How dangerous is it to be a communist in the US? Should I be very hush hush about it? I won’t ever be open about it but I’m just wondering how secretive I should be. Most of my close friends and certain family members know that I am a “Socialist”. I am pretty young and still need to start my life and I don’t want to ruin my chances of anything.

Some precautions I’ve taken are installing a vpn and only going doing commie stuff with vpn on. I’ve separated personal and political social media accounts and never post political stuff on my personal ones. Should I be doing any other things?

Thank you in advance

  • pinkeston@lemmygrad.ml
    6·
    2 years ago

    uhhh I’m not a user myself and haven’t learned too much about how it works but I think the general wisdom is Tails by itself is very good and to only add on a VPN if you know how to configure it properly so it actually helps and not hinders your privacy

        • SaddamHussein24@lemmygrad.ml
          8·
          2 years ago

          Thats not secure AT ALL. By using a VPN before TOR, it means that VPN can read EVERYTHING you do through TOR. If you just use TOR, they cant. Why? Both TOR and VPN send the data encrypted. However, since they are 2 different networks, the encryption is different. Thus, this happens:

          Your computer encrypts data using the VPN protocol, sends it to VPN

          VPN decrypts the data

          VPN encrypts the data using TOR protocol, sends it through the TOR network

          TOR exit node decrypts the data and sends it to the server you are connecting to

          Do you see the problem here? The VPN can read everything you do, this is not a safe setup. Just use TOR, its safe enough. All your ISP knows when you are using TOR is that you are using TOR, it doesnt know what you are doing on TOR. If that is still a problem for whatever reason, then use TOR bridges, a built in feature of Tails that uses secret TOR entry nodes, thus hiding from your ISP that you are connecting to TOR. This is explained here in detail:

          https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/tor/index.en.html#:~:text=Everything you do on the,you are connected to Tor.

          I highly recommend you use Tails. Its extremely safe, if im not wrong Edward Snowden used it when he published the NSA leaks, so its definetely safe.

          • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭@lemmygrad.mlM
            2·
            2 years ago

            No, what I meant by You -> VPN -> Tor is as described in the linked article:

            1. You encrypt packets for Tor traffic
            2. You send the packets to your VPN
            3. Your VPN forwards the packets onto the first Tor node

            Of course, not encrypting the Tor packets locally largely defeats the point of using Tor

            • SaddamHussein24@lemmygrad.ml
              4·
              2 years ago

              I think you dont understand how Tor and VPNs work. All a regular VPN does is create an encrypted network between your computer and the VPN. You send data through that network, VPN decrypts it and send it to a website you are browsing. Regular VPNs arent meant to be used with Tor. Tor does the same thing but with multiple random decentralized servers, which makes it much safer. The Tor encrypted network is between your computer and the Tor exit node. When you are using VPN + TOR, you are using 2 encrypted networks together, one between your computer and the VPN, and another one between the VPN and the Tor exit node. The Tor encryption happens in the VPN, not in your computer, since the VPN is pretending to be your computer and thats how the Tor Network sees it as. What you are saying is setting up a united network between your computer, the VPN and the Tor network, but that is much more complicated and different thing. A regular VPN doesnt work like that and no commercial VPN offers such as a service.

              • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭@lemmygrad.mlM
                3·
                2 years ago

                I think I was just unclear. To my understanding, this is the process:

                1. A packet P is encrypted for Tor and incorporated in a packet T, which also contains the address for the first Tor node (unencrypted).
                2. T is encrypted for the VPN and incorporated in a packet V, which also contains the address for the relevant VPN server.
                3. V is sent to the VPN server.
                4. The VPN server decrypts V and can read T, which contains the unencrypted destination (the first Tor node) and the encrypted P (which the VPN server cannot decrypt).
                5. The VPN server sends T to the first Tor node.

                Is this still incorrect?

                • SaddamHussein24@lemmygrad.ml
                  21·
                  2 years ago

                  No, thats not how it works. To do that you would need to create a custom VPN server to create a united PC-VPN-TOR encrypted network, which no commercial VPN service offers. Ill try to explain it more simply. Regular commercial VPNs are designed to be used for normal direct connections, not for Tor. The VPN acts as a 1 intermediate, “impersonating” your PC in order to provide you anonimity. Imagine that you want to buy “Maos Little Red Book” in a library or something, but you are afraid that will get you flagged for some CIA watchlist, so you ask me to buy it for you. Im the VPN and you are the PC in this case. The library doesnt know you bought the book, but i do.

                  Now lets imagine you instead ask a random guy on the street to do it for you, who then asks another random guy who then asks a third one. That would be Tor, much more anonymous. However, if you do VPN + TOR, meaning I ask the random people instead of you, it defeats the purpose, cuz i still know you bought the book. Thats the problem. Its the VPN that requests Tor encryption, not your PC, because the VPN thinks you are just accessing a website, its not designed to be used with another proxy on top. The VPN is designed to be the only proxy, its not safe combined with other proxies. Do you understand know?

                  Edit: Tor is not designed to be configured through an additional proxy. Thus, Tor understands the VPN to be your computer, and sets up the end to end encryption from the VPN. Equally, VPN isnt designed to be used with Tor, the Tor data travels unencrypted (for the TOR protocol, it is encrypted with the VPN protocol) from PC to VPN, and only becomes encrypted from VPN to TOR.

                • Amicese@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  Not incorrect, but the VPN still has access to the Tor packet, so the security is compromised. The goal of TOR is to provide an anonymous network; running the TOR packet in a VPN just gives away your data, therefore reducing your anonymity.

                  I’d read over the Tor site for clarification.

                  VPNs aren’t about encryption; VPNs form fake IP addresses that have fake geolocations.

            • SaddamHussein24@lemmygrad.ml
              21·
              2 years ago

              But thats impossible, thats not how Tor and VPNs work. The VPN has to encrypt what you send them, otherwise your ISP can read everything and its pointless. However, the TOR network and the website you are visting cannot decrypt the VPN encription, only the VPN can. Thus, the VPN has to decrypt what you are sending and can read it. Sure, you could have the VPN encrypt the TOR package on top of it, not before it, but no VPN offers that service. Youd have to set up your own server and VPN and besides being a pain in the ass its pointless, since the server has an internet connection and by being your server your ISP would know you are using TOR through the VPN.

        • Nyoomie@lemmygrad.ml
          2·
          2 years ago

          That is true, yes, but also it highly depends on your VPN provider and what you’re avoiding. Since I Imagine most communists want to avoid “the government” and not some specific group:

          "Against a global adversary with unlimited resources more hops make passive attacks (slightly) harder but active attacks easier as you are providing more attack surface and send out more data that can be used. " and “If the VPN/SSH server is adversary controlled you weaken the protection provided by Tor.” (i.e. the US may very well give large sums of money and threats to access VPN logs, because at the end of the day, these services operate for money).

            • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
              3·
              2 years ago

              Just wanted to say you are absolutely correct and most people replying to you are giving you bullshit. And they are ignorant or deliberately misleading people.

              All ISPs in the US are part of surveillance programs and networks. This is a fact. The CIA/NSA and the FBI as well as local cops can easily access and understand what you are doing on your ISP connection and knowing your ISP provided IP address immediately leads back to you, your credit card and your home address.

              Your home ISP keeps records on you going back years, probably at least 5, but potentially forever tied to your account, name, social, etc.

              If you use Tor naked on your ISP connection your ISP knows you are a tor user and the NSA knows you are a tor user and your threat profile on the vast naughty lists is elevated.

              VPNs may very well be intelligence honey-pots or otherwise compromised. I would suggest foreign VPNs located outside of US/five eyes jurisdiction as an ideal. However, even assuming that VPN XYZ which is located in Switzerland or France is an NSA run honeypot you are doing nothing to worsen your situation. You’re just adding steps to their process of identifying you which is never not a good thing.

              They already have full visibility into your traffic from your ISP and can legally subpoena and use that against you in open court (in fact in many cases your ISP will hand it over without a warrant). By using this theoretical NSA honeypot VPN if they trace it back only that far they cannot in open court reveal that unless they want to blow the lid off the fact they’re running that service and have to shut it down and go to the trouble of spinning up a new one (and do this every time they want to do this) or to engage in parallel construction which is difficult and expensive and not always viable. Unless you are an incredibly high value target they’ll know you use tor but be unable to do anything about it.

              Let us imagine for a moment you access a communist revolutionary website via tor, however it was compromised by glowies with malicious javascript that manages to get your computer’s IP address and send out a beacon outside of the tor tunnel to try and get your real IP address. On just tor they now have your real IP address. However if you’re using a VPN (and especially if you’re using it in a very secure manner for example via an injector upstream or the tor client is in a virtual machine with no hope of having access to your real internet connection, only the VPN one) they only have your VPN IP address, a shared IP address.

              More HOPS is better so long as the final hop doesn’t know who you are.

              What is not secure or sane is to use tor as a tunnel and have the final connection made by your VPN. Why? Because your VPN assumedly knows who you are via payment details and it would defeat the point of tor’s anonymity. You could potentially do this safely if you only ever connected to the VPN over tor (including during sign-up and including during sign-up and all use of your connected email address) AND if you paid using a truly anonymous payment method like giftcards bought with cash far from your home or certain cryptocurrencies subjected to anonymization techniques.

                • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Correct. Your VPN would connect to the tor network and thus see only the entry IP not the routing or the exit IP (they have no more ability to see that than your ISP does).

                  Your VPN knows your entry IP (usually the one assigned by your ISP) because it has to send and receive packets to and from it, your VPN also knows your destination as it has to pass packets to and from it for you. However your VPN only knows the first hop. The entry tor node’s IP address. Tor is a multi-hop system involving at least 3 hops, entry, onion routing, and exit. The entry and exit nodes are not supposed to talk directly to each other so in theory can’t correlate who you are and in theory means an attacker that controls an entry or exit node cannot use that to deanonymize people. A sophisticated attacker with control of large amounts of nodes in the tor network (or in a position to carefully observe traffic and perform timing correlation attacks) could in theory de-anonymize you. In such a scenario adding a VPN increases the complexity somewhat as it would mean your attacker would have to not only control significant parts of the tor network but also your VPN.

            • Nyoomie@lemmygrad.ml
              2·
              2 years ago

              Hm, that makes sense to me. I am not versed well enough in privacy topics to see why that’s not the case, so I think you’re correct. And the more I search, the more people say that yes You -> Tor -> VPN does not hinder the tor connection itself and protects the non-tor traffic coming out of your system + people probably trust their VPN way more than their ISP for good reason.

              • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭@lemmygrad.mlM
                2·
                2 years ago

                I think You -> Tor -> VPN is primarily useful to access websites that block or otherwise inconvenience known Tor nodes (Cloudflare…). The best option for most of those who want all traffic to be secure is probably still TAILS (or Whonix, etc.) without a VPN, just because it’s easy to make mistakes. I mainly use VPNs when downloading things because Tor is quite significantly slower

                • Nyoomie@lemmygrad.ml
                  3·
                  2 years ago

                  Heck i meant to write You -> VPN -> Tor my bad, but yes you’re totally right on that front

                  Also agree just use tails without anything extra probably easiest way

                  But also very interested in the convo above explaining why we’re both potentially wrong lol

                • Amicese@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  Then you may as well just use a SOCKS proxy. VPNs are just glorified proxies.