Thanks, hope the NYT don't mind. I can't be bothered with proxies and VPN's - whenever I find a free one that works, the party doesn't last long, so I don't bother much anymore.
He was afraid to go to (A) any country with an extradition treaty with the United States (B) any US ally. It just goes to show that most of the countries of the world actually do like the United States I guess/or could've in his opinion been coerced to extradite him.
>> "It just goes to show that most of the countries of the world actually do like the United States"
I doubt countries support the US in things like Snowden because they 'like' them. They do it because the US is powerful and the repercussions of not extraditing Snowden aren't worth it to them.
It may seem hard to believe, but countries like Germany did operate by the assumption that the Americans at least have good intentions. Everybody knows that the US can and will push their agenda when they think it is important, but often nobody sees real harm in cooperating either.
That is also why the spying on Merkel is extremely harmful to American-German relations. It changes the view of the public at large on the US.
Actually, that is the oddest part of the story, to my mind.
Is it really true that Merkel, or any other major political figure in any major country, believed that they weren't being watched by essentially every other country, allied or not?
I can see that the public at large does not understand that, but the only reason I can find for the issue to come up is Merkel using that lack of understanding to manipulate German public opinions.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and it came out that German intelligence were listening to Mr. Obama's phone calls, I would at worst chuckle and at best be impressed if they came up with a new way of doing it. And I'd view any outrage from U.S. government circles as the cynical attempt at manipulation that it would be.
You have no idea what you're talking about, sit down. Hong Kong is nothing like China and the reasons he did it were well-documented and well-reasoned. I don't think you'd do something much less "ironic" if your government was threatening your ass.
How realistic is this in practice? On this side of the "great wall," it is relatively simple to create and use a VPN. Isn't it likely that VPNs are prohibited, or at least given special attention, within China?
I don't think they outright ban VPN just yet, but even if they did: get the OpenVPN source, XOR every incoming and outgoing byte with your favorite constant. That will already beat any packet detection engine out there (if you also take a little care to eliminate the "side channels", i.e. run it on a random port), while not compromising the security at all.
I wish we could just have dynamically mutating protocols, and Tor et al are certainly working in that direction, but for a single person with the education, this would be my way to go.
