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
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.
This is pretty much the idea behind Tor, right?
yeah to hide the traffic from the CIA by allowing normal people to using the service.
Yuppp
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).