# A Survey of Defensive Measures for Digital
## 4 Exploring Defensive Measures against Digital Persecution  
Living in a persecuting society where internet technology is used to surveillance and censor the citizens can be perilous for the disenfranchised. However, netizens in these countries are adaptable and implement their own tools and strategies for defeating state internet controls. Some methods are simple behavioral strategies. For example, internet users in China [29] and South Africa [30] will use homonyms or thinly veiled language to get around censorious filters. Others rely on defense technologies, which are the focus of this article. A defensive technology can be useful against surveillance, censorship, or both. Proxy sites can be used to get around site blocking, like what is found in Pakistan. These are publicly accessible webpages that perform queries on behalf of their visitors. For example, if YouTube is blocked in a country, then a user can visit the proxy site instead and request the content they want through there. The traffic is not blocked, because it is not detected. This can also thwart mass surveillance, because, from the ISP level, it appears that the user is only sending traffic and receiving traffic from the proxy site. An improvement over proxy is VPN. VPN services provide an encrypted connection between two points over the public internet. These can allow users to hide their internet traffic from state monitors operating at the ISP level. VPN can also allow a user to get around site blocking. These are not the same as onion networks, like Tor. Volunteers run the nodes in an onion network where a VPN's nodes are privately owned and managed. This can confound state efforts at seizing the traffic, as there is no single corporate entity who can hand over logs or user data. However, malicious actors may control the nodes in an onion network, so there are still risks. Mainstream social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have shown a willingness to cooperate with persecuting governments. In response, privacy-conscious netizens have turned to alternative social media. These sites that have a rebellious culture, value anonymity, celebrate breaking from social norms, and will actively defy attempts to censor them. However, government agents can still operate on these sites like any user. These tools work well against mass surveillance and censorship. However, a user seeking defense against targeted surveillance tactics, like Pegasus in Mexico, will have to consider endpoint protection. This includes antivirus software, which can thwart state-sponsored malicious code. Malware developers will try to create viruses that evade antivirus detection, so this will not always be effective. Encryption on local storage will also thwart targeted surveillance. Provided that the user does not share or improperly store the keys, locally encrypted files will be unreadable if a computer is lost or stolen. This protects the user from the efforts of secret police, who may confiscate electronic equipment. A user can also destroy local files using wiping technology. These are tools that overwrite data on the disk with known values, which makes it impossible to recover them. Wiping data would be important to a user concerned that files on his computer may be used as evidence against him. Finally, there are security-centric OS. In many cases, security is an afterthought in designing and OS. Indeed, there have been instances where an OS was deliberately made insecure and backdoors are left for developers or law enforcement. A security-centric OS is a system where the user's privacy, anonymity, and safety are prioritized over performance. These systems may use onion networks as a default or destroy evidence after every restart. An end user ought to employ more than one of these security tools in order to achieve the strongest defensive posture. An example of an ideal scenario: [PERSON], who lives in a persecuting society, communicates with his friends on an alternative social network that he connects to via a VPN.