Cuz this is some real honeypot-lookin stuff right here and makes me question if they're deeply unserious about cybersecurity and protecting their members.
They do suck at cyber security, and any effort to fix it is the individual effort of chapters. They'll put your info into a big excel that every chapter in the country can access. I know because I was accidentally added to a chapter from Delaware signal months after I joined a chapter in Missouri.
It definitely doesn't work like that now. The party has made a lot of improvements but there's still room to grow
They'll put your info into a big excel that every chapter in the country can access.
Fucking hell.
seems to me that given this it's only a matter of time before ICE or some other federal agency has a full list of names and addresses of PSL members
can't think of a better reason not to join tbh. the fourth reich gestapo will show communists less mercy than their third reich counterparts did
Not sure why you think they don't have that already, or couldn't generate it with data already on hand
Cops can get this in a single geofence to wherever the meetings are held. But Palantir or Google probably already serve this info up on a silver platter for feds.
you can't be an anonymous vanguardist last time i checked. and if this is just comments, it should be accessible to normies and others. is your concern that a communist org shouldn't have digital records of people who have ever talked to them? if the nazi administration is at the point of interrogating and arresting people who asked PSL a question in this manner, we have more pressing issues than this.
vanguard parties were often clandestine and utilized pseudonyms because they were actively being repressed.
You're telling me that "Joseph Man Of Steel" isn't the name his mother gave him???
i mean totally anonymous to the organization, not outwardly anonymous to the public/authorities/all partisans.
unless you live in one of the major "terrorist left" cities, communists are few and far-between in the greater continental united states. Try organizing a party when your possible members are scattered by dozens of miles apart. Takes all kinds of people to make a party, too. If you expect every inquirer or applicator to be an expert of cyber security who owns their own ISP, only uses one-use disposable phones, and communicates exclusively through messenger pidgeons with cryptographic codes written in lemon juice requiring an enigma machine to decode, I hate to tell you you're going to only have a revolutionary party of you, yourself, and your lonesome.
I mean, fair enough I guess, but asking for all this information from someone just to ask a question or give a comment feels off. Like that ICE tracking site that got compromised, I visited it a couple weeks ago and immediately noped out because it was obviously sus, this feels similar. Maybe just a false alarm in my head which is why I ask, because I learned my e-paranoia from watching y'all anyway.
I think your paranoia is good. Just lie about the info, who cares?
Isn't this always the problem between good guys and bad guys? Good guys always try to tell the truth and stay within the law, while bad guys dgaf and just kill people and do coups lol.
But yea, definitely use a VPN and don't be logged in to any big tech stuff.
What is "all this information"?
You are asking a question so they need at least 1 way to contact you. Phone and email is pretty normal.
You dont need to provide as full name, you can give a fake name or just initials.
Location makes sense because you might get passed on to local people. That way they dont have to have 1 person answering every message from all over.
How do you think this should have been done?
To join any organization, you will have to put your name on a list. If you think not putting your name on a list will protect you, then you are paralyzed and incorrect.
If you dont want to fill this form, you can always do it the old fashioned way: go up to them at a public event.
buddy, pal, just assume that if we use the internet then the feds can find us if they get serious and accept the fact that there is a distinct possibility greater than zero that this may lead us being dragged out of our houses to be shot and thrown in a ditch. When you step up to the plate of actually joining a party and committing to the work assigned to you by your party, you are choosing to shed degrees of your anonymity to work towards a better tomorrow. That doesn't mean you don't have to go yolo no protection just go to the most active part of your town and shout to the crowds you're a spooky scary communist to the passing crowds, but if you commit to being a communist in a communist party you have to be willing to be honest with your comrades.
Also external public access is different from internal communications. don't just assume what you're seeing on the surface is all there is in depth.
Being openly communist comes with certain risks we just have to accept. I'm pretty sure this was a big point in Revolutionary Suicide.
Haven't read his book yet, but it sounds like it could be concidered a universal concept for us
First off, I'm not seeing any asterisks next to those fields so they might not be required. You can try to leave them blank but maybe they are required.
Second off, this sort of form is just an abuse vector for haters. Having an info@pslweb.org email is way more secure for both parties and prevents a script kiddie from just looping a POST request.
Couldn't you loop an SMTP request instead? (might get your email banned though)
Yes but that's much more difficult to do and easier to respond to.
If what you want is a throwaway email to do malicious shit with, it's very easy to get those.
Again, getting a different IP is much easier and harder to block.
Throw away email providers also have low reputation and might already be blocked by the victims email provider.
Reminder that this is %100 a game about making it more difficult. Simply knowing how to send an SMTP request from the command line is a sufficient obstacle to most hooligans.
That's a very good point. Most people out there are unlikely to have any clue how to use a command line. Those who do generally have better things to do than maliciously waste others' resources for amusement or out of political anger at fringe parties. (Because let's be honest, in the West, socialists are generally fringe parties.)
msmtp can be used to easily script SMTP calls, and the malicious actor can keep getting aliases until their account gets banned, although getting a new alias probably is more challenging than getting a new IP address.
This isn't really challenging my point. Someone juvenile enough to use this sort of attack isn't going to know about the msmtp command or how to set an email alias. They didn't even know how to change their IP when they attacked my org.
The one in my city uses Google Forms for this sort of stuff and calls over unencrypted channels, so be careful (and there were other organizations in the area that had much better opsec)
Yeesh. But hey maybe this is just one of those moments where we (the collective US left) have to really get our digital shit rocked by the feds a few times until we re-learn opsec the hard way.
Don't let anyone gaslight you, that shit is whack. Shows how serious they are about the rising tide of fascism and the value they place on protecting their members.
This is the kind of form democrat political campaigns make so they can harvest your info and sell it along to every future campaign in the country as a mailing/fundraising list.
Aside from everything, lying on internet forms is valuable initial response, ask under first last name hifedslooking @subpoenaeddocuments,
I wanted to contact them and saw they use twitter and facebook. Lost all interest in that org. fuck em.
It's a political party that nominates candidates. No one is running a presidential campaign exclusively on a matrix channel.
All I'm suggesting is that a group called Party for Socialism and Liberation should not ONLY use these corporate surveillance networks. Although I like your idea of someone only using Matrix. That would be an absolute shitshow.
There's a lot of issues with their technology stack, but using popular social media platforms to make themselves known isn't one of them. Although it would be good if they had Mastodon accounts also so that people addicted to Instagram or whatever wouldn't relapse because they wanted to get information from them.
I should have specified that what I oppose is that they ONLY use those platforms. Their list is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Soundcloud. Not a single federated service. Not even one of the pretend-to-be-federated services.
At least tell me you think they should get their asses off of Twitter. Using Twitter at this point seems pretty inexcusable to me.
I agree that they should start posting on Mastodon/Bluesky, this is an issue I've noticed with every socialist or adjacent org in my area with a social media presence. I wouldn't say that leaving Twitter is a good idea though, it's still popular and I've talked with leftists who told me they browse it because it's a lot more culturally diverse and they thought Mastodon/Bluesky was too homogeneously west-centric and liberal.
Lmao
Chat 🤦
What about that shows you they're unserious?
They're asking for comments and for you to leave a way to reply to your query. Am I missing something otherwise?
Asking for full name and a street address just to send a comment sets off the opsec alarm in my brain. Any time I see someone asking for far more information than is strictly necessary makes me suspicious.
PSL protects it's members through numbers, not anonymity. As a PSL member you're expected to be willing to put your name on your politics and be public about party affiliation.
I believe the disagreement goes all the way back to the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - the Mensheviks wanted to allow members to the Communist Party to remain anonymous, such as a professor who might lose his position if he "came out" as a Communist. The Bolsheviks said: too bad, we all make sacrifices.
The PSL only makes two exceptions, as far as I'm aware: immigrants who are at risk of deportation may disguise their identity. And union leadership (and similar positions) are allowed to remain anonymous and this isn't too hard since those sorts of PSL members aren't really doing so much of the day-to-day work of organizing protests and other events.
I think this is a good system. It filters out people who are likely to get spooked on the job anyways. I think it's a matter of practicality. You have to give your home address to the council to speak at City and County Council meetings. You have to give your home address to run for public office (if you ever run into a petitioner for ballot access, they'll have a paper under the signature sheets that shows the home addresses of the candidates, and the legal names of their electors, and you have a right to see it if you ask). If you're registered to vote (and if you're in PSL, you're going to register to vote, and vote for the Party's candidates), literally anyone can Google your name and find your home address, because those are public records.
Minute point here in relation to visibility of communist party membership. I won't assume to be an expert on how pizzle sets their own standards but communist parties do operate on a certain level of secrecy in the form of organizing cells that are generally speaking kept separated from each other on larger geographic scales in order to ensure no single member of a local region has a full picture of the whole party's membership. A shop cell may know of other nearby shops cells in a city with members for ease of coordination but only the city organizer would have a full picture of what's up in the city. That city organizer as well may know some details of other local cities but won't have the full picture a state organizer has, and so on to district, region, and all the way to the standing committee who act as the true public face of the party.
You may know a handful of local communist party members and the general secretary and national chair of their party, but you won't know or shouldn't know any details between the two. The central committee that is the true brains of the party between congresses remain nameless and faceless. Strands of cells could be compromised but it won't compromise the whole party right away. Enemy intelligence has to at least invest more time and effort in cracking information to make a dent in the party.
Idk why you'd think it was a honeypot. The feds definitely don't need you to put your info into a form to know that you're looking at PSL's website.
It's almost certainly because they have VAN or a similar database for their electoral work and they're trying to collect data for it as well as send you emails/texts. I'm not sure I agree with the efficacy of it but it's probably just electoral brain worms.
The feds definitely don’t need you to put your info into a form to know that you’re looking at PSL’s website.
Tech illiteracy (not least the part that grows from ease-of-use of technology) is dangerous in these kinds of cases. Comrades, who might really know theory and lots of other stuff besides tech, will "log in with Facebook" on their Chrome browser signed in to their Google account using default DNS and no VPN and change their address from 123 High Street to 🤔 124 High Street and be convinced they have decent opsec. We've gotta address that where we can.
Aboveground cadre shouldn't be expected to be anonymous. At the end of the day, you can't be a vanguard from the shadows. The Communist disdains to conceal their views after all. Now, there's underground cadre, but underground cadre is tasked with clandestine operations like blowing up shit and assassinating high value targets. Underground cadre is the foundation of what would eventually become a guerilla army. In this case, anonymity is needed because the state is actively trying to kill the underground instead of merely jailing them like the aboveground.
Those are the stakes at play for any serious vanguard party. You only get the privilege of anonymity if you sign up to forfeit any semblance of a normal life for the sake of the revolution.
This is merely a form to ask the PSL questions not join the vanguard.
I don't think you're really wrong, but this really just cements that people with dependents they can't risk don't belong in the PSL.
On your above/underground cadre note, wouldn't any underground cadre at one point have been part of the aboveground group, and would thus be caught in any roundup of the registered party members?
I read a bit about the French Resistance in WW2 recently, and it seems like they had a network of hundreds rolled up basically because they kept paper membership rolls.
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