"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear"

…is actually accurate in most cases. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t examine our privacy, just that most of us have no reason to be as ridiculously paranoid as we end up: only running sandboxed VMs for different parts of life, using Tor with VPNs, or foregoing easy browsing entirely by blocking most of everything. None of us are evading the feds unless we’ve done something particularly naughty, and we should all generally accept that if the feds want somebody, no amount of TAILS USBs can stop them.

Of course, the flip side is also true. Many civil liberties activists note that such a phrase is based on a mistaken view of privacy as a whole. Swedish politician Rick Falkvinge has written extensively about the subject, emphasizing that the ultimate authority to decide “suspicious” behavior is up to the state in such a surveillance-heavy system. He also discusses how a system that can perfectly enforce flawed laws will freeze social progress. Further, I support privacy as a basic human need. The fruits of the Western surveillance economy have proven to be detrimental to our development (but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this article). But while regrettable, pretending to be a secret agent helps no one and socially isolates you, which in many ways is the goal of the proverbial panopticon.

OPSEC theater is when we give ourselves a false sense of control by developing the theory of mind of someone the feds are interested in. Those who engage in OPSEC theater buy in to many fanciful concepts of data protection while ignoring the bigger picture of their privacy efforts. I know people who are hyperfocused on maintaining the secrecy of their web traffic. When they find Tor inconvenient, they use a heavily hardened browser with ad-blockers, canvas blocking, etc. and create compartmentalized groups of accounts for different bubbles of their lives. Things like this seem reasonable until you realize that the majority of your web traffic involves YouTube, Twitter, the occasional Reddit rabbit hole, and reading through the first chapters of books you downloaded from Project Gutenberg. This works in isolation, but breaks down when you must liaise with a normie.

In short, don’t overthink your privacy. The feds aren’t out to get you, only the passive dragnets of the world’s intelligence agencies that will throw away the data they have on you to save on storage costs. If you have a compulsion to do dissident things, maybe the feds’ interest in you is justified.