A paper-only journal would defend against the state, but not against people you live with. A digital journal can be encrypted, but an intelligence agency could potentially gain access

A digital journal doesn’t need to be any more government-accessible than a paper journal.

Depending on your threat model, this could require special hardware, special software, or both. In order of ease of setup, I would suggest:

• Keep all your data on your own physical media. No cloud services, period.

• Keep it encrypted.

• Disable network connectivity at every level that you possibly can, such as:

  • OS level: disable wi-fi, disable blutooth, and disable networking entirely.

  • Firmware/BIOS level: If you BIOS has options to disable networking components (especially wireless ones), do that.

  • Hardware level: If your laptop has a switch to disable wi-fi, use it. If ethernet, unplug the cable. Etc.

  • Physical level: Remove any removable wireless cards or antennas.

  • Wallet level: buy a computer than never had wi-fi or bluetooth in the first place. This could mean a retro computer, or could mean using a micro-pc like some models of Raspberry Pi.

Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.