"Fear is the path to the dark side"; why you should avoid irrational paranoia
Master Yoda from Star Wars is a great hacker, despite being fictional, and we can learn a lot from what he said about being unnecessarily paranoid:
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. And I sense much fear in you.
When one is irrationally paranoid, he will become suspicious, distrustful, and overzealous, and demonise people who care about him, and cause him to lose property (including data) or even his life. As I noted in a tweet:
I'm a full professor at an ancient university and I got here through hard work, high intelligence (lots of very clever people think I'm very clever), persistence, pulling my weight and…
AMAZING AMOUNTS OF LUCK
I recall that in the first Kung Fu Panda film, master Oogway noted that “There are no accidents”. Not saying it's always the case, but many incidents happen to you because you wanted them or was prepared for them. Maybe luck has less to do with pure chance than we assume.
Thinking you have bad luck and being pessimstic may be self-fulfilling.
Following the Snowden findings, some people decided to go to great lengths to avoid the NSA, CIA, or FBI, knowing about their private lives, and online services such as Google or Facebook "fingerprinting" them.
However, do you honestly think the NSA/etc. hate you enough to harm you? In my #SummerNSA effort, I have said many unkind things about an idolised version of the NSA, and nothing happened to me, my homesite, and my other online writings / blogging. (And I announced the “Summerschool at the NSA” screenplay on Reddit several months before the Snowden findings of fact.)
Moreover, I had much earlier written and published “The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it”, which is a surrealistic political satire that criticised the Hizbullah at the time, but which I can also retrospectively tell had a lot of criticism directed at the Israeli military (= IDF), Israel, and other organisations. Since my home address is common knowledge, Iran could have killed me a long time ago.
On the Freenode online chat service, a chat friend told us that he was glad that Google has his gmail.com E-mail messages because it means someone else besides him has them, and so they are less likely to get lost like his previous E-mail messages got lost in a hard disk failure.
I keep most of my important digital data in public repositories on GitHub and other “code sharing” sites because to quote Linus Torvalds: “Only wimps use tape backup. Real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it.”. Nowadays, one should use git as a version control system most of the time, but the point is that one should publish or perish.
(Note that there are also Google Drive, Microsoft 365, and similar services, which are more friendly to laymen, have web interfaces, and have coarser-grained revision histories.)
My contact info is publicly available, and I actually wish for more people - of any sex/gender, ethnicity, talents and interests, race, nationality, etc. - to contact me and chat in any plausible medium.
I know many people that have lost priceless data forever because they decided that it needed the utmost protection. Family photos, months and years of coding work, a novel… all gone, because it *had* to be encrypted.
xkcd 538
A Crypto nerd's imagination:
Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Let's build a million-dollar cluster to crack it.
Friend: No good! It's 4096-bit RSA!
Cueball: Blast! Our evil plan is foiled!
What would actually happen:
Cueball: His laptop's encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password.
Friend : Got it.
Hover text:
Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)
Moreover as xkcd #538 notes, the bottleneck for revealing secrets is you and the amount of pain and intimidation you're willing to endure. When I was a teenager, a friend who was physically stronger, forced me to reveal the 4 digit password to my digital watch's secret phone numbers’ storage - not unlike that xkcd strip and the “give us the gate key” scene from the film The Princess Bride. Moreover, as the xkcd’s hover text notes, if your data is worthwhile, then you’ll share it far and wide.
On Facebook, a friend wrote that he wishes it did a better job at fingerprinting him, given he was often annoyed by its recommendations.
I actually even hope my thoughts have been recorded and I wish to share them. I have had many good ideas for hacks, memes, or fictional universes, and I'm not ashamed of my wrong, stupid, and/or "dirty" thoughts. I recently publicly came out with my deepest secret which is (brace yourself) the fact that I'm attracted to physically strong and/or muscular women. And… turns out I am in good company, and I felt relieved.
My assumption is that the universe's defence community records and publishes every important piece of information, and yet everyone and everything practise Wheaton's Law (= “Don't be a dick.”) so there's rarely a lot of damage. Moreover, people who have malevolent, destructive, intentions, will likely be too incompetent, careless, and sloppy, to succeed in being harmful. Some Internet "criminals" may extract some money from the bank accounts of profitable organisations (e.g. from that of apple.com which has more than 100 milliard dollars), but they won't dare to bankrupt any of them, much less to permanently delete a blogger's canon of gratisly-available content-and-code, that took a lifetime to prepare.
My interest in computer security is primarily motivated by my desire to have more reliable software, rather than to try to protect my “privacy”. Or, to clarify, I wish to prevent loss of data, information, knowledge, lives, etc. rather than try to avoid making private ones public.
So please do not be paranoid and overly possessive of your crown jewels.