A Practical opsec guide – looking for feedback & suggestions
A Practical opsec guide – looking for feedback & suggestions
I recently put together a detailed opsec guide that covers practical steps for reducing your digital footprint, securing communications, and avoiding common pitfalls people make when trying to stay private online.
The goal was to create something that's actually useful and not just the usual "use a vpn and tor" advice. I tried to break down realistic methods that can help both beginners and people already familiar with opsec.
Id love to get some feedback from the community - what's missing, what could be improved, and if there's anything you disagree with.
I'll read through this. I'm teaching a free class on cybersec / opsec to members of local activist organizations starting next month, so resources like this are potentially really useful.
Thanks! Hope it will help you sharing the knowledge, good luck!
UPDATE:
I've had a chance to read through it.
- It's short, to the point, an easy read, covers a lot of bases. I think that makes it an excellent starting point for people at the beginning of their journey.
- It doesn't contain a lot of specific information, but I think it's a good thing to have literature that's just a general overview as a starting point.
- Stylometry is far from an exact science (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11707938/). However, I bet this won't stop the current administration from using it (and possibly falsely accusing people because of it), so it's good to know about.
- This will be extremely useful as I'm creating my lesson plan and I will probably pop it out to the class on day one as suggested reading.
Overall: Great resource and very timely. Thank you.
I would add, that if you're planning to make a lot of use of tor, and run tor hidden services locally, syncing the Monero block chain over tor (possibly to multiple local machines) and solo mining on old slow computers is a great way to generate a bunch of random tor traffic.
Perhaps an addition to your guide: Although I have not tried it myself, I hear it is quite easy to run local open-source AI models. By instructing the AI to reformulate your texts whilst adopting a certain personality, one should be able to efficiently protect against stylometry. This can even work with realtime chat.
Local ai models can help against basic stylometry, but they're not a silver bullet. Advanced stylometry doesn't just analyze wording - it looks at sentence structure, punctuation habits, even typing cadence. If you just run text through an AI rewriter without changing behavioral patterns, you're still traceable.
AI can be a tool, but relying on it blindly just shifts your fingerprint rather than erasing it.
Hey one thing I noticed in your safe mobile operating systems section is that you recommend divestOS as an alternative to graphene. I have made the same recommendation for years, but if you aren’t aware that project actually shut down in December so it’s just gone now. A good recommendation that is still maintained is CalyxOS, which also supports bootloader locking after install (at least on pixels, they have caveats for fairphone devices). I haven’t had a chance to read all of your guide yet though, but other than this I’ve enjoyed the parts I’ve gotten to. Thanks for making it!
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