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?
Any unencrypted language is crackable; if you are simply using an alphabet to obscure English, it will be immediately broken simply due to frequency analysis of the the letters and word lengths. A whole unencrypted language is harder but there will be plenty of context clues to crack it. Encryption is by far the best way to ensure privacy.
thanks for your reply. Do you know if there are any ancient languages that (so far) withstood attempts of translation?
Not definitively. Ancient Egyptian hyroglyphics withstood it for a while but the Rosetta Stone cracked it (also I suspect modern computing would have done so by now anyway). The Voynich Manuscript is uncracked but there is a hypothesis that it gibberish, an uncracked natural language, or a ciphertext (encrypted).
So there is no way of knowing, if any non-cracked language might just be gibberish.
I am really surprised that even languages like sumerian and ancient egyptian and ancient south american languages were translated. I guess language has to follow certain rules, and these allow them to be translated.
this in turn would mean that our own contemporary languages like english, han, hindi would be deciphered by alien invadors (I know not likely lol). In turn we would be able to decipher any alien language we might come across in the future and be it just in the form of an intercepted age old radio broadcast from a distant system.
You need some sort of reference point to translate a language. The rosetta stone allowed for linguists to get their foot in the door for ancient egyptian because the same text was written three times in ancient greek (which they already knew), ancient egyption and another one i cant remember.
from there they were able to use what they knew to expand their understanding outwards.
you’re better just writing in your first language and encrypting using strong encryption.
keep in mind quantum computing is coming so you will need to use encryption designed to withstand that.
You’ll also want to keep in mind that when you delete a file on a computer it usually isn’t destroyed, it’s just sort of de-referenced and maked as “available space” so you’ll need to ensure that your medium for writing isn’t writing unencrypted to disk at any point or at least is overwriting those sectors after use otherwise what you write could be recoverable without having to decrypt
You also need to keep in mind that encryption is about being too complex to crack.
As computers get faster algorithms become useless.
Many state actors are recording encrypted communications and waiting for computers to catch up.
So use the most over the top complex algorithms you can to extend that hypothetical time when it can be cracked.
I wonder if they’ll be able to crack those encrypted insurance dumps wikileaks used to release anytime soon. I imagine there will be some interesting revelations in them
I never watched GOT but this has “winter is coming” vibes I am sure gpg wont work after quantum is commonplace I need to investigate other options as per your recommendation
GPG has long been capable of using ciphers that don’t use polynomial methods and are therefore resistant to quantum decryption. And new ciphers are developed all the time; a ton of work is being done in the area of post-quantum encryption and those ciphers will be available to GPG when they’re tested and proven.
(I still don’t recommend GPG to people very often; its many ongoing usability issues make it a non-starter. If you use encryption incorrectly you’re only creating the illusion of security, which is worse than having none.)
ty; 4 xplaining this.
I use GPG due to it’s ease of use on a unix based system as it often is prepackaged.
you need to be careful with this. the usual workflow here is you write to a file, you then use gpg to create an encrypted version of that file, then you delete the original. the problem here is that “deleting” from an operating system often doesnt actually delete from the disk. so your unencrypted file is often wholly or partially recoverable
Not quite what you’re asking for, but during WW2 the US employed Navajo speakers to use their language for certain verbal communications because it was so different from popular languages and hard to decipher. There’s a lot written about them out there. I would also recommend checking out The Code Book by Simon Singh, it’s a great recap of the history of secret codes and breaking them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeciphered_writing_systems
The Voynich Manuscript (Wikipedia, YouTube) has been challenging to decipher. The video covers some of the reasons why it’s still undeciphered, as well as discusses some of the analytical methods used to attack such codices.
In short, natural languages tend to leave fingerprints which can be used to attack crypto. It seems a mix of constructed language plus cryptography to obscure it is strongest.