Salt Your Data

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Go for a walk somewhere you've never been. Wander around until you get lost and find your way back home again. Take a different walk tomorrow. Salt your data. Leave your phone at home sometimes, take out the batteries or let it run down to empty for shits and giggles. Leave it in the car overnight. Get a new facebook. Get seven LinkedIns. Update them all infrequently and with conflicting information. Encrypt your grocery lists. Learn to fingerspell. Go to a different restaurant, shop at different stores. Take a different stop on the subway and walk the rest. Show up for work early at random intervals, and just sit in the parking lot. Learn all the different long ways home.

Make new friends. Reconnect with people from high school. Talk with the homeless people at the bus station (you can bribe them with a sandwich if you don't know how to start a conversation). Go to a club full of pretty people. Spend three hours at the library reading things and never checking them out. Go to political rallies for your ideological foes. Pop into a church on Wednesday.

Humans are creatures of habit, so make new habits you can take with you in your unpredictable life. A morning sudoku. A fidget toy. Mismatched socks on Thursdays. Don't worry about it being too silly or to small, you're just reprogramming your security blanket settings. Because you should be able to go about your business and not have anyone tracking your movements, logging your emails and phone calls, listing your associates and political affiliations. You should have your freedom to assemble, to speak, to security in your own property and privacy, but as long as the only thing keeping the cameras off your back is the discretion of a bored contractor you don't have any of it. Salt your data.

Don't wait until you have a reason to do it, then it will look suspicious that you have changed your activities and the powers that be will use this fact against you in a secret court of secret law. Don't assume you're safe, today it's Muslims in American and Trans people in Greece, but tomorrow it could be Buddhists in England or Single Parents in Brasil. Even if it's never you, you have a responsibility to make life difficult for those who would indiscriminately spy on and harass the citizens of the world so they can sleep better at night.

Or Kill Me.

[Sita]

I loved sitting for hours in the library reading. Don't get the chance to do that anymore.

Love this post. It's not only a good idea if you want people to not know your habits, but it's good for not getting stuck in a rut.
Just have to be careful not to make the randomness predictable, if you know what I mean.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I loved sitting for hours in the library reading. Don't get the chance to do that anymore.

Love this post. It's not only a good idea if you want people to not know your habits, but it's good for not getting stuck in a rut.
Just have to be careful not to make the randomness predictable, if you know what I mean.

I absolutely do. The flower project I've been on has done a good job of encouraging me to take random different paths every morning instead of the rut I wore into the dirt over the winter.

[Cain]

the powers that be will use this fact against you in a secret court of secret law

And they'll do it secretly.

That said: yes.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I like the repetition there 

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

 

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

It makes me sad that the anon forum I posted this in (after here) is getting push back from idiots.

WHO CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT STUFF, GUISE? GOING FOR WALKS AND SHOWING UP EARLY FOR WORK IS EXPENSIVE! 

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

It makes me sad that the anon forum I posted this in (after here) is getting push back from idiots.

WHO CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT STUFF, GUISE? GOING FOR WALKS AND SHOWING UP EARLY FOR WORK IS EXPENSIVE! 

THEN DO SOMETHING REALLY RADICAL AND CHANGE SOAP BRANDS WHEN YOU SHOWER (REMINDER: SHOWER MORE OFTEN!) OR SHOVE A DIFFERENT BRAND OF JUNK FOOD IN YOUR SLACK-JAWED GAPING MAW. IT WILL KEEP MORE STUPID FROM FALLING OUT.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I, for one, have a home office. I'm not changing my routine. I have security/privacy measures in place. You are far too paranoid to be outside an asylum.

I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING, THAT'S JUST COPYPASTE.

[Cain]

I have security/privacy measures in place.

LOLNO.  If you think this is paranoid, and aren't already salting your data, then you don't have a security system, you have the illusion of a security and privacy system, a nice little bit of theatre and ritual to console yourself that you've done what you need to.

Here's what an actual infosec expert said to me:

At this level, the nation state level of surveillance, one cannot hope to really be secure in their communications using technologies as they are because of the access the government has built for themselves post 9/11 with the Patriot Act as it's fulcrum.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I, for one, have a home office. I'm not changing my routine. I have security/privacy measures in place. You are far too paranoid to be outside an asylum.

I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING, THAT'S JUST COPYPASTE.

Dear Sir. Grow up. Your blanket fort won't protect you. There are, in fact, monsters out there. They're just people who don't give a shit about you.

[Cain]

Amazon Web Services are currently datamining this thread.

AWS's chief information security officer (CSO) Stephen Smidt spent ten years as a section chief for the FBI; AWS's deputy CSO, Carl Moses, spent nearly four years as an FBI Assistant Section Chief, and Andrew Doane, AWS's director of security products and services, spent six years as a technical director within "the US Intelligence Community".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/aws_spook_cloud/

In a statement emailed to The Reg late on Friday, Amazon Web Services confirmed the existence of a contract between it and the US's Central Intelligence Agency

LOLPARANOIA

[Junkenstein]

They just won't fuck off will they?

How many threads is that now? A fucking few.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

ONE MORE ALIAS FOR WHEN I INEVITABLY END UP IN COURT FOR SOME BULLSHIT! HOORAY!

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Man. These guys are so jihad getting on my Afghanistan nerves with all their bombing nose-pokey bullshit. :P