He talks about how he and his associates were dissidents and had meetings and they agreed on a protocol to talk gibberish at the end. Fake, military sounding code words and stuff. It was a fun thing to do. Years later they discovered the amount of head-aches and resource drain they caused on the secret police who tried in vain to discover the meaning in this nonsense, thinking that perhaps there was some serious stuff going on.
That is why I hope one good thing comes out of it, and that is people might start taking cryptography slightly more seriously and they'll also start actively fighting back. This is one way and it is fun too. (for some strange value of "fun").
Another great Žižek story/parable about surveillance is the red ink one, which I think is also relevant here:
So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=1614
He talks about how he and his associates were dissidents and had meetings and they agreed on a protocol to talk gibberish at the end. Fake, military sounding code words and stuff. It was a fun thing to do. Years later they discovered the amount of head-aches and resource drain they caused on the secret police who tried in vain to discover the meaning in this nonsense, thinking that perhaps there was some serious stuff going on.
That is why I hope one good thing comes out of it, and that is people might start taking cryptography slightly more seriously and they'll also start actively fighting back. This is one way and it is fun too. (for some strange value of "fun").