I hate to break it to you, but this is not going to keep you safe from a state-level adversary. I could drone on about this for pages and pages, but the sad fact is that if you are a target, it doesn't matter that you are using a "secure phone", "secure OS", or "encryption". Time and time again, these systems have been broken or breached with simple tradecraft and subtle sabotage. The Pentagon has a concerted (and ex…
> I hate to break it to you, but this is not going to keep you safe from a state-level adversary. I don't really like this kind of anti-crypto argument. At this point I think making normal communications between normal people less embarrassingly mass-snoopable is a very worthy goal. For the time being, people who really, really have something to hide need to be extra careful (as has always been the case). Which is no…
At the end of the day, state actors all have finite resources. If we continuously tell people to not bother with crypto at all, then we are being self-defeating.
Right now targeting those that use crypto is like shooting fish in a barrel. So few people are using crypto regularly, that they are incredibly easy to single out. If everyone used crypto, the amount it would cost state actors to find and further investigate individuals would quickly overwhelm the current resources of those state actors.
Obviously people using these devices need to know they aren't foolproof and only use them for casual secrets that at most implicate, but not provide solid proof of activities considered subversive by a state actor.
Making the cost of dragnet mass surveillance phishing expeditions prohibitively expensive should be goal number one right now in the crypto community. State actors commit the crime of violating everyone's privacy because it is so incredibly easy and cheap to do so.
I don't know how much it currently costs for state intelligence agencies to investigate an individual, but whatever it is now, I would hope the the price were one to two orders of magnitude more expensive than it currently is and be at least in the 7 figure range. If someone really is a terrorist bent on causing lots of damage and killing civilians, it is trivial to justify spending 7 figures on surveilling that individual. The benefit of making it super expensive to surveil everyone, is that these state agencies can no longer casually surveil those it shouldn't be, such as American lawyers doing work protected by attorney client privilege [0].
At the end of the day, although state actors have deep pockets, they are bounded to some degree by market factors like what activities they can legitimately justify given the cost of surveillance and the the amount of talent they have available.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/eavesdropping-ensnared-...