Estonian feds now have showed up to my flat in Tallinn, complete with an official search warrant, reiterating the reasoning being having the black-star SACP flag on my balcony since January, me having taken a photo with it in the border city of Narva on Victory Day (with the flag subsequently seized for criminal evidence) and "possession of possible extremist paraphernalia". As expected, they found nothing in violation of the law if possessed in private, but documented the multitude of USSR and Palestinian memorabilia (Ushanka, Red Army officer overcoat, Lenin banner, USSR flag, rolled-up South African and Palestinian flags, Keffiyehs, a Palestine sash, EFF beret and a large collection of books), likely to be used as evidence for who-the-fuck-knows. Of course, yet another pat-down too.
Apparently also the police have received complaints of me having this flag on my balcony from residents of adjacent apartment buildings since early January, only choosing to respond in early May. They still call it a "Soviet/Russian Federation/pro-Putinist" flag with zero nuance or context. The police in Tallinn are also waiting for the police in Narva to ship the confiscated flag to continue criminal proceedings. Plenty of liberal drivel to also deal with such as "7 October this and Hamas that, Soviet occupation of Estonia, mass starvation and gulags, Putin's genocide, Kremlin apologia, etc.", your typical "R*edditor/uKKKraine flag in bio" slop, really. The only irony was that the officers had "forgotten" their "Slava uKKKraine" patches. One of the cops also even called me a "traitor to my country" and a terrorist.
So it is confirmed true that I'm the first person to be politically persecuted for expressing support for the South African Communist Party in 32 years since the end of Apartheid, while in a "country" that freely allows the display of Banderite/blood-and-soil and even Azov flags in demonstrations.
Remove biometrics from your devices and set up strong passwords.
If you have a windows computer, ensure Bitlocker is enabled and don't store the key on the microslop account. Upload it to your password manager.
Use a VPN and hide your online activity. Since it's the EU, get Mullvad.
They will come back.
just an FYI, bitlocker is backdoored and we just recently found out. law enforcement should be assumed to be able to unlock anything if they cooperate with microsoft.
google and apple are likely doing the same.
proprietary software and services should never be trusted with sensitive info, especially if the feds are after you.
Yeah you should ideally use Linux.
plus luks encryption and the latest bios will give you the best fighting chance, yes.
also beware of
depending on your specific situation
Veracrypt is free, open source, extremely cool and does whole-disk encryption for Windows. Works on all OSes, whole-disk encryption works on most (but not all) hardware. They also do encrypted volumes and a very powerful concept called 'Hidden Operating System'.
Bitlocker is backdoored. There's a public exploit for decrypting it available right now. Use veracrypt if you're going to do full disk encryption on windows.
Also beware of doing this as their country -MAY- have key disclosure laws which in short could mean the police could be allowed to hold them indefinitely in prison until they hand over the passwords or until decades of time have passed and they get a really good lawyer to convince the judge they've genuinely forgotten the passwords. Some countries may also have laws where they just straight up sentence you to five years prison with no getting out even if you then reveal the keys for a contempt of court reason.
So in other words while encryption and passwords may protect your data they won't necessarily protect you.
If you have data you're willing to rot in prison for years to decades to prevent them getting (e.g. you're a secretary of an underground communist party and are protecting your members) then yeah it can really help and stifle them. However if you're just an average person the time you spend in prison for resisting could end up greater than the time you would get for whatever the crime on your computer is.
So know the law in your jurisdiction.
Know if you may be compelled to decrypt and if so plan ahead of how far you're willing to resist before you find yourself in a tight spot and manage your risk and data accordingly. Veracrypt has hidden volumes so you could have a decoy set up but you'd need to put some decent amount of personal info and proof of use to convince forensic examiners that you haven't given them a decoy. You could use it, claim you use private browsing mostly (hence no browser history or very little), claim only if pressed that you deleted a lot of your stuff in response to pressure you were feeling (but not to hinder an investigation, just because you thought it looked bad). Though the problem with that for an OS is Windows writes all kinds of log entries with regular use, it would be clear unless you boot into it regularly that it's not being used often. You could have a USB drive with a bootable image of for example Tails OS and claim you regularly use that instead which leaves no trace and would explain your lack of recorded usage. The gotcha with this is you need to actually boot Tails and gain a basic understanding of its use as otherwise if you're totally ignorant of it, they ask you to use it in court to prove it, you can't do it, they hit you with perjury and then you're done.
But the best tactic is simply not to have anything incriminating on your devices in this situation. Delete it. Anything truly important you cannot part with place in an encrypted veracrypt volume and send the only copy securely to a friend (don't use email, authorities will get a copy of it). That friend should be out of European jurisdiction entirely so they cannot be pressured. If you don't have the files key disclosure laws don't apply or matter, if you have the files but not the key you can be in trouble. So better to not have the files but the key than have the files but not have the key.
For sending files in these situations use file uploads, use some kind of service like mega, email is all scanned and kept forever and accessible to authorities. A mega account opened using a disposable email address and the file and account deleted after your friend downloads it should prevent acquisition by adversaries. Ideally you'd want to use tor or a no-logs VPN when doing this as police might be surveilling your internet traffic and I doubt mega deletes immediately and if given a warrant with your IP they may be able to find the file.
I'd also recommend fully shutting your phone down. "Before first unlock" makes """"investigations"""" harder to do.
Cryptography is a wonderful thing!