On Mon, 2014-01-20 at 00:00 -0600, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
I am continually reminded why I prefer to be onymous when talking to various counterculture/resistance/etc movement members around the city. So many of them are paranoid of each other and 'the man'
So I can confirm this from direct experience. I like dealing with people with real names, locations, and whom I can tell them whatever I feel like is appropriate, without having to compartmentalize my life.
It's definitely a privilege to be able to do this. In the United States, the animal liberation activism community (among others) is rightly paranoid of infiltrators and state repression. There's a certain level of paranoia that's culturally accepted as necessary "security culture". This might involve using pseudonyms, but obviously not very secure ones, because this organization happens primarily in meatspace. This dovetails nicely with the somewhat nomadic lifestyles of the people involved, and the self-determinist ethic from the punk scene that's so wedded to this group of cultures. It's common for people to introduce themselves with obviously psuedonymous names like "carrot" or "scout", but these people might even use these names on a personal basis with people who know their legal names. This comes back to the threat model -- these activists are scared of at most an FBI investigation, and at baseline local police keeping tabs on them. Weak pseudonyms are expensive enough for local police to keep the community afloat. Likewise, I doubt it would have been very dangerous for adrelanos' partners or close friends to know their activities as a Whonix maintainer. Probably a hyperinvestigation leveraging the full powers of the surveillance states of the world would have penetrated this layer of psuedonymity, but I doubt this would ever have happened. It would have been interesting to see how far this could have progressed along a spectrum from complete psuedonymity to complete ...nymity. How long would adrelanos have been psychologically capable of keeping up the act if a single friend had known? -- Sent from Ubuntu