Do they have to be viable candidates? I don't mind being in a permanent state of casual campaigning

>An individual running for a seat in the House or Senate or for the office of U.S. President becomes a candidate when he or she raises or spends more than $5,000 in contributions or expenditures.

One generally needs a certain number of petition signatures to appear on a ballot, but apparently not needed just to legally be a candidate.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/registeri...

Do you have to actually spend that $5000? Or can you just have it "raised"?

Create a nonprofit to accept the "raised" contribution, and then swap it with another candidate in the pool for "consulting fees"...

> Create a nonprofit

I like the enthusiasm, but this would get you slapped by the IRS (eventually). Any other ideas?

Maybe if we just pay each other in a ring through a legal escrow? Everyone puts in $5,001, the escrow pays everyone back $5000.

So we start a party where we all sign to get each other on the ballot and donate to a pool that allocates $5k to each of us? Can this $5k just be moved around per candidate which counts as spending?

This would become a problem if someone just joined the party with the intent of cashing out the 5k$ and leaving. Maybe you could fix this somehow with smart contracts? idk

Legal escrow! No smart contracts needed

if you cash out the $5k you lose candidate status.

“Fine by me, I’m $5k richer now!”

Assign it but don’t physically give it to them?

We can even make a political party out of it where everyone in the party is a candidate.

The Privacy Party is born.

All Aboard the Pirate Ship![0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Pirate_Party

To be fair the Pirate Party is very pro privacy for seemingly obvious reasons.

This has a very Slack vibe to it that I can dig.

No love for the Church of the SubGenious?

I gave you an upvote in the previous comment because I knew what you were talking about mainly due to Slackware's reference to Church of SubGenious. I don't think many know what that is though.

For those curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

That is indeed a great idea. Where and how do I sign up.

It would be a great act of civil disobedience.

Oh, that is great!

I would like to add, just think of the chaos at the primaries if the act of declaring candidacy one also declares they are running for the R|D nomination. The voting machines can barely deal with 20 presidential candidates. Imagine what would happen if you had to thousands of people running for a congressional seat!

I nominate np_tedious for President, along with the rest of Hacker News.

I thought we were an autonomous collective.

Some of us are more autonomous than others.

Some are more collective.

The way this works is that no one is excluded. They collect everything blindly, then sort through for what they want. That was the issue when they falsely claimed US citizens were excluded. That’s the issue when they say the same about election candidates or sitting senators or whoever.

These programs are all or nothing by design.

"Do as I say, not as I do." - I've literally heard these words from the mouth of a LEO before.

I'm getting the same vibe from EARN IT, no military grade encryption for us civvies.

“(G) if the target of the electronic surveillance is an elected Federal official or a candidate in a Federal election, that the Attorney General has approved in writing of the investigation;“

Just use a damn VPN.

And when a court order requests the provider hand over your information?

That's what the other six VPNs are for, right?

Right, you have multiple personas, which are using branched/nested chains.

No perfect solution, for sure, but you have some reasonably options to mitigate risk. If you can, use one outside the US i.e. with no financial presence of any kind there.

Admittedly that's a high bar, the next best choice is one that claims to keep no logs and has successfully defended such a claim to law enforcement. Not a long list here, but there are some.

Just use ~3 VPNs in a nested chain. So an adversary would need data from all three. Better yet, have the middle one be in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your adversary's.

Are VPNs legal in China? It would be hilarious to set up a chain of VPN connections that are each in a jurisdiction that will not cooperate with one another.

E.g. one connection each in China, Russia and USA, and three more in the opposite direction of geopolitical allegiance if you’re super paranoid.

I'm not at all familiar with Chinese VPN services. But it's my impression that the Chinese authorities mostly care about domestic VPN use. Citizens are limited to approved VPNs, which are obviously backdoored.

More generally, as long as you're not interacting with domestic Chinese people, authorities don't care much about what you're doing. That's what I've seen providers claim in darknet forums. And that was my experience when I leased VPS in Hong Kong. Once I made it clear that I wouldn't be interacting with domestic Chinese people, all was cool.

I have used one Russian VPN service, Insorg. They're one of the oldest. I've read about others, but don't recall names. And it's my impression that Russian authorities also mostly care about interactions with citizens.

So anyway, I typically start with a mainstream VPN service. Then I chain one or two notoriously hard to coerce ones. And for Mirimir, IVPN is the final one. Because I've written stuff for them, basically, so using IVPN earlier in chains would be stupid.

> Are VPNs legal in China?

No, but their use is extremely common anyway.

You've invented Tor.

Although Tor is better, because the connection reroutes dynamically. And worse, because anyone can volunteer to be an entrypoint or endpoint - this matters because a very well-resourced adversary could conceivably control both your entrypoint and your endpoint, and use a timing correlation attack to de-anonymize you. But I don't know that nested VPNs are immune to that either, given the level of invasive surveillance 5-eyes has over the entire internet.

No, I've copied Tor :)

And re dynamic circuits, I did a crude hack: https://github.com/mirimir/vpnchains

I only use Tor via nested VPN chains. The VPNs mainly provide backup anonymity, in case Tor circuits are compromised. And they also anonymize me vs Tor use, which may avoid attention.

When I don't care so much about anonymity, I just use nested VPN chains. Throughput is 5-10 times that for Tor, latency is lower, and I'm not limited to TCP.

VPN is asking for your financial support