Be anonymous

So what if they find that you used a phone?

They still had to somehow link your online identity to your phone. And how would they do that? The phone is simply a computer that you use, through VPNs, to send and reveive mail and post messages to groups etc. They’d have to approach ProtonMail, then your VPNs in order, and then get security footage from the place where you were accessing the VPN at that time. And then cross-reference your gait etc. to a database. Maybe in 10 years they would have such coordination, and we will need better tactics.

What’s far more interesting is what to do if VPNs are banned in a country. You can’t be using one there. You’d have to have set up anonymous hosting and port forward stuff yourself.

Again, it’s possible that all anonymous hosting, VPN etc. is shut down and requires KYC by say 2050. That is why you must bootstrap from what are valid but essentially “compromised* accounts now while you still can, and hope they are grandfathered into the new totalitarian surveillance system. Buying phones on craigslist is one example.

Another example is those eyes Anderton installs in Minority Report, but security in that movie is like a bad joke, IRL he’d be outed instantly by his gait, heart patterns via wifi and so on. In fact they didnt even change the access keys after he ran LMAO

Charles Stross has a book series about a family of people that can step between different timelines of alternate Earth's that explores this a little.

**SPOILERS** Once the US that's basically our world discovers the existence of "world walkers" when they nuke the Whitehouse, it quickly steps into an authoritarian surveillance hellstate capable of realtime surveiling the population around the country to the point where they can track people entering their timeline because they were on camera exiting a building they were never recorded entering, or were flagged buying a plane/bus ticket from a city they shouldn't have been in according to previous records, or in one case for leaving a coffee shop with a noticeably empty backpack when she'd entered the shop with it completely full, having passed the contents to a world walker she was meeting. That irregularity automatically flagged everyone entering/leaving that building for review in their system and they backtracked all of these people through their paths that day until finding the gap where he'd stepped through to their world. That all happened in a matter of minutes and then quickly homed in on him.

Anyhow,it goes into detail about the lengths they go to to avoid detection by these systems and honestly didn't strike me at as all farfetched. The technology and capacity exists and it's a concentrated effort on part of the government is all it would take to implement it.

VPN providers can also be compelled to share all logs, even if they say they don’t log your info or activity, there are court cases that prove there are weaknesses in VPN providers, whether it was the method of payment you signed up with or if they logged your meta data on sign up, location services and telemetry from a mobile app backend etc.

Privacy is never a guaranteed thing when you introduce ubiquitous computing to the mix, even things outside of computers can profile you like being captured in CCTV around the time when your signals are picked up from a computer/smartphone phoning home or unusual internet activity, like the scene out of Mr. Robot.

Yup.

Then it would again boil back down to who forgets to run that to get caught/doxxed.

>> If you're in e.g. Brazil, haha, yeah, good luck spending bitcoin or any other crypto and going unnoticed

South America is the greatest tumbler of all. I spent years in Argentina under the currency restrictions and paid my rent in Bitcoin, bought USD and pesos at black market rates in Bitcoin, all with people I met on localbitcoins and never using an exchange. I don't know about Brazil, but there is a huge market for peer to peer BTC in AR and UY, and you can just trade an envelope of cash over the table at a Starbucks in Buenos Aires for anywhere up to $10K USD.

In the USA I would be scared of being on camera, but I really doubt you would have that problem if you meet someone in a bar or on the beach in Brazil.

[edit] Just to explain this comment for people who think of BTC as something that you have to buy or sell on an exchange where you're allowing the endpoints to be tracked; the original reason for cryptocurrency was that you don't have to show your passport or link it to a bank account. That still obtains in lots of places in the world where people will happily give you their shitty paper money for bitcoin, and you can use the paper to pay your rent. Don't buy BTC on an exchange, and don't sell it on an exchange. Buy it from someone in person in a phone-to-phone transfer, or win it in a poker game. Keep it in a private wallet, not an exchange. Sell it P2P in person when you want to. You don't need to use an exchange at all.