Archiving for Persecution

Archiving ready for Persecution!

There are few requirements on the Christian life but one very often runs in stark contrast to what the world expects us to be.

The World’s desire for the Christian is that he can do what he wants as long as he doesn’t upset the status quo and doesn’t pester us. Yet Jesus has entrusted to us the Great Commission to go into all the World to preach the message of the Gospel.
And here is a conflict where again and again through the ages it has been attempted to silence us and to marginalise us. At the moment we can see a lot of laws being made forcing us to bow down to the world’s standards and rejecting God’s standards or else we will face litigation and get punished.

We have new laws within the LBGT sector which now require us to not just stay silent on the subject of whether the proposed lifestyle is morally acceptable but we are required to praise it and endorse it in our sphere of life.

Laws restricting any criticism of Islam or against the so-called Islamophobia are discussed.

A mayor in Texas a self professed lesbian has pushed to have sermons of pastors subpoenaed to be analysed for any content critical of the LBGT movement. There hate speech laws, copyright laws and data protection laws all designed to silence people whenever it is required using the big arm of the law.

Any suspected transgression in these laws whether justified or not may result in all of our IT systems being confiscated for the purpose of forensic examination to establish whether any laws are broken.

Now this is serious stuff. I have met a couple of people where this has happened to. All their computer equipment got taken by the police for forensic examination and disappeared in some lab for analysis. Sometimes it may be there for years.

What should we do?

A lot of us are using the Internet, social media, messenger services etc. as a means to communicate and also to share the message of the Gospel. A lot of our materials such as Christian literature, the Bible, commentaries are now in digital format.
All it takes is a single visit by the police and all is gone – PC, Laptops, Kindle, smartphone, USB storage, Backup HDD, DVDs etc.

Now the big question is: What would your life look like when all digital media is gone suddenly?

Replacing IT equipment is cheap these days and may only be looking a few hundred dollars but once the data is gone it is gone.

Let’s have a look at means and ways to protect your data and ensure it is still accessible on day X:

• Encryption
  Always ensure your data is encrypted, especially if it is sensitive data,
  Make sure that you have the means to decrypt it
  There are a lot of encryption programs available a good program for archiving and encryption is called 7Zip
• Cloud Storage
  an interesting modern solution and you can get free storage on Dropbox, One Drive, Google Drive,
  still and issue is that you never know what is happening with your data and the company can always switch of your data or surrender it at the behest of law enforcement.
  Even though you may have a free and good backup it may not be available should you need it
• USB Memory Sticks
  You can now get them storing 128GB and more and they will allow you to easily store and access the data without the fear of a third party either using the data or just deleting it.
  Once a USB stick I had went through a washing machine cycle hidden in a trousers pocket. To my surprise the memory stick still worked afterwards and was very clean as well.
• SDRam cards
  The little memory cards you can stick in your smartphones are very potent these days. You can store 32/64GB on one of them and they are smaller than your fingernail. It would be easier to weatherproof the cards and to hide them somewhere or even bury them.
• CDRoms and DVDs
  Almost old technology these days but you can store up to 8GB on a DVD and they are very cheap. The problem is that they deteriorate over time and the data stored on them may become unreadable.
• Off Site Server Storage (you control)
  You can hire servers in other countries who will not co-operate with law enforcement easily. Most of them are virtual servers with a lot of storage and high speed internet access. You can lease them in countries like the Ukraine, China, Barbados and even in semi-autonomous places like Sealand a self declared nation outside government control. The importance is to use encryption and to always use VPNs i.e. encrypted network traffic. Still this is not 100% secure and you should always look at plan B to protect your data and to keep it accessible.
• Using Stego
  There are more methods to hide data in plain sight. There is a concept and also software making use of this concept called Steganography. Originally it was about hiding messages inside of images. This concept was made use of by dutch painters who sometimes had to hide their message in plain sight and only the initiated would know how to interpret the image. In modern data systems a movie file can be used to hide GBs of data. Someone will look at the computer and only see a couple of films and when the films are played they actually work. Still hidden within the vast amount of data can be a Bible or a commentary as well as other audio and video files. With encryption it is very difficult to extract and crack these hidden files.
• Hiding Files inside file systems
  The Microsoft NTFS file system has some features which allow files to be invisible and hidden inside the file system only certain tools will allow extraction of the hidden files. It is not that safe and a forensic analyst will find them but still they are not in plain side

Conclusion:
we are living in perilous times and it looks very much likely that Christian persecution is on the horizon. We will still have the great commission to preach the Gospel even though the law says that this may be bigoted hate speech worthy of persecution. We shouldn’t make to easy for those who are after us and use technology to protect ourselves and to be prepared in the worst case scenario. Make sure that you will have all the tools tomorrow to preach the Gospel if they are taken away from you today.

My prediction for the coming years is – if the Lord tarries:
– YouTube, FB, Google, Social Media will become more restrictive and throw users off their platform if they appear to be non-conformist
– Any potentially controversial contents will disappear
– The DarkNet will become the new home for “Free Speechers”
– We will see Christian persecution through the backdoor