As an older person, I would take a somewhat different path for myself, if only because I know for a fact that the first-level people that are doing the spying are anything but your regime’s very best.

What you want is something that you can have in the open, looks worthless, shitty even; something that invites mockery as opposed to suspicion. Something in your own language and handwriting that the bottom-feeding impatient, intellectually challenged thugs who will actually be doing the searching open up, laugh incredulously, mock you for writing while you stand there silent, embarrassed and ashamed – and then toss aside as worthless.

You’re right that pen and paper are the way to go, IMO, and if English were your native tongue I’d simply recommend that you learn cursive and then enshittify it: in the US, for example, most older people read and still write in cursive, but very few under the age of 40 or so, and even then they don’t see enough of it to be able to read shitty cursive. It’s the same for a number of languages: handwriting will always invite slop, and manual slop will never truly be machine readable. It’s often not even human readable except to its creator, and not always then. So you’d want to look at your own language and its handwriting traditions.

Me, I’d go back to writing in English cursive, but now with a system of added hooks and slight errors that, on the surface, just make me look more sloppy and stupid (not hard, lol) but which mean something to me, and me only. Cursive is incredibly easy to fuck up in such a way that it is unintelligible to everyone but you; doctors do it all the time, and most people after a decade or two of signing their own name in it. You can easily fuck up your own in the same exact way, in whatever archaic but lingering handwriting system your native language uses, and that’s the writing part done.

Then, you’ll also want a list of acronyms and code words that mean something to you only – and for good measure, learn to write absolutely horrifying poetry about sexual partners you will never have. Make all your journals look like the condensation of self-pitying incel tears running down the pages. Put your genuine thoughts between lines of rancid, revolting “oh no one will ever love me the grocer looked at me wrong I feel so misunderstood” horseshit, but remember that you can use theme as a keyword index: for example, whenever you mention “grocer” or another frequent character in your anguished tales, you know the next line contains references to a rally; “pretty girl” is a specific contact, whatever.

Get into cheap fountain pens, and now paper and pen journaling is a legitimate hobby for you. And paper journals are easy to destroy: should you ever want to tear a page out and burn it in the kitchen sink, all you need is a lighter. You could even throw in some shit about how you were so angry (or ashamed, or depressed, or whatever) about what you’d written that you could never bear to see it again so you ripped it up and threw it away, oh woe is you. On every page, badly draw a lot of squiggles and useless illustrations and marginalia to make it visually confusing and difficult to follow. Cross out irrelevant words and underline other irrelevant words. Use different colors. Spill drinks on it every so often. Smear ink now and then.

Make it look like a ten-year old got hold of a fountain pen and some meth.

And in the middle of that shit, hide the information you want to keep, right there in the open.

There’s literally no downside to paper these days. I’m guessing that your regime expects you to write everything online, keep everything online, just for ease. But your paper journals can be kept in plain sight, as well as your cheap pens and ink and fountain pen hobby supplies. (The uglier the better, but don’t go overboard: if you’re neat and clean, then your physical journals should be as well.)

But should you ever come under suspicion, and the cops toss your home, they’re going to pick up those journals and read it and laugh at you and your truly shitty poetry, probably openly and in your face, before flinging it down and looking for your REAL digital cache of subversive info.

I have great respect for unbreakable codes, such as the Navajo language referred to elsewhere in this thread, but in real life, an unknown language will attract attention and cause low-level enforcers to seize that book and pass it up to real translators and code breakers.

Instead, if you openly make it trash to the thugs who will be doing the searching, creating journals that they just laugh at, mocking you and what they think is your sorry self-pitying life, it will never get that far. That’s where I’d put my own efforts, anyway.

I am sorry you have to take these precautions, and wish you well in your endeavors. May you be a thorn up the ass of your regime, lol. Good luck to you.