Paranoid glowy thoughts
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delete all photos of your guns from Google Photos. If your cloud provider has search by keyword, search for guns. Delete your friend's guns too. Google and other large media companies have already agreed to sharing this info with various "law enforcement" government bodies.
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if you're not using a VPN you're retarded. bUT iM noT poSTINg Im jUSt luRKIng. Well if you ever do decide to organize, you bet your ass your friend's odds of getting vanned jumped up because of your idiocy. Connect to a non-US VPN without logs, ideally someone not based in Hong Kong. The Chinese VPNs are cheaper for a reason. Use TorrentFreaks privacy guides they do every year, and do further research outside TF. Don't use 'private internet access'.
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Apple's refusal to participate with FBI warrants has NOTHING to do with their relationship with the NSA. Their FBI relationship is a smokescreen, they're members of PRISM. Do not keep photographs of your guns, ammo, memes about igloos on your fucking iCloud.
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VPN connections don't make you anonymous at all if you're signed into your fucking email, holy shit. If you are behind a VPN and open your gmail, your internet activity is linked to it. Don't google stupid shit while YouRE behIND a VPn. Use a separate browser in private mode for sketchy shit, ideally one not connected to your Apple/Google account. Private tabs in the same browser are not sufficient. When you open the initial Chrome window as "John Doe on IP x.x.x.x" then open incognito, you still have the same IP address. It can trivially be linked back. Use a separate damn browser, or launch the browser incognito with "firefox --incognito" launch parameter, or similar.
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Close the fucking browsers before you disconnect from VPN, close your Discord/gamechat/twitch/onlyfans-cam in your taskbar before you disconnect from a VPN, jesus. AJAX calls made by your browsers might not finish until your browser closes, which will fire back unencrypted if you don't close the fucking browser first.
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ideally if you need to do some sketchy googling, get on a good VPN out of country, and use Tor Browser on top of your VPN. Make sure you kill your other browsers when running this so your VPN connection can't be linked to a Google account. If you're really paranoid, use Tails OS, a live Linux USB disk that boots from a flashdrive to avoid OS leftovers and spyware kept in Windows.
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Windows/MacOS are closed source and you should assume everything you do on it is monitored. Remember, PRISM allows router hardware manufacturers to have their firmware backdoored, you don't think they're in your laptop? If you're googling actually illegal shit and want to keep it quiet, use tails
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if you do keep a paper copy of your guns serial numbers for theft/insurance reasons, make sure it's on paper and offsite, or encrypted.
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if for whatever reason you're stopped or questioned during a "peaceful protest" press the power button a few times on your phone. It's usually enough to force fingerprint scanning to be disabled. Ideally turn the phone off if things are going sideways.
What's up with PIA?
they got bought out by a company that sells your data.
Fuck reddit, but these are good synopses, one from an actual PIA employee:
https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/dz2w53 /our_merger_with_kape_technologies_addressing_your/
the other on datahorder https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/e05hn3/psa_pia_privateinternetaccess_has_been_bought_by/