Privacy-enhancing hardware and the media problem

Violet Blue had a great post on ZDnet last week, Charlatans: The new wave of privacy profiteers, on the most recent mainstream privacy hardware devices, and the consistent stream of the most recognized experts and journalists promoting them as great new solutions.

Too bad Violet did not carry it to its ultimate conclusions. She in fact ultimately blamed it on users and suggested that they exercise more criticism. But how can citizens be blamed when: (1) A tight-knit group of those identified as experts in the media and sectoral media keep ailing at inadequate solutions or solutions ,where no info is even available for an assessment (almost of all of them), (2) a reliable recognised standard to compare 2 solutions does not exist.

The problem is not citizens but the terrible mix on incompetence, arrogance, conflict of interest and self-censorship of many of the most recognized mainstream sector experts and journalists. Even those who figured how wrong they were in the last 18 month, still have very hard time admitting they made huge errors of judgement.

It is a castle of incompetence, lies and liars that can and should all come down crashing, if we are ever to have even a demand for constitutionally-meaningful hardware-level privacy. If it doesn’t, the added safeguards, auditability and extreme independent auditing levels – and added costs! – would not be perceived by the media, experts and the users from the inadequate solutions out there. Fortunately there are very high-end customers that can afford knowledgeable advisors that guide them towards adequate techs.

Dear Violet, there is lot’s of evidence, much of which you have produced already in your article. Look also at what happened to Pando and Tor. It would be very risky for Violet, as an IT journalist. You could find yourself is a worse position than Pando did.