I’ve been thinking about how to organise in the current era of the complete panopticon we live under.
Anything and everything digital is compromised and is collecting data on you. The surveillance industries have completely captured social media and all forms of digital communication.
Encryption doesn’t mean shit and it’s not feasible to have to teach every person in your org how PGP and public/private keys work.
But how about going back to pen and paper? Instead of sending online messages which can be logged and read by any cop and informant, members of an organisation would use letters or pure paper media and use each other to send information through a chain of other comrades.
Imagine an organisation that has 10 members. Each member is expected to move a distance of 2 km to deliver the mail to the drop-off point, or hand it over to the next comrade who will hand it to the next comrade in the post chain.
That’s <30 minutes of walking, by the way.
With ten members, able to walk 2km each, a letter could reach around 20 km, which is quite a big chunk of any city.
If I wanted to send a letter to a comrade who was a bit of a distance away, say 6 km, the letter would maybe exchange hands 5-6 times to reach its destination.
And if your comrades have a car, your covered area multiplies.
I’m drunk and high, but I think what I’m trying to say here, is what if radical organisation came with an underlying postal service, where trusted comrades would be expected to act as mail men for the organisation, as to avoid the surveillance state?
the main problem is metadata. Encryption is fine and largely unbreakable, but if you get caught, they just need the metadata of your messages (who you sent to and where) and they can just pick everyone up and probably get those messages at some point.
Going paper is a decent alternative. Traditional surveillance is being trimmed down and replaced with digital-only surveillance.
to avoid metadata leakage you really need to all be running something like grapheneos and simplex chat, probably wireguard every phone to a trusted no-logs server with a lot of traffic too.
most people wont do that though
flock
Many ebikes have compulsory wifi/bluetooth and rely on smartphones to serve as a control panel. The spy shit being put on street lamps ping every Internet of Things device that passes by, or will soon. I hope leftist tinkerers come up with jailbroken firmware, or even custom controllers, that allow a strict airgap, and wired controls, for ebikes.
What prevents good ol’ cops following you? You can leak the addresses of the entire org in a matter of days with this method.
A Linux PC with an end-to-end encryption open source messaging app is much more secure in this fashion, isn’t it?
Additional thoughts:
Paper leaves no trail and can be burned or destroyed.
Given enough party discipline, a letter can reach any local target by the end of the day
Unique wax seals can determine if a letter has been opened or tampered with, and if each comrade has a unique seal, that effectively works as a pseudonym. Think of Japanese ID stamps.
It encourages your lazy asses to go outside more.
For extra security, a ledger could be made to keep track of who’s letter is destined to go where, and which ID/seal/stamp is currently holding the letter or is expected to hold the letter.
Not just letters, but all kinds of materials can be sent around, like propaganda leaflets, food, tools, equipment, weed, etc
I like the idea but really we can achieve security and private organizing digitally. Just not with the standard closed source big tech services people gravitate towards, or many device types either. It does require digital literacy and security training, but physical delivery would also require a good deal of training and understanding of the system to work. It could be cheaper materials-wise though
The feds have a long history of opening your mail and reading it then resealing it and delivering it to you.
Are one-time pads still viable in contemporary cryptography?
They remain the gold standard, and unbreakable, and always will. Problem is, you need to distribute the pad(s) to the people doing the communicating beforehand
You also need to generate the pads randomly as if your generation method is flawed someone may be able to reconstruct prior pads via analysis of remaining ones.
But there are shitloads of good algorithms so you’d have to be rolling your own cryptography to make that mistake.
Encryption works, but yeah PGP is 100% sharp edges. Modern double ratchet crypto protocols like OLM / axolotl / signal take UX and human error into account and are much more secure as a result. You do have to take care tho because none of these obfuscate the social graph in practice.
Which i think is a similar problem you’d encounter trying to run a postal service. That’s the benefit of things like i2p, but it only works if you have a lot of unrelated traffic to hide in and its still possible to break anonymity if you have high resolution passive observers at enough points in the network.
