Comment by anonym29
4 months ago
Ironic that a site offering anti-surveillance resources is itself hosted behind the servers of Cloudflare, a US-based company (read: must turn over all data to NSA whenever they receive a national security letter, if they're not already eagerly, voluntarily turning over that data) that MiTM's a substantial portion of all global internet traffic.
You gotta take what you can get. This level of concern is right out the CIA guidebook of how to infiltrate a group and make sure nothing gets done
I'm not advocating against the existence of a Flock map, which is a good thing. I'm arguing that it shouldn't be hosted behind a CDN that openly cooperates with the same totalitarian surveillance state that the site in question is attempting to help people protect themselves from.
This is almost like hiring an off-duty police officer from your local police department to protect you from corrupt local police department.
The argument isn't take the site offline, it's to not use infrastructure that is openly recognized as being subservient to the same adversary the site's authors are trying to protect people from.
But the NSA isn't your local police department. Your risk from the NSA is, at the very least, different than from your local cops, and almost certainly smaller. In my day to day life, I am not worried about being jammed up by the NSA, I am worried about some local police department.
I am also less worried about some random NSA analyst going rogue to come after me. If the NSA is going to abuse its power, it is probably going to be as a whole institution. But some local cop breaking the law because he has a hair up his ass about someone happens literally every day.
We can entirely write off every US-based company as inherently evil simply because they're American.
Or, you know, we could operate with an ounce of nuance and not oversimplify the complexities of the world we live in.
Most US-based companies aren't conducting MITM attacks that capture plaintext traffic for something like 20% of all global internet traffic.
Accordingly, most US-based companies are not in a position for bulk data collection and assisting the totalitarian surveillance state.
Cloudflare, however, is, and does. They are not a trustworthy party here, no more so than Flock itself.
MITM attack is a disingenuous label applied to a completely voluntary service that the site you're visiting opts into.
Why? Because, for many, it's a technical necessity to protect sites from the dark forest of the web (i.e., assholes.)
You can cast aspersions on the implications of that in conjunction with US intelligence access, but you're painting a completely fabricated picture of reality that borders on delusional.
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