alreadyburnt

Yeah it can be pretty difficult to navigate this space, there's a lot of stuff that's just research concepts, there's some stuff that's just borderline charlatanry, there's some stuff that's downright malicious, there's some stuff that's good at what it's doing but too complicated for most folks to use. My biggest area of concern is usability and user experience so I'm working pretty hard on that right now, but for now the project I work on(I2P, see r/i2p and geti2p.net) is still largely in category 4. Making progress though.

Signal tends to be a pretty good choice for most people but I'm fairly sure it's easy for regimes to spot Signal users on the network, which could be a bad thing if Signal is associated with activism in the area you're in. Then you start to get into the weeds and need to model your threats against your circumstances. A reasonably trustworthy VPN provider(Such as Mullvad or Mozilla VPN), or better yet, a "secret" VPN hosted by a cooperative org like a news org or a university would be a relatively simple solution which would prevent your connection to Moxie's server from being visible to the network and prevent much of the danger. There's also Psiphon, which is VPN-Like and free, and focused on circumvention so it will connect in many hostile networks: https://psiphon.ca/ https://psiphon.ca/en/download.html

Signal over Tor would also hide the connection to Moxies server, but adds the complication of configuring Orbot and Tor. Snowflake could hide the Tor connection by shaping it to look like WebRTC(Which is a browser-to-browser peer-to-peer protocol used in apps like Zoom, Jitsi Meet), and pretty much complete the package, but again, another layer of complication.

One issue we sometimes have is that the developers of these tools mostly live in places where we're relatively safe to develop them. Heck I even got a grant once. That is an enormous benefit to us, but it limits our experience with the real-world instrumentation of oppressive tools to research projects, leaks, user reports and understanding the news.

There are some pretty decent sites out there with more information, https://privacyguides.org/ is one of the best, they also have a subreddit r/privacyguides, but it's still more general privacy. It's important to understand the tools they promote, but they do promote very solid tools.

Please don't ever hesitate to DM me here on reddit if you have any questions, or reach out to me by e-mail at hankhill19580 at gmail dot com, my PGP key fingerprint is: 96F9655531B77E370BB2A2712FF909D2A72703A5

Thanks! I work on some of these (privacy-enhancing)technologies and it's very helpful to get feedback from people who use them in the field.

Do you use any specialized communication tools in these dangerous environments and if so, which ones?

You're welcome, I'm glad I could help.