I am starting to organize w/ my friends IRL, but we also need to communicate with each other and other people further away (that we cant meet regularly). Since a year ago i got interested in privacy oriented messagging apps such as Briar or DeltaChat, we have been using the latter. But i still am unsure if it is safe to organize and communicate to other people my thoughts on how to organize better and grow as a movement. I know there have been CIA operations to infiltrate leftist movements (like COINTELPRO or more recent stuff like the 5 police officers of antiterrorism found in 5 different Autorganized Universitary Collectives here in Italy). I know that there also could be spyware on phones and idk if the app can really make communications safe. Is writing a document on this computer (even with GNU/Linux) safe? sorry if i couldn’t explain myself. sorry for the disturb.
thanks alot :3
P.S (edit)
By “organizing” i mean sharing to people online the idea and direction including plans as to the growth and work of the organization.
Might want to pop over to the darknet if you’re that worried about anonimity.
Nono, anonimity is not the Problem.
There are two separate concerns to think about here. First, is infiltration where bad actors join the organization. This is a difficult problem to address since it’s an issue of trust. You should vet people who join, but there’s only so much you can do there. It’s valuable to read up on how the Bolsheviks handled this problem incidentally where they created a system forcing these agent provocateurs to provide genuinely useful work to survive.
In terms of communication, I would absolutely do that offline. There is no real benefit to doing any serious organizing online, and people shouldn’t even bring their phones or electronic devices when meeting in person. That’s by far the safest option. Online places make sense for agitation and recruitment, but not for any serious work.
I agree that anything of import should be handled offline. So much lax security relies on the idea that you’re too small of a fish to be a target. By the time that changes, it may be too late if you’ve left too much of a trail - an adversary could have already mapped out the connections between everyone in your group. At this point, I think everyone in the west should include a hostile government adversary as part of their threat modeling.
I edited the post.
I would put that under agitation, promoting the org and getting people interested is very much a legitimate use of online resources. You have to meet the people where they’re at.
alr.
there is a problem though, after we get people in this org we need them to organize and it will happen that we have to communicate things that don’t count as agitation. The problem is that i cant always go meet these people directly since there will be people far away. i have a solution to this, but i do first need to know how to not have infiltrations.
The solution typically is to create cells. You need people who are educated on the theory and aligned on the goals, who are willing to do the work to organize locally. The local scale organizing can happen completely independently, with the top level organizers keeping in touch and making sure everybody is pulling in the same direction. That’s basically the whole idea with having a vanguard. My recommendation would be to use online communication for high level planning and general strategy. Then let the individual cells figure out how they plan to implement things locally according to their conditions. This sort of isolation protects everyone as well.
You kinda read my mind, but not exactly.
Plus isn’t high level planification the most sensible?
Yeah, that’s basically why hierarchies end up being necessary in practice. It doesn’t make sense for everybody to talk about every single detail of every chapter. So, you end up needing delegation so people organizing at a higher level trust that chapters have things figured out locally.
No
soberana is a collective organizing mostly online and on discord (big lol at this one tbh)
they mostly organize influence campaigns online, a lot of mutual help that can be done online (incl even mental health care and lawyer services with their organized professionals), direct action coordinating with other established irl orgs and some more. not to mention the actual online communities they helped foster.
they correctly see the internet as the new way public discourse happens and a great tool for organizing, with a much lower barrier of entry. they are actually sizeable, effective and a part of why communism is breaching actual mainstream discourse in brazil.
honestly i think lemmy tankies should be doing that to some level since we’re all here. we’re wasting mad potential for sure.
- Use Libreboot or (if you can) Canoeboot.
- Use Linux OS like Debian or (if you can) Trisquel.
- Encrypt your OS.
- Don’t use iphone and avoid using smartphone unless it uses Replicant or something like DivestOS.
- Use technology such as sandbox or (better) virtual machine.
I am sorry if my english is bad.
Your English is perfect, dont worry.
I shouldn’t use the phone in organizing matters, right?
You will have the structure to rework your own cybersecurity stack much earlier than you will attract the interest of any authority. It’s much harder to build an organization that has even a little crumb of impact than it is to secure your communication channels. Focus on the first.
An organization with secure communication and no impact is impossible to fix. An organization with a lot of impact and insecure communication: it’s a few days/months of focused work to fix.
alr, ty
i guess that if you look it from the pov of someone with a threat level of organization with certain political influence, doing that online get’s complicated, it requires a lot of know how and even then, as mentioned, it’s better to do the important talking offline and if you’re super tinfoil hat use a jammer when talking lol. but if your threat level is simply having a right to your privacy while keeping camaraderie with fellow people on some other province or whatever… then yeah, use a private messenger, don’t say anything too illegal and you’ll be fine, i’d use matrix personally for this. you could even use genzedong’s server since there are a lot of other communists too.
Depends on what sorts of things you are organizing.
Book clubs => fine
Firebombing attacks => hell no
Engineering discussions => depends on what is being engineered.
And a GNU system offline and encrypted is pretty secure. Even the NSA uses that. Just make sure that you have SeLinux setup to harden security and an encrypted boot partition
sorry, but what is SeLinux?
a Linux kernel security module that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including mandatory access controls. Basically a set of tools that lock things down such that even if they compromise the root account, it doesn’t mean that they can compromise the rest too.
Ah in the kernel.
And since that it should be like doeable without opening the computer, alr.
I already talked Abt intel ME with a friend so there Is no problem with that
Well coreboot and libreboot are excellent options but one must remember that the biggest weakness is generally the human. Because if they really want in, they just physically seize you and shove a soldering iron up your bum and turn it on and wait until you give them everything.
Yeah I generally don’t consider this since I can’t really prevent it.
You can do it like the resistance in Italy where they bought messages but they didn’t know everything so they couldn’t tell everything even if they got captured
