Seconding this recommendation. Story of Your Life is the best sci fi story I’ve ever read

You might like Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader, edited by Mike Ashley.

By the way, the sad reality is that many of the good sci fi stories have flat prose. It’s just something you have to accept.

Very well. Since privacy is irrelevant, give me your full name and address. I promise I won’t report you to ICE.

If you think you can organize a resistance to fascism while being surveilled 24/7, be my guest. The only thing you’re doing by being a stupid doomer is discouraging people from taking proactive steps towards better privacy. Surveillance is what kills our freedom of speech, assembly, and petition.

It’s funny how much people deny that privacy is the foundation of freedom when every tyrant knows it. That’s why they set up surveillance systems.

No, the state can’t just do that. They could do it to any one person, but not to everyone. Consider this hypothetical: the state wants to kill 100 people. If everyone is outside, this job becomes easy. If everyone is in their homes, this job becomes harder. Why? Because breaking down doors, moving equipment, etc. costs money. And government agencies don’t have all the money in the world! They can’t:

1. Go after every single person who uses cash
2. Go after everyone who uses a vpn
3. Go after everyone who uses encrypted messaging
4. Go after everyone who attends a protest and who wears a mask and puts their phone in a faraday bag.

Privacy works best in a larger group. Telling people privacy is dead actually hurts you more than telling people that there are indeed effective steps you can take to protect yourself.

Encryption requires no respect from the State

Keeping your google account can be helpful if you want to follow this strategy:

1. Register on Signal using your phone number
2. Port your phone number to google voice ($20 transfer fee but free after that; additionally while its privacy sucks, google is great for security)
3. Change the settings so that every caller is sent to voice mail
4. Use mysudo and cloaked for VoIP numbers
5. Set up Signal on a new device (ideally a grapheneos pixel)
6. Use a calyx institute hotspot for data or buy a sim card with cash

Socialists need to learn to stop being dogmatic. If a Marxist-Leninist revolution is our most viable solution, democratic socialists et al should back it. If democratic socialism is more likely to succeed, Marxist-Leninists should back it.

Your number one step is privacy. Privacy is the foundation of freedom; it “protects the right to be left alone”.

If you’re a beginner, Naomi Brockwell’s videos have very good tips. If you’re not a beginner, read Michael Bazzell’s book Extreme Privacy. Read it in full and decide the level of privacy you want (you likely will not need every single one of his tips).

No, don’t use Telegram. Chats aren’t end to end encrypted by default, you have to specifically request a secret conversation. It’s also not possible to encrypt group chats on telegram. Matrix, signal, session, simplex, and many others are much better.

Yes, people should have that, but it’s not that simple. Some liberals, particularly classical liberals, think a free market would bring those things to everyone. I don’t necessarily disagree, though I think free markets can only ever be free under communism/socialism, not capitalism. The issue with centrally planned, universal healthcare is that a hostile government could refuse to provide you care, much like insurance companies that don’t approve coverage for many things. Additionally, there needs to be strong medical privacy protections.

Use an SLNT bag

Just when will my human rights, which are grounded in the constitution, stop being put aside by bullshit rulings ad absurdum

Also, this is why you should use a privacy screen.

This is already the case.

You can opt out of TSA facial recognition and CBP facial recognition

Nothing to hide doesn’t mean everything to share. When it comes to id verification specifically talk about:

1. how storing millions of IDs will be a tempting honeypot for hackers, making data breaches much more likely and much more common.
2. how these companies will become a digital playground for traffickers searching through leaked IDs, looking for potential trafficking victims.
3. how these laws could lead to stalking, harassment, and get people murdered or raped.
4. how these laws could escalate political violence in a society already divided and rife with polarization. Having access to someone’s address, searching their address on Google Maps, seeing a political sign in the yard is political violence waiting to happen.
5. how these laws could very well lead to someone committing suicide after their ID is leaked and posted, which led to them being stalked or harassed.

When people doubt you or accuse you of paranoia, concern trolling, or fear mongering:

1. Remind them about the Tea app incident (in which 13,000 IDs were leaked and posted online) and ask what if Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit is next?
2. Tell them: Don’t underestimate hackers and don’t trust these companies to delete your information.
3. Tell them: Don’t underestimate what people are actually capable of and the kinds of ideas that go through people’s heads (there are some really bad people and really unhinged people in the world).
4. Even accuse your politicians and lawmakers of backing or being behind human trafficking rings if you have to to let them know how serious these risks are.

Also remind them that wanting surveillance to make sure everyone is following the law is bad because not all laws are good! Civil disobedience is a powerful tool against tyranny and we must protect it. I don’t want a society where no one breaks the law.

Here’s a script you can send to your state legislators and governor:

I demand a state medical privacy law at least as strong as the Minnesota Health Records Act (Minnesota Statutes 144.291-.298). Here are seven types of disclosures that HIPAA permits without patient consent or knowledge, but which generally require patient consent in Minnesota:

1. Disclosures of health information for treatment purposes, unless consent is not possible due to a medical emergency.
2. Disclosures of health information to other providers for healthcare operations purposes. [Note: healthcare operations includes over 60 nonclinical activities, including business activities. According to Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 134, July 14, 2010 (see pages 40872, 40906, 40907, 40911), your medical data can be shared with over 2.2 million entities, including 1.5 million business associates, without your consent or knowledge.]
3. Disclosures of health information to payers for payment purposes.
4. Disclosures of health information to outside researchers for medical research purposes. [That’s right, non-consensual medical research is explicitly allowed by HIPAA, but greatly limited in Minnesota.]
5. Consent of a patient’s authorized family or legal representative for disclosures of health information to funeral directors.
6. Disclosures of health information for military or national security purposes unless the disclosure is specifically required by federal law.
7. Disclosures of health information for law enforcement purposes, unless the disclosure is in response to a valid court order or warrant. [That’s right, under HIPAA, medical providors are permitted to share sensitive health data without a warrant.]

Source: Mayo Clinic’s Notice of Privacy Practices (link: https://www.primarycareondemand.mayoclinic.org/notice-privacy-practices)

Minnesota is the only state to have a comprehensive medical privacy law stronger than HIPAA. [State] should be the second.

You’re daft if you think its something anyone cares about after 20 years of implementation.

The reason it’s taken 20 years to implement (and actually, it still hasn’t technically been implemented, since we’re still in the initial enforcement stage) is because people cared and still do.

This neglects states where it is illegal to have both a state ID and a driver’s license, people who can’t afford both, people who can’t afford a passport etc.

I did only say state id in my original post, because I personally don’t have a driver’s license, but I really meant any form of state identification. Sorry if that was unclear. I have edited the post. As for “people who can’t afford a passport”, well, there’s also the option of getting a passport card for $65 ($30 for the card, $35 for the processing fee if getting a card for the first time. When renewing the card, you only pay $30) and the card lasts 10 years, so it’s pretty inexpensive. But also a passport isn’t terribly expensive when you consider the fact that it’s valid for 10 years. Lastly, I wanna say that I am not neglecting people who can’t afford passports; it’s the federal government who’s doing that by requiring a real id. Also, I said in another comment that if you absolutely need a real id right now, then you should keep it. Just consider getting rid of it as soon as you can.

You’re also neglecting that plenty of states haven’t enacted a mandatory Real ID program yet or it hasn’t gone into affect yet, however that may happen in a year, two years etc and so not getting a Real ID upon renewal will end up costing them more money they don’t necessarily have.

I’m not sure what you mean. In another comment I listed the five states that only have real ids and said that the residents there should protest to their state legislators and governor. I never said that you shouldn’t go without an id at all.

Your reasons for not getting a Real ID aren’t even particularly clear and you didn’t answer any clarifying questions.

What makes the Real ID more dangerous than a State ID or Passport?

How are my reasons unclear? I explicitly said why in my post: the secretary of homeland security has unilateral authority to expand the official purposes of the real id. Can the secretary of state do that for passports? Can a state executive officer do that for a state id? Additionally, in another comment, I said that there are plans to make real ids digital and accessible remotely and in real-time according to AAMVA testimony: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/HM07/20231205/116640/HHRG-118-HM07-Wstate-GrossmanI-20231205.pdf. This would allow the government to revoke your digital real id in real time if you say or do something the government doesn’t like. A digital real id would also make it much easier for the government to track you. Passports, by contrast, are probably immune to digitalization for this century, as the US would have to convince 150+ nations to accept a digital passport. (I should have mentioned this in my original post, but I thought it would make my post too long.)

Is there a reason to believe that this regime or one in the future will preclude Real ID from being used to prove things like citizenship status or voting rights?

There is no reason to believe that, which is why we must fight back now, before 90%+ of Americans have a real id, making it easier to do what you said. We have proof that we actually can resist. Because of efforts from state legislatures and people around 2008-2010, the DHS’s real id rule from that time was largely ignored. The ACLU even declared in 2012 that the real id was “dead” (source: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/real-id-dead-new-mexico-ids-will-continue-be-valid). That’s proof that we can resist this.

[By the way, if you’re curious about the reasons why Real ID was able to survive past 2012, it’s because 1) around 2016, the federal government started saying that you would need a real id to fly, while acknowledging in a small footnote that there are 15 other acceptable ids that the TSA accepts, including passports. So people started pressuring their state legislators to comply. 2) The Real ID office at the DHS colluded directly with state DMV chiefs to prepare for real id implementation: “Nevertheless, it is telling that despite what was happening at the higher level, DMV chiefs were largely cooperative with the REAL ID Office. One interviewee said that although some governors prohibited their states from becoming compliant with REAL ID, those states still implemented perhaps 95 percent of the Act’s requirements. State DMVs would use the language of being ‘consistent’ with the Act’s requirements, rather than ‘compliant,’ thereby avoiding embarrassing their governors, while at the same time making the licenses more secure” (source: Magdalena Krajewska’s 2020 journal article, “Implementing the REAL ID Act: Intergovernmental Conflict and Cooperation in Homeland Security Policy”, https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa010).]

Is the process to receive a Real ID in some way more of a risk to personal privacy?

If it is a risk, what are the risks to personal privacy while getting a State ID or Passport?

One risk is that it makes it easier to create a national id database. Now, the real id act doesn’t explicitly create a national database. However, what the federal government did do is it offered federal funding to each state to cover the costs of implementing real id, but “to be eligible to receive such grants, states shall provide electronic access to their databases to all other states” (source: same journal article as above). Meaning that if Texas and New York both accepted federal funding and the federal government wanted access to New York’s database, it could just ask Texas.

There are indeed plans to create a digital id that can be updated in real time according to AAMVA testimony: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/HM07/20231205/116640/HHRG-118-HM07-Wstate-GrossmanI-20231205.pdf

Suppose the Secretary of Homeland Security says you need a real id to vote or receive medical care. And suppose we now have digital real ids. What’s gonna happen to you if you do something the government or corporations don’t like? Well, your real id will be revoked in real time and you won’t be able to access medical care.

We must stand up to this now. Passports will generally be safe this century from digitalization because the US would need to convince 150+ countries to accept a digital passport.

That’ll only true once over 95% of Americans have a real id. Right now, 50-60% of Americans have a real id, and that number needs to go down. Again, the DHS cannot enforce anything if the majority of Americans refuse a real id; the proof of this is the fact it’s taken 20 years to begin “initial enforcement”. With resistance, we can change those 20 years to “never”.

Yeah, I’ve heard that from other people as well. What you should do: if you live in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, or Wyoming, you can only get a real id. Contact your state legislators and governor to demand a state id. If you don’t live in those states, specifically request a state id and only bring what you need for a state id. In Illinois for example, you can prevent a real id from being issued to you by mistake by bringing only 1 proof of address instead of 2.