A threat model for opposing authoritarianism

A decade ago, I published a book on privacy Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance." In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in - where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use it to pursue political enemies.

In the parlance of cybersecurity, I had the wrong threat model," which is a fancy way of describing the risks I was seeking to mitigate. I had not considered that the United States might be swept into the rising tide of what scholars call competitive authoritarianism" - authoritarian regimes that retain some of the trappings of democracy, such as elections, but use the power of the state to crush any meaningful dissent.

Julia Angwin

Democracy is not nearly as much of a given as many people think, and in this day and age, where massive amounts of Americans' data and personal information are collected and stored by the very corporations supporting the Trump regime, Americans have to think very differently about where digital threats actually come from.

Nothing protects any American - or anyone visiting America - from ending up in an El Salvadorian concentration camp. Plan accordingly.