Privacy is like swimming in an endless sea: Oftentimes you find yourself barely treading water; often more you’re choking, trying to find your balance and your breath. Never forget that you spent your whole life drowning until you decided to swim, though.

Meds

I’m not sure about your situation. But I’d recommended setting up Buskill on your laptop/pc it can wipe the luks slots on your drive making it completely unreadable all by just disconnecting a USB (this could be magnetic so if they pull you it’ll get auto triggered) but then again this is only useful if you live in somewhat free country where cops can’t torture you to decrypt/restore your data.

i don’t know why you need extreme privacy. But what I can tell you is it’s OK you can take a break from whatever you are doing that needs this lvl of privacy.

Reporting on bad regime, they’ll still be doing bad stuff once you come back from a break.

I’m always hiding my internet activity from others.

Me, too. What’s wrong with us?

I think the less stressful approach is limiting Internet activity altogether rather than obsessing about whether or not what I’m up to is hidden well enough. For example, you could write your own software. I, myself, obsess about whether or not my python scripts actually work instead of inveigling my friends to encrypt everything they put in the Cloud. See, for example:

• https://pypi.org/project/tonto2/

What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering the possibility that a government is spying on your actions despite strict privacy practices?

Threath model analysis. I do enough to not be in the bycatch as more than a IP (no cloud & social media, encrypted private communication, terminating cloud services after use) and low profile enough to not be targeted directly.

What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering

Not being prone to paranoia, as unhelpful as that is

I’m also a realist, which keeps my expectations in check.

Remember that you are one person. Nobody in government censorship or reconnaissance of the public cares about you enough to spy or hack you. You alone aren’t worth the effort or resources.

Remember to play. Go outside for a walk, meditate, consume entertaining non-toxic, non-fiction media, have sex or masturbate. All work and no play makes Ringpop a dull person.

The Onion Router, for internet stuff, or a (reliable and well reputed) VPN. But you have an entire community of people more specialised than me for how to not get noticed on internet anyways. Stays informed on the world, and reduce risky things, for you to get some better sleep. Dunno what businesses you do, but your priority is to stop depending on them. Hiding everything you do is just like putting yourself under the spotlight.

A physical diary that only you knows about, to free yourself from your stressful thoughts and ideas, (with a lighter always nearby) will ease a lot. It works very well for me.

All evenings, take 10 mins of your free time to yell the hell out of your mood in your pillow (gotta think about neighbors). Do sports, or things of your interests. Works too.

Oh and you shouldn’t post things implying that much that you are doing suspicious things, anywhere on internet. Best irl stuff about you to talk about on corporate internet is none, even mundane things like your country. Illegal things must be done irl the good old way.

To remain free (for good reasons or not btw).

But at the end the goal is to protect the freedom for everyone and give everyone a chance to live without interruptions by any entity that wants to regulate that

What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering the possibility that a government is spying on your actions despite strict privacy practices?

Because I’m a fan of my fucking rights and I’ll defend it against an authoritarian government. I don’t need to be a terrorist to value free speech.

How do you all stay calm with all this pressure?

It’s hard, but by using good tools, writing out my privacy model, being informed. It will not necessarily make you calm about the current state of everything but at least be knowledgeable about how good your entire environment is.

“I do a lot of dangerous and risky **** on the internet”

Well, you’ve already failed. You just admitted on an open forum accessible by everyone that you’re clearly involved in something.

I don’t really have anything to hide… but I still believe in a fundamental right to privacy and personal agency. For a lot of people, these tools keep them alive (ex. Targeted minorities in oppressive regimes etc).

But for me, this is more of an academic exercise - I find it interesting, and the things I learn can be shared with others who need them more.

If your activities are affecting your ability to sleep and have peace of mind, my only advice is to stop.

It is never a requirement to perform 100% of all “Privacy best practices” 24 hours a day and 7 days a week with perfect execution. Simply put, nobody has that level of threat on average unless they are someone like Snowden, a Journalist covering a story, or are working as an intelligence agent.

It is best to assess your threat level and choose Privacy preserving techniques and tools according to what best suits your life and situation first. Don’t overdo it, don’t try to achieve perfect privacy, don’t try to keep up with the metaphorical Joneses. There will always be new threats to your privacy to assess; and you shouldn’t be ignorant of them; but you also should not ever let that growing list of threats overwhelm you.

If you need to take time to stop reading privacy news…do so. Just like regular world and national news; it can put you in a state of constant panic. Manage your mental health and state first before you ever allow yourself to address your privacy issues at hand.

Once your mental state is clear and your focus is sharp; focus specifically on little things you can easily do to protect your privacy. Maybe make sure you have a VPN set up or ensure you go over critical privacy settings on your devices to ensure none have changed or shifted since you last visited them. Then consider other small things you can do; if you can say, for example, choose a new email provider, then do so. If not, pick a new thing to address and move on. Do not make managing your privacy a chore if you can possibly help it. Take improving it one step at a time, take breaks for your sanity and make sure you don’t overdo it all at once.

I dont do anything actually bad on the internet. I have never even went to the dark web with the onion protocol. Im just not interested in the shit i would find there.

I use privacy tools because thats what I believe should be default. People deserve their privacy. No company or government actually have the moral right to take it away. They are supposed to be elected by the people to work FOR US. That part is just forgotten now.

Why are you doing sketchy things on the internet?

If your own conscience is haunting you, that’s a good signal for you to fix your behavior so you can have a clear conscience and you won’t need to worry about the law closing in on you. What a horrible existence that must be.

The kind of “privacy” you get by using a VPN or avoiding Facebook tracking your web browsing is absolutely not appropriate for using against a threat model that includes three-letter agencies or even, frankly, the local cops. They can just, like, come to your house when you aren’t there and bug it. Point a camera at your screen, station a dude in the closet, replace the computer with a cunningly painted cardboard replica of the computer which is a spy, etc. Or from the other end, they simply exploit a zero-day in every one of your seven proxies, because they care enough about catching you to burn them.

Sometimes the threat model says you just lose and you can’t actually get what you want by using computers, because you have an information technology hammer and a fundamentally legal or political problem.

If you think the police are actually on to your crimes, stop doing those crimes! If the crimes needed doing for some reason, someone else less likely to be known to the police will probably do them instead, and you can surely find less-crimey ways to further whatever they were meant to accomplish. If you’re in it for yourself for some sort of personal gain, quit while you’re ahead.

If you think you’re drastically overestimating the likelihood that the police are after you for your crimes, and it is affecting your ability to function, that’s definitely a problem for your therapist. Presumably one who doesn’t insist you explain your various crimes to them in detail, a thing which your lawyer (which you also maybe need?) might have concerns about.