Welcome to the first in a series of articles focused on Information Security (InfoSec for short). This will not be a typical vanilla InfoSec series: it is tailored to how, why, and when to take communications underground in the digital age. The time is coming, and soon, when simply mentioning a certain public figure’s name or making your affiliation with certain groups known will be enough to draw the attention of officials that want to squash dissent; the administrative state has already demonstrated that they know no boundaries when hunting people they consider dangerous or subversive; witness the revelations about the USPS Inspector Service’s analysis of public social media posts to find suspected “domestic terrorists”. The threat is real, and it’s only going to get more pervasive.
First, why the ruckus? The Internet is a big place, right? Nobody can possibly sift through all of the e-mails, social media posts, and chat rooms to find subversive behavior, can they? In a word, yes: yes they can. Any programmer worth anything has the ability to put even rudimentary tools together that can harvest and analyze publicly-visible (and in some cases, not publicly-visible) information from social media and open chat rooms (including Telegram, particularly open groups) with automated tools that never sleep, never get tired, and never miss a day of work. Trust me when I tell you that hostile tech companies and various government agencies have legions of programmers that do nothing but scoop up information and analyze it; they excel at winnowing out certain keywords and then building maps of contacts from social media. The same skills developed for finding legitimate terrorist threats or targeting advertising can be and is being used now to look for so-called domestic terrorists…and the definition of “domestic terrorist” is getting mighty broad these days.
Now let’s talk about why this is important. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist reading other posts on this site to determine that I believe we are in the midst of a Communist Revolution, Menshavik-style. One of the hallmarks of a Communist revolution is the suppression of any and all opposing, dissenting speech. It begins with simply squeezing that speech out of the public square: that has already happened with social media platforms censoring any content at all from Donald Trump, and he’s only the most visible example. The next step is to actively persecute enemies of the State; that is beginning with the ransacking of Rudy Giuliani’s and Victoria Tensing’s offices by the Department of Justice. Soon, all speech perceived to be dangerous or subversive will draw the attention of some official agency or other, and something as simple as pointing this out in this very article will be enough to wind up on the radar. This is the usual progression of oppressive and totalitarian revolutions, and we see it unfolding right here in the United States of America. All of the tools developed to find overseas terrorists will be employed, and have no illusions about the tech industry’s inclination and willingness to provide unfettered access to every part of their platforms (including e-mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo); they already have demonstrated that willingness.
So what can be done? Well, it’s going to get a little shady from here on out. The short answer is something known variously as “The Dark Net”, “The Deep Web”, and other shadowy and vaguely unsavory names. Those are simply buzzy ways to describe a group of technologies used to mask and encrypt activity that traverses the public Internet, hiding a person’s location, identity, and activity from prying eyes. These are technologies like Tor (The Onion Router), the Invisible Internet Project (I2P), Freenet, and other lesser-known projects. These projects (especially Tor) have been in existence for several years, and have been used by journalists, dissidents, and people in countries where Internet usage is highly controlled to bypass censors and hostile governments. Now I’m not going to gloss over anything here; there *is* certainly a certain criminal element that uses these technologies too, specifically because it’s so easy to mask one’s identity and location. However, one could make the argument soon that anyone who defies the established Party agenda will become a criminal, so we’ll fit right in. We’ll certainly be hunted.
Now finally, before we close out this introduction, a word of caution: no technology that is open to us will be completely immune from infiltration and abuse by those seeking to do us harm. The weak point has always been the human element; it will not take long for the Feds to figure out what’s up and they will devote resources and time to rooting us out of the dark recesses of these hidden networks; Tor has already been demonstrated to be vulnerable to good old-fashioned police work to find and shut down various criminal enterprises like the Silk Road site, which was compromised and taken down because the operators of the site got sloppy. As far as anyone can establish, Tor itself functioned as designed but certain individuals breached their own security through forum posts that were used to establish their identity. So included in our threat model is the simple human factor: always know who you are communicating with, even when those communications are supposedly secure. The old maxim holds as true on the Dark Web as anywhere else: anyone can be anyone they chose in the virtual world. How you establish bona fides is a discussion for another article, but it’s an important topic. Also: even though a chat room might be encrypted and hidden, anyone with access can still see what you’re saying: always be very careful of what you put out in public, and NEVER, under any circumstances, ever put sensitive information in an open chat room. Be wary of strangers. If someone seems to be too good to be true, they probably are not true.
So that brings us to the conclusion of this introduction to taking our communications underground. It will be a shadowy world, but it will be necessary and vital to any resistance that is to be mounted against the Communists. Caution and discretion are the words of the day, every day.
Coming soon: Going Underground in the Digital Age Part 2 – The TOR Network