Rage Against The Panopticon

What I've learned about mass surveillance.

Photo by Lianhao Qu on Unsplash

We live in the most surveilled time in history.

Everyone wants our data. Everyone wants to track us. Everyone wants to catalog us. It’s about money. It’s about control. It’s about invasion. It’s about making you feel like you’re being watched all the time.

There’s a plan behind this. In fact, a social theorist named Jeremy Bentham once offered the concept of the panopticon. In short, it’s about creating the everpresent sensation that everything you do can be seen. When people feel like they’re being watched all the time, you don’t even need police.

Everyone polices themselves.

The desire for privacy lies at the core of our psyche. It’s no wonder so many of our anxiety dreams revolve around the idea of appearing in public exposed and vulnerable, or watching deep secrets spilling out everywhere. Most of us aren’t trying to do anything “wrong.” We just know how judgmental society gets when they find out you do something they consider “weird.”

The irony here is that everyone has secrets. Everyone has things about themselves they want to protect, simply because they don’t want to endure the shame we all heap on each other, for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately, bad people use privacy as an excuse to do bad things. In turn, governments use that as an excuse to invade our lives.

In a normal world, nobody would care about what we get up to in our private arenas. Instead, our sick social economic system has made that the focus of, well, everything. Kash Patel shouldn’t care whether you have a foot fetish, but he probably does. Fascists love invading our privacy, and the tech broligarchy wants to monetize all your deepest personal desires.

It’s their jam.

The government is now conspiring openly with big tech companies like Palantir to build sweeping databases compiling everything everyone knows about us into one place. RFK Jr. and his minions are even trying to build a database that tracks autistic people, and you know they’re not doing that to help us.

The data industrial complex wants to type your name into a search box and instantly see everything about you. They want to see what you bought yesterday. They want to see your mortgage statements. They want to know how much debt you have. They want to see your Ancestry.com labs. They want to build algorithms to analyze all your social media. They want to run models predicting everything from whether you’ll shoot a CEO to how much you’ll pay for a banana.

They want to sell that.

It’s quite terrifying.

They want to know when every protest is going to happen, so they can deploy their “reaction force” before it starts. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s actually true. Trump’s Pentagon really plans to put hundreds of national guard troops on permanent protest patrol to stomp out “civil unrest.” You can count on them getting access to Palantir’s Panopticon.

What can you possibly do?

I’ve spent the last few months reading articles about online privacy. One thing you can do is set up a separate computer that’s free from the data industrial complex, at least as much as possible.

For starters, use an open source operating system like Linux. I’ve tried several distributions. All of them have their own little quirks that make them a little more irritating than a mainstream OS. Still, it wasn’t that hard. You can find instructions for setting this up all over the web. For a while, I set up a computer to use dual boot, which means you can choose which system you use every time you start. According to what I’ve read, Windows can’t access anything on your computer when you’re running the other OS—because it’s not booted.

That said, you maximize your security by having a computer that gets rid of Windows or Apple altogether. These companies are notorious for mucking around with privacy settings and rolling out new “features” that expose your data. They also preinstall all kinds of junk, and they make it hard to get rid of.

If that weren’t bad enough, these companies are also shoving AI apps down our throats, and these things will potentially have access to everything on your computer—everything. In short, they’re privacy hellscapes.

Linux does none of this.

Now that you have a secure OS…

From here, you want to choose only a handful of apps to use, and a secure browser. You aren’t using this device for work. You also might not even be using it for your regular social and family activities, depending on how private you want it to be. Experts routinely mention Firefox and Brave as good browsers. Tor seems to offer anonymity, but not privacy. So if you’re using Tor, don’t ever log into personal accounts or share sensitive information.

That’s not what it’s for.

Get a VPN. It’s simple. A good one will let you set up an autoconnect so that it’s always on, and a kill switch so your internet will disconnect if the service gets interrupted. A VNP connection hides your IP address, making it harder for companies to track you across the web. At any given time, hundreds or thousands of surfers are sharing the same IP address. That’s part of the appeal.

You can technically get your own dedicated IP address for an extra price. That tends to eliminate some of the problems you run into with a VPN, like frequent robot checks. On the other hand, using a single IP address over and over again makes it easier to fingerprint you, so keep that in mind.

Get an encrypted email account, especially for your personal life. Ditch Google and Microsoft entirely. They’re not going to protect you from anyone or anything. A lot of secure email providers also give you multiple “alias” addresses for one account. Apart from privacy, it’s just a good organization tool. You can use one email for personal stuff, and another one for shopping. They’ll even let you generate burner emails for signing up at places that feel spammy.

Finally, get a password manager. Don’t rely on built-in managers in a browser. Get something like Bitwarden or 1Password. Some of these services let you organize your passwords into different folders and share them. So if you want to keep all your bills and utilities passwords in one place and only share those with your family, you can do that. Once again, it just makes life easier—and safer.

Now you have a device that’s largely free from the data industrial complex. Kash Patel will never know about your foot fetish.

In the end, nothing will stop a government agency from knocking down your door and just taking your stuff or forcing companies to give you up. For now, the point is staying away from the pro-fascists who are obeying in advance, the ones who aren’t even going to try to protect you, the ones who make you play ridiculous security theater with captchas and then offer your data up on a silver platter for anyone who wants it, the ones who can’t stop their own data breaches.

The least we can do is not surrender to them.

Now, what about phones?

It’s trickier to set up a private phone now than the movies make it look. You can still buy an unlocked phone, and that’s the starting point. They don’t come with any obligations to a specific carrier, and they have a lot less preinstalled junk to pose security risks. As this article in Wired explains, unlocked phones and prepaid plans are still around and “not going away anytime soon.”

There’s a wider user base than you’d think, beyond the stereotypical Breaking Bad villain. Use cases for private phones include everything from dating to side hustles. A lot of us just want a separate phone for engaging in activities that we don’t want directly associated with our main phone.

Protestors have been using burner phones on a regular basis for years now. They use these phones specifically to record police violence or other human rights abuses, then share them on the internet. They do this without compromising their personal information or location. A piece in The Intercept explains how.

Once you get your private phone, how private it stays is up to you. It almost comes without saying that you shouldn’t be using big tech apps from Microsoft and Google on these devices. The minute you log into an account with your personal info, the phone becomes compromised.

Privacy experts say unlocked phones make it much easier to detach yourself from the international mobile equipment identity (IMEI).

What’s that?

According to one article, “While a serial number identifies a phone in terms of its manufacturer, the IMEI is what identifies a phone on the cellular networks.” The IMEI remains the same regardless of what SIM cards you use. It’s there for one specific reason, to identify you.

If you want to stay as anonymous as possible:

Privacy experts recommend you pay cash if you can. Then you follow these steps to set it up without giving yourself away. They tell you to never turn on your secure phone at home or work, or even around your other phone. On top of that, you have to find and disable every tracking feature on the phone, and that tends to vary by phone. In short, you have to act like a spy.

Of course, someone using a second phone for a side hustle can’t avoid giving up some of their personal information. Still, you can minimize your risks by taking some other steps. First, you can use an app like Burner to get a second private number that’s not directly associated with you. Next, you can use services like Anytime Mailbox to set up an address that’s not your home.

You can also use VPNs, private browsers, and password managers to lock down your personal info on any of the apps you use. You can use all of these tools on a phone as well as a personal computer.

One thing to remember:

There’s a big difference between a private device and an anonymous device. If you just want your device to remain private, then you can probably log into some apps as long as you follow the rest of the advice. That works well for a second job, a side hustle, or a dating phone. If you plan to be like Jason Bourne, then you can never put any personal data into the phone, ever.

You can never turn it on at home or work. You can never turn it on when you have your other phone on.

Ever.

Now, let’s talk about the cloud

If you’ve ever wondered if the folks at Dropbox or Google Drive can see your stuff, the answer is yes. They can. They’re probably not super interested in your stash of sexy foot photos, but that’s not the point. If a corrupt government agency comes to them and demands access to your files, they can get them.

Easily…

Plus, as the world becomes more chaotic, these clouds are practically guaranteed to hemorrhage whatever you’ve stored there.

Word on the street, Google Drive has been getting up in everyone’s business and deleting content that “doesn’t align” with their notion of community. Even payment processors have been taking it upon themselves to start policing morality and penalizing anyone who produces anything they don’t like. They’ll call it “inappropriate,” even if it’s just a love story between two girls who like feet. In some cases, these services aren’t just deleting the material from their cloud. They also remove it from the local device. All of this is going to get worse before it ever gets better. So if you produce content that has even a hint of adult flavoring to it, then you could get harassed by government and big tech.

That’s reason enough to store your most sensitive information on external hard drives instead of the cloud. Even a flash drive can hold a hundred gigs now. You can back your data up to as many of these drives as you want. Label them. Keep them somewhere safe and not plugged in.

If you must use the cloud…

Several companies offer encrypted storage. That means they can’t look at your data the same way Dropbox or Google Drive does. Some examples include Tresorit, IDrive, and Ice Drive. Don’t just take my word for it. Do some vetting. People on Reddit are rather candid about their experiences.

Fair warning, syncing devices with an encrypted cloud system takes a little longer for file transfer. It won’t make a huge difference for standard file sizes. If you work on big projects, it can become a pain. So it would be smart to sync with an external drive, and then use encrypted cloud storage as an extra backup.

For what it’s worth, you can use third party services to encrypt your external storage devices as well. If you mess up, though, you could lose access to all your data. So make sure you have more than one backup.

Compartmentalize

It would be a real pain to keep every single piece of content and information under lock and key all the time. So, do this instead:

Chunk it.

This is why some privacy enthusiasts and experts recommend separate devices for separate worlds you live in. It’s not just about staying off the grid or pretending you’re Jason Bourne. It’s about keeping areas of your private life off limits and declaring boundaries. It’s just better that way.

If you’re using separate devices, then use separate cloud storage services or at least separate accounts. Separate means separate.

As far as I’ve read, there’s no way to participate in this economic and financial system without giving up some aspects of your privacy. Anything you buy with a credit or debit card can be traced back to you. Anything made over the last 5-10 years probably has a serial number or another type of identifier. Even your printer will turn on you if you do something seriously illegal.

But like we said, most of us are just trying to make it harder for big tech companies to manipulate and exploit us with our own data. We don’t want Meta to be able to tell Kroger exactly how much money we’re willing to spend on coffee and bananas. They will misuse this information. They’re already trying.

One last piece of advice someone gave me a few months ago: Unless you’re trying to be completely anonymous, turn your wifi off when you’re in public. Go through your phone’s settings and make sure it doesn’t switch to public wifi automatically to “save data.” That’s a security risk. Disable it.

Oh, and one more thing: If you’re making content, use open source apps. Do your best to stay away from Adobe or any other big corporation—unless you’re perfectly okay with CEOs looking over your shoulder. I’m not a cybersecurity expert, and that’s the point. If I can do this, then pretty much anyone can.

Technofascists are looking for reasons to make our lives harder. They’re looking for easy ways into your life so they can screw with you.

Don’t give them one.