For when the government goes a little too far
I've been thinking a lot about privacy lately, with the Online Safety Act and Digital ID coming in it seems like the world is going back 20 years. Encryption is the backbone of modern civilisation and keeps us safe and anonymous online.
This is where we can leverage free and open source projects to try and keep some resemblance of what we have right now. It's important to prepare for the worst now and hope to not have to use it.
This is some projects I have been using to prepare for what seem's to be an inevitability
**And of course FKS stands for Fluffy Kitten Squad, nothing else**Meshtastic is a radio mesh project that allows off the grid communication, using relatively cheap devices to communicate over miles. I've had communication over 14 miles with line of sight.
The more people that join the mesh, the stronger the system is overall, I would reccomend getting two nodes to start off with. One node can stay at home and be on 24/7 and the other can be a portable node you take around with you.
Matrix is an open standard and network for secure, decentralised communication. Matrix allows you to run your own homeserver and still allows you to talk to other users on other servers, kinda like how email works
Personally I have a VPS located in a different country running Synapse and my own domain name, I use Element on my iPhone and Linux machine.
This can be a lot to setup for someone who isn't a nerd like me, so another option is to just create an account and use matrix.org as your homeserver. However doing this means you have to link your personal details to your account, potentially de-anonymising yourself so be careful
A VPN or a Virtual Private Network can help protect you online, it isn't foolproof however. It shifts the risk from your ISP over to the provider that you choose, so it is important to pick a reputable provider that has a no-logging policy.
Using a VPN can 'move' your location online to a country that has stronger privacy laws and less rescrictions.
Remember anything you do online which can be linked to you isn't private, a VPN isnt going to stop Facebook from knowing who you are and where most likely you are in the world, even if you have your VPN location in The Gambia
If you are sceptical of all of the VPN providers, you can always run Wireguard on a VPS (could be the same one if you got one earlier for Matrix)
Onion Routing (Tor) is a routing protocol that is layered like an onion, hence the name. It routes your internet traffic through multiple servers over the world, theoretically providing anonymisation. This comes with the same warnings as the VPN however, if you are going to go on Tor and login to Facebook there is no point to using this.
I would always have a USB drive with Tails OS around the house, just in case as it would be the easiest way to 'get back up and running' from a collapse of internet privacy.
Be careful when using Tor, some exit nodes can be run by malicious actors who can potentially spy on your traffic if you are not using HTTPS. Also be aware that some websites block Tor traffic.
What devices you use on a day to day basis will be important if *puts on tinfoil hat* Client side scanning becomes a thing. Client side scanning means your device becomes a snitch for the government as it will essentially record your screen and report back to the higher ups. This means encryption would be useless.
To mitigate this risk, I would recommend using a device that is open source and privacy focused. This means you can inspect the code and make sure there is no backdoors or snitching going on.
Remember, the less proprietary software you use, the less likely you are to be effected by many of the measures government's around the world are wanting to implement. This means avoiding software like Windows, macOS, iOS and Android as these have centeralised control
You can always put on two tinfoil hats and never connect your phone to a phone network to prevent tracking through cell towers, and only use public wifi, but that sounds very inconvenient
Kiwix is a self-hosted Wikipedia for when that gets put behind an ID check. Turns out the entirety of Wikipedia is around 117GB of space, which can fit on basically anyone's laptop. Personally I have a Raspberry Pi (a small board computer) running a Kiwix server 24/7 and it works great.
A Raspbery Pi and a 2tb HDD can have you setup with your own Wikipedia and your own cloud service, no need to rely on big tech to store all your photos anymore!
Who knew you could run your own AI at home, Ollama is a self hosted AI service where you can make your own ChatGPT without any of the relaxed data protection that comes with it! All you need is a modest gaming pc, preferably with a Nvidia graphics card
Mobile devices have gotten so powerful now, if you have a newish mobile phone you can run smaller models right in your pocket, there are many apps out there that are just scams and take more of your data than OpenAI so be careful
Remember, AI is still in its infancy and can be very resource intensive, so make sure your device can handle it before diving in
With the way things are going in the world, I genuinely don't think we need to be preparing for a nuclear war. I feel the deterioration of privacy is the biggest threat to us today
Having a basic Bug Out bag is one of the best piece of mind things you can have