The publisher should print excerpts from the government's furious objection to the publication of this book on the cover of every copy. I'm not sure I've ever seen a book that both the CIA *and* the NSA consider too dangerous to be read.
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When I wrote this line on the third page of PERMANENT RECORD, I never imagined the government would underline it with a lawsuit on the very first day of publication:
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Hours after the United States government filed a lawsuit seeking to punish the publication of my new memoir, #PermanentRecord, the very book the government does not want you to read just became the #1 best-selling book in the world. It is available wherever fine books are sold.
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Yesterday, the government sued the publisher of #PermanentRecord for—not kidding—printing it without giving the CIA and NSA a change to erase details of their classified crimes from the manuscript. Today, it is the best-selling book in the world:
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In recent interviews, I've gotten questions over if or how I use a smartphone. They're so dangerous for someone like me, so it's quite difficult to give an in-depth answer. But I published a paper with a few years ago discussing some risks:
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Phone security has been something I've struggled with for a long time. I once spoke with 's about how it's possible to physically remove internal microphones and cameras from a phone, but even that only mitigates a portion of the threat.
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But as long as your phone is turned on, even with "location permissions" disabled, the radios in the phone that connect it to all the nice things you like are screaming into the air, reporting your presence to nearby cell towers, which then create records that are kept forever.
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Software is equally important. The iOS and Android operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone conceal uncountable numbers of programming flaws, known as security vulnerabilities, that mean common apps like iMessage or web browsers become dangerous: you can be hacked.
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If I were configuring a smartphone today, I'd use 's as the base operating system. I'd desolder the microphones and keep the radios (cellular, wifi, and bluetooth) turned off when I didn't need them. I would route traffic through the network.
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We are nearly exactly that with Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone... maybe the best viable option you can buy today.
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Making dishonest comparisons and misleading people about the state of privacy/security is a bad look. It's a clear pattern for the people involved in your project, which is quite sad. Maybe promote your work without dishonest comparisons to others doing something much different.
(1/2) How is it dishonest? The fact is that the pinephone will have physical kill switches and separated modem. And with no binary blobs using malinline kernel. With full open source gnu/linux stack.
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(2/2) Sure the project have differences, but its a fair comparison as both provide privacy/security that one should expect from a phone today. Don't put others down to make your project look better.
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