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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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I used to work at a 3 letter agency hiding my identity on the internet. Two points jump out to me from your post:

  1. I don't think your change of MAC address caused you this hastle. The MAC address is a physical layer id and won't get transferred beyond your router in the TCP/IP packets. Something you install (like a game) could use the MAC address to uniquely identify you, but I don't see how something like gmail could do that. Is there some sort of new javascript black magic that lets gmail access the MAC address? It seems much more likely to me that you triggered additional "security" measures via some other path.

  2. Your burner phones also uniquely identify you. If two phones are in the same location (or connected to the same wifi networks) for extended periods of time, the borg can link them together as belonging to the same person pretty easily. These burners are probably a waste of money unless you are literally throwing them on a train after buying them and using them once.

If anything the OP's active efforts to appear untrustworthy as documented by @anon_ and @confuciuscorndog may themselves have triggered the scrutiny.

My guess would be that as a general rule, people who are seriously concerned about security don't maintain consistent pseudonyminous identities on public forums, and if they do, they try to blend in with the background rather than advertise thier presence.

Your burner phones also uniquely identify you. If two phones are in the same location (or connected to the same wifi networks) for extended periods of time, the borg can link them together as belonging to the same person pretty easily. These burners are probably a waste of money unless you are literally throwing them on a train after buying them and using them once.

I can say with some definitude that your phone's individual identifiers are trivially available to anyone who cares to know. So, triangulating you based on using multiple burner phones in close sequence is easier, not harder, than using one phone in sequence across a few discrete locations and then using a different one.

I guess it really depends who you're trying to hide from. In my mind, the layers roughly go like this: low-effort spammers, higher-effort spammers, a casual stalker, a dedicated investigator, government agencies in general, and then last a specific government investigation. There's a little bit of overlap between some of the layers and your ISP itself is in a bit of a unique spot as well. Even a very poor opsec burner phone number is pretty effective for at least the first 3 categories, and arguably that's all most people care about, though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4 (up to and including a dedicated investigator/stalker/etc).

though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4

Nah, I'm not that concerned about government agencies, I've already made peace with the fact that if they come after me there's nothing I can do. I'm more concerned about your average journ*list etc. wanting to gather info on me.

What does opsec have to do with spammers?

A lot of web vendors resell personal information to third parties, who in turn sell to third parties, which often sell to spammers at best and scammers more often. This includes places you'd expect to know better: QuinnyPig has gotten contact points he's only given to Amazon resold to spammers. Mostly e-mail in his case, but I've personally gotten phone calls from vendors trying to use one of my online identities.

((Which is funny, but in a morbid way.))

If all they have is an e-mail or phone, without even a real name, there are upper limits to how credible their spam or scams can be. You might, maybe, get generic stuff like "your car's extended warranty has expired". The more personal details you have available connected to the same account, the more those people can start more aggressive tactics. Just standard purchase info is enough to make a pretty compelling-looking fake invoice, for one of the more common scammer tricks. And this can scale up pretty dramatically as more information leaks.

((And it's just annoying to get ten thousand spam phone calls or e-mails, even with tools to block them. Yes, in theory CAN SPAM and the national Do Not Call list should help, but they're limited in effectiveness.))

Opsec's not the only way to have problems, here, but it's a non-trivial way for many attacks to come in.

I don't know. I have never used a VPN in my life. Gmail filters out just about all the spam emails. My phone filters out the spam texts. Maybe I get a spam call every now and again, but by simple virtue of never picking up a call from anyone I don't know and never listening to voicemail I'm pretty insulated from most scams. I'm skeptical that there is much benefit to being super anal about logging into discord.

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