The value of HNDL is that it is a one-way bet. Once the data is recorded, it stays recorded. Decryption is retroactive. You cannot patch the past. Your metadata argument actually strengthens the case for concern rather than weakens it. You're correct that the US likely prioritizes metadata over full packet capture—but that's worse for anonymity, not better. Metadata clustering is when they correlate this across years.
I am skeptical of its size—it would be infeasible to capture every bit of information traveling through the internet. Storing all of that information long-term would require an unprecedented amount of storage and compute. Theoretically, if the US were doing this, allocating the budget and construction towards collecting any and all information would be infeasible
The infeasibility argument died a decade ago. You're understating how aggressively that's been deployed. The NSA's Utah center went live in 2013. It's designed for exactly this: long-term metadata and encrypted traffic storage. The budget isn't just "feasible"—it's already allocated and built. Storage hasn't been cheaper in the entire history of the universe. We're not debating whether they could do HNDL.We're debating whether they're already doing it. If they can, they already started doing so decades ago.
In the event that current PQC is eventually cracked, tougher encryption would likely be developed.
That's not how it works. The asymmetric cryptography protecting the key exchange doesn't get "tougher"—it breaks. Once RSA nopes out, every TLS handshake ever recorded becomes an attack surface. PFS mitigates this only if you assume the initial exchange wasn't compromised. But if they have the recorded handshake and a CRQC, they derive session keys. That's not a speed bump. That's a retroactive deanon. I fucking hate that all we do is move along with a little more complicated crypto because of fear. Fear isn't a good motivator. The entire fucking world has bad cyber security. Everyday is another hack. We will never have something that can survive a human lifespan this way.
all HTTP traffic was unencrypted, and yet the behavior of everyone on the internet was not immediately broadcasted and leaked. To believe that the totality of everyone's prior habits will be publicly relayed and held against them is to gamble on the total competency of the powers that be;
Modern metadata clustering with machine learning can isolate individual patterns inside that noise. We have capabilities now that didn't exist in the HTTP era.
On your organizational pushback argument: Larger organizations will develop post-quantum protocols, yes. But individuals using consumer VPNs and Tor? They're riding on infrastructure designed years ago. WG TLS 1.2 handshakes is vulnerable right now. They can't retroactively upgrade their past traffic. The encrypted tunnel from 2024 that you thought was secure? It's sitting in a data center waiting.
Awareness in one's OPSEC and its continuous improvement is tantimount to maintaining an online presence—speculative outcomes towards a global privacy death disregards the breadth of societal checks and balances as well as organization pushback to complete obediance.
Future OPSEC helps future traffic. HNDL targets the past. No amount of current OPSEC improvement undoes what's already recorded.
Yeah, well, that's the boat we're in right now. The most bulletproof thing I can think of at the moment would be using
SimpleX Chat or
reticulum-meshchat and setting up
one-time pads (or JS8call with an antenna, as the post documents) with your communication buddy. Nobody's getting in that! Data fragmentation through relays (and padding) is also another method that makes HNDL much harder to do, as implemented inside the aforementioned SimpleX Chat.
You're entering a level of schizoidism I haven't quite reached yet, sorry. If you want to feel safe, flee to Russia, squat in an abandoned shack next to a Kebab place where they have free Wi-Fi, get a DPI-bypassing proxy protocol and hope for the best. This is the best we get right now, and that's that. No much more one can do at the moment.
You're right that I'm not in the same headspace as you. But dismissing this as "schizoidism" because the threat isn't immediate ignores how asymmetrical power operates.
You say "the best we get right now, and that's that." But that concession is exactly the problem. We're aware that crypto breaks. We know CRQC is coming (maybe 10 years, maybe less). We know governments are harvesting encrypted traffic now. We're proceeding as if this is an acceptable baseline because the alternative is "flee to Russia and squat by a kebab place" which I still do not what muzzies have to do with this.
That's not a solution; that's helplessness framed as pragmatism.
The chilling effect isn't paranoia. It's rational response to observable conditions. Here's what changes when the state knows who you are and has your complete digital history. A future administration with different values discovers your history. They don't prosecute. They "leak". Your family sees it. Your employer sees it. The threat of release controls your behavior more effectively than a prison cell. How about social credits? We're not there yet in the US, but China shows the model. Once they have the data, the infrastructure to weaponize it can be built. You can't un-know that they know. This isn't about SWAT teams breaking down your door. It's about the permanent record becoming weaponizable infrastructure. The only tool preventing that is anonymity. Not through obscurity. We need actual cryptographic separation between your identity and your speech.
I'm not betting on incompetence. I want to not give them the data in the first place.
A God-tier stack is live RAM only OS > WireGuard > WireGuard > I2P > Tor. Each hop does add entropy but misconfiguration undoes work. The goal can't be "maximum hops"; it has to be "maximum isolation with minimal failure modes." more hops increase the attack surface and create more points of failure, but that is the trade-off for avoiding a single point of deanonymization. However, even this is just buying time. Every piece of anonymity software is, by definition, a high-value cluster for HNDL. By using these tools, we signal our value as targets. It's better than sitting ducks but we're more of the same, I2P, Tor, or not.
The goal is to blend into the crowd, but you cannot blend in when they fingerprint you when math catches up. Crypto isn't a shield. It's a timer. The timer is fucking ticking.
