@fluffy @DutchBoomerMan @NonPlayableClown @SarahGation

> from leaked NSA documents i've read and court indictions i've perused, i hypothesize that you stand out quite a lot using tor.

If it were more common, it wouldn't make anyone stand out. Just mentioning XKeyscore/Echelon/Carnivore/etc. probably has landed people on lists, but here's something you may not have known: visiting LWN or the LKML archives got people flagged and added to a watchlist by the NSA for a while. Maybe Linux isn't on the list any more; cryptocurrency-related activity probably is, but I have bad news if you think a proxy is less suspicious than Tor, because nearly all proxy services are on the list. Expect that you stand out if you have *any* technical interests if your traffic looks meaningfully different from "zoomer on Tiktok" or "boomer on Facebook".

> i do not know your threat model,

I'm not really worried about the internet nutcases (though there is no reason to make anything easy for anyone, they so far seem incompetent), but the government hates encryption and anonymity and if no one exercises the rights, then we don't keep them. So there are three components: (1) being more trouble than I'm worth (sure, NSA supercomputer under the desert: is it worth millions of dollars to crack my keys?), (2) raising the bar that the government would have to jump over in order to destroy civilization as we know it, and (3) I can, so I do.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton tried to illegalize encryption: would you rather have encryption or not? I'm glad it exists. I suspect that operating FSE raises the expected value of cracking a fellow, so it's better to take whatever steps I can. Look at the chudbuds.lol admin: she probably would have had no trouble keeping her taxes and legal documents and nudes and whatnot on the same computer she used for gaming if she hadn't also been running a fedi node and doing political streams on Twitch. I do not plan to be the weak spot for any service I run.

> i am not even pretending to defend against a nation state level attack

I don't expect that the car is safe from cruise missiles or a 35mm chain gun, but I still wear a seatbelt. The seatbelt's utility in terms of keeping my head from going through the windshield is relevant whether or not the seatbelt's utility is nearly zero for stopping bullets.