Techlore is (in my eyes) a pretty mainstream, moderate, and beginner focused privacy community, its also quite small in the realm of things. Most people here are just trying to minimize corporate tracking/data harvest, make unethical government mass surveillance a little bit harder, and regain a bit of control over their digital lives. Not exactly a juicy target for law enforcement. I find it extremely unlikely that any government agency would find it worthwhile to specifically target this community or coerse Henry as an individual.
That said, I would never seek to invalidate your concerns just because I think they are unlikely or don’t entirely understand what you are asking. Things that are unlikely are unlikely but not impossible. So I will try to address them without further commentary on whether or not it is a likely scenario.
Both Discourse (this forum) and Youtube are public platforms. So anything you say here is already public (with the exception of direct messages which are not public, but also not encrypted afaik). The same is true of youtube, any comments you’ve made are public, and any videos you’ve watched, links you’ve clicked, etc are known to youtube (google) already.
So the question you’ve got to ask youself is IF an adversary were to compromise, this forum, the youtube channel, or someone with administrative access to either, what is the risk to you? What data could possibly be exposed? And are there other easier or more likely ways this (meta)data could be compromised.
A non-exhaustive list of some of the things that are not public on the forum which could potentially be compromised (and even if not compromised you should be aware that forum administrators and to some degree moderators can usually see some or all of these things).
- Probably every IP address you’ve ever used to logon to this forum (or at least the most recent one), and possibly links to any other usernames that have logged in from the same IP.
- Definitely Account details like the e-mail address you used to signup, as well as other information about your user profile/account.
- Probably metadata (things like when you accessed the site last, etc)
- Definitely the Region/country of your IP address)
- Definitely some information about your browser.
- Probably a history of content you have deleted or edited.
- Possibly the ability to see information about deleted accounts
Lots of this can be mitigated by your own opsec (if you are concerned about your IP or your email being exposed, its up to you to not share your true IP or true email). Personally, I treat this site and every other forum I use as a public space (including the bits that are technically not public), so the impact of a compromise (whether that was hackers, gov’t, or whoever) wouldn’t impact me that much.
Generally speaking there are two questions that are good to ask yourself to help keep your concerns rational/reasonable.
- What is the likelihood/probability of a particular threat you are concerned about actually happening?
- If it did occur, how severely would it impact you?
These questions might help you find more balance and stay grounded, and help you focus on the the threats that are most likely and/or most serious to you.