Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone?

• MolochAlter@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yes but you should write that by hand on clean paper

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• adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Depends on the recipient.

  And you could always encrypt a message against your recipient’s public key, print it out, and then mail it from a random drop box. You could even include a public key in the message so the recipient can send you back letters, and include an address in the letter they could reach you at.

  It’d only really work if enough people were sending such letters to enough recipients though, or the act of encrypting your messages in such a manner would itself be a data point.

  Also, you could print the messages on thermal paper, so they fade over time.

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  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Does it? OCR is still pretty bad, it’s definitely going to be more annoying than plaintext. It might be worth it, but that doesn’t really make it that much less of a pain in the ass to deal with. You might need to use symbols that aren’t alphanumeric (along the lines of QR codes) to make the conversion to plaintext more reliable.

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You’re probably right, but steganography with FEC should be enough to do the job; any predictive text errors would be caught with the checksumming.

      After all, Phil Zimmerman got the entirety of the PGP source code from the US to Germany as a book. OCR combined with predictive text reconstruction has come a LONG way since then. The big problem today with OCR is that it often corrects errors that were present in the original document.

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