men in striped prison uniforms with triangular patches

Police State Proofing

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I hesitated to write this piece. It is quite painful and I feel the desire to deny what I see. This is something that happens to other people. It happens to other countries. It could never happen to my country. And yet, here we are.

men in striped prison uniforms with triangular patches
Gay men were particularly targeted by the Nazi regime.

My horror started with the election in November. A large portion of the electorate in the United States of America proved that they were morally bankrupt. Secondarily, they demonstrated some measure of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and stupidity. It was devastating to watch. In my lifetime I had seen such progress.
Overturning sodomy laws.1 2 3
The ability to be visible without risk to employment or housing.
The recognition and protection of core family relationships.4
Then nationalising that.5

All this progress and potential for kindness, or at least leaving others in peace, is now at risk. The risk is that law is becoming optional, and in that context we are all at risk within our personal minority status. In my family, that means, because we are gay, we could be subject to the random whims of the border patrol.6 7 We knew all this would be the result of the election on 5 November. It is why we were so devastated. Even we, however, have been startled by the speed. Every. single. cabinet member. has been approved by the US Senate. But I decided to start taking real action when Kash Patel was elevated to Director of the FBI.8 This is the beginning of the police state. Our data needs a new home. It is sad. It is scary. And yet, as amateur historians, the signs are all here for us to read.9 So, I started into the process of moving all our digital world out of the immediate jurisdiction of the US.

men in white t-shirts and underwear on rough metal shelving
Prisoners at the CECOT facility in El Salvador

I had barely begun when the new regime starts to rattle the economics of the world.10 It says a lot that even the bond market for US Treasuries is suffering.11 We were fortunate to see the writing on the wall, so we liquidated everything that was not retirement tax sheltered and moved it to Euros ahead of the so-called Liberation Day. Even so, my calculations indicate that we have lost a frightening amount of money in our investments across all categories. In three months we saw a net worth drop of 20%. In three months.

In the intersection between these two issues, I was struck by an articulation of something that had been bothering me for many years. In The Long Memo, Finnegan offers us a clear picture of the rentier capitalism into which I have certainly fallen.12 In brief, rentier capitalism, in its modern manifestation, is when that which is produced or productive is owned by one who does not create or contribute. It is leased to those who use it or even improve it. Much like a peasant in medieval Europe, one holds a property only while the legal owner is paid. In medieval society, with a bad harvest you lose everything because you actually own nothing. In modern society, as Finnegan details, we have similar constructs that are leading to the same dark ends. In the extreme, a rented apartment, leased car, entertainment streamed, tied to continued rents. When you change your position, or your economic standing, or the government changes your legal position because you are part of a disapproved group, there is loss.13

My experience in this regard is trivial, but instructive. We moved our Apple IDs to Spain and all the TV shows that we purchased over many years were no longer there. Poof. Gone. Now I am feeling directly the situation Finnegan and Wikipedia describe. If I had purchased DVDs I would still have something, but we have fallen into a rentier arrangement. My purchases were really only a lease.14 The American Dream that is dying was that one owned something. A house. A car. An encyclopaedia. Increasingly, all these are leased.

So, in all this, I have taken action. It has been a lot of work, but I am pleased with where we have landed. I shared the following with my friend Joseph and he suggested that I share it here.

Website Movement

I have been using Hostinger for many years, but the firm, based in Lithuania, had understandably sold me a license via their US reseller, so to make the whole completely EU-based, I started a new account from Spain and then moved my server to the new install. I am still using the old license for my mother and will move her blog when I need to renew that license. It was a process that involved also taking advantage of their email capabilities and their hosting of Domain Names.

I now host all the domain names via Hostinger and at that time I moved all our email accounts from Apple to Hostinger on my server hosted in a data center in France. I was not able to move Patrick’s work-related email as Hostinger did not have 2-factor authentication that he is required to have as a realtor, albeit retired, in Washington state. I solved that problem later.

Liberating the Ebook Library

After we returned from our trip to Egypt and Greece (posting about that soon), I began to step away from the rentier society by removing all my ebooks from Kindle and stripping from the files the locks that keep the books imprisoned in only the one system.15 It was tricky, but in the end, I setup a Windows virtual machine using free VMWare and an inexpensive-to-me Windows license. Then with epubor ultimate, I was able to convert the books. Then I found out about calibre and that is my library management system. It has a plugin to free new books, so that is good. Now I purchase books from ebooks.com and immediately drop them into calibre where I catalog them and push them out to our reader of choice, Yomu.

Data Storage in the EU

So data storage is an interesting challenge.

There are two issues.

The first is security in the case of a police state, so then who has keys to my encryption? In this case Apple currently gets high marks. They are using advanced cryptographic capabilities and when using the Advanced Data Protection option (unless you live in the UK),16 my entire data set at Apple iCloud is encrypted and only I have the keys. That said, one needs redundancy to avoid the whims of the rentier overlords and ideally a setup that is EU based because of the second issue.

That second issue is the rentier capitalism problem. In this respect it is important to have a redundancy plan. If Apple, to pick an unlikely example, shut down my account, I would lose access to everything digital. So I need alternatives.

As I was looking, I found a neighbour here in Valencia. Internxt is a firm started here that focused on EU based cryptographic security. They were having a sale when I found them and I was able to contract a 6TB space with them for life. In the end, it is not as helpful as I would like as I am having considerable difficulty with the synchronisation system. As Patrick pointed out, it is not relevant that it doesn’t work perfectly today as we have a lifetime account for an amazingly low price. I will wait.

Email and Storage

So, as I was looking for alternatives to Internxt while they sort out their desktop synchronisation application, a friend mentioned Proton for encrypted emails as one might send to an accountant or a journalist in the US like Josh Marshall. So I took a look. Based in Switzerland. Founded by CERN scientists including the redoubtable Sir Tim Berners-Lee.17 Focused on personal security and encryption. The email system can only be used in an environment where it can be decrypted by the user. I obtained an account and moved all our email, including Patrick’s professional account, and the account includes a terabyte of storage.

So, now we have all the documents and email stored in Europe and fully encrypted on Apple, Internxt, and Proton. I am using Advanced Renamer to rename exported photos from Apple Photos so I have a copy locally. I then use FreeFileSync to copy everything from Apple iCloud to a local backup, then synchronise all that with Proton. I have freed my library of 745 books and found alternative paths for that. We have decades of living expenses here in Europe. I have found ways to replace what was more rentier capitalism and focused our spending and time on scenarios where our capital acquires something other than the promise of availability while it is convenient to the seller.

Watching and hoping

We continue to watch what is developing in the US. It is not encouraging. We are both deeply saddened and horrified. We are scared for the peace of the world, the economic stability of the world, and the safety of our friends and family.

We could be wrong in what we see. We could be failing to see some great advance in the governance of a people and their interaction with other peoples. We would be delighted to be wrong about the need for all that we have done during this first 100 days of the new regime in the US.

But hope is fading /
like a dying summer light /
that reeks of dank fear.

Be good to each other.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors. Lawrence v. Texas. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 26 Apr 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lawrence_v_Texas&oldid=1287415450. ↩︎
  2. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/558/. ↩︎
  3. Rogers, Brian. Houston man whose case advanced gay rights dies. Houston Chronicle. 27 Dec 2011. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-deaths/article/houston-man-whose-case-advanced-gay-rights-dies-2425608.php. ↩︎
  4. Wikipedia contributors. United States v. Windsor. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 Nov 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States_v_Windsor&oldid=1257962115. ↩︎
  5. Wikipedia contributors. Obergefell v. Hodges. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 27 April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Obergefell_v_Hodges&oldid=1287662775. ↩︎
  6. Dumas, Daisy. Australian with working visa detained and deported on returning to US from sister’s memorial. 11 Apr 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-with-us-working-visa-detained-insulted-deported. ↩︎
  7. Walters, Joanna. Trump officials deport two-year-old US citizen and mother of one-year-old girl. 28 Apr 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/26/trump-administration-child-deportation.  ↩︎
  8. Snyder, Timothy, Ph.D. Kash Patel’s Plots. 18 Feb 2025. https://snyder.substack.com/p/kash-patels-plots. ↩︎
  9. Synder, Timothy, Ph.d. The Evil at Your Door. 17 Mar 2025. https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-evil-at-your-door. ↩︎
  10. Finnegan, William A. Trump Nukes the Global Economy. 2 Apr 2025. https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/trump-nukes-the-global-economy. ↩︎
  11. Richardson, Heather Cox, Ph.D. Letters from and American: March 28, 2025. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-28-2025. ↩︎
  12. Finnegan, William A. Renting your life. 19 Apr 2025. https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/renting-your-life. ↩︎
  13. Wikipedia contributors. Rentier capitalism. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 31 Dec 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rentier_capitalism&oldid=1266440518. ↩︎
  14. Doctorow, Cory. Kindle user claims Amazon deleted whole library without explanation. 22 oct 2012. https://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html. ↩︎
  15. Digital Rights Management is horrible. It is almost entirely for the benefit of the rentier capitalists. For more on this, there is Derek Haines with What is DRM and why is it such a bad idea for ebooks?. And for a slightly more comprehensive an take, Cory Doctorow, then of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered this Microsoft Research DRM speech way back in 2004. ↩︎
  16. Hall, Rachel. Apple removes advanced data protection tool in face of UK government request. 21 Feb 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/21/apple-removes-advanced-data-protection-tool-uk-government. ↩︎
  17. Wikipedia contributors. Tim Berners-Lee. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 27 April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_Berners-Lee&oldid=1287674424. ↩︎

2 Replies to “Police State Proofing”

  1. bradtipp

    Hi David. I’m sad to see you write this but also pleased that you are not deluded or ignoring the reality of the shit show that is 2025. I’ve been thinking long and hard about what to do, while still here in the US. Resistance is the only answer. Stand up to the bullies and try and play the long game and think about where you spend your money. In this world it is one of the only ways to influence the people at the top. I, like many, was deluded that ‘it won’t be so bad’. Well, that didn’t last long thankfully, even after you and Patrick woke me up to your reality back in November.
    My biggest concern is that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. While the economy here is doing well, I fear that AI will further core out the middle class and that in five years’ time we really will be living in some dystopian reality. In reality much of America and some of Europe is already living in poverty, and has been for some time. The inability to change the basic inequality is the root cause of people’s wish for ‘anything, but more of what we have’. Sadly, their saviors are just going to be more extreme and they will suffer even more – See Trump’s Tariffs as an example. The only answer is to be equally radicle on the other side. Rise up for free healthcare, free higher education and tax the billionaires to fund it. We need a peasants uprising, but we need the peasants to know who their enemy is.
    As George Orwell so prophetically said – If there is hope, it lies in the proles. I have hope!

    Reply ↓
    • David Wright Gibson Post author

      Thank you, Brad. I really appreciate so many things about your observations. I’ve been contemplating a response most of the day as I did laundry and chores.

      You put your finger on exactly the kind of resistance so many of us in the US need to engage. It might involve protests and civil disobedience, but it is also conversations, totally normal and often not even slightly confrontational as was our lovely evening with you both back in November. It is a perfectly normal reaction to feel “that is impossible, he cannot do that”, or “oh I know he said that, but he did not mean it”, or a general “that cannot happen here.”

      And if one is white, heterosexual, and ideally male, one will likely be able to continue in the world as described in an interview on the show by Alex Wagner of MSNBC as “tourist friendly autocracy.”

      Only through these conversations is there hope to help people understand that nothing normal or safe is happening.

      You also bring up a serious point that I do think we fail to discuss enough. We do not spend enough time talking about the failure embedded in the governments of Clinton and Blair and their successors. The failure to address the needs of the many. The failure to paint a picture of what the world could be if we organised the government around taking care of the many versus socialism for corporations or oligarchs. Of course, all this is in the context of the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that you and I spent so much time discussing professionally, and in that context is social disruption and job loss.

      That, together with the failure to defend the benefits of a messy democratic form of government has led us, as you say, to a desire for saviours who will no doubt cause more pain.

      It took us decades to get here. It will likely take us decades to unwind the current situation.

      Be kind to each other.

      Reply ↓

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