Ever since Edward Snowden told us all about the NSA’s rampant spying on Americans, I’ve been meaning to convert Windypundit to an encrypted site, and I think I finally did it. If all is working, you should be seeing “https:” in front of “windypundit.com” up there in the address bar.
(You might not see the little lock symbol, however, depending on your browser. That’s because the images in my Amazon ads widget are being served unencrypted by Amazon. In theory, those images could be intercepted and altered in transit, so your browser is letting you know that you’re looking at mixed content, some of which is not strictly secure. Apparently Amazon ads are infamous for ruining secure pages this way.)
It’s not that I need the security. The whole point of a blog like this is to share everything on the site with literally anyone who wants to see it. In fact, I’ve gone through rather a lot of trouble to make sure that happens. Ask the server for a page, and ye shall receive it.
My reason for adding encryption is really just to make a small contribution toward gumming up the workings of the surveillance state. This page traveled to your browser as one more secure data stream on the net — random bits for all practical purposes, except to you and me. There’s nothing worth spying on here, but only you and I can be sure of that. It’s one more thing that intelligence and law enforcement agencies can’t read, one more thing to waste their time, one more thing to discourage them from trying.
Encryption disguises the internet’s valuable data in the hiss of (pseudo-) random noise. Spying on the internet takes work, and that work pays off because the data is there to find. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make it harder for them to spy on us, and that will make it less worthwhile for them to try.
Be the noise.
Matt Haiduk says
March 28, 2015 at 10:02 pmSo, what you’re saying is that you clearly have something to hide because you’re hiding something? Sounds like a basis for a warrant to me.
Mark Draughn says
March 29, 2015 at 9:38 amHeh. I would argue that encrypting internet traffic is no more suspicious than sending a letter through the U.S. postal service. Or does using an envelope instead of a postcard mean you’re trying to hide something?
Actually, making them get a warrant would be a step in the right direction. Getting a warrant takes work. They have to fill out the application, a judge gets involved…it takes a bit of time. But without encryption, all they have to do is watch for the data to flow past a monitoring point. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to do that without a warrant or other legal cover, but I’m not sure there’s any mechanism in place to stop them. (There certainly isn’t for the NSA.)
With encryption, the pipe is secure. Even with a warrant, Comcast can’t give them my unencrypted traffic, so they have to go after the endpoints — my server or your computer. Whether they do that legally with a warrant or illegally by hacking, it’s still more work than activating a sniffer at an internet hub.