I hate this comic because it is profoundly lazy, and I hate it when people hand-wave away meaningful security advances with it.

Hitting people with wrenches leaves marks that can be shown to the media and truth & reconciliation commissions. Wetwork and black-bagging dissidents leaves records: training, operational, evidence after the fact. And it hardly scales – no matter what the powers at be want you to think, I think history shows there are more Hugh Thompsons than Oskar Dirlewangers, even if it takes a few years to recognize what they've done.

If we improve security enough that our adversaries are _forced_ to break out the wrenches, that's a very meaningful improvement!

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kridsdale3 3 days ago | parent [-]

OK sure, but you don't really need to scale, just find the one guy with $500,000,000 in BTC that you want and hit him.

	▲	5f3cfa1a 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Again, lazy! Yes: if you have half of a billion dollars in BTC, sure – you're a victim to the wrench, be it private or public. If you're a terrorist mastermind, you're likely going to Gitmo and will be placed in several stress positions by mean people until you say what they want to hear. Extreme high-value targets always have been, and always will be, vulnerable to directed attacks. But these improvements are deeply significant for everyone who is not a high-value target – like me, and (possibly) you! In my lifetime, the government has gone from "the feds can get a warrant to record me speaking, in my own voice, to anyone I dial over my phone" to "oh, he's using (e2e encrypted platform) – that's a massive amount more work if we can even break it". That means the spectrum of people who can be targeted is significantly lower than it used to be. Spec-fiction example: consider what the NSA could do today, with whisper.cpp & no e2e encrypted calls.