Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism August 27, 2018 https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2018/08/welcome-age-privacy-nihilism/150829/?oref=rf-river
Yes, the masses are doomed to pervasive surveillance. It's horrible and all, but so are lots of other things. Maybe that's whataboutism, but whatever. Even so, it is possible to evade much of that surveillance. It takes some effort, true. But it's also great fun The key insight is that "you" can be compartmentalized into many unlinked personas. My meatspace persona and Mirimir (and other personas) all browse the web. They mostly all use Google, except via Tor (because Google blocks Tor users). Some of them use Facebook. Only my meatspace persona uses a phone, it's true. Although Mirimir now has a virtual SIM, so hey But anyway, the point is that each of those personas uses a different VM or physical machine. Those machines reach the Internet in different ways. And they have different sets of interests. And no common correspondents, social media, or whatever. For all intents and purposes, except for maybe the NSA, they are different people.
The best you can do is not use the Internet, or minimize your presence on the Internet by as much as possible. Which is what I'm doing...I'm minimizing the amount of stuff I do online for privacy and safety reasons. But even if you minimize the amount of Internet you use, the government still has countless other ways to spy on you, and breach your privacy i.e. ctv cameras, facial recognition and license plate recognition software used by the police, stingray hacking technology used by the police and the government can track all of your financial transactions with little to no effort. All you can do is not make big brother/TPTB interested in incriminating you for some bs crime they made-up out of thin air.
Well it is because I know certain things are too dangerous to ever do safely. Trust me...I've done extensive research on privacy technology like Tor, VPNs and etc to know that none of them are truly 100% safe. I do try to maintain a basic level of privacy online, but that is mainly against non-government/non-three letter agencies. I actually know several people irl who have been busted for porn, and that alone is proof that I know none of these so called privacy technologies are truly safe. Especially since I have the common sense to connect the dots to figure out that, if certain types of illicit content is mainly hosted on certain sites, wouldn't that mean those sites could already be compromised by various government agencies, and certain sites, would just be honeypots ? Yeah I am pretty sure those sites are already honey pots, and I understand Internet law enough to know that merely visiting certain sites alone is enough to send the Party Van to your house. You don't even need to download any content off those porn sites intentionally. The mere fact that you visited one leaves enough evidence on your hdd that you've "download" illicit content . And thus that can count as enough proof to send you to jail. And who would want that? And even if you encrypted your entire hdd, why would you want unsavoury government agents to raid your house and seize all your electronic equipment? I don't want that , and I am pretty sure nobody wants that . Even if those government agents drop your case, by the sheer chance that they can't crack through your hard drive's encryption and just give up and go after lower-hanging fruit who don't use full disk encryption, why would you want to go through all the trouble of having to pay tens of thousands of dollar, and potentially even more money, to hire a lawyer to prevent one's ass from going to jail? It all seems to be worth more trouble than it is actually worth, in my honest opinion.
Live free or die, bro Based on what I've read, people who get busted are people who were careless, and practiced poor OPSEC. I get that FDE won't save you from prison or worse, even if it's uncrackable. But then, death is always around the corner, no matter how cautious you are.
When I was back in the job we used to have a system that tracked traffic for users accessing sites using VPNs. Using precise timing, it would be matched with ISP records. We would share with other LEs from different countries to compare data records, as a user we were looking for could be anywhere in the world and same for them. Worst job ever, as well as being time consuming, to look for matching patterns, hopefully AI will make it easier. You get a hit, with an account on the site's activity matching ISP activity, and it would then be a knock on the door with the hooligan tools and maximum prejudice. “How did you find me I used a VPN?”, usual response was “well someone must of ratted you out”…
Yeah, well, that's why you use nested VPN chains, plus Tor when it really matters. Traffic correlation is possible, sure, but it's a lot harder than you describe.
It doesn’t matter what you do in between, we match the source and destination; your ISP and the site you visit. We didn’t call it traffic correlation, it was Net Sum Plus or something, we just called it ‘net summing’ that ran on its own app in windows. It wasn’t easy, but the look on the face when we knocked on the door was worth it.
You're blowing smoke, bro. If you weren't, I'd have been visited years ago I mean, I've been essentially anonymous online for over 20 years.
