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…
So I’m not an agent but i work in IT.
If i were inclined I would snoop traffic going over the home network probably with a packet capture with the ability to decrypt ssl traffic. So I would have tools installed on your computer/device to make that easy. This would amount for computers/ tablets and other devices that don’t have LTE/cellular connections.
To make sure you didn’t use the tor and other end to end encryption I would block those protocols on the network.
To make sure you were not going through other networks/hotspots I would monitor and get alerted to any new ssid’s at the house then blast the frequency that ssid is broadcasting on to make it unusable.
To make sure your phone was always monitored I would put parental controls and backdoor remote access and logging.
That covers a decent amount of situations I can think of off the top of my head.
Want to circumvent this? Use internet at the friends house on a secret device that your parents will never find out about so keep it away from your house. Use online personas, don’t use your real anything online.
Thank you for this insight, I’m SOOO glad that my parents are tech-illiterate. Can you imagine how fucked if mom worked in actual IT? Oh fuck, all the porn sites¹… 😭 (very conservative household, “porn = bad”, and “if you touch your [penis] too much, you’ll lose the ability to have children”, wtf mom? For context: my family is from China and porn is literally illegal there)
¹I don’t really watch anymore… depression resulting from decades of household infighting
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even in the US it would be punishable. Morality aside, using a billion dollar NSA malware on a person carries a real risk of getting the malware caught. The NSA might be willing to wear that risk for a high value person, but not for some employees kid.
Purely on a misuse of a valuable asset it would be punishable.
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.
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.
