The Bard in Green

I’m actually doing two classes on alternating weeks, but they’re both

“Here’s basic opsec principles and now we’ll talk about a bunch of tools that are useful specifically for activism in (against) the current political climate.”

I’m doing a basic class where we’ll just try to help people organize in safer ways (Telegram is like the number one organizational platform right now). One of our goals there is to try to set specific projects / organizations up with dedicated Matrix servers and help them get non-technical people to use them.

We’re also doing a more advanced class where we want to help people set up their own hardened laptops and (for those able to secure the hardware) GrapheneOS phones. That will probably be like Unit 2 of that class. We want to start with threat modeling and help people figure out the tools they specifically need to do their work.

UPDATE:

I’ve had a chance to read through it.

• It’s short, to the point, an easy read, covers a lot of bases. I think that makes it an excellent starting point for people at the beginning of their journey.
• It doesn’t contain a lot of specific information, but I think it’s a good thing to have literature that’s just a general overview as a starting point.
• Stylometry is far from an exact science (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11707938/). However, I bet this won’t stop the current administration from using it (and possibly falsely accusing people because of it), so it’s good to know about.
• This will be extremely useful as I’m creating my lesson plan and I will probably pop it out to the class on day one as suggested reading.

Overall: Great resource and very timely. Thank you.

I would add, that if you’re planning to make a lot of use of tor, and run tor hidden services locally, syncing the Monero block chain over tor (possibly to multiple local machines) and solo mining on old slow computers is a great way to generate a bunch of random tor traffic.

I’ll read through this. I’m teaching a free class on cybersec / opsec to members of local activist organizations starting next month, so resources like this are potentially really useful.

Scratch under the surface of every for profit privacy / anonymity service, you find shitty libertarian cryptobros who probably post racist memes on 4chan while whining about feminism in the man-o-sphere. That doesn’t speak to the nature of people who care about privacy, it speaks to the nature of people who care about privacy and also want to do capitalism.