honestly just accept there’s dirt on you. as reality sets in and we realize that it’s all out there we will start to have new social norms and the social contract will change according to it. it will be considered rude to look at someone’s dirt, it will be considered rude to bring it up etc.

now the government putting us in camps is a whole different story. i think that in this economy and situation we just have to accept that setting up concentration camps is just not productive anymore and that’s the main reason why people won’t do it. what’s the point in throwing dissenters in a camp when they’re wage slaves anyway? there’s no incentive for it anymore

One time I was watching TV with my wife and then we decided to look something up on her phone. Half an hour later we got ads for it on my phone. Like it was listening to us or both being on the same WiFi meant it knew what was being searched on the other device.

I think that targeted advertising is really the worst of it for most of us though

The idea that you are being constantly surveilled is a bit of a propaganda thing. There is no doubt a bunch of data being collected from your digital signature. But the Idea that anyone is looking at it isn’t very realistic. Especially if you’re not actively participating/leading a large revolutionary movement.

They want you to fear so much that you never act. Have escape plans and minimize the information given and poison the information is just about the best you can do. But the sacrifices and practices you’ve made are inspiring and no doubt impactful on your safety. Not to mention the skills you learned doing such.

It doesn’t occupy my mind outside of stuff I try to keep hidden. For that you can always just have a conversation away from tech in the middle of the woods or something.

I dont have much to contribute, I just want to say I occasionally suffer from the same paranoia. Yet the potential future we fear is a current reality for many people. Its a privilege to worry that we could potentially be the victims of fascism some distant time from now. One must come to terms with this possibility, real or perceived.

Just like anything else, privacy is not an individual pursuit - it is collective. Actual privacy and security can’t be achieved without a collective superstructure which upholds it.

A concrete example of this is the degree of surveillance encountered in public spaces. Are you going to attempt to map a route which bypasses flock cameras on your commute to work? Are you going to avoid going to grocery stores? You literally can’t avoid these things without collective grassroots power which abolishes the means of intrusive surveillance.

Another example in this same realm of thought is the question of gun ownership. As communists, we don’t need to concern ourselves with being individually armed, because when our degree of organization reaches a certain threshold, our integration within the working class will provide the resources needed to be armed when the situation requires it.

Don’t get me wrong, opsec and threat modeling are important both at an individual and organizational level, but it’s also equally important to not get bogged down in the “privacy enthusiast” stuff.

I drink and buy guns and just sort of wait till I get murdered by the police. Also I sometimes unplug my LG TV so it can’t listen to me.

Honestly I just don’t think about it. I have a good VPN which is the biggest help to hassle ratio and I try to keep my revolutionary talk off my mainstream socials but I am 99% sure my name and address are on a list somewhere or would get dragged up if someone was making a list.

It’s very easy to slip into paranoia over surveilance. Personally, I try to keep to opsec as much as I can, without compromising the rest of my life.

For example: If you want to avoid being surveilled, then the first thing you need to do is to get rid of any digital device that can connect to a network (phone, internet or local network). Which is practically impossible in today’s terms.

Also, if an organization with enough resources (government, big corporations) wants to surveil you, they can use other digital devices in your proximity to do so. You might turn off your phone’s listening abilities “for marketing purposes”, but most other people probably don’t. So anything you say is still being recorded. There was a recent hubbub with LG TVs connecting to all devices in the house, siphoning a bunch of data, and then sending it all to LG. Even turning off the TV’s options wasn’t sufficient, and it was even discovered that they had back-up microphones on at all times, which created audio files designed to fool anybody looking at them for what they actually were or what they contained.

Another time me and a friend were talking about people dying on Everest. We are both people who take care of their privacy. But for a whole month youtube would recommend to both of us documentaries on Everest accidents, even though we never searched for it.

The risk of you individually being pursued is I think quite small, unless you start doing stuff (by which I mean bombing oil drills and what not). Generally, depending on your threat model, you should and can accept some decrease in privacy for sake of convenience.

For example, by having account here you have already made such a choice: being pseudo-anonymous vs only lurking via Tor. Also, if your threat model involves a state-actor the only actual reasonable tip is to move to a country far away that lacks an extradition treaty, there is little opsec that could wholly protect you from such a threat level today.

When it comes to minor police transgressions and such, there are obviously some good tips, and you can read more here: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/threat-modeling/. I am personally mostly annoyed by constant tracking and fingerprinting by data brokers and big tech, which is why I have a very containerized online presence, this is also my recommendation for most people.

I use GrapheneOS without any google account or google play services, use almost exclusively vetted open-source applications and PC operating systems (Secureblue, QubeOS). I self-host and use end-2-end encrypted cloud sync where I keep all my pictures, digital books (theory), music, etc, this is also backed up on a remote server e2ee as well. I use an anonymous VPN, secure and privacy friendly email with email aliases for each thing.

My general approach is, when I am connected to the internet I don’t want data brokers to be able to fingerprint me or my device. So far this has gone quite good.

Way I see it, it’s about managing risk. Nothing, digital or physical, is 100% secure, so to start with, the aim is never going to be “100% security”. This leads to, there will always be some risk, so it’s a matter of managing it.

Doing higher risk things means more effort should be put into managing it. So like, in history, an org such as the IRA that was doing stuff underground had to take more precautions because not doing so could easily compromise the nature of what they’re doing and get them into trouble. OTOH, an org like DSA doing electoral campaign work, the risk isn’t the same in the capacity of doing that kind of work because that work is seen as normal/legal in the eyes of the system and mass arresting DSA members for trying to elect people would fuck up the perceived legitimacy of the bourgeoisie system pretty fast. Still, this doesn’t mean not caring about privacy and risk in the second case, it just means the risks aren’t the same.

If things take a turn toward fascist death squads, that is going to raise the risk for a lot of people in a lot of ways. But if that happens, they’re likely going to be targeting orgs first as a means of trying to consolidate power, less so individuals. It doesn’t preclude the possibility of hunting individuals, but this also raises other questions about the picture as a whole; with ICE and its racism, for example, there have been people fighting back in various ways. Hiding may be easier the less of a digital footprint you have, but looping back to the start, nothing is 100% secure and unless one’s goal is basically to run rather than resist at all, they may very well get targeted as radical just for resisting the status quo. Alex Pretti and Renee Good were far from political radicals, as far as I’m aware, but they were willing to resist ICE in the moment and that combined with them doing it in a very unprepared (for violence), on-the-spot kind of way got them killed. OTOH, there’s this: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/13247419

Being prepared for confrontation can be the difference between being a martyr and sending fash running scared. This also comes with its own dimension of risk and risk management though. For example, if one were to “prepare for confrontation” in a country with strict gun laws and taboo about individual ownership of guns by having a bunch of guns in their place of residence, they’d be putting themself in a spot to get targeted as a “terrorist” easily. So there’s no one version of preparedness that is universal. Recommendations can change based on locale and based on how conditions are developing in real-time.

There was a point with ICE and Minneapolis (I believe that was the place) where some people were talking about arming up to be prepared for ICE and there was even a clip of somebody watching their neighborhood outside, holding a weapon. I’m not sure how that panned out in the long-term cause I haven’t heard much about it since, but ya know, those people were not kidding around, that is for sure. They were also taking on a degree of risk, I’m sure, by doing that, but the circumstances had pushed them into a place where they felt so threatened, that seemed to be the way to defend their community.

I know this doesn’t really answer much in specific tips. It’s more of a framework outline of how I try to think about these things.

I don’t worry about it too much, I take basic precautions. You’re more likely to get in a car accident or have a heart attack than get scooped by the state.