of DOGE, loosening and confusing the controls on 
that money enough to drastically increase the profit margin on 
embezzlement. But that's irrelevant to the discussion here.

We must infer that the executive branch is now in control of a database 
that collected a very detailed dossier on every citizen. That's exactly 
the sort of database an authoritarian regime needs when it has decided 
to do something blatantly unconstitutional, like prosecute someone for 
political reasons. They need to sniff every detail of a subject's life 
searching for anything that subject can be prosecuted for. One of the 
compelling pieces of evidence that this database now exists, is that 
there's approximately no other way that a blatantly political 
prosecution of Letitia James or Jim Comey on the grounds of supposed 
irregularities in decades-old real estate transactions could have 
happened.  Somewhere somebody entered those names in a database and it 
came back with every detail any branch of the federal government had 
ever collected.

That database was also needed to provide targeted data for the purpose 
of rigging elections, but with elections managed by the states, the 
crucial information needed for that task was not in the possession of 
any of those federal agencies. Not coincidentally, in May the states got 
messages from the AG demanding their voter rolls and information on 
their elections including ballots from previous elections. About thirty 
states capitulated, deliberately subverting the intent of the 
constitution's separation of powers by giving them exactly what they 
wanted without a fight. Until then they were less able to effectively 
organize and target whatever the hell they're planning for the next 
election.

But this is the increasingly authoritarian USA. DHS is growing more 
paranoid by the day and ICE recruits are being trained in tactics that 
directly violate the constitution. Innocent people are shot in the 
streets (and then immediately accused of having been "terrorists") just 
because some psychopathic manchild has his ego threatened or his fear 
triggered.  Masked thugs are *ostensibly* deployed to round up foreign 
criminals but only ever *actually* deployed to cities that voted against 
the current president, where the administration wants to spread fear 
and/or provoke reactions that will allow them to invoke some kind of 
emergency power that will allow them to interfere with the next 
election. And people including citizens and other legal residents, are 
routinely "disappeared" from the streets by those unidentified thugs.

So far the "disappeared" people have been found. In some nameless jail a 
thousand miles away, sometimes weeks later, and often having been denied 
other important rights such as communication or access to counsel. But 
so far they have been found. If this continues in the direction it 
appears to be going, it seems likely that there will come a point when 
the "disappeared" people are no longer eventually found, joining the 
ranks of those who are shot, killed, and then denounced as terrorists.

Journalists and publications are subject to reprisals from this 
government for any unfavorable articles. Recently the current 
administration fired the DOJ's senior antitrust attorneys because they 
opposed a merger that allows Larry Ellison (a long-time toady who has 
been first in line to bribe Trump in every way possible) to put CNN (up 
to now relatively independent) under the control of Paramount (who have 
already capitulated to the wanna-be dictator). That's another necessary 
step in the authoritarian program. If you can get all the channels 
spouting the same bullshit, you can give people the illusion of choice 
while rigging an election.

And if someone becomes a public inconvenience to the regime, they can be 
prosecuted on Trumped-up charges by an increasingly criminal DOJ, with 
the assistance of the database that DOGE collected. To be clear, that is 
illegal and at least for now those people are winning those cases. But 
those cases are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend and 
most people simply don't have access to those resources. To be even 
clearer, those wins will become more and more infrequent as the 
work-in-progress of corrupting the justice system draws closer to 
completion.

So yes, we live in interesting times. If we do anything that's at all 
political, the process of "drawing the attention" of state-level threats 
has become effectively automatic. And in the post-DOGE era, the 
consequences of drawing the attention of the US administration are 
potentially much more dire.

Bear


(The same bear who is already on dozens of such lists and already knows 
damned well that this missive will definitely draw someone's attention).

(Also the same bear who has had to learn the twin curses of prophecy. 
Cassandra's Curse is to speak the truth and never be believed. Sybil's 
Curse is that even when believed, warning people of their fate does not 
empower them to escape it.

But "real" curses are bullshit. These effects are depressingly prevalent 
but not absolute. And "real" prophecy is also bullshit. My so-called 
"prophecies" are a complex jumbo-gumbo of knowledge, guesswork, 
projection, inference, and attribution, lightly seasoned with fermented 
pessimism, piquant confirmation bias, bitter experience, and just a 
touch of salty paranoia. I could be wrong.

Hope is neither entirely futile nor entirely irrelevant.)


PS.  It's hard to believe that the phrase "Trumped-up" regarding bogus 
charges actually existed before Trump was born. It's enough to make some 
believe that somehow the collective subconscious made some kind of 
prophecy. But real prophecy is still bullshit. Its first recorded use 
was in 1728.