How dangerous is it to be a communist in the US? Should I be very hush hush about it? I won’t ever be open about it but I’m just wondering how secretive I should be. Most of my close friends and certain family members know that I am a “Socialist”. I am pretty young and still need to start my life and I don’t want to ruin my chances of anything.

Some precautions I’ve taken are installing a vpn and only going doing commie stuff with vpn on. I’ve separated personal and political social media accounts and never post political stuff on my personal ones. Should I be doing any other things?

Thank you in advance

  • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭MA
    1•2 years ago

    So am I right in thinking that, in the You -> VPN -> Tor case described in the article, the VPN would only be able to see the address of the first Tor node and the encrypted data to be sent to that node (i.e. as much as the ISP would see without a VPN)?

    • @darkcalling
      2•2 years ago

      Correct. Your VPN would connect to the tor network and thus see only the entry IP not the routing or the exit IP (they have no more ability to see that than your ISP does).

      Your VPN knows your entry IP (usually the one assigned by your ISP) because it has to send and receive packets to and from it, your VPN also knows your destination as it has to pass packets to and from it for you. However your VPN only knows the first hop. The entry tor node’s IP address. Tor is a multi-hop system involving at least 3 hops, entry, onion routing, and exit. The entry and exit nodes are not supposed to talk directly to each other so in theory can’t correlate who you are and in theory means an attacker that controls an entry or exit node cannot use that to deanonymize people. A sophisticated attacker with control of large amounts of nodes in the tor network (or in a position to carefully observe traffic and perform timing correlation attacks) could in theory de-anonymize you. In such a scenario adding a VPN increases the complexity somewhat as it would mean your attacker would have to not only control significant parts of the tor network but also your VPN.