When you start reading about prepping, you’ll notice that “privacy issues” is not a big concern for most preppers. This makes sense because most preppers are thinking about things like earthquakes, tornadoes, and prolonged power outages where the need to preserve one’s privacy is not a high priority (to the contrary, in these situations, you want your messages requesting help to be seen by the whole world!).
In our situation, however, privacy is very important because our government is taking extraordinary actions against critics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Since those critics include us and we know that the government has the ability to collect vast swathes of electronic communications and information, it makes sense to protect our privacy to the extent possible.
Unfortunately, while some recommended actions are very easy, some can be quite difficult. What has evolved, then, is a strategy where what you do depends on the degree of risk that you are facing. So regular people who are posting memes and writing checks probably blend in with the rest of the American population and are not likely to be targeted for retribution. These folks just need a regular level of privacy and can take a series of easy steps to attain that.
Folks who are opposing the President very publicly or in the courts probably need a much higher level of security and will need to take not just the easy steps but also the difficult ones. The same goes for those who are breaking the law (such as sending abortion pills into anti-abortion states) and those who are being entrusted with very deep secrets (such as journalists working with confidential sources).
Therefore, below, you’ll see us divide up recommended actions into a series of categories that reflect your perceived risk. The higher your risk, the more of these actions you should take. You’ll also see that we provide plenty of links to outside source for these actions. This is because a lot of smart people have been thinking very hard about this stuff for a long time now and you ought to be getting the nitty-gritty details from them rather than from us.
Easy Things To Do For People Who Are At Low Risk
Everyone should take some basic steps to secure their privacy now. As you know, corporations are busy tracking us now to figure out how to sell us more stuff. In addition to that, however, both corporations and the government are recording as much of our communications as they can and are saving them for future use.
It’s this “save for later” use that’s the most concerning. The government may not be interested in us now but if that changes in the future, they will already have a number of our messages saved that they can go back to and examine. And since corporations are doing the same, the government can compel them to release whatever information they have on us whenever it wants to. This is already done to help the police solve crimes where a person’s location at a particular time is useful – they get the location of the suspect’s phone over time from the phone companies and use it to solve their case (and we happen to agree with the police doing that – so long as the process requires a warrant from a judge).
So. Here’s the easy (and free!) stuff that you should do no matter who you are,
- Use the Signal app for texting and perhaps some phone and video calls.
- Make sure your browser is set to HTTPS-Only Mode.
Further Reading
As we mentioned earlier, there is a LOT of information on the Internet written by experts about maintaining your privacy. We are not experts in this sort of thing but we would like to point you to a few of them so you can learn directly from them,
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has long been on the forefront of the fight for privacy on the Internet. They’ve long maintained a very well done site called Surveillance Self-Defense which is written for the average computer user and is geared toward solid practical advice.
- Consumer Reports is another non-profit organization that’s well known for their buying guides. They also maintain a website dedicated to educating people about keeping their information secure.
- This Wired article published shortly after Trump’s election is entitled “The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance” and it covers,
- Using encrypted communications.
- Using encrypted devices.
- Using encrypted cloud services.
- Staying anonymous online.
- Keeping your location private when online.
- Using cash for sensitive purchases.
- The difficulty in using “burner phones” correctly.