As we prepare to resist Donald Trump’s assault on our freedoms, liberties, and very lives, it will be important to protect ourselves against surveillance and retaliation on the part of government as well as non-governmental entities. In this series, I intend to outline some steps you can take to protect yourself as part of the resistance and thereby allow your efforts to continue while defending your personal safety.
To begin I’d like to address risk assessment. This involves determining the possible consequences of resistance activities, and which consequences you are willing to take a chance on.
The risks of resisting the Trump regime fall into four main categories, some of which can overlap. They are:
- Loss of privacy
- Arrest
- Threats to personal safety
- Disruption of resistance efforts
Loss of privacy is important, not only in and of itself, but also because it can result in the other threats listed above. Donald Trump will be inheriting the powerful NSA surveillance systems put in place and/or augmented during the Obama years. These systems are, we are told, not currently being used inside the US, but they can be very easily and have been in the past. Using these systems, the government can simply set up alerts when your communications use certain keywords or phrases like “resist Trump,” “not my president,” or even “tiny-fingered vulgarian.”
Arrest or detention can occur if you are involved in a street protest, or if the government decides to implement “anti-terrorist” legislation to penalize certain communications or online posts.
Your personal safety can be threatened by police personnel during street protests or while arresting you. You can also be threatened by private citizens who decide to act as vigilantes. This can range from someone punching you in the store for wearing a “dump Trump” T-shirt to mobs threatening you in your home.
Disruption of resistance efforts can occur if communications are disrupted or spied on during demonstrations,if falsecommunications are sent to resistors, or if key people are identified and arrested. It can also consist of “plants,” people placed among demonstrators to engage in illegal activities and thus invite wholesale arrests and/or damage the public image of protestors. Disruptions can also occur if resistors’ private accounts are hacked in order to discredit them.
What you will need to do is assess what risks you face and what consequences you are willing to accept. Acceptable consequences primarily involve arrest and detention, since I doubt anyone is willing to accept disruption of their efforts or risks to their family’s safety.
If your activity will consist primarily of online posting, you will need to decide if your postings will be such that they will attract attention from government or non-governmental adversaries. If such risk is high, you are likely to be questioned and possibly arrested by officials, or to face online harassment and worse from non-governmental adversaries.
If you will be participating in demonstrations, you need to determine if your activities will be designed to invite arrest, such as civil disobedience, or if the authorities are likely to just start rounding up everyone whether their actions are legal or not. You will need to decide if incarceration is acceptable to you as a form of protest or if it is something you want to avoid.
You will also need to determine if your activities will be significant and visible enough to invite non-governmental groups to threaten you in your home and how much of this risk your are willing to accept.
You also need to be aware that some of your past activities, such as posting on Daily Kos or previous arrests during demonstrations, will open you up to increased surveillance or worse.
You may decide that all of this is just tinfoil-hat paranoia. That’s your choice, but I believe that at least some of these risks, and probably all of them, are real and need to be addressed.
Once you have determined the risks you will be facing, you can decide what measures you need to take to eliminate or lessen those risks. I will be discussing these measures in future diaries, which will include links to some very good diaries that have already addressed security measures.
All of my security diaries will, I hope, be springboards for discussion in the comments section, and I look forward to engaging in these discussions. I will try to post new diaries on this topic every few days if there is enough interest to make it worthwhile.
The resistance will be difficult, and there will be casualties. I believe it is important to keep that in mind as you decide what you will do. But I hope many of you will join the large numbers of people who will fight against the coming assault on all of us, individually and as a freedom-loving nation.