For a few years now, mass surveillance and its implications, especially in the age of AI and age verification, have hugely affected my life. To keep long stories shorter I’ve sacrificed a lot of convenience for the sake of my privacy, but I’ve also been slowly coming to the realization that maybe all of the things I have done to stay private haven’t been so worth it? I live in the USA, and my main fear is that when it all goes tits up here I—or significantly worse, my family—are gonna be on the death squad hitlist for my radical tendencies. I plan to hopefully leave the West by the time that happens, but weeks and decades and all that.
This has all come to a head recently because my GrapheneOS phone’s WiFi/Bluetooth radio crapped out only a couple months after I had paid it off and flashed GOS. It brought me a lot of peace to know I was no longer being spied on by my phone and that I also had the comfortable ability to integrate my phone into my homelab setup that I couldn’t do on stock PixelOS. I went out and got a Pixel 11, only to discover the jury is still out on whether Graphene is gonna support Pixel 11s at all, and nothing has been released.
This has all caused a huge headache where I am anxiously awaiting a release of GOS for the 11 while also trying to not hold out for my entire refund period so that I don’t end up stuck with a stock android phone. I had a refund put in when I first heard it wouldn’t be supported, then Graphene went back and said that it will be, so I cancelled the refund, then Graphene went back on that again and it now seems uncertain. I’ve got about another week to return the phone, I’m probably gonna wait another couple days to see if they release the OS for the 11 and if they don’t I’ll refund and get a 10.
Regardless, this whole situation has really made me question: how much do you comrades worry about actually being surveilled on a day by day basis? Do you try to read theory in a way that avoids surveillance, or do you all think I’m being a bit too paranoid about all this? Sometimes I think its ridiculous to expect the NSA or something to come and target me, but then again we live in an AI age nowadays.
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.