Trump is an evil man, but at least by this point, he is basically a gibbering and insane senile narcissist from a broken and fucked up family with a psychologically abusive father.
It is my belief however that Stephen Miller, with no discernible tragic backstory or mental impairment, knows exactly what he is doing and he loves it.
Telegram for iOS lets you create “secret chats” but as far as I know other platforms have eliminated that functionality at the request of governments. And I would assume Apple technically controls the keys on device.
Jesus, these guys just can’t keep it in their pants can they? Why not use something with more plausible deniability like an actual business card? The fact that the administration responded to this with condemnation instead of outright denial and deflection like they normally do is pretty damning.
My theory is that there is no traditional white supremacist presence in blue cities during the recent demonstrations because they’ve all been absorbed into ICE during the department’s sudden and extreme expansion. What are ICE’s new hiring practices? What vetting is done to hire these new federal agents? Where is all this money going exactly? How can we actually know any of this during one of the most opaque administrations in history?
As events play out, look for more blatant evidence of a white nationalist paramilitary presence in ICE.
One of my favorite commentators is historian Heather Cox Richardson and she postulates that given Trump’s advanced age and inability to contain his outbursts, the administration may be propping him up with stimulants.
That’s a great question, and it is because it enables a chain of cryptographic controls that enable verification, tamper resistance, and secrecy while selling Bitlocker as computer security. It is technically secure, except that MS has your recovery keys and can just give them to whoever they want, like the FBI!
This way, they can mathematically verify:
Who you are and the exact unique machine you use (verification from a unique machine ID associated with your encryption keys and Windows account data)
Know that the data has not been altered in transit (tamper resistant hashing of your data)
No one else knows except them (secret encryption keys stored in hardware that only Microsoft controls, not you, Microsoft)
This architecture also keeps their data on your machine secure. If someone maintains an encrypted archive on your hard drive that only they control the keys to, say like a movie or a video game, who owns that data really? If it’s decrypted only for authorized use, you’re really only renting that content from the owner. This is called Digital Rights Management, and it’s much easier when this security chain is in place.
Technically they could do this remotely if they really wanted to and your machine were powered. Imagine what you could do with this power for every Windows machine on the planet.
It’s not a security flaw, it’s by design. Microsoft has been building this surveillance apparatus for years, and the purchase of government access to your computer and data using your tax dollars is a lucrative alignment of state and corporate power. Their recent design choices point to a rabid desperation to turn your PC into an Apple-style walled-garden.
It goes like this:
Require online Microsoft account creation.
Require TPM compliance to run Windows.
Forcibly encrypt the user’s data under the guise of “security”, even without permission or even user action. (Encryption is good! Right?)
Link your identity, payment information, data, online activity, and encryption keys to your hardware ID.
Record everything you do and use that data to train an AI model with onboard tensor hardware.
Exfiltrate the entire model, or just query it remotely for “online services.” Or, in this case, just have MS give you the fucking recovery keys. lol
All done “securely” with tamper resistance and mathematical verifiability that whatever is on your device is yours, and that you took that action with limited plausible deniability.
If you think you’ve got nothing to hide, think again about the current activities of ICE, law enforcement investigations based on reproductive health data, the pornography suppression movement, age verification, and the data harvesting of dissenting speech. What’s legal today can quickly become “illegal” tomorrow. The constitution is just a piece of paper in a fancy climate controlled box.
Even if you don’t care that MS and the federal government can decrypt your data, when Bitlocker is enabled your MS account becomes cryptographically linked to your identity and machine, making it a powerful tool for surveillance, identification, and DRM.
The funny thing is I’m perfectly happy with Windows 10 LTSC and if it was available without a corporate license, I would have happily paid for it. MS execs are their own worst enemy.
Watching a president with nuclear authority pick fights by text the way an internet troll argues online produces a special kind of exhaustion.
I’m eager to see FINALLY media outlets addressing this plainly and clearly. This man is last person in the nuclear chain of command with launch authority. Donald Trump is literally insane and being propped up by a viciously idiotic authoritarian movement installed to take advantage of it. To say it’s dangerous is a cosmic understatement.
For the past 60 years or so, humanity has had a loaded nuclear shotgun to its head and now a senile wild-eyed narcissist has his finger near the trigger. Of all the horrors we have not yet seen from Trumpism, this is the one I fear the most.
Trump is an evil man, but at least by this point, he is basically a gibbering and insane senile narcissist from a broken and fucked up family with a psychologically abusive father.
It is my belief however that Stephen Miller, with no discernible tragic backstory or mental impairment, knows exactly what he is doing and he loves it.