Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, relocate to Russia - you know, a country that doesn't even have free internet anymore and just like China pushes for totally state-controlled national network...

Yeah, right.

To point a finger at Germany while recommending Switzerland or Russia of all places as alternatives is just beyond retarded.

So there have been a few (two, apparently) raids/seizing of documents in past 15 years, so what? Why no mention of other illegal raids or seizing of documents?

Ah, right - bias. You know THESE raids were different, because they affected the radical left instead of kiddie porn, drug dealers, neo nazis, or religiously motivated terrorists.

So we now know were the author draws the line, since apparently it's more important WHO does the spying than that there's spying at all. And of course a country where illegal raids can actually be brought before a judge and ruled illegal are much worse than regimes that don't even give you the option...

I'm not a fan of the German government, but I'm even less a fan of political extremists with a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-attitude.

Can you please make your substantive points without ranting or calling names? We want curious conversation here, and those things destroy curiosity like firebombs on a city park. Especially when the topic is in charged territory as with national themes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> To point a finger at Germany while recommending Switzerland or Russia of all places as alternatives is just beyond retarded.

Reminds me of the old joke:

   Use Signal, over Tor, over Switzerland

Well, most people these days cannot grasp what anonymity means. Anonymity doesn't exist, therefore you have to wear a mask to blend in.

I mean, TOR browser is great and all... But the traffic will be suspiciously obvious for outside actors that look for statistical behaviours before they take a deeper look.

I hear a lot of (even CS people) that say things like "oh it's encrypted via TOR so nobody can listen" ...which is just such a wrong statement and makes people careless about everything else, including starttls email and http requests by default with their web browser.

People assume they are safe, but nobody mentions how they should use their own biggest piece of spyware correctly: the web browser.

If ungoogled-chromium dies, there'll be pretty much no safe alternative available.

PS to avoid potential errands: And no, recommending Firefox is just as uninformed as recommending Switzerland. Use mitmproxy to verify.

From what I've heard, the Nordic countries like Netherlands, Norway, Finland, etc. and some Eastern European countries like Romania are people friendly (at least for now).

I quickly checked for the Netherlands and it seems there's no big practical difference.

The 2017 Act on Intelligence and Security Services allows Dutch intelligence and security services to tap into internet traffic without giving clear reasons or oversight.

Doesn't sound all that "people friendly" to me.

There's a difference between privacy laws concerning companies and public institutions (where the countries you mentioned score indeed very high) and access to internet traffic by certain government agencies.

The latter is legally possible (often without requiring strict legitimisation) in all of them. Officially there might be differences when it comes to legal requirements, but in practise government intelligence and security services have full access to internet traffic anyway.

Also, Netherlands is part of nine-eyes (and so are Denmark and Norway for that matter)

And it's not a Nordic country neither geographically nor in spirit. It has an economic system that's much closer than that of the UK and US than the Nordics.

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