Your privacy online is a thing of the past. I’ve come up with a theory that could potentially already be in use by government agencies. It could be used today considering the government can now officially get away with it.

Choosing Targets What makes an endpoint “suspect”? They can be identified via the blacklist method, wherein known “bad” sites are flagged and all traffic to/from them is analyzed. A way to supplement this blacklist is using a whitelist, where a database of all known sites is built up over time, and any new sites that aren’t in the database are automatically flagged for analysis. For ISP users, I could take this a step further and say that if the goverment gets access to ISPs, we can switch the term “endpoint” with “user”, meaning a dynamic IP can’t hide them.

Known Passwords Supposing it takes awhile to brute force passwords for users, it would be quite convenient to keep a database on all their known passwords. This database can be built up either by passively sniffing traffic for passwords and saving past decrypted passwords. These passwords (and combinations+permutations of them) will be used first in brute force attacks, greatly increasing a chance of a hit.

Conclusion Even with an elaborate setup such as this, one can argue that if they have nothing to hide, then privacy shouldn’t be a concern. Even if you don’t have anything to hide, would you still feel a bit nervous if a stranger was standing outside your house listening in on your conversations? After all, as long as the conversations don’t have anything you wouldn’t mind him hearing, what harm could be done? We know he’d never misuse or abuse that information he collects either… Right?