Let’s talk about practicalities: What should you do about online surveillance?
Notice that I didn’t say, “What could you do…” The starting point is to discern what your convictions require of you. Should you fight it? How hard? Only you can answer that. It’s a matter of calling and mission from God.
Indeed, fighting it requires special knowledge, skills and resources most of us do not have, nor will we ever have. There are plenty of good guides out there, and a lot of silly nonsense, not to mention an awful lot of vendors trying to sell surveillance security, both for you and against you.
The real question is whether or not it matters. I know what matters for me, and I can explain it in terms of my mission and calling. My mission is to promote the gospel message as best I understand it, and to provide pastoral care for any who wants it. Frankly, this requires that I reach out to the world around me. Hiding from notice is obviously unproductive in that mission.
Instead, I approach the issue from the angle of whether or not that message gets out there, particularly to the audience God intends. For me, “computer security” (CompSec) means protecting the message from censorship or compromise. I’m far more worried about the message being garbled or blocked than whether anyone knows where it comes from.
I’ve experience both problems in the past. The issue of garbled is primarily two things: Someone changing the content in transmission or after it’s posted somewhere, and someone taking advantage of comment facilities to attack the message in an attempt to confuse the meaning. I’ve fought far more with the latter, especially on this blog. You have no idea how many comments I’ve deleted over the years.
But the broad attack indicated by the word “censorship” has consumed far more of my attention. I’ve used firewalls and the like, not because I worry about snooping, but because I must watch for electronic interference. I use a VPN not to hide my tracks from surveillance, but to prevent someone blocking me from reading certain sources or to hinder posting the message in some places. Both of those have happened.
The ISP through which I connect at home has been compromised, but there is no other ISP that I could switch to that wouldn’t be equally open to such a thing. The whole idea of a VPN is that the packet snooping on the ISP network can’t read the contents of what is transmitted by VPN security. They can’t target specific items in the traffic, and it costs a lot more to simply cut me off totally. It’s not about the snooping itself but what adverse actions arise from that snooping. It’s focused on getting the message through, in and out.
The same can be said about my choice to run Linux on my computers. My research and my experience both indicate that running Windows would introduce unacceptable vulnerabilities in getting the message in and out. The whole Windows ecosystem is wide open to derailment of the message in favor of crass materialism. Frankly, I would prefer something like FreeBSD, but that doesn’t work very well on laptops, and the developers aren’t too interested in resolving that. My focus on laptops has to do with a host of offline issues; they are the best way to address my mission needs. Linux is an acceptable answer on most laptops and I am adept at figuring out how to make it happen. I recommend it for anyone with the time and resources to invest in it.
But I’m not a fanboy promoting Linux for its own sake, nor any other alternative operating system. The alleged moral issues behind all of that means nothing to me. I’m not interested in the question of Open Source, except how it serves my mission. There are advantages for the message; there’s nothing more to it.
Farther along this path, I keep at least one paid-for encrypted email account based outside the US. I keep track of places around the area that offer free wifi, and test them periodically. I keep cellphone connectivity as another alternative, and very carefully select the apps I run on it. I keep a printer that Linux can control and that doesn’t slip invisible ID codes into the printed product (commercial dot-matrix). I maintain alternative means of powering most of the hardware I use, because power does sometimes go out here where I live.
You get the picture. This online ministry is just about all I have right now. Everything else either supports that ministry or it’s just a hobby.
