Yes I am a skinny “quirked up” white boy with long hair who grew up in sheltered white suburbia and smokes too much weed. Yes I am a college student who was introduced to communism online and rapidly became radicalized.
It’s such perfect ammo and it is ruining me
I respect that. The better your OpSec, the more you encourage the comrades around you to improve theirs.
Good. I think this is justified paranoia.
As for OpSec tips I can’t really speak to the government end of things besides really getting serious about the right hardware, OS, and software (and VPN of course but you’ve already got that covered). With the way dragnet surveillance has been in the west for the past 20 years especially, I don’t think there’s any stopping them but the best things you can do is to make it much more difficult for them (hardware, software, OS, VPN) and to not give them cause to pay close attention to you in the first place.
As for reactionaries? Well I would never engage in the act of doxing anyone because that’s against the law and if we don’t put our trust in the law to protect us then who can we trust? However a close friend of mine used to be involved in doxing fascists and I learned everything I know about OpSec regarding non-state agents from him telling me how he went about the work of doxing fascists and the methods he used to connect the dots etc. etc. I think one of the best ways to teach OpSec would be to work on doxing fascists so you would learn very quickly what to do, what not to do, and why, but that’s against the law so I couldn’t condone it. The other problem is that doxing is usually pretty tedious work of trawling through a trove of mostly-useless data while picking out one or two crumbs that may or may not form a piece that creates a comprehensive picture, at least for deeper doxing and not the doxing by opportunity because some dipshit was posing for a photo in front of their work vehicle with a nazi flag or something, so it takes a particular type of person to really get engaged in this work and not find it intolerably boring. At least that’s what my friend told me anyway.
So that’s a very long way of saying that I don’t have any books to point you towards and that OpSec against the feds is all about mitigation whereas prevention is very much the name of the game when it comes to reactionaries.
Interesting! That’s very comforting actually. Like how knowing how to physically defend yourself, requires you to know how people often attack.
It’s maybe… reassuring? to realize that if somebody really wanted to track down this account, they could, but they’d have to work their asses off finding scraps of data. As long as I’m using my VPN each time (and not using an OS I consider compromised like Android or Windows) there’s not many crumbs to leave, unless they go directly for the VPN servers.
Finally, I’m still self-censoring somewhat to not be targeted. Like you said, why give them a reason to notice you? I want to be around for a long time, and I’m not too keen on inflammatory comments anyway. Why give a Fed a reason to do all that digging, when you could just blend in. Comments and posts likely to get flagged aren’t going to build communism anyway. I think my way is to work diligently and quietly, first to get myself secure, and then work outwards towards mutual aid, education, and helping in any way I can.
Maybe that’s selfish, or cowardly, but I’ve been through hard times, and I want to at least have moments of peace in between the barbarity we’re subjected to. Isn’t the whole point to work together? I’ve been burnt out on two decades of putting everything on my shoulders, and I can’t do that anymore. I deeply want to help more than I do, but I can’t light myself on fire to keep a comrade warm.
It seems you have a good friend, shame I couldn’t meet them. Somebody really should tell them that doxxing fascists is against the law and is therefore wrong.
He explained it to me in terms of pseudo-anonymity. Imagine somebody has pieced together 25% of your personal details. They could even have a photo of your uncovered face. And maybe there’s another 25% that they think is likely about you or that you almost definitely fit.
That’s a lot, right?
Well, not necessarily. There might be dozens of people, maybe even more, who also fit that 25% perfectly (or near-perfectly when it comes to the photo of your face) and who also fit that presumed 25%.
Unless those candidates all have leaky social media and there’s some way to narrow the candidates down, or if you can stake out and surveil each of them like some private investigator to narrow down the candidates, that 25%+25% is still obscured by pseudo-anonymity.
But let’s dial that back to say 2%+5%. Not much, right?
But this time around you happen to mentione somewhere that you were a speaker at a conference that has a list of speakers available. Worse yet, maybe you say that you were the keynote speaker. Or maybe you mention that your partner founded a charity or has a rare disease that they are a vocal and visible advocate for.
Suddenly those small scraps are just verification that they’ve found who they’re looking for.
So this is why I encourage layers of separation if you’re serious about pseudo-anonymity.
Small gaps in your layers of separationSmall continuities in your layers of separation can connect a lot of disparate breadcrumbs, if you’re unlucky or incautious.Back when my friend was very active in doxing fascists, he would pollute his breadcrumbs. He had undiagnosed ADHD, which is part of why he would pollute the breadcrumbs like it was going out of fashion because he knew he’d slip up but this would make the slip-ups more like sleight of hand than security breaches; a small signal with 100% fidelity is much more useful than a very powerful signal that only has 10% fidelity. In fact, one is basically useless unless you’re using very powerful algorithms and you are creating multiple profiles based on confidence intervals.
Feds could do that. Reactionaries, in his opinion, neither had the tools, the skills, or the inclination to. He told me that this would be coordinated taskforce-level efforts.
But to intentionally use lingo from different regions, to use different spelling conventions to what region you’re in (even if it’s only half of the time), or to mention going to the Wawa occasionally when you’re in a completely different country to where you’d find a single Wawa makes potential doxers hone in on the wrong spot. This quite literally throws them off the scent.
Polluting your breadcrumbs, even only haphazardly, scatters that signal in noise and makes it infinitely harder to find the right trail. You don’t have to be Fort Knox, you just have to be in the top 50% of hard to hit targets and you’ll likely be way too much effort to bother with.
To give a more direct example, I use the name Jay in the game.
What are you gonna do with that? Search Jay in google? Use social media crawlers to identify anyone who is named Jay?
What does it even refer to? Is it because they’re a birdwatcher or an ornithologist? Are you going to get a map of all the regions where there are rare jays and use that to guide your efforts?
Maybe it’s a first name but maybe it’s an initial (which one?) or maybe it’s a preferred name that is only used with friends but not on official documents? Hm. That’s not so useful.
Or maybe you’ve been watching the account and you know they are acutely aware of etymology and they often start little struggle sessions over innocuous-seeming terms like “goober” and “spoøk” and “peanut gallery” and “spirit animal”. Maybe they have even gotten some of these words onto the filter list by accident? And maybe they’re one of these extremist urbanist train-lovers and car-haters who have written lengthy critique about the birth of suburbia, the creation of car-dependence, and how this ties into a transposition and diffusion of Jim Crow policy onto the economic sphere to make everyone a little engine of economic apartheid for generations to come?
And so maybe “Jay” has to do with them adopting the archaic term for an unsophisticated and gullible person that is lower class and is closely associated with the term “jaywalking”? Maybe they have written a lot about the power of reverse discourse and the reclamation of terms, and this is a little in-joke to themselves and a performative reclamation of the term as the embodiment of their burning hatred of car-dependency? And maybe they use strategic incompetence, ignorance, and obliviousness as a strategy around people they do not trust and have said as much in comments?
Maybe they’re also autistic so there’s a layer of irony in adopting that name and another layer of radical-self acceptance and self-awareness in the most sincere way, making it only semi-ironic? Would that explain the train-loving, or would it not?
I can tell you which one is the most compelling case for the reasoning behind the name Jay. But just because one has more evidence than another doesn’t mean that it’s the more accurate one, it’s just the one more likely to be accurate.
But oh no! Two things can be true at once!! Maybe some bits of evidence are simply coincidence?
Who knows!
I can give you a list of comments that contribute to all of these points except the bird enthusiast one. But who actually knows the term ornithologist and uses it casually anyway? But then again, an etymology nerd who is autistic would do something like that. But maybe they keep a layer of separation between their politics and their bird enthusiast stuff? They do say that separation is one of the key parts of OpSec, don’t they?
Tell you what, you guess every part of this accurately and you figure out what I’ve left out - if you DM me with every correct part identified accurately and every incorrect part I’ve put forward accurately, and every missing part accurately identified too, I’ll tell you if you guessed right.
You only get one shot at it though :)
How much time and effort do you think you’d put into this before you give up and do something more productive with your life?
Yeah. Oh well, he’s mostly retired from the game of doxing fascists aside from the local ones these days, although he has an uncanny Rainbolt-like reputation amongst his little crew. When he turns his efforts to it, anyway. He used to run on very high pollution of breadcrumbs back when he was right in the game but he doesn’t give as much of a fuck anymore since he doesn’t feel as though he’s doing the high-risk work visibly anymore.