Cuz this is some real honeypot-lookin stuff right here and makes me question if they're deeply unserious about cybersecurity and protecting their members.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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PSL protects it's members through numbers, not anonymity. As a PSL member you're expected to be willing to put your name on your politics and be public about party affiliation.
I believe the disagreement goes all the way back to the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - the Mensheviks wanted to allow members to the Communist Party to remain anonymous, such as a professor who might lose his position if he "came out" as a Communist. The Bolsheviks said: too bad, we all make sacrifices.
The PSL only makes two exceptions, as far as I'm aware: immigrants who are at risk of deportation may disguise their identity. And union leadership (and similar positions) are allowed to remain anonymous and this isn't too hard since those sorts of PSL members aren't really doing so much of the day-to-day work of organizing protests and other events.
I think this is a good system. It filters out people who are likely to get spooked on the job anyways. I think it's a matter of practicality. You have to give your home address to the council to speak at City and County Council meetings. You have to give your home address to run for public office (if you ever run into a petitioner for ballot access, they'll have a paper under the signature sheets that shows the home addresses of the candidates, and the legal names of their electors, and you have a right to see it if you ask). If you're registered to vote (and if you're in PSL, you're going to register to vote, and vote for the Party's candidates), literally anyone can Google your name and find your home address, because those are public records.
Minute point here in relation to visibility of communist party membership. I won't assume to be an expert on how pizzle sets their own standards but communist parties do operate on a certain level of secrecy in the form of organizing cells that are generally speaking kept separated from each other on larger geographic scales in order to ensure no single member of a local region has a full picture of the whole party's membership. A shop cell may know of other nearby shops cells in a city with members for ease of coordination but only the city organizer would have a full picture of what's up in the city. That city organizer as well may know some details of other local cities but won't have the full picture a state organizer has, and so on to district, region, and all the way to the standing committee who act as the true public face of the party.
You may know a handful of local communist party members and the general secretary and national chair of their party, but you won't know or shouldn't know any details between the two. The central committee that is the true brains of the party between congresses remain nameless and faceless. Strands of cells could be compromised but it won't compromise the whole party right away. Enemy intelligence has to at least invest more time and effort in cracking information to make a dent in the party.