The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

I don't know how to deescalate it, but its beginning to feel like the most sensible solution is transferring significantly more resources and power to the States (which is precisely how our country was founded). Many states do, internally, have division, but broadly speaking California would be happier to run itself more independently of Donald Trump, as much as Mississippi would be happier to run itself more independently of Joe Biden.

It doesn't feel like this is optional; some amount of fractionalization will happen, possibly in four years, possibly in fifty, but it is inevitable. The choice in front of us is to either, ease ourselves into it using the democratic framework we have in place by significantly reducing the power of the executive branch and transferring more tax-originating resources from the federal to state & country levels, or; some form of civil war.

And, I beg you, don't form this idea of "civil war" in your mind to resemble the first one; it won't. For all the ugliness of our first Civil War, our second will be far uglier. One possibility may take the form of a second Trump-like presidency destroying the Federal faith of left-leaning states, causing the west coast to secede. Another; domestic terrorism, cyber warfare, untraceable and unstoppable flash attacks on critical infrastructure such as electricity and water, splinter military groups.

As left-leaning as I may be, we can't come out of the Trump presidency and Biden election thinking all of this is over. We can't ban Parler from AWS then wash our hands clean and say its a job well done. This rage is real, its everywhere, and there are four hundred million guns owned by civilians in America [1]. Gun control? A fairy tale. Suppression of dissenting speech? Someone didn't read 1984, or the Constitution. The only solution is to fractionalize; if people feel anger at the President, the solution isn't to install a new President, it's to make the position of the President one that isn't worthy of Anger.

The scariest part about our future as a country lies in the reality that this will never happen. We are driving full speed toward a civil war, or worse, and the immutable system we've built won't allow us to do what is necessary to avoid it.

[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/09/18/how-many-people-in-the-u-s-o...

Also, there are charges pending against people who had a stash of firearms in a hotel in Virginia, just across the Potomac, and planned to bring them over at a later stage. Firearms are largely banned in DC so the idea was to take over the Congress first and then establish a defensive perimeter.

Now, I didn't say it was a good plan.

Facebook has started efforts to roll out end-to-end encryption for its Messenger as well, using the same protocol as WhatsApp, which Signal blogged about: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/#:~:text=Facebook....

Posts and other content on your "wall" or "timeline" are intended to be relatively public, according to whatever privacy settings you have set up on your account, and won't be similarly encrypted; but the content will only be available to the people that you allow to see your account and post. That's more of a permission set described by a database like you describe. But you can share different posts with different groups of people you define; or participate in public or private/secret/invite only groups where content is only accessibly by those people.

Yes, that content would be accessible as plaintext by certain FB employees, just like your Gmail account's contents could be accessed by certain employees at Google. However, there are very strict policies around not accessing user content at FB by employees unless required for the function of the employee's job (e.g. investigating spamming, child pornography, and other abuse like that I would imagine; or assisting law enforcement with subpoenas or court orders for the content).

Notably WhatsApp has no ability to hand over message contents between individuals whose conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption even if it receives a court order to do so, because the encryption keys protecting that content truly live only on the user's devices, and the plaintext content never touches WhatsApp servers today. As long as you don't back up your message history outside your device in plaintext (and what WhatsApp stores on the device might be encrypted now too; I'm not sure), the only way for anyone to obtain the message history is to get their hands on your phone and the encryption keys & message history it contains. So if your phone is protected by a strong passcode and a security vendor hasn't found a way to bypass iPhone login security, as long as your iPhone is locked even the US government won't be able to get at your data.

I believe their was a court ruling that passwords to your phone are protected by the 5th Amendment against testifying against yourself, so I don't believe a court can compel you to reveal the phone password, but I'm not up to speed on the current case law. So if you lock your phone before an attacker seizes it, they can't get the contents even if the attacker is a government (unless they're willing to use physical coercion as in XKCD 538 [1], or indirect physical coercion such as ordering revelation of the password under threat of contempt of court, if that's permissible).

WhatsApp is also allowing businesses onto the platform, to use it to communicate with those customers, and some of those conversations may be regularly encrypted, not end-to-end encrypted. Those conversations are displayed differently in the UX of WhatsApp when the conversation begins, to clarify that they're not protected by E2EE. (It's arguably impractical to have real E2EE between a customer and a large business with, e.g., many customer service agents. What would that really mean? I personally think E2EE is most meaningful between individual people who personally know each other, not between people and businesses which are anonymously-defined, constantly-changing groups of people.)

I'm not a spokesperson for any company and these are my own opinions based on what I've read from public news sources.

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/