I wanted to make this post to try and raise awareness about internet privacy and censorship among communists, as this seems to be often overlooked in these spaces.

By using big tech services, such as Google’s endless arsenal of “free” services, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, you are letting these companies learn everything about you: your interests, the people you talk to, the places you go to and your political interests. And as is well known nowadays, all of these companies are lapdogs for western intelligence agencies, handing over all of that precious data to them and censoring dissent. I hope you can clearly see the problem here. As a communist, this presents a massive threat to your freedom of speech, freedom to protest and even your safety, especially if you live in the imperial core.

I urge all comrades to stop using these services, by switching to private and open source alternatives, and to use additional measures to protect your privacy such as TOR or a trustworthy VPN like RiseUp, Calyx or Proton.

You can find more resources here:

  • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    Can someone help elaborate on the claim that TOR is an op? I’ve considered using it but claims that it was created by the FBI have scared me away…

    • TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
      11·
      2 years ago

      The core principle of Tor, onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.[13] Onion routing is implemented by means of encryption in the application layer of the communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[14] and then called The Onion Routing project (which later simply became “Tor”, as an acronym for the former name[15]), was launched on 20 September 2002. The first public release occurred a year later.[16]

      In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[14] In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501©(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor. The EFF acted as The Tor Project’s fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.

      It’s a govt project and is used by the govt for secret communications and getting info from journalists in countries where networks are censored. They allow a certain level of illicit behavior on the network because it masks their own activities. But due to the inherent security of the system, it’s still one of the safest networks out there. Just don’t do terrorist shit or get into cp.