Catacomb Resident Blog

Don't Be Surprised

19 September 2024

A few years ago I felt a deep stirring in my soul about sharing hard truths. Not that I had any hope of correcting anyone else, so much as I wanted to express the rumbling of what seemed to me God's wrath on America. I was under no delusion it would be an easy job; I was expecting trouble.

Anyone who's been reading this blog for very long has seen that trouble. I began with a blog on Google's Blogger service, but when a couple of people got booted for similarly strong messages, I left before it could hit me. I then contracted with an old friend to host me until the Feds starting poking around. I didn't want him to have to face that on my behalf, so I moved to Substack. I was so sure I'd be protected, because Substack was hosting some very rowdy blogs that would have been damned everywhere else. Nope; I got a bogus closure, as did the account of one commenter.

So, here we are on this privately hosted blog, and once again there is some evidence of efforts to harass. It appears that some process on the Net is trying to interfere with my posting here. Everything is fine until I actually try to post. There's an unusual lag. If you know anything about network snooping, you recognize that as a sign of something on the network checking my posts before they go up.

[Edit: This was back when I was using WordPress blogging software on this blog.]

There's nothing my benefactor can do about something like this. It's the modern version of the old Carnivore (DCS-1000) monitoring appliance that the feds could have installed on any commercial hosting provider's network and it would snoop all the traffic. It also made telltale signs that savvy networking techs could recognize. I'm not saying this is the same thing exactly; Carnivore came introduced in 1997, so that's obsolete tech these days. It's much more sophisticated, and such monitoring has been mandatory on every network for years, including all those cellphone networks.

Once or twice, a post here has been outright blocked. I've had to go back and try a couple or three times to get it to take. It looks like crappy throughput (network congestion or local disconnection) if you aren't paying attention to the timing. For me, it shows up only for posting, not for any other administrative task.

Feel free to call me paranoid, but I've been working with this stuff for a long time. I've seen other people targeted this way and tried to help them. I'm praying about my options. For now, as long as the posts go up, I'm not too worried about snooping. I've known that was happening from the beginning.

My point here is that you, dear readers, deserve to know what's happening. If the blogging should simply stop for a few days without explanation, you know something is blocking persistently. It's almost guaranteed that someone else in our community will step up and say something on their blog. If this blog simply disappears, that's a whole other kind of trouble. Again, get familiar with the other community blogs in the right sidebar.

Stuff can happen when you speak your convictions publicly. The current government hates that sort of thing and has already censored quite a few folks with much bigger audiences than mine. Censorship is already here.


Comments:

Derek Ramsey

"Nope; I got a bogus closure, as did the account of one commenter."

I also got hit and have not been able to comment there ever since your blog closed there.


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