Not sure where in the world this question belongs on here, or if it should be on here at all, but I’m broadly curious about the fact that privacy could be difficult to come by, these days.
We pretty much gave up our privacy with smartphones. Just wondering what could be done, if anything, by utilizing old technology? Not just regarding privacy, but elsewhere in a resistance movement? Is there a chance certain authoritative powers may be over reliant on tech advancements? (A-la a Martial Arts crook showing off his moves in front of Batman to intimidate, only for Batman to swiftly and easily best him in the confrontation by much more simple means)?
Clearly hi-tech surveillance of hi-tech communications is easy & cheap in bulk. Surveillance by any means of old low-tech communication was prohibitively expensive and labor intensive. Which is why we didn’t need laws to protect our privacy in 1940 or even 1960. The government could not afford to surveil all of us or even a tiny fraction of us. Corporate America both had no reason to, and really couldn’t afford to.
So there’s that.
Fancy counter-drone gear to prevent an attack by a flying grenade or baby bomb won’t stop somebody who rides up on horseback or walks up on foot carrying the same munition in a backpack.
etc.
Your OP is so cagily worded as to make it hard to see what else you might be thinking.
I don’t know if I’m sure what I’m asking for, specifically, either, to be honest… but I’m very curious about the topic and the discourse it may invite.
if that’s okay? Not trying to break rules or come off as intellectually lazy. I just think it’s an interesting thing to discuss and I haven’t seen anyone bring it up on here… but I’m no expert on the subject. So… kinda putting it out there? I don’t even know of it should be asked on here, but… I’m really curious is all.
I don’t know what “cornfieled” refers to, but I’m “afraid” (Should have maybe used less dramatic language) of breaking any rules on here. I’m not concerned about a secret police, but just openly asking questions on a public message board.
The most recent version of what the OP was talking about was Hezbollah’s use of pagers for communication. Since the Israeli’s had hacked cell phones with Pegasus spy ware, they switched to the more primitive forms which weren’t so easily hacked. Of course that had problems of its own.
“Cornfielded” means “made to vanish”. It’s a reference to the Twilight Zone episode/sci fi short story It’s a Good Life where people the reality-warping child villain didn’t like were “sent to the cornfield”.
Ok. If it vanishes, it vanishes. I didn’t really have expectations regarding it’s fate, but wanted to bring it up in case someone had anything useful or interesting to say. .
Not sure they are old tech, but carrier pigeons were used as an alternative to radio, for example by the French Resistance, who had English pigeons dropped to them to send messages back before D-Day.
Depends what tech. Obviously, plain telephone service gets digitized and sent through standard trunk lines. I wonder if line of sight laser modulation (or to get more primitive, blinking morse code) would be practical? If the light source were deep in the building set far back from the window, you’d have to be close of line-of-sight to catch it.
Many people get tin-foil-hat paranoid over high flying drone surveillance (probably for good reason) but it seems to me a network of wide awnings and tunnel passages through buildings would make tracking a person difficult. Perhaps plenty of outdoor lighting to help blind eye-in-the-sky. There’s the solution from Minority Report where everyone carries the same coloured umbrella. (Which IIRC was also used in real life?) The downside of this is that computers analyzing video would have no problem tracking a single umbrella in a crowd. I think it was some Sci-Fi story where people were wearing full-face gauze masks to confuse facial recognition software. Doctorow had a story where people wore baseball caps that projected a rapid cycle of faces onto the wearer’s face to confuse facial recognition. there’s also adding and removing lifts to confuse height detection, etc.
(I’m surprised at the actions of Hamas the last few days. I’m sure the IDF has high altitude drones taking video which they will analyze to see where Hamas fighters emerge from and disappear to. In the first ceasefire, Hamas specifically demanded no air surveillance.)
Reminds me too of the story the Americans tried to track the Ho Chi Mihn trail with sensors that could detect urine odor. Viet Cong proceeded to hang buckets of urine randomly on trees.
I was in London for the Mayday parades in 2000, and after the riots there I saw a group of young men on the subway (tube) changing jackets and such from their backpacks, so the station cameras could not match them up and identify the stop they got off going home from the riot. OTOH, a loss prevention officer where my wife works mentioned the bad guys change their clothes, wear masks, but forget to take off their distinctive $300 sneakers that make them easy to identify.
The Why Files, in “Quantum Armageddon,” says that after encryption is permanently blown by stabilized qubits, confidential business will be written on paper. It shows ancient manual typewriters being dusted off.
Yeah, I misremembered the title. I was not terribly impressed by it. I consider it alarmist/sensationalist, and it ignores a lot of facts about post-quantum cryptography.
Another one that came to mind - Magic slates - the plastic sheet thing that you write on with a stylus and can then lift up to make the drawing go away.
