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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

"private" or encrypted? It sounds like she was using WeChat, which... I don't think anyone ever had any delusions that this was truly private.

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No one is surprised that non-encrypted channels are being surveilled. What's interesting is how offhand it's becoming, that a police officer can casually peruse someone's private messages and apparently doesn't take much care to conceal this fact, even from a journalist.

Maybe something deeply cultural in this. An American couple I knew went to China back in the 90s, to teach English. They discovered all they had to do to request say, more towels was to mention it aloud in their room. Must have put a bit of a damper on their love life.

There are hilarious surveillance scenes in the british TV show Ambassadors

They are not “private messages” if they are sent though a medium where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. I’d even argue if there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, one should not bet one’s life on anything they send being private.

It’s gotten to the point where if a message I send touches the internet in any way I consider its privacy compromised.

From what I've heard it's pretty common for controversial private messages to simply disappear from one's inbox.

Can 100% confirm this happens on imgur too. Shared a link - I don't remember what it was, unfortunately - trying to ID someone who'd done something stupid on the internet, that sort of thing.

My "I just sent an interesting PM and it probably won't disappear but just in case it does this is a canary message" stayed, and the interesting message actually did disappear. The chat bubble remained, the message content was gone (so the bubble was tiny).

Feel really really stupid I believed "nah, it won't disappear" enough not to screenshot both messages beforehand >.<

TIL that day that the imgur moderators (that, like all unpaid moderator situations, have a reasonable amount of drama associated with them) have access to PMs. Nice.

The same applies to IRC.

An IRC network owned by PrivateInternetAccess, Snoonet, also applies censoring filters to your private messages, and redirecte them to volunteer moderators in case you should use words that they consider worthy of censoring ("to prevent spam", of course)

I think that says everything one needs to know when even companies that claim to focus on privacy do this.

Actually it’s not even about guessing or delusions: WeChat plainly admitted that it shares everything with the Chinese Government.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-...

I think most people who are not in this group would expect it to be private. My snail mail isn't encrypted, but I have an expectation that it is private.

> but I have an expectation that it is private

Regardless of what your expectations are, it's not private. Just because you expect something to be private does not mean that it actually is.

Yes it is. USPS first class (ie regular not bulk) mail IS absolutely private and may not be opened by authorities without a warrant (and tampering with them by non authorities is a federal crime).

What security agencies have done is scan and collect all envelope info (metadata) which was ruled to be not private (makes sense) but with powerful enough cameras, lights, and enhancement software that most letters sent in standard envelopes can leak their contents.

And exploiting security bugs is not unlawful? This is a secyrity bug in the transport mechanism of data.

> And exploiting security bugs is not unlawful?

Not when you have all of congress (minus a very select very few) wagging their tails and eager to please you it's not.

Do you think Chinese residents have an expectation that snail mail is private from the government?

Do you think citizens of western countries (eg. US and UK) do? Do you think the government respects that?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/29/report-nsa-... https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/29/5253226/nsa-cia-fbi-lapt... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_interception https://books.google.com/books?id=2OZgDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=P... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai... http://www.pucl.org/from-archives/81july/mail.htm https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/henryporter/2010/m...

She's a tech journalist covering China. She knows WeChat is monitored. This was more of a confirmation of how blatant it is.

I live in the US and have had snail mail opened without my permission and forwarded to me at the post office before. Once they put a sticker on it, once they didn't even bother. So, no, your snail mail isn't private at all. Government is free to open it and examine it any time they want. Legally the inspector is only supposed to open discount classes of mail, which is about half of them, to make sure you aren't lying to ship something cheaper, but in practice they are free to open anything and do.

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