Surveillance and Censorship

All glory to our God, the Father of Jesus Christ. He alone makes this life worth living.

I’ve messed with computer networking a lot. I’ll admit that I don’t always grasp the technical writing on the subject, but the Lord saw fit to grant me a talent for pattern recognition. The more I mess with networking, the more I discern patterns that are useful to me. So while I could offer a very basic discussion of packets and BGP and DNS, what has helped me most in my computer tech support ministry has been knowing what to expect from the whole mess in terms of what most people do with it.

Once you recognize the patterns of what is typical, it’s easier to look into what might be improved, and what is just the nature of the beast.

My interest began with my introduction to Linux 30 years ago. My now deceased brother knew quite a bit about computers and networking and I learned a lot from him. But nothing accelerated my interest like realizing one day that I was under federal surveillance. Having served in the Military Police and having done surveillance, it was very easy to recognize that surveillance back in the good old days before it was common on the Net. It had to do with odd noises on the phone lines and people who were obviously not locals asking questions about you in your small rural community. You find out quickly who your real friends are.

That experience put me on the path to learning more about the various agencies who did this kind of thing. Some of them were pretty clumsy about it. It was confirmed when they finally got around to interviewing me personally. Quite honestly, I had done nothing to warrant the attention. I just happened to friends with a fellow whose brother was a warrant fugitive. I quickly went from total trust in the federal government and an active participant in law enforcement to feeling like I was thrown under the bus. The US Marshals slandered me to people I didn’t even know, trying to get more information on me. I was forced to leave the church where I was leading worship music.

Wanna laugh? Today I’m listed by the US Marshals as a cult leader and militia organizer.

As you might expect, I became a bit of an activist about the abusive behavior of both government and church leadership. I dove into networking with a very strong purpose to help people keep doing what God called them to do in spite of interference from various authorities.

Over the past 30 years, that ham-fisted surveillance has come and gone several times. I’ve written about some of those experiences in the past. My whole activism is wrapped up in sharing information. I don’t encourage people actually doing anything except to be aware of it and speak boldly. In the process, I’ve offered a high volume of criticism for government agencies and officials, always aiming to reveal their evil.

So I’m not the least bit surprised that the surveillance is back again. These days, most of us use the Net for our communications and the various federal agencies concentrate their surveillance efforts there. Some are better at it than others. You’ll never detect NSA snooping; it’s so pervasive that it’s part of the normal traffic. Other agencies are still clumsy about it, giving away clues that are glaringly obvious. This is how you recognize the organizational incompetence of the federal government, with so many agencies fighting each other instead of working together. They keep spying on each other at least as much as they spy on us.

To be specific, I will warn you that my Gmail accounts are under heightened surveillance. I opened several so that I could compartmentalize my activities; that’s part of how you deal with surveillance, how you learn to spot it. It’s part of the same idea behind using multiple browsers, each for a specific range of activities. It complicates surveillance, makes it a lot more work.

Right now, the hottest hot-button issue is the war in Ukraine. If you so much as mention that on the Net, one agency or another is going to check you out. Our government has worked very hard to spin this, as if it’s a holy war blessed by God. But it’s not working, because a huge number of people are yammering on the Net about how the Russians are right and the US government is intolerably evil, always trying to destroy everything it can’t control.

Depending on how you reckon things, maybe I have earned a decent privilege for criticizing my government. I’m a service-connected disabled veteran. I served in the US military until my body quit working properly, largely because of that service. They used me up and sent me home. I don’t regret my choice to serve, but I also don’t shrink from confessing that I helped my government do some awful things. Yeah, I was exposed to stuff I can’t talk about without the risk of going to jail. But there are plenty of things I can talk about, and I’ll do that.

I stand firm on one thing: The US government is unspeakably evil. The people running the show deserve the burn in Hell, with only a tiny few exceptions. But I’m also quite adamant that God should take care of it His way, and we should not interfere in meat-space. Further, that’s only a generality, because your heart of conviction may demand you do something that I won’t do. Obey your convictions first, and don’t take me too seriously. But the main point is that I will not organize any activity against the US government, save for the very narrow field of speaking the gospel truth. No amount of snooping is going to uncover my hand on any other form of resistance.

Tell the truth as you experience it, as best you know it. In this one thing I will openly defy any government. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment; I have a commission from God and no human government has standing to oppose that calling. I willingly face the harassment from government for that cause.

As a practical note to readers: I’m not going to pay for bulletproof hosting. It isn’t worth what it costs, because your account ends up on a DNS blacklist. The Net is closing, pun intended. Along with others, I predict that by the end of 2024, this kind of Internet gospel ministry will be shut down, no longer possible. Don’t think of it as religious persecution; it’s purely political. The government is going after every form of free expression, including porn. It’s a blind steamroller kind of thing, and it just happens to include folks like us. You need to give prayer and thought to how you will carry on the work of the Lord without using the Net.

This blog could disappear without notice, or some other odd interference could make it quit working as it does. It could be a technology issue, but it’s increasingly likely censorship will take it down. What we all need is to become less dependent. Fellowship online as much as possible, since the Radix Fidem way of covenant faith is currently rather rare. We are thinly scattered. But the day will come soon when we will each stand on our own in the Lord. We need to be ready.