CompSec and Surveillance

Posted on December 19, 2024 by ehurst

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.

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Linux Mint on HP 15t-dw300

Posted on December 18, 2024 by ehurst

Okay, so I tested an iPad for a while, but I just can’t get used to the Apple way of things. They don’t make it easy to handle documents; it’s all about media — every medium except text. The iPad would not reliably connect to any cloud storage except its own. And that Apple cloud storage was painfully hard to get into from any other device. It is very truly a walled garden.

I still needed a second device with my primary computer, and I was contemplating another Android tablet when I received a hand-me-down laptop — HP 15t-dw300. You can look up the specs, but it came standard with an i5 Intel CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB NVMe drive.

It was cranky on Windows 11, which is why someone gave it to me. I wondered if I could get Linux to run better. I tested several different distros and things just would not work right. I put it aside for a while, then remembered I could run a hardware self-test. I looked it up and on HP laptops, that’s F2 right when you power up. I believed that either the drive or the controller was not behaving properly, but the self-test came up clean.

I booted into the latest release of Mint on a bootable USB jump drive and took the time to run GParted (partition utility) first. I deleted all the existing partitions. The run of different distros had made a hash of the file system, and it was still looking for one that had been replaced twice over. Once I deleted all the existing partitions so that the whole drive was unallocated space, I was able to install Mint without any balking at all. Further, it booted back up cleanly.

The only flaw is that the 3.5mm headphones jack does not work as advertised. The headphones get nothing and sound keeps coming out of the speakers. I had to add an adapter to the headphone to plug it into a USB port, upon which Mint immediately switched the sound output.

It’s running just fine for now, and I intend to keep it that way. This will be my mobile device. All I need to do is purchase the added service so I can have unlimited data on tethering my cellphone and I can use this machine anywhere. And it will work for my uses a whole lot better than any tablet could.

Sometimes God provides things in unexpected ways.

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NT Doctrine — 1 Peter 1

Posted on December 14, 2024 by ehurst

Peter writes from Rome, after Paul’s execution and shortly before his own. His audience is Hebrew Christians in what we today call Northern Turkey. This region of the Roman Empire featured rather severe persecution rather early. But because Peter already knows his time is short, he’s in a good position to offer apostolic advice. This was the “last times” for all of them.

The first thing he mentions is that they belong to a spiritual realm in Christ, not of this world. There is no comparison; our eternal inheritance is precious beyond anything here. When we find ourselves in the last times — a phrase referring to persecution — knowing this keeps us focused on our testimony. Our lives were forfeited on the Cross with Christ, so we should hardly be surprised when this world seeks to take them.

We carry on in this life solely for the glory of Christ, for His reputation. This typically demands that we pass through persecution in order to offer the testimony of our relentless commitment to Him. Nothing can pry us loose from His grasp; the world needs to see that. Suffering for Him is a privilege that isn’t available to fakes.

Peter declares the paradox that we live in faith precisely so we can die with grace. Death is the ultimate deliverance from sin and sorrow.

The prophets of old knew their messages of the coming of the Messiah were not for their times, but far in the future. They did their best to discern the signs of His coming. It puzzled them that He was supposed to suffer and then glory. Indeed, the heavenly beings were longing to understand all of this, as well. Apparently, God kept close counsel on this plan.

So, this is worthy of contemplation. Dig deep into the implications of His Return and the Judgment. Get the big picture on all of this. Find your role in the final revelation of Christ as the full manifestation of God Himself to all of Creation. Don’t listen to fleshly urges and miss your chance to be a part of this. Naturally, that means being ready to suffer and die just like He did on the Cross, for the Cross is part of our divine heritage. Our lives should manifest His holiness.

If you call God your Father, He who judges all righteously, then demonstrate how seriously you take His Word. We aren’t here in this foreign world for that long, so don’t fold. Our Jewish ancestors threw away the spiritual inheritance and left us nothing. The ransom to recover all of that treasure was not mere material things, but the sacred blood of the final Passover Lamb, Jesus Christ.

The Son was there at the Creation of all things, and Creation knew instinctively His Day would come. And it did arrive, quite recently, just in time for all of us to come to Him when we needed Him most. The Father raised Him from the grave with such glory that there is no mistaking where we put our trust.

By submission to Him, your souls have been washed clean, and you are fit to stand in His Presence, to absorb the power to love each other as He does. We are a new kingdom of souls born into Eternity through His promises. Isaiah warned us that all mortal flesh lives and dies rather like grass and flowers, but the revelation of God is eternal. That revelation is the gospel message you heard, and it owns you.

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Don’t Celebrate Hatred

Posted on December 11, 2024 by ehurst

If you need a human explanation of the case of the murder of the healthcare insurance CEO, try this. Do you realize that the reason the healthcare insurance industry exists is because the medical provider bigshots didn’t want to be bothered with all that stuff? They created health insurance as a way to contract out the job of marketing and collecting the money. The reason healthcare costs so much is because of all the free riders injected into the system, mostly at the behest of the providers. It’s just another welfare program.

But all of that still misses the point. The problem is materialistic leftism — pagan idolatry. You cannot fix this problem because it is a natural outcome of American middle-class culture. The only way to stop this on a human level is to destroy that culture. Except, the destruction of that culture is built into the culture itself. The result is the fruit of the roots of the tree. You can be sure that the bulk of the middle-class people of America will soon be pushed down into the lower classes. The people have no clue how this stuff works, sowing to destruction, and they will reap the whirlwind.

The only sanity here is knowing you cannot stop the train wreck. This is just the firstfruits, so hang on. Be adaptable or you’ll forget why God keeps you alive.

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Online or Offline

Posted on December 9, 2024 by ehurst

Wake up, blog!

I’m torn between the desire for operational security (OpSec) on one hand, and on the other hand, the commission from God to teach what I know.

I use a VPN on my computers. I discovered some time ago that my account on my ISP — the best one in town — was compromised. What tipped me off was that the ISP blocked some sites that my phone could reach when it wasn’t using WIFI. My cell service is through a different provider. The choice of sites blocked indicated who was behind it. Using a VPN means that the ISP can’t selectively block those URLs because it’s all encrypted between my computer and the VPN servers.

The picture is complicated. You need to understand that whoever is messing with me isn’t that serious about it. I perceive that I am under a rather low level of surveillance and harassment. On this blog I was previously harassed by comments from people who were clearly sock-puppets — agents of clandestine government services trying to herd people into saying things that would get them arrested, or at least revealing the wrong kind of information that justifies a court order for closer watching. Because I was able to name and shame the sock-puppets, that harassment ended.

Had they not backed off, I could have filed complaints with their service providers for abuse, which creates a big hassle for the sock-puppet operations. I’ve done that before on previous blogs. Even if they are masking their source through their own VPN, it still requires some kind of response from the VPN provider itself. That’s the current state of law and industry standards. Cellphone harassment via services specific to cellphones is one thing, but when someone engages the Internet itself, they are forced to leave tracks. The Internet won’t work without the source IP address in the packets. You could, in theory, masquerade your cellphone number, but you can’t hide your IP address, and that IP address belongs to somebody who is legally obliged to respond to certain complaints.

Keep in mind that different agencies have their own unique set of habits regarding this kind of stuff. If it’s the likes of NSA, CIA and their allies, your goose is cooked. But if it’s something like FBI or US Marshals, they tend to be ham-fisted in some areas. For real threats, the various agencies cooperate, but I believe I have gotten some low-level attention from the ham-fisted sort. They have screwed up from day one. Were it more serious, I wouldn’t know about it, or would likely already be gone (from the Net, at least).

If the feds wanted to simply cut me off from the Net altogether, it requires a very substantial rigmarole that still has lots of leaks. I’m not that kind of threat. The bureaucratic instinct is to watch and manipulate in situ, not cut you off. The former is far easier and more productive in their thinking. The latter is currently nearly impossible, and requires that you be officially identified very narrowly as some kind of threat that doesn’t quite justify jailing you.

If you are working alone, it’s a whole lot easier. Once you garner support, it really complicates federal persecution. Taking all my devices means I’ll just get them from someone else, and it could easily include devices that still appear to be in other people’s hands. There are functional tablets, for example, that don’t run malware and don’t report your location so clearly as Android devices or iPads do. I’ve been looking at them online, but so far they tend to be clunky or expensive. Still, I believe they are the future for me, somewhere out there in the “not just yet” land. (I’m waiting for improvements.)

Radix Fidem community and Kiln of the Soul ministries are not interested in the kind of activism that gets serious attention from the federal government. All we do is simply infowar. It is most certainly warfare, but not aimed at any concrete results. We are proposing a very non-mainstream faith in Christ, loudly denouncing sin as we understand it, and proposing kinds of answers, but not specific actions.

We purposely limit our reach. This is not your traditional evangelism that seeks to convert just anyone, under the assumption that every human is fair game. We believe firmly in Divine Election; we do not choose who will respond. Indeed, we intentionally avoid anything that smacks of manipulating people into faux responses. We aim for miracles that only God can perform.

For the non-elect, there is nothing anyone can do on our human level, and nothing anyone will do in Eternity. For the Elect, Satan’s whole business is information warfare. That’s his sole power with humans. Our flesh is his best ally, but we are teaching nailing the flesh to the Cross, subjecting it to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Devil certainly doesn’t like this, but he is not yet allowed to seize human government personally, and so must work through fallible and blind human nature among the non-elect. This puts distinct limitations on the hassles we face as believers.

I can’t guess how quickly things might degrade to the point Satan is allowed to seize control, but for now, there are way too many factors missing to imagine that day is very close. The threat right now is indirect. No human government is set up to make faith itself illegal. That would require dramatic changes, and my convictions say that’s not coming soon. The persecution we face is political, not directly aimed at faith. The faithful are being swept up in a general oppression of those who dare to dissent about anything at all.

So, the commission from Christ means we conduct information warfare on the Net for now, and engage individuals as the opportunity arises online or offline.

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Hiatus Time

Posted on October 18, 2024 by ehurst

The Lord commands and we obey. That pressure I mentioned a few days ago isn’t gone, but it has convinced me to make some decisions. One of them is that this blog is going to take a nap. For the time being, my writing and photos will appear on the forum. See you there.

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God Pranks

Posted on October 16, 2024 by ehurst

Do you understand that God has a sense of humor? The Bible is loaded with puns and sarcasm that most people miss. Job, in the midst of his sorrows, answered one of his harassing friends with something like this: “Oh, yes, you are the models for humanity and all wisdom will die with you.”

God declares that He wants us to be His friends, His family. It is not out of place to imagine that He will play harmless pranks on those close to Him. When He wants to do something amusing, it naturally comes across from the Spirit Realm into our fallen realm. It will bear that signature; the nature of the prank will clearly be a matter of His divine authority at work.

Thus, we have people who have experienced what is called “concurrence” or “synchronicity” — events happening near each other in time, but bound together by a theme or meme, if you will, in your mind. Yes, God can and does arrange these things to make us laugh with Him.

Thus, you may replace your kitchen sink, watch a film in which a boat sinks, and find in your area a sink hole opened up all within a matter of hours. I’ve experienced these kinds of events from time to time. It’s my kind of humor, and I have felt in my heart that God was inviting me to be amused at the collision of small things in a short space of time, each reflecting a theme that I would recognize.

Don’t be surprised when God pulls such a prank on you.

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We Shall See

Posted on October 15, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday I was distracted by a very heavy sense of pressure. It has happened often enough that I recognized it as a moral burden, a potent sense of anticipation that great evil was coming to America. Furthermore, I was not alone. A couple of friends contacted me about the same thing bearing down on their conscious awareness.

I’ve written about this often enough; it’s part of mysticism. We are setting about intentionally trying to become aware of the Unseen Realm. We want to be a part of it. We are consciously preparing to take our place in Eternity and this world simply isn’t where things happen assertively, but is a mere reaction to things that originate somewhere else.

During those periods of pressure, I spend a lot more time in prayer and contemplation, striving to connect better to that other realm. Anyone close to me can tell I’m distracted, even if they don’t sense anything themselves. It’s rather like a calling, a bell ringing for my attention. It’s never processed intellectually, but it often results in moving me to do things differently. It’s not about data, but about persons and strong connections on a different level.

Some of my habits have already been changing, and in many ways such pressure confirms and gives focus to the resolve that moves me.

Let me give you some specifics of what has been moving already. I rarely use a graphical browser to read and research things on the Net. I use something called “elinks” quite a bit in a terminal window on Linux. It reduces the content clutter. Granted, there are whole sites where it doesn’t work at all, but most of the time it’s just fine. I get the data I’m seeking and don’t have to worry about the manipulative distractions common on most websites.

It’s not just the advertising; it’s the whole package of how color, shape and imagery are used to condition our thinking and receptivity to the content. For example, I’ve done some research on human awareness and how the media on the Net affects us as humans. I’m not going to link to the videos because, oddly enough, the videos themselves participate in the same manipulation they pretend to be warning about.

Do you realize just how much of what crosses the wires on the Net is not direct human communications? The majority of all traffic is generated by automatic processes — bots and algorithms talking to each other. We have created a whole generation of people whose creative efforts are entirely controlled by algorithms and what the service algorithms will promote. People seldom act on the interests of other people, being steered instead by how the algorithms promote or hide their output. The creative output serves profitability, not self-expression.

And content creators also must avoid censorship, that vast ugly effort to shape human perception.

Part of what I was facing in that pressure in my soul was about this very thing. I’m being called to change how I engage the Net because of how God is working among His people. Something awful is coming that will shut down opportunities I’ve enjoyed in the past. It’s not that my message will change, but that the means and methods will change.

Nor should you imagine that everything happened all at once yesterday. Rather, yesterday signaled to me a moment of turning, that the balance of things had finally shifted and decisions had to be made.

Don’t get hung up on the specifics; that’s not the point. The point is how God works in us. We are being steered by the Spirit, if we will listen. I’m doing my best to stay open. When we seek the Lord with passion, then that passion will burn more brightly at times. So, much of what happened yesterday was a shift in my heart on a moral plane, not a matter of mere facts and actions. The implications will play out in the future as my conscious awareness discovers what has changed in my convictions, bouncing my resolve off of circumstances.

We shall see what it means.

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Cause of Resistance

Posted on October 13, 2024 by ehurst

People send me a lot of junk by email. The motivations vary; I don’t mean to slam anyone for thinking something is worth my attention. Sometimes it actually is worth it. Even hucksters sometimes give away something useful in order to make their pitch.

Consider this video. At about 45 minutes, it’s a time sink. It will include toward the end promoting something I cannot support, solutions that I don’t believe will do much good.

For example, I believe that cryptocurrencies are useful only in the short term. They are more like weapons against centralized government. Once you leverage them for some immediate goal, trade them away. Their value will die suddenly when you least expect it. Think of them as expendable.

But the meat of the video is an insider’s revelation of things hidden by our wicked government officials. In summary, the story of the Salk Polio Vaccine is paired with some truly unconscionable “medical” testing of bio-weapons. This physician tells how we came to the place where Fauci was hiding “gain of function” testing in Wuhan, China. He warns that anything involving work with SV40 (a monkey virus) is guaranteed to promote cancer. And it’s quite intentional.

Thus, most new vaccines today are part of a long term campaign to generate millions of new cancer patients, which is where the real money is in industrial medicine. It’s not so much that they intend to kill you outright, but to turn you into a cancer patient so they can milk the system for profits.

You can work out the details of the history he offers in the first 30 minutes or so. I had to watch it twice because of the wealth of details. Then the talk turns to his political advocacy for things like cryptocurrencies and decentralized medical rights. Now, I’m certainly in favor of decentralized medicine, and I agree wholeheartedly with the message to resist any government mandated vaccines, but I don’t hold out much hope for changing the way western governments are doing things.

Rather, I suggest you will face a social and political siege in any future replays of the pandemic game. The next time, we will be forced to consider violence as the means to keeping medical toxins out of our bodies. If there is going to be an armed revolt in America, this will be the cause. Medical or climate based oppression is the best weapon the commies have.

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NT Doctrine — Hebrews 10

Posted on October 12, 2024 by ehurst

We were born trapped in our fleshly natures. There was no way we could have broken the bondage; the flesh must die. Jesus did that for us. His death on the Cross broke the bondage and set us free to walk in the Spirit. This is what the writer of Hebrews tells his fellow Jews in Rome.

The Covenant of Moses was just a shadow of the real thing. Mount Sinai was a promise of what was to come. Blood sacrifices spoke of the price, but were not that price. They could not break the bondage of the fleshly nature. Otherwise, once free, there would have been no need to keep making the sacrifices over and over again. Though commanded by God, these rituals and sacrifices were just the shadow of redemption.

God revealed that Himself. David in Psalm 40 prophesied the truth: It wasn’t a matter of those sacrifices, but of a firm commitment based on the promises of things to come. The Law of Moses was a promise of redemption. Moses himself said that what God really wanted has always been the same: our hearts. Thus, the Messiah’s submission to come and simply live the Father’s will was the promise of a New Covenant.

So, Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice once and for all, breaking the bondage of the flesh. Now He sits at the right hand of the Father, until such time as this New Covenant is fulfilled in His children. The New Covenant is not written in human language, but in the hearts of those children.

Following Christ to the Cross is the ultimate fulfillment of every command God had ever revealed to mankind. What the author indicates, but does not say, is his audience should stop whining about persecution in the flesh. It cannot change what Christ has done in your soul. He has broken the bondage of the flesh. Take up your cross of commitment and sacrifice, endure with patience, do His will in the face of sorrow and death. Encourage each other to endure and keep pulling together as a family. That’s what it means to follow Christ.

Now that the bondage is broken, you are free to walk away from sin and defilement. You would have to willfully seek out disobedience; there’s no further cleansing that can help you. Are you trying to provoke God’s wrath?

Back when these Hebrew Christians first came to Christ some decades ago, they were willing to endure some persecution in defiance of Jewish authorities. They understood being released from the bondage to this life and its trappings. Are they now going to fold under Roman persecution?

He quotes from Habakkuk 2 about how God operates on a different time frame, yet He never fails to act. When God comes to deliver, He will be searching for those who were faithful in waiting until He was ready to act. We get the feeling the writer sensed that the opportunity to slide back into the safety of the Talmud would end soon when Rome would destroy the Temple.

Don’t turn tail and hide in Judaism; Rome will destroy that, too. What’s left will never be the same.

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