As the title says I live in a surveillance state where among other things the government uses paid snitches, listening devices in your home, installs Trojans/malware in your phone and computer, even outside agents can stalk and observe you 7/24.
I may not be a target of any of this as I am didn’t commit any of the crimes required to do these (for example being involved with cannabis, or helping illegal aliens or some crimes that actually warrant this like organized crime and so forth)
However with the snitch system were convicted criminals are incentivized to incriminate others to save their own skin I am not put at ease with assurances that if you have nothing to hide that you would have nothing to fear.
I do not believe however that the surveillance state is intended to prevent terrorism or organized crime. I believe the true intention of the surveillance state is to consolidate power and nip any sort of true dissent in the bud.
So in imho if you were to call out the government on their bullshit you would stand to be victimized. Even if you are well within your rights with regards to freedom of speech/thought/assembly.
So if everything on your computer may be subject to government’s prying eyes, you’d need your own language and alphabet/writing system to at least retain the ability to keep notes and write a diary.
I would like to be able to note down my thoughts without having to fear the government can read it.
I was thinking of something like Tolkiens Elven tongue/language. I know it is a lot of work especially since it is only for internal use.
What’s your opinion on this?
I wasn’t talking about a cypher but rather a full on language. I got the idea off of native american languages being used in the war to prevent decription of secret communication.
If it’s an existing language then it’s not secure.
If you make up your own language you’ll waste a thousand hours and someone might use the notes you used to learn it.
Just use damn encryption, it’s easy and fast. Also has additional benefits. If someone wants to force you to give them/translate your notes you can’t do much (they’ll know when your translation is inconsistent).
With encryption you can hide a volume inside another one. If you enter the weaker password you can put decoy files there, with just your run of the mill notes. While behind a stronger password you hide your actual diary.
Using a foreign language only delays the “enemy”, which might be tactically valuable depending on the situation but the message will eventually get cracked, have no doubt about that. It’s not a secure way of hiding your information and it’s foolish to even consider it. Some forensic dude’s gonna analyze your shit and it’s all going to become 100% transparent in no time at all.
Encryption, on the other hand, can be mathematically proven to be EXTREMELY unlikely to be cracked even by the best efforts of well funded experts, when properly implemented and used.
Do you speak more than one language? Fluently? I speak 3 languages fluently, and know a few others to certain degrees. How long do you think it takes to learn a language fluently enough that you can use it for most stuff you might want to write? And even if you choose a weird or obscure language that will make it harder for you to learn, and if someone wants to read it all they need to do is pay any person who also speaks it.
If on the other hand you want to invent your own language and writing system there won’t be any other speakers to consult, however inventing your own language will take you thousands of hours, and if you only speak english languages your created will likely just be code words for everything because you don’t know about things like declinations or gender. As for the writing it’s easier to create a hard to crack writing system, however at the end of the day your system will either be semantic or phonetic, i.e. a symbol will represent either a meaning or a sound, if each symbol is a meaning you’ll need thousands of them which means thousands of hours to create and learn just a basic setup, if on the other hand you use phonetic symbols it’s almost a guarantee your language will be cracked simply because of repeating patterns. So the best case scenario is that you spend the next 5 years developing and learning a new language, and it would take a couple of months, best case scenario some years for someone to break it.
Let’s compare that with cryptography, you only need to remember a master key, if that master key is complex enough, e.g. 12 random dictionary words (which you can use several tools to generate), it would take all of the computer power in the world a couple of billion years to crack. Quantum computers might speed that up, but there are algorithms that work around that. How long does it take you to memorize 12 words? A couple of hours maybe, and you have something which is, in any meaningful use of the word, unbreakable. That seems like a much, much better deal.
And this comes back to an idea in computer science which is “don’t reinvent the wheel”, whatever you think is your great idea to encrypt your messages is likely already been thought of and discarded by the people who understand the most advanced cryptography algorithms today, and if you understood them you wouldn’t need to think on writing foreign languages.