What does the Fox say?
Welcome to my little corner of the internets!
![Future Fox with VR googles and a tail made from fibre optic strands, lit with a cyan, almost teal, light.](/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/_f8445719-0b53-45c0-a38a-2cea26d2b1e4.webp)
I'm Fox Silver, aspiring citizen journalist, netizen of the world, physically based in the penal colony known as Australia, specifically, the capital city of Canberra, ACT. Don't really know what I did wrong to get stuck here, but eh, it is what it is I guess. Lived in the Canberra region all my life, not a blow in.
I am a lot of things, a cypherpunk (I love encryption), a software engineer, a sysadmin, a business analyst, and a cyber/IT security officer. I have been playing with cryptocurrency since around 2013, love privacy coins, specifically Monero (XMR).
I love animals, in fact, I have a preference to them over humans. I'm also a privacy advocate, especially in the Orwellian sense. I believe if we throw our privacy rights away and let the government tell us that we have have no privacy, we're as good as under oppression by that point.
![A German Shepherd Dog with his squeaky toy.](https://foxtrot.blog/content/images/2024/01/image-19.png)
I'm starting this blog because the Australian Government has some rogue employees who are breaking the law, and they seem to be doing so with impunity.
I started calling them out on their shenanigans over on medium.com, but I appear to have hurt their feelings or something, they sent ACT Policing to my house to try and scare me into taking down my posts, when that didn't work for them, it appears that they have now started making reports to medium.com, asking them to take down my posts.
![Notice from medium.com that some posts have been unpublished.](https://foxtrot.blog/content/images/2024/01/image-20.png)
If someone does something that I believe is unethical/immoral or illegal, I will speak up about it. The government will not silence me simply because it is embarrassing for it, or it hurts the feelings of some of its employees. If the government wants to make laws and expect that I follow its laws, then I expect that the government will also follow the laws that it sets, it is as simple as this!
I have noticed a trend of late, among government employees, they seem to be forgetting that they work for us, the people. They are literally called public servants, that is, they are servants to the public.
If you stuff up in the workplace, your boss will most likely reprimand you. We, the people, can be critical of our servants/employees if they do wrong by us. If they want to take me to court and complain that I am pointing out they are doing the wrong thing, well I am more than happy to oblige them. I am not required to remain silent on their say so, or withhold certain information because they would prefer it.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell
I don't write lies/untruths, I go to great lengths to substantiate what I am saying by producing evidence in my articles, or at least, ensuring I have, in my possession, facts that support what I am saying should I be pulled up on it in court. If I only suspect that something is occurring, and I cannot prove it, then I point out that it is an allegation not a fact, with the hope that someone can investigate and get to the bottom of it, although it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that there are no checks and balances within our government, it can simply do whatever it likes, and there is nothing to hold it accountable. Australian Government employees are free to make their own version of the law, apply it, and then remain free from any punishment in doing so. In most cases, the government sweeps the conduct under the rug and then tries to paint the plaintiff (in this case me) as the villain, because I dare speak out about what is occurring.
As a result of medium.com taking down my articles, I decided to build my own censorship resistant blog server utilising the free/open source ghost.org platform. This is running in a docker container on my own compute assets in the sky, with all HTTP routed through Cloudflare.com, authenticated TLS pulls, WAF rules on the admin area, all the security bells and whistles that the free plan of Cloudflare has to offer. I very much look forward to the government trying to have my blog posts taken down now.
I created a custom 'dark mode' theme for ghost, and coded in a few features such as pinning posts in front of all other posts etc. I intend to expand the feature set of this theme as my requirements grow. If you want to use it, you can, it's open source and available here.
Also I feel like I should say this, I am not anti-government, and I'm not anti-police. Society requires governance and law enforcement. I am against government employees and/or police doing the wrong thing, abusing their positions provided to them, working for themselves and not us. These are the people that I will write about. If you are a government employee just doing your job, and you are following the law and acting just, then I would have no reason to feature you on my blog. The Statutory Oversight team at Comcare is in complete meltdown mode over my blog, because they know they are breaking the law and I am calling them out on it. They have no intention to improve their behaviour, and as a result, their own guilty conscience seems to make them (strangely) think I am going to harm them. I have never threatened to harm a Comcare employee, not a single time ever, so it can only be their guilty conscience that is filling them with fear.
If you would like to get in contact with me, check out the contact page.