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
good thing i’m a :fedposting: so I don’t have to worry about opsec
Everybody jokes about opsec until the feds show up at your moms house. Just saying, it happens. Are you prepared to deal with that legal situation? They aren’t going to cart you off to gitmo, but they will ruin your life.
It’s a bit embarrassing to explain to your loved ones or employer why federal agents had to come to talk to them. Also, if you need to face a hearing or if the proceedings go any further than a few “friendly” visits, federal defense attorneys are VERY (25k+) expensive.
It’s honestly best to not make any joke or reference at all to things that could cause your comments (or tweet, post, etc) to be subpoenaed. Not sure if hexbear would respond to a subpoena, but I know that all popular forms of social media would. Which is why if you are going to post something that may fall into that category,
It’s really hard to stress how much this is not how VPNs work. Any VPN company who claims they can hide you from a government intelligence agency is full of shit
I think it would work somewhat well for some stuff if used correctly if you’re using a VPN from a foreign country not affiliated with the west. Like Russia or China (this is essentially a component of what “Tor” ie onion routing is). I think if you’re willing to give up many online conveniences it’s probably very easy to be completely “untraceable” online. And the mass surveillance stuff is mass surveillance, like recording all the internet traffic of random people in Afghanistan or the US or wherever. Even if the government has access to the private keys of every certificate authority in the world (they probably have a lot of them), it would still be hard to spy on you. Of course if you aren’t doing “opsec” then it’s super easy to track people. They’re probably scraping everything about every user of this site right now, simply by recording Cloudflare traffic. But using a VPN is a preeeetty good way of hiding your identity, as long as you don’t do anything revealing of your identity while you’re connected to said foreign VPN. But like OutrageousHairdo points out, if you do literally anything else on the same computer, it’s futile. Actually, I guess even a foreign VPN is compromisable if they don’t use the proper method to connect to it, or if the govt modifies the VPN program in an update or something.
