Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever). When I hear land of the free, I immediately think bullshit. We are slowly losing our freedoms, what can we do to prevent this? I mean, when Edward Snowden dropped the leaks, people protested, but barely anything changed. What can we do? This post not only applies to Americans, your own government in another country may possibly does the same thing. Feel free to comment!
My feeling about that is that I should assume anyone who could monitor my traffic should be assumed to do so and I therefore should apply reasonable defenses regardless. Even if the government doesn’t do it, hackers around the world will. That means the moment it leaves my router, it’s assumed compromised.
Same for smart Internet connected devices. The government might be listening, but I certainly don’t trust the manufacturer to not be listening for the purpose of advertising either.
How many stories broke out recently of ISP router having been compromised by foreign hackers for years? Yeah. The Internet is the wild west.
In point of fact, the alphabet agencies have for years now adopted a “capture now/read later” approach to encrypted traffic they consider to be suspect. “Later” is code for “after we’ve got cost-effective and scalable quantum compute that can break traditional encryption”. So if you haven’t been keeping up with bleeding-edge quantum-resistant cryptography when generating and using your own keys, you’re probably going to have your traffic read by an NSA analyst (or more likely, some sort of NN-based “terrorist detector”) at some point.