As the title says I live in a surveillance state where among other things the government uses paid snitches, listening devices in your home, installs Trojans/malware in your phone and computer, even outside agents can stalk and observe you 7/24.

I may not be a target of any of this as I am didn’t commit any of the crimes required to do these (for example being involved with cannabis, or helping illegal aliens or some crimes that actually warrant this like organized crime and so forth)

However with the snitch system were convicted criminals are incentivized to incriminate others to save their own skin I am not put at ease with assurances that if you have nothing to hide that you would have nothing to fear.

I do not believe however that the surveillance state is intended to prevent terrorism or organized crime. I believe the true intention of the surveillance state is to consolidate power and nip any sort of true dissent in the bud.

So in imho if you were to call out the government on their bullshit you would stand to be victimized. Even if you are well within your rights with regards to freedom of speech/thought/assembly.

So if everything on your computer may be subject to government’s prying eyes, you’d need your own language and alphabet/writing system to at least retain the ability to keep notes and write a diary.

I would like to be able to note down my thoughts without having to fear the government can read it.

I was thinking of something like Tolkiens Elven tongue/language. I know it is a lot of work especially since it is only for internal use.

What’s your opinion on this?

  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    IMO to write down your thoughts just for your own usage, you can either encrypt your data if it is legal to do so, or you can write your thoughts on paper. Otherwise, check out this evergreen CrimethInc article about security culture.

    I wouldn’t choose Elven Tongue or Klingon or similar fictional languages as a basis for a secret code because the people who code break are probably aware that those languages exist. Additionally, if I were a data scientist trying to sift through your communications trying to find coded text, the first thing I would classify is what languages are present. If Elven Tongue showed up, that is probably what I would look at first.

    On that note, if I was trying to hide something, I would probably use a whole-word replacement scheme in a way that makes a whole sentence look normal. Even if the government collects all my data, do they really have the time to manually review all of it? Probably not; they’re probably going to use some kind of machine learning algorithm to search for “problematic” strings in their dataset and then flag whoever said them for further manual surveillance. If you think you are already an active surveillance target, then you might need to go with cyphers.

    It’s probably a good idea to learn some code breaking. Lastly, Lemmy is a public social network. I wouldn’t put any plans that you ever intend to execute on this website or any of its instances in any form. It’s just not what it’s designed for. Best of luck.

    • AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      thanks for your input, I am not planning anything just wondering.

      I was thinking of creating a new language more, rather than using Elven Tongue. I only wanted to use it as an example.