The whistleblower who exposed social media’s dangers to teenagers says the next major legal battle will be against the AI friends that minors interact with
I would never be a whistleblower, because we’ve all seen what happens: The whistleblowers are imprisoned or exiled and the vast majority of the population simply doesn’t care, and we continue barreling down the slide of oppression.
Not always. I think some have done a truly lasting effect, especially Snowden and people’s distrust in governments not spying on you. Everyone started caring about privacy more since then.
What? Who cares? What fallout has there been at all from Snowden’s whistleblowing? Who was punished? What powers were removed? What laws were created or removed?
Yeah, I would use Snowden as an example in the opposite column.
Sometimes I wonder if people have conflated coverage with results, like how people are still demanding the release of the epstein files and not the heads of the people already implicated in what was released so far. Snowden, the panama files, ect. did not have the effect that should be expected. Like yeah the governments spying on you, and then instead of doing anything us people just rolled over and bought a new Iphone.
I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden, http:// was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.
But for some bizarre, unexplained, unreasonable and arbitrary reason - the majority doesn’t.
Yet, day after day, hour after hour, they’re complaining, complaining and complaining about the mountain of problems with Facebook and social media. People, make up your fucking mind already. Do you want to continue to be fucked with for more years by the very things that have already been fucking with you for the past two decades? Or do you actually want someone to take the bullet FOR YOU and TRY to do something about it?
Because this kind of sacrifice only works - if you fucking gave a damn. The more times you don’t give a damn, the more this shit continues running as is.
They complain about the problems they are complicit in creating. It’s like Boomers complaining about the homeless and younger generations ruining home ownership despite intentionally jacking up home prices to enrich themselves. Lots of selfish bastards here in the US.
And the solution to that is to scrub the metadata and introduce some light content fuzzing (to avoid variable keyword/phrasing inclusion traps that can be used for narrowing down leak investigations).
Like, yeah, there are hazards to doing an exfil dump like that, but if you know what you’re doing and understand the threat vectors that are likely going to be employed against you, you can cover your bases reasonably thoroughly - especially if you have a homelab with local ML/LLM capabilities that you can use (and, well, know how to use) to obscure/modify the precise phrasing of things such that it becomes way harder to attribute the leak source.
And, I’m not saying “chuck it into your local model and cross your fingers” - it would be an element of the sanitization pipeline. If you are so inclined to do this sort of thing, you should absolutely do as much manual and deterministic verification and sanitizing that you can.
It goes without saying that this is all at your own risk. But if you think it’s worth it, there are ways it can be done.
Install local ai on your hardware. Feed your data to it. Ask it what metadata can be extracted to identify chain of custody. Strip it off, ask it the same. Keep iterating until it cannot pull any useful meta.
Then leak it from a fresh system using a connection that is not directly connected to you.
Easier said than done, but still possible. There are actual crimes committed that people get away with all the time, they just never end up in the news. Unsolvable crime is still a thing, so untraceable leaks can be too.
If whistleblowing actually worked, I might be willing to accept some personal consequences as a whistleblower.
But like you said, it doesn’t work, so if you want to do something for the greater good, you’re going to end up doing something more anonymously and possibly more illegally.
I would never be a whistleblower, because we’ve all seen what happens: The whistleblowers are imprisoned or exiled and the vast majority of the population simply doesn’t care, and we continue barreling down the slide of oppression.
Or sometimes… (googles “Boeing whistleblowers”) they just kinda…
Shoot themselves in the back of the head twice and fall off a balcony
Welp
Looks like a suicide to me boss…
Not always. I think some have done a truly lasting effect, especially Snowden and people’s distrust in governments not spying on you. Everyone started caring about privacy more since then.
What? Who cares? What fallout has there been at all from Snowden’s whistleblowing? Who was punished? What powers were removed? What laws were created or removed?
Yeah, I would use Snowden as an example in the opposite column.
Sometimes I wonder if people have conflated coverage with results, like how people are still demanding the release of the epstein files and not the heads of the people already implicated in what was released so far. Snowden, the panama files, ect. did not have the effect that should be expected. Like yeah the governments spying on you, and then instead of doing anything us people just rolled over and bought a new Iphone.
I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden,
http://was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.It only works if the vast of the majority cares.
But for some bizarre, unexplained, unreasonable and arbitrary reason - the majority doesn’t.
Yet, day after day, hour after hour, they’re complaining, complaining and complaining about the mountain of problems with Facebook and social media. People, make up your fucking mind already. Do you want to continue to be fucked with for more years by the very things that have already been fucking with you for the past two decades? Or do you actually want someone to take the bullet FOR YOU and TRY to do something about it?
Because this kind of sacrifice only works - if you fucking gave a damn. The more times you don’t give a damn, the more this shit continues running as is.
They complain about the problems they are complicit in creating. It’s like Boomers complaining about the homeless and younger generations ruining home ownership despite intentionally jacking up home prices to enrich themselves. Lots of selfish bastards here in the US.
The message is clear: society wants you to insider trade. Just go to a non-extradition country before you leak it.
Don’t be a whistleblower. Just exfil the data and drop it somewhere.
Most of the time that data can be traced back to you and/or the recipient is going to want some sort of way to verify that the info is legit.
I think in the case of Chelsea Manning it was anonymous but they traced it back to her through the file metadata.
And the solution to that is to scrub the metadata and introduce some light content fuzzing (to avoid variable keyword/phrasing inclusion traps that can be used for narrowing down leak investigations).
Like, yeah, there are hazards to doing an exfil dump like that, but if you know what you’re doing and understand the threat vectors that are likely going to be employed against you, you can cover your bases reasonably thoroughly - especially if you have a homelab with local ML/LLM capabilities that you can use (and, well, know how to use) to obscure/modify the precise phrasing of things such that it becomes way harder to attribute the leak source.
And, I’m not saying “chuck it into your local model and cross your fingers” - it would be an element of the sanitization pipeline. If you are so inclined to do this sort of thing, you should absolutely do as much manual and deterministic verification and sanitizing that you can.
It goes without saying that this is all at your own risk. But if you think it’s worth it, there are ways it can be done.
Install local ai on your hardware. Feed your data to it. Ask it what metadata can be extracted to identify chain of custody. Strip it off, ask it the same. Keep iterating until it cannot pull any useful meta.
Then leak it from a fresh system using a connection that is not directly connected to you.
Easier said than done, but still possible. There are actual crimes committed that people get away with all the time, they just never end up in the news. Unsolvable crime is still a thing, so untraceable leaks can be too.
I absolutely would 100% never trust my personal safety to a slop generator, thank you.
If whistleblowing actually worked, I might be willing to accept some personal consequences as a whistleblower.
But like you said, it doesn’t work, so if you want to do something for the greater good, you’re going to end up doing something more anonymously and possibly more illegally.