Everything do is being watched and recorded, and soon it will be public:
The Senate voted to kill Obama-era online privacy regulations, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell your browsing habits and other personal information as they expand their own online ad businesses.
Those rules, not yet in effect, would have required internet providers to ask your permission before sharing your personal information.
I wonder to what degree this is to facilitate explaining why your intel is public later on. If in four years your browser history is released online by somebody, or used to judge you and negatively affect your life, you would assume it was government that recorded it and released it. But if this passes, it could have been anyone who had access to it.
Sooner or later everyone is going to be anonymizing their online browsing. But until then I wonder how much more of our private data will be legally allowed to be released, to explain why so much of our private lives are suddenly public one day in the future.
[…] Your Browser History Is About To Get Into The Wild […]
AC, I’m curious what you recommend people do to protect their internet usage, computers, etc. What do you personally do? I started using a VPN, switched email to a Swiss service that enables encryption, generate original passwords for each service, and some other standard steps.
I’m interested to hear your opinion because you’re both very clued into this security/privacy subject, but also don’t seem like a guy who wants to hide like a hermit away from the world.
You can insulate yourself from all but the largest private-sector operation targeting your online activity, but without going into detail, I would just say government has a lot of resources, and a lot of manpower, and I assume most keystrokes of mine are monitored in real time. It would be very hard to get around that, short of losing any in-person (which would take a long trip through a very rural area with mountains, a lot of planning, and a lot of cash on hand), getting off the grid, and then reconnecting with sterile machines via public wifi, without cell phones on hand or surveillance cameras, and on and on. Basically, not practical given the minor benefits.
I think that type of attention is probably common today for a lot of alt-right and new right figures. If you ever see what is out there, you will realize that hiding from government is not an easy task in person, let alone online, especially if they focus on you.
If I ran a crime syndicate, it would be run 100% offline. One-click killing offered on a hitman website would be a bad business plan, and you’d be rolled up by the afternoon no matter what you did. Then again, the fact there is Mafia and a Heroin epidemic given what is out there, leaves me wondering if criminal activity is viewed as not important enough for this, or if the machine views itself as so important it wouldn’t risk itself for that. It is not impossible it is primarily about protecting “the machine.”
Now in your case I would say this. If you employ any measure that a router could be programmed to detect autonomously, like connections to a VPN, or passing encrypted traffic, chances are that measure can get you flagged, and government has the manpower to check out every flag in very detailed fashion – and I believe they do. Once they see your traffic, they will track it back to you, and from there they will get into your system however they have to – I’d assume even by gaining access to the machine to install a key logger on it, though it looks like Microsoft includes that in Win 10 already, and I assume it can remoted on once they key in on the machine.
So these days there is a sort of choice – do you want to prevent private-sector actors from snooping on your activity or reading your emails, in which case government may come looking itself due to how you protect your traffic. Or do you open yourself to normal hackers by acting like a total rube, but in the process disappear into the amorphous mass of rube traffic that is not flagged by you trying to protect your privacy. If I wasn’t doing this site, I would go with the rube option, because there is a good chance the alternate involves your entire life being uploaded to the machine’s servers, from conversations in your house to your medical records – and maybe finding out they have turned some family friend who you liked, to use them to gather information for your file.
At some point, I believe something will come out about government someday, and everybody will be blown away. If I didn’t believe God wanted me here, I would rather have disappeared into the masses.
As for you, if you frequent the alt-right, you are probably in the files, and they have a rough idea of who you are. They aren’t killing too many people at this point, so I wouldn’t worry about it if you are minor in the movement.
But factor in we may all need bug-out bags one day. There is no telling where this is going, and truth be telling most people would not believe where it is already, right now.