Am I too paranoid?

I was going to write a page about an article from Phrack, an old-school hacking e-zine. It wasn't about hacking, but was about how to make yourself happy by “hacking the idea of happiness”, using various studies to figure out some interesting unintuitive solutions. It had some cool points, and I had things to talk about, but I didn't post it. I didn't because I was scared that if someone traced me back to reading Phrack it could potentially cost me jobs in the future. If I decide at one point to work in government, or do anything in the cybersecurity industry, it could be a bad mark on my permanent record. In my mind, if when I'm in college I write about reading an article that is associated with a hacker e-zine, it's almost the same as having a felony in practice on my resume.

I'm not a hacker. I haven't done anything. I just read stuff on line that seems interesting, but now I'm scared to associate myself with even visiting a website. These are websites that aren't illegal, and I'm posting from an anonymized blog. I should be pretty secure, and even then it shouldn't even matter if I'm secure because I'm not doing anything bad. However, I was scared of literally writing an anonymous blog entry online about something that is barely arguably controversial.

This got me to thinking, am I too paranoid?

That's what this blog is about. Realistically, somebody who googles the name “REDACTED” would not find this blog. However, a more in-depth background screen might. Then the question comes up: If this blog DID show up in a background check, would it matter?

One of my professors had worked on a program before she worked at Stevens to find “at-risk” employees. This was intended to find “outliers” who might be the Edward Snowden of their respective companies. However, finding outliers is hard, so it ended up resulting in saying an employee who visited the wikileaks website once is a high risk indiviidual.

If the background check uses something like that, then this blog would be bad to find.

The bright side is maybe I don't want to work for a company that has a system like that in place (not because it doesn't make sense, but because it isn't accurate). When I was 14 I did a few dumb things online so I couldn't “become some corrupt politician” in the future. That was kind of dumb but the bright side is this blog entry could be the same kind of thing.