I'm pretty sure I'm on a watchlist so the moment I go dark by using vpns or whatever ithink the feds will go "holy shit hes actually gonna buy drugs or build a bomb or something" but in reality it's just because I want to pirate nintendo games or something
Yeah, exactly this. The feds are never going to do anything about leftists because we're not a threat. Reactionaries with nothing to lose who need somewhere to put the hate they should be directing at capitalists scare the shit out of me.
Yep. When Stochastic Terrorism kicks up and the misguided decide to target "Communists/Socialists", you want to be hard to find.. Don't get caught up in an Indonesia type purge..
has a front yard
Found the CEO of the bourgeoisie
I'm a loud stupid communist to distract the feds from my more vulnerable comrades.
That's how I rationalize my opsec laziness.
Awarding you the quad-revolutionary salute in your valiant efforts, comrade.
:rosa-salute: :fidel-salute: :kim-salute: :chavez-salute:
as long as you aren't organizing workers I think they'll continue to ignore you
:fedposting: By god, this guy is drunk AND watching ben 10? they're too dangerous to be allowed to live. get their ass"
What DO we do about online death threats, if showing up to the threatener's house IRL to just talk to them isn't an option?
No showing busy is opsec. It distracts the agent from your true intentions thereby obscuring them.
VPNs aren't really how you even go dark. Even with one every website you log into still knows exactly who you are - you did hand them your username after all - and they will often also store cookies or other identifying information with your computer to keep track of you regardless, and that's just the beginning of their tactics. They can also just grab your setup details, like screen size, browser, etc. and just construct a profile to give them a decent chance of just guessing that your two separate visits to their site are from the same person. To really "go dark" you need a separate account on a different internet network that you haven't got your name on from a computer you use nowhere else and keep in a faraday bag at all times you aren't using it, or something equally paranoid. And also Tor, Tor is pretty good. If you're actually buying anything online stealthily, this is unfortunately one of the few realms where crypto has a genuine undeniable use. I've heard Monero is hard to track (hence why it's a common choice for malware crypto miner programs) and is the preferred medium of exchange, but that advice is dated and might have been from a fed for all I know. Even then, unless it's a purely digital good, you still have to hand some information to somebody to receive a good, be it a drop-off location that they could stick around at and get a look at you from, or worse, an address that you're associated with.
Sure, state agencies likely don’t (currently) care about random people on fringe leftist forums, or people posting vaguely leftist shit on corporate social media.
god, I hope not...
The point of opsec might not be to protect yourself but to protect others who actually need it. If everyone practices operational security, those who actually need opsec (activists and such) will blend in and thus be protected. If only activists practice opsec, activists will be quickly identified and smothered.
If everyone "goes dark", those who actually need to go dark are protected.
yeah to hide the traffic from the CIA by allowing normal people to using the service.
I feel like this should be driven home to people in actual orgs too. DSA still using Google Forms and Slack and 3rd party hosted online polls and stuff which is basically just giving free statistical and personal information to the government. They probably have to do even less work than they used to in order to keep tabs on left-wing activism in extremely high detail (more detail than organizers themselves potentially have).
Opsec? Why would I care about opsec? Members of the public can't just walk into the J. Edgar Hoover building.
It’s really hard to stress how much this is not how VPNs work. Any VPN company who claims they can hide you from a government intelligence agency is full of shit
I think it would work somewhat well for some stuff if used correctly if you're using a VPN from a foreign country not affiliated with the west. Like Russia or China (this is essentially a component of what "Tor" ie onion routing is). I think if you're willing to give up many online conveniences it's probably very easy to be completely "untraceable" online. And the mass surveillance stuff is mass surveillance, like recording all the internet traffic of random people in Afghanistan or the US or wherever. Even if the government has access to the private keys of every certificate authority in the world (they probably have a lot of them), it would still be hard to spy on you. Of course if you aren't doing "opsec" then it's super easy to track people. They're probably scraping everything about every user of this site right now, simply by recording Cloudflare traffic. But using a VPN is a preeeetty good way of hiding your identity, as long as you don't do anything revealing of your identity while you're connected to said foreign VPN. But like OutrageousHairdo points out, if you do literally anything else on the same computer, it's futile. Actually, I guess even a foreign VPN is compromisable if they don't use the proper method to connect to it, or if the govt modifies the VPN program in an update or something.
Counter-point: testing and using opsec tools is invaluable to those whose life could really depend on it.
