One thing is for sure. These technologies don't make protest or revolution any easier. They give asymmetric power to whoever wields them (the state) against whoever doesn't (a loose collection of angry people on the street without the same tools).
This isn't the 1800s anymore where the most powerful tool was a gun, and you could distribute these symmetrically across state and people to keep the state in check.
Surveillance, crowd control weapons, access to banking, control over media, eventually AI and widespread robotics, have properties that empower the state. In the context of mass protest, the status quo gets harder and harder to dislodge.
None of this matters much while democracy is still existing, but it's a risk that's there. It makes the fall of democracy more of an absorbing state that you can't escape from.
The encryption gives asymmetric power to the people. Tor and Matrix for communications that can't be broken by the rich, no matter how powerful. Bitcoin for free transactions, vpn and torrent for the media etc.
You have a lot more faith in technology than me. There is a strong history of compromising data at rest (such as in phone backups) and getting metadata either directly or through side channels. It's not very hard for me to imagine a system that tells you who is talking with who, when, and with what IPs no matter how anonymized you think you are. That all assumes good opsec too.
My understanding is that Tor was compromised several years ago.
Pegasus alone means that once you become a target, you're done.
It also means these "defenses" are only generally available to the technically savvy.
That well might be true. But what about the people upu communicate with? They have messages from you, and probably don't have airgapped backups. So your ironclad backups don't matter much.
Telegram is Russian owned and run out of a monarchy. Telegram is not anyone's friend. "delete" is also not a black and white concept. There are many degrees of deletion.
Telegram used to be very hands-off with messages, no matter how criminal, unless they were hurting Telegram itself (spam). Then its owner got arrested for having actual knowledge of criminal activity and still not stopping it. Now it cares about reports, bans criminals and reports them to the police. There are rumours it uses keyword scans to find things that are not reported. Remember it has your phone number which is linked to your ID card.
I'm far from a security expert, but I also have direct security expertise, and from the way you talk, I am highly confident that there are a lot of things you don't know you don't know and I think you've failed to imagine the wealth of information available to institutional powers.
The original MS Blaster writer was found because Microsoft uploaded a memory dump when the author was creating their proof of concept. Room 641a is the connection based data reception we know about. Snowden's PRISM showed a high level of corporate <-> government intelligence collusion. Pegasus is generally considered an intelligence "I win" button.
Compromising someone's security is not a matter of ability, it is purely a matter of resources and will, and as the ruling regime changes from protecting rights, to protecting itself, the "will" for invasive mass surveillance will become much much stronger and your ability to remain anonymous will wane into nothingness. Corporations will increasingly have little choice but to compromise their users.
In your list of security features you listed a what's what of "social media" based security offerings/"solutions" in which the security providers "profit" from you believing they provide security.
Tor was compromised. Matrix is Europe wanting their own messaging platform. Bitcoin is literally profitable for providers, I don't think it's generally considered private, and mostly it's a hedge against inflation based theft. Your browser directly betrays large amounts of information and finger printing is largely considered doable regardless of your configuration, which makes VPN's questionable security, not to mention there are whole lock down configurations required and many browsers upload browsing history to the cloud by default. Torrent is very not private.
If you haven't heard the phrase "bits of entropy" and can explain what that means and why that's an important concept, then you are speaking far beyond your level of knowledge.
> Bitcoin is literally profitable for providers, I don't think it's generally considered private, and mostly it's a hedge against inflation based theft.
Communication does not cause change. There are two factions at war. One has uncensored communication (but has been conditioned to only use censored forms) and the other has unlimited access to guns, bombs, and napalm, as well as uncensored communication on all platforms, including the most popular ones where it censors and gaslights the other faction. Which one wins the war?
It's a trick question. The former group have been made complacent. No war occurs. It was won before it started.
That is a pretty disingenuous quotation, you cut it mid sentence destroying the context:
> It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.
I cut the context because the context doesn't matter.
Anyone making the claim that this likely the last era of humanity that anything is just wrong. The future (even just the future of humanity) is longer and weirder and wilder and more filled with unknowns than anyone alive now can imagine.
This is not the last era of humanity that anything.
We should still be protesting/fighting unchecked power.
There have been many last eras of humanity of things. The last era of gas lighting (lighting powered by gas, not the manipulation tactic). The last era of information being passed down orally. The last era of monarchs. The last era of human computers. I understand that you are saying there are no last eras of anything so this can't be the last era of something, and that's incorrect.
The post I was replying to was not worded as "the last era of X". It was worded as "the last era of humanity". Certainly things, practices, places, peoples, beliefs come and go. Humanity likely will end at some point, but that's not about to happen in any predictable way in the currently foreseeable future.
Incorrect. It was worded as "the last era of humanity doing X". It parses as "the last era of {humanity doing X}" and not "{the last era of humanity} doing X" (which isn't something that makes sense anyway).
No. Just no. No matter what what the thing is. It just isn't.
That's not a reason to NOT protest/fight unchecked power. It just isn't the reason to do it.