The Age of Anonymous Email Is Nearly Over | Hacker News Reader

The Age of Anonymous Email Is Nearly Over

cheapskatesguide.org

30 pointsDanAtC6 comments

We know things like XKeyscore[0] exist now so I imagine people changed their behavior after that. Having one account for your whole digital life can prove disastrous in terms of privacy. If all it takes is an agent to type in your e-mail and get a laundry list of all your other online activity, then you have failed at opsec (if you are trying to do good opsec that is).

This is why I have several accounts that are insulated from each other and also dedicated accounts for each type of activity (one account for Facebook, another for Twitter, another for Reddit etc). Basically every activity gets its own dedicated e-mail so you can't do cross-correlation of activity and it also limits the blast radius in the event of a breach.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

Having several dedicated accounts is a wise approach. However, I doubt many people are doing the same, because of the effort required. Opsec is really, really hard. All you have to make is one mistake, and you are done. But, I guess having several accounts at least limits the damage.

Cute that you think multiple accounts is even a tiny annoyance. We're talking about the NSA here, there are so many ways they can fingerprint you and link all your activity together, you can't possibly stay anonymous, the effort required would be ridiculous unless you have a really good reason to.

The reality is that is not about the NSA or any other government agency. They have infinite resources, compared to you and me. Most government agencies, not just NSA. A normal person has zero chance of avoiding anything with the government. Who has that much knowledge, except some exceedingly extreme hacker/whatever. No mere mortal man has the knowledge.

The real reason is to reason to have multiple accounts is to avoid commercial scum. And not ever, ever to use email providers like google and yahoo and microsoft, etc. I use tutanota. Proton mail is fine too. I have multiple accounts with tutamail. While google or yahoo can get emails that I send to people who use google accounts, they don't get everything. They don't get every single email to shuffle through.

Don't worry about NSA. Worry about google, yahoo, and all the companies that they sell the information to. That's the real issue, if you think about it.

> We're talking about the NSA here

And the NSA is not some magic eye of Sauron. You can dodge their gaze. Yes you need 'ridiculous' amounts of effort, but that's the price one pays for being anonymous. You need to make surveillance expensive, and this is done through good opsec combined with properly implemented cryptography (no side channel attacks possible). Snowden changed the game here. Many have gone dark and the NSA is now compromised as a result.

I really don't mean to be obnoxious, but those are some bold statements. Can you back them up with evidence?

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