It's becoming a question that if you have any sort of beliefs that may not be looked upon kindly by this government or future governments, maybe you shouldn't be writing anything on the internet at all. Maybe you shouldn't be texting or writing emails, either.
Over the past year, I've certainly been debating not expressing myself at all in writing. It's starting to feel very dangerous.
Do it anyways. Be assertive about your rights. They were paid for with blood.
There's a reason why "live free or die" is an expression. Your fear of death or punishment can be used to virtually enslave you. So you might as well live free, because you're going to die one way or another.
I think of Satoshi Nakamoto. He seems to have gotten away with being anonymous. But that was 10 years ago, and he did everything an individual reasonably could in terms of opsec. Even then, he’s still been narrowed down to a pretty short list of known individuals.
These days, someone who was a normal young person using the internet and social media in the 2010s has very little hope if an online mob decides to unmask them, let alone professional investigators.
If the government can do it, so can corporations. And individuals, for that matter.
There's more than just the government to be afraid of. If you're hiding from an abusive ex, they may be able to find you despite a new life under a pseudonym. No matter how many proxies you're behind, an advertiser could skip the tracking cookies and connect the dots between accounts with writing style. If you've written anything under your real name, you could get doxxed by connecting it to your "anonymous" Internet posts.
So indeed: maybe you shouldn't be writing on the Internet at all. If it's possible at all, forbidding the government from doing it will not make you any safer.
For what it's worth there are also some tools out there to mitigate stylometry identification. [1] Some discussion [2][3] I do not know if using such tools would render one's writing less interesting or artistic.
There seem to be many tools on github [4] that work with and against stylometry.
That's a shitty way to live your life, especially in period when these things are doing mere baby steps. Glass is always half empty strategy.
Maybe you are uber-important, rich and powerful and you should be actually concerned about this. But chances are high (not only due to your nick 'pessimizer') that you are just making your own paranoia and depression worse for little more than nothing.
Self-censorship is very common in oppressed regimes, I've seen it damn well under soviet/russian oppression during cold era in my own country. Even people with good intentions do pretty horrible things desperately trying to not get any attention they don't want.
Expressing certain thoughts is already dangerous in some contexts. Not state-actor-is-coming-to-get-you levels of danger just yet, at least for us common folks, but it's already happening and it ain't gonna get better.
It certainly is, but anonymity and pseudonymity tend to protect you unless you get some sort of celebrity or need to communicate for your job.
Anyway, one expresses one's opinion for the sake of other people. Maybe instead of worrying about what other people think, I should concentrate on my own safety. I can do other things for people.
That's been part of my anti-censorship arguments for a very long time. There's no technological reason why your phone calls can't be monitored and controlled just like any other medium, such as Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.
I'm gonna take this bait and list a few "beliefs" that the current U.S. government disapproves of enough that some branch might dedicate some resources to investigate. I'm not even going to bother with the obligatory "it's not my belief" since you explicitly said that's not relevant.
- The 2020 presidential election was not sufficiently investigated despite unusually and statistically unlikely results and questionable legal/procedural changes and activities at the state and local levels in regions that benefitted the eventual winner.
- White male Republicans who advocate for stricter enforcement of immigration law and internationally accepted asylum processes, seek to reduce or prevent taxpayer-funded education/encouragement about non-generative sexual preferences and practices to prepubescent children, and who support the individual right to defend against a monopoly on violence by a potentially tyrannical government, are NOT threats to democracy nor are they extremists to be likened to domestic terrorists.
- Recognition of extremely strong correlation between prevalent cultural norms of any given socioeconomic demographic and the geographical crime/violence rates in which those same demographic groupings reside is not racism nor xenophobia when the recognition is aimed at addressing the cultural aspect (caveat: I accept that there is also strong correlation between those who believe this and those who apply this belief to everyone within said socioeconomic demographic - eg. "poor Appalachian opioid addicts are all unintelligent, violent thieves")
- The variations of global temperature and weather phenomenon have been in fluctuation, and at more extreme levels, long before human intervention
I'm sure I could think of a few more but the effort to phrase things properly is not worth it for the inevitable [dead].
Those are the most popular outspoken right wing identity politic beliefs that the government absolutely does not care about. They're plastered on 'news' networks and 'news' radio every single day and the FCC does not care.
Part of my worry is that people who reply to me on the internet are looking for reasons to denounce me.
That being said, I've got a 12 year history here, you should search for whatever you need to see in order to tell me that if I weren't such a reprehensible person, I wouldn't have anything to worry about.
>you should search for whatever you need to see in order to tell me that if I weren't such a reprehensible person, I wouldn't have anything to worry about.
I would... but then your username would check out.
If you'll allow me to speculate on what I think you're getting at, it looks like you are trying gather a list of potential heresies in order to respond and remind us that none of those examples are illegal to express. And, because that speech is not illegal, there is no reason to fear the government having the ability to associate one's speech with one's real identity through these tools.
That being said, people like me worry because the government also has things like the Disposition Matrix. Sure, our speech is perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment but there's nothing stopping some agency from classifying us as a risk and subjecting us to all sorts of who-knows-what behind the scenes.
Even if they are legal nothing promises that they will remain legal with the future governments.
And it doesn't even need to be governmental threats, we can already witness people being cancelled/getting their life ruined publicly for things they have said years if not decades ago on social media, things that were socially acceptable back then too.
Funny, Tucker Carlson is still being broadcasted to millions of americans most nights. Where is this supposed "cancellation" of people who are critical of the war in Ukraine?
If what you're speaking about is free people exercising their freedom to associate (or not!) with you, everyone has a right to not associate with someone they don't like, barring very specific exceptions, and people may not like you for your opinion, meaning an opinion you have can lead to you being ostracized. For example, if my employer were to hire someone who used to be a local head of the KKK, I would likely be up in arms about that. Lot's of very conservative workplaces often feel the same about other things. Think about what happens when people who work for hobby lobby get upset about their employer's policies.
This isn't "cancel culture", it's literally humans being humans the same way we've done for 100,000 years. Hell, even monkeys make outgroups.
It is already something recuiters are suspicious about. I have had to justify myself and explain that I value my privacy a lot more than I care about likes and thumbs up.
Unfortunately short of "faking" it, I don't think there is a way to not look suspicious... pretty sad.
I guess there's a business opportunity right there - surely, with capitalism being what it is, some enterprising soul must have launched a service grooming social media accounts which you can then purchase or even rent whenever you need an online presence?
Over the past year, I've certainly been debating not expressing myself at all in writing. It's starting to feel very dangerous.