Think like the NSA or CIA type of stuff
Assume they are kinda the helicopter parenting type.
Just curious… cuz maybe I have an idea for storywriting… maybe…
Generally speaking, it’s illegal to use government access for personal reasons. Now if you are talking about civilian parents:
Put TailsOS on a thumb drive. No traces left of your activities once the drive is unplugged.
Watch for basic consumer level spyware on your smartphone.
No vpn. Use Tor either through TailOS on a laptop/desktop or Orbot and Tor browser on a phone.
Don’t talk in your sleep.
Get comfortable lying.
I think you do a lot of the same thing current kids whose parents are grooming them to be politicians do, except as a kid you would voluntarily do these things.
Keep your online history crazy clean and consistent. Engage in as a little controversial rhetoric online as possible. Choose your friends and who you choose to engage with extremely carefully. Create a believable, likable, almost too clean online public persona and stick to the story like glue, heck make it more truth than fiction if possible.
Using digital privacy practices is useful, but the parents in this case could still see if their kid is using a VPN or Tor, they just wouldn’t know what was being done on those protocols.
Truthfully if the child was going to rebel in any way that actually threaten a nation state, I wouldn’t be able to conceive of a way the parents wouldn’t be able to figure it out very quickly unless the child were more tech savvy and socio-politically savvy than not just their own parents but the intelligence agencies themselves as well.
Sounds like a cool piece of fiction, just not easy to make believable, at least imho.
Not really rebel, more like, say, the kid is LGBT, or maybe is forbidden to talk to someone because they are of a different race or social class, or its an authoritarian regime and they’re trying to find out what is really going on outside their country’s borders.
I don’t think that would be an entire story, more like a subplot of a bigger story… like maybe flashback scenes of a character’s “origin story”, of how they found out their parents are supporters of an oppressive totalitarian regime, and they’re like trying to flee, or something…
Yeah, that sounds like narratively speaking it’d be easier to pull off than becoming a threat to a nation-state. Escape is far more believable and feasible. Still difficult though, as it depends on your world building in regards to the nature of the authoritarian regime. Specifically, are levels of oppression within this fictional regime to the point where even the use of digital anonymity tools is severely scrutinized/punished? Or can the child character claim a legitimate reason to use said tools?
As I said in my previous response, it’s unrealistic that the parents wouldn’t be able to see that their kid was using Tor/VPN to access…something. Can you conceive of some excuse said kid would use should their parents confront the child about said use? Would they outright confront the kid or would they use other tactics to discern what was going on?
Ultimately you either have to make this very believable by utilizing extensive research into the technologies and sociopolitical dynamics involved in the plot, or you have to expand the world into sci-fi so that you can expand the amount of suspension of disbelief you are then able to ask of your audience. Or some mixture of the two I guess.
As a fan of Mr. Robot, I’m more keen on going as realistic as possible (and even Mr. Robot had moments of large amounts of suspension of disbelief), but ultimately it’s up to you which route you’d like to take.
Just not tell them things? They’ve undoubtedly got other things to worry about, and I doubt their superiors would be impressed with them bringing the Awesome Might of The Gubermint down upon their offspring.
Hypothetically, if they are truly professional and in operations rather than being analysts, etc., they would leave work at work but basically be too exhausted to truly helicopter-parent at home. I’m projecting a bit though, because once you become a parent you are exhausted beyond belief (substitute “I” for all those “you”s, heh)
Depends on the generation of the parent too, I think (have they kept up with modern surveillance technologies?). If you haven’t watched the TV show “The Americans” it could be interesting. Set in the 80s but there’s two kid/teen children of agents in it, so secrets kind of start going both ways
Do you assume secret services are constantly spying on their kids?
Idk, I was just wondering like… what if my parents had worked in the NSA, like they could probably pull up my search history.
Cuz they like to cross boundaries like that.
In a functioning society accessing private information on someone else would be subject to a proper review system with audits to prevent anyone from accessing information they don’t have a very good (legal) reason to have.
So yeah it’d probably be possible in the USA, but in other places they definitely couldn’t just pull up your search history.
I can’t remember if it was local or national news, but I believe last month or so, a police officer was charged with using work resources to creep on his ex.
So, it’s certainly possible, but they could get in a lot of trouble if word got out.
Well, parents can already do that. I think the basic solution is still a VPN. Can’t read encripted traffic. Tor would be tempting to say, but a lot of nodes are owned by the government still would be better than nothing. Other than that, use strong passwords, set the browsers to delete cookies on close, use a password manager.
You don’t get access to anything you’re not working with and if you do have access and they found out you used it to spy on your kids then you’re probably getting fired.
