I've been talking about reclaiming your privacy and anonymity online for the better part of 3 years at this stage (12 years if you count Tumblr). At first, it was about being a question-mark to the advertisers; preserving your browsing history, download history, and the contents of your computer from the prying eyes of corporations trying to make determinations about you based upon what you bought at Walmart yesterday. In the back of my mind, I always had this nagging feeling that something else was going to happen. Something bigger that would cast a dragnet onto the entire internet. I didn't realise it would happen so soon.
The United States is currently experiencing the Nightmare scenario. Social media (namely Xitter, Bluesky, Tiktok, Facebook, and Reddit) are being used as that dragnet. Using the data that users freely supply to those services, police departments are identifying and arresting protesters, whom the regime makes disappear under the guise of "protecting homeland security". Taking this month's recent executions in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as an example: Renée Good was observing ICE activity from a distance and was killed for it. Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse who was at the protest to treat protesters who had been injured by police action, and was killed for it. The news does not mention the protesters who get arrested for "disturbing the peace" or "incitement to riot" anymore because it happens everytime a protest takes place. The stories on tumblr and reddit of people being arrested at home, at work, and during class because the police traced their Google Advertising ID from a protest are many, and, indeed, is the reason why I established this website in the first place: as an emergency dephoning guide to protect against being randomly arrested or executed for being part of a specific group. I foresaw the police using Google ID's to target Black people, developmentally disabled people, protesters certainly, or anyone else they could convince their favourite judge was a danger to society.
This is now happening on a national scale. The federal government— more accurately, the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement— are using not only Google Advertising ID's, but also internet traffic supplied them by ISP's and analytical AI to identify and target dissenters.
At this stage, it is important to mention that Renée Good and Alex Pretti were white. I, myself, believed that white people were safe from the government. I even said at one point that they wouldn't touch white people because they stood a good chance of hoovering up Trump supporters instead of trans people or whatever else it was I was talking about at the time. This has proven untrue; white people are not safe. Nobody is safe.
The thing that brought me here to write this was icelist.is. Purportedly a site that doxxes ICE agents, I remember hearing about this site on tumblr 2 weeks ago and immediately thinking "honeypot".
First, what does that mean in this context? A honeypot is something designed to attract internet traffic in order that it can be monitored and its sources found. In other words, you go to the website and your IP address is logged and traced, then you are arrested. Since my VPN service lapsed at the beginning of the month, I decided it wasn't worth the risk finding out whether it was legit or not.
The fact is that, despite my incessant blathering about the subject, there are fewer VPN users than there need to be. The ratio of zeal over toppling a fascist dictatorship to concern about online anonymity is about 10:1; therefore, more people than are likely to realise it will blindly stumble into these back alleys, not realise their IP addresses are being logged, and then wonder why they are suddenly being arrested by federal police.
Like I said, this is the nightmare scenario. It's time to start getting really paranoid, really fast about your internet traffic. You need a VPN. You need to switch to LibreWolf. You need to start thinking about how your every action online is being monitored. You need to start giving a crap about your privacy, because it's all but eroded away to nothing for the average person. More people need to be doing this than not doing this because, remember how they caught John Barnett, the whistleblower at Boeing? They traced him down because, in a crowd of 99 people, he was the only one taking security precautions. He was the only one using TailsOS, the only one using a VPN, the only one using Tor, and the only one who cared about not being seen. In the fascist dictatorship, it's no longer about what they can see, it's about what they can't. The point here is that the corporate feudal state keeps a detailed log about every single person with a computer or a smart device in the entire world and, if a log should suddenly stop being updated, that becomes suspicious in and of itself.
You need to become more paranoid.