When I first heard the advice to ditch your phone when you go a protest, I thought maybe that's a little extreme. But it's a real threat. We already knew post Snowden there is an extensive big brother apparatus. We saw post 911 that all rights can be taken away in the name of counter-terrorism. Now with a government that's operating outside the law and labeling peaceful protesters as terrorists, I don't think we can rely on telcos to protect our identity. The mass surveillance will fingerprint a device, and the telco will know your name so it's not at all an extreme precaution to ditch your phone.
Basically: if it has a modem in it, it can be used against you in some way. Phones, routers, cars, public signs, cameras.
It's been so turbulent lately, that it's hard to register events that would have blown our minds if so many things didn't also happen around the same time. Remember when Israel made a bunch of pagers explode indiscriminately across Lebanon and Syria? So many things going on, one worse than the other, that it is hard to stop and really consider the implication of these single events fully.
Yes, seemingly so. I guess we'd have to wait for full investigations to conclude before saying for sure, but sure looks like it.
> “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities."
> “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.
I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon? That's not a tool a normal consumer uses, it's only used by people to evade phone surveillance. I think it sounds like a high probability that anyone receiving one of these pages in Lebanon is part of Hezbollah.
But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.
Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it? Maybe these "wartime covert operations" need to read up on Human Rights and figure out a way to work within it?
Its important to not be hyperbolic in these times.
The two technologies ICE uses rely on permission for apps tonuse geolocation data for advertising purposes. Same reason you start seeing ads for local things when you travel.
Technically they can subpoena cell records to see which towers your phone connects to, but this is not viable for multiple people.
For privacy, if you care, having a rooted degoogled phone with no sim card is sufficient enough. You can check its signature by using your laptop as a IGW and capturing traffic to see if any apps or services ping anything.
If you want off grid comms, meshtastic devices are very nice, me and my wife use LilyGo Tdeck pluses for comms and finding each other at festivals. The portable modems are also nice because you can use them for GPS for your phone vs built in location services.
It's most certainly not. Phones connect to a cell tower even without a SIM to make emergency calls. The phone can still be tracked and it's not a difficult leap from there to identify the owner of the phone.
That may be true for this specific use case, but the protection on bigger services could be easily rolled back. E.g., law enforcement was able to ask Google for "tell me everyone who was in this specific area during this time" [0] and is still able to ask "give me everyone who searched for a specific term" [1].
Nevertheless, it's eerie that we are even having this discussion today. I didn't say "scary" because I'm far away from these events, but definitely uncomfortable - I know, the "events" may approach sooner or later my location too...
There’s millions of people who have been dealing with this daily for the last few decades. The sim swap networks and VPN/TOR users across the world live like this.
When I was in Iraq it was basically expected that all of your communications are totally pwnd, if you live in China you’re totally pwnd.
Cell trackers like described in the article have been in use for the last 15 years by police and law-enforcement inside the US.
You typed out how awful the situation is, and how you cannot trust anything, and then ask why it's eerie? I feel like you answered your own question before you even asked it.
Hate to break it to you, but people just simply dont care as much as you think they do. We have the right to own firearms for the purposes of protecting us against tyrany, but thats pointless when we cant even realize tyrany right outside our door.
This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse.
Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.
Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.
Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.
While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.
A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.
As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.
The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.
The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.
Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.
> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?
Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.
great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s
not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.
however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.
I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)
There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.
Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.
- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area
Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.
Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.
>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.
As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
If the threat is observation and tracking, you really want to turn off all radios, right? Cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC. Otherwise you are hoping some anonymization/obfuscation is preventing your signal from being correlated to those captured at other locations and times.
If the threat is self-incrimination after the fact, you also don't want to carry any device that is determining and persisting its own location info. Don't track your protest as a fitness activity on your GPS sports watch...
Typically that history is kept and it is kept for up to 20 years depending on which telco you look at. Those and the CDRs are gold for data mining and there are companies that specialize in doing just that.
It's insane if you think about it but the phone company knows as much or more about you than your mother or your spouse.
I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.
I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.
Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)
People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.
[edit]
Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.
yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?
edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.
if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.
security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.
there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
> Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well.
> bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over bluetooth mesh networks. no internet required, no servers, no phone numbers.
All it took was a white mother (and US citizen) getting shot in broad daylight. As much as I hate to admit it, a large enough segment of the population needed something blatant like this to care.
There's such a long list of things one could say that about.
In this instance the "representation matters" thought process seems to bear out.
Folks talk about aspiring to role models who look like them. People also react strongly when this sort of thing happens to someone who looks like them.
The problem is that you can slice representation every which way. It could be "I only identify with 6'3" males who live in Idaho and like trains", or it could be "I identify with humans".
The fact that US culture chooses to identify with people of the same colour is telling, though I don't know, maybe that's a human thing and my country is too homogeneous for me to think otherwise.
It's not. I was a "90 day fiance" immigrant (the concept, not the show).
We had a sincere relationship, but we both agreed that our marriage, while genuine, was earlier than it would have otherwise been other than logistics of an trans-Pacific romance.
We stayed together 5 years, then separated/divorced, amicably. In the midst of all that I missed a USCIS filing date.
I was out of status briefly, but also in a situation where I was ostensibly entitled to stay (USCIS would have to demonstrate a belief that the marriage was under false pretences), so I hired an immigration attorney to straighten things out (which basically involved filing paperwork that I needed to file, and a letter from her and one from me explaining why I missed it.
She did make the comment to me during all that though that I had no cause for concern above and beyond that, quote:
"I hate that I can say it, but the reality is you're both 'the right color' and a high-earning male. USCIS has you so far down the list of their priorities for reconciliation you could stay here decades before them calling you to account".
Most K1 applications are approved, most are female, most are not white.
I doubt your case would have been any different had you not been a "'the right color' and a high-earning male".
She wasn't referring to K1 visas specifically, she was referring to USCIS and how they'd prioritize dealing with enforcement actions against people in non-compliance with their visa obligations.
And I'd suspect as an immigration attorney, she likely had first-hand experience of same.
Would be unlikely that the USCIS radically changed their approach when dealing with paperwork messups for populations if these different countries while apparently approving applications at basically the same exact rate.
You're not understanding. This has nothing to do with the K1 visa. Or approval rates. I came from a low risk country.
This is about adjustments of status, for any visa, and people who fall out of compliance and are in a period of being "unauthorized" to be/stay/work in the country.
And sorry, given ICE's mandates, ruled temporarily okay by SCOTUS, that color of skin, accent, name are effectively "probable cause" for detention, I'd say her perspective is absolutely aligned with current enforcement priorities.
I think you are not understanding me. My contention is adjustments of status snafus isn't going to be much different than K1 approval rates in terms of how people are treated. It seems by the numbers, people are treated the same as it relates K1 whether they come from a "right skin color" country or not. Why is that going to be wildly different when it comes to minor issues?
I wonder what conclusion the FBI's investigation will come to because it sure doesn't look good for ICE to me. Best case, those two agents get sentenced to life for murder but the damage is done and a life taken. If the officer fired two shots and she died at the scene then it seems reasonable to me the bullets didn't go through the windshield and, instead, went through her rolled down window while she was turning away from the officer. If that's the case then I'm predicting riots everywhere over the next couple weeks.
// i know pretty much zero details of what happened and it will be impossible to get any actual facts that are not politicized for weeks
Given that this administration appointed the head of the FBI due to his loyalty to Trump, the most likely reason they took over the investigation is to shield ICE from any accountability.
The US FBI now seems to act much as the National Enquirer does, as a "catch and kill" tool.
In the case of the Enquirer, this was through buying exclusive rights to inconvenient stories and refusing to publish them. In the case of the FBI, it's by claiming exclusive jurisdiction over incidents and quashing or impeding independent investigation.
Trump watched the video in front of a bunch of reporters and said "meh". Nothing will change for 3.5 years minimum. 40% of the country thinks he's doing great, and a greater percentage of those 40% vote vs the people who vote from the other group.
The only way elections will change anything is if the Senate flips to 2/3 control by the Dems. I doubt enough GOP will vote to convict to reach 2/3. So even if a 51% House impeaches, it will go no further. We've already seen this scenario. Twice.
Are they now? If so, where is the carefully nuance bio of Good? Why do I get choreographed and weirdly aligned responses from various online profiles ( my 'observer' note )? The answer is obvious: there are points to be made by strategically aligning her verious 'more than one thing' portions of persona to match a narrative, which, but I repeat myself, is very, very tiring.
I don't know, I don't think it's normally assumed that when someone dies (or more to the point is murdered) in a very public way we all immediately deserve to know every thing about them.
I don't know what you're talking about really. What I mean to say is the rest of this comment is incoherent to me.
BS. And I do not say this lightly. When it fits a given narrative, media has no issue or qualms in publishing anything and everything related to a given person they find online. It is only when they selectively release it over days that you just know how well the person does not fit the script, as it were.
She can be both, she will become lots of things over time depending on agenda. Her background was decidedly under-reported, for a few justifications, including preventing a preferred audience from sympathizing with the victim.
Not sure what your point is other than volume of information available increases over time.
You do have a point. My point is that we are constantly a part of informational warfare and it is getting old. I would love nothing more than people to look at it all with a cold eye and say something akin to: oh, I recognize this pattern. Instead, I attempts of various power centers to frame it in a way beneficial to them. Some of us are rather tired of this.
its not some pattern of abuse by shady actors manipulating opinions youre noticing, its voting algorithm and attention economy itself.
new ideas are constantly being published, and popular ones gain momentum by being shown to more people. as the idea gets saturated, the popularity gets overshadowed by the time based downranking.
if the idea is still popular though, in this case that ice murdered some woman as part of their shock and awe campaign, variations are going to show up such as "legal observer" and "mother of a three year old"
But why is your own framing exempt from the analysis? The idea that you should see a murder and "look at it all with a cold eye", to try and dispassionately understand whether it might have been justified, is a non-obvious idea that's quite advantageous to power centers that expect to be shooting people frequently.
Again, this concept of "newly assigned martyr" you have is not something that fell from heaven fully formed. It was shaped and given to you by what you call "power centers" - ones which are currently running the United States government! - because they think this framing is beneficial to them. I'm going to stop the conversation here before I start coming up with unwise insults, because it's just infuriating that you can't turn this critical eye on yourself and the informational warfare you're subject to.
What's infuriating is that you are acting as an agent of the government, defending their murder of a random citizen, but perceive yourself and frame yourself as a dispassionate observer who's interested in the media dynamics of how different descriptors get attached to people. I don't know if you started off like this, or if you're so deep in DHS propaganda that you can't find your way out, and right now I don't care to find out.
The difference between us that I know exactly what ( and even why ) I advocate for: keeping the system stable.
<< random citizen
She was a not some random citizen; I would have been addressing it differently if that was the case. Now, if you have a stomach for it, we can go over what kind of citizen she was.
I fundamentally disagree that ICE deserves that presumption. They have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be unreasonable people who want to hurt others. I'm sure there's a story they'll tell about why it was totally legal to shoot her, but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove that there was she was doing something so terrible they had no choice.
Hm, as with taxes, do we get to choose which federal enforcement agency we are willing to submit to? Not going to lie man, it is a fascinating frame of mind to me and I am absolutely willing to talk to you about it if you wanna go that route.
<< but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove
This is not exactly how any of it works, at all. I am not being difficult man, but I don't get to, say, block FBI caravan, because I don't think they deserve 'that' presumption ( quotation, because I am not certain what it refers to ).
I similarly don't get to tell DEA, ATF, and multiple other agencies to just fuck off, especially if I encounter them in the wild.. doubly so, if I was attempting to track them that day..
The real question then becomes:
Why do you think you get to pick and choose, who can enforce the laws of the land upon you?
More importantly, whose authority would you accept?
They just shot another couple in Portland. I get to tell them, and you, to fuck off as much as I'd like. I encourage you to get on board with the right side of this issue while you have the chance.
Good luck out there friend. I am not sure what you meant to say, but it may be a good idea to stop here for both of us. I see no reason to continue this further.
I think you know precisely what I meant to say. There will come a time when the stain of having supported these murderers will be inescapable. At best you'll live in fear that your life will be ruined forever if anyone ever makes a viral post with strategic quotes from your 2026 commentary. You still have a chance to escape that fate if you want to.
Best of luck in your endeavors. As noted above, it would be wise for you to stop now before you say something very, very unnecessary. I urge you to reconsider this path.
If you are actually issuing a threat and feel confident nonetheless, feel free to post it in plain English for everyone to see.
That said, in spirit of kumbaya hand holding, I would like to offer you a chance to look at the reality around you.
If you look at the released cam video, the only thing that is clear that Renee was not an innocent bystander.
I urge you to pull yourself out of the radicalization spiral you're in. This video shows an innocent victim whose murderer will be prosecuted and convicted. He calls the victim a "fucking bitch" at the end, I'm genuinely baffled what twists of logic you're using to not see this.
I would emphasize since you mentioned it that I don’t intend any sort of threat. Despite the murderers’ best efforts, we do still live in a free country with free speech. Supporting murder is a terrible thing to do, and I will never in this lifetime hold the hand of someone who does, but it isn’t a crime and doesn’t deserve anything other than deep and enduring shame.
So this is getting to be pretty real and pretty scary. How many of you have actually considered just not using your mobile phone any longer? Turning it off, only powering it on when you need it, and not bringing it when you leave your home?
Within a lot of our lifetimes, this was the norm. Are these devices so useful that put up with carrying a tracking / listening device on us at all time?
FYI, powering off your iPhone does not prevent it from being tracked. It continues to broadcast a low-power Bluetooth signal other Apple devices will relay to iCloud.
"Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even when it's offline, in power reserve mode, and after power off"
Settings > Apple Account > Find My > Find My iPhone
I really dream of doing it. I gave it a soft-run a few years back when mine was stolen and it was really hard. Not just creature comforts and habits like GPS etc but even things like so much of the modern world assumes you have a phone on you. Things like parking, event tickets, restaurant QR code menus (thankfully this one seems to be actually getting better though.)
My only comment is being able to call emergency services wherever you are is very useful. Pre-cell phone times was just hoping there was a landline somewhere. And you weren't able to get instructions from the operator and be with a fallen person at the same time.
I do not of know a single person in my extended family/professional network/social circle who has had location tracking or app eavesdropping directly impact their life. The only impact I’ve seen is via advertising exposure.
(For me) The convenience of Google Maps for navigation, and messaging for communication, is too beneficial. The _impact_ of these technologies as surveillance tools _in my life_ is hypothetical.
> I do not of know a single person in my extended family/professional network/social circle who has had location tracking or app eavesdropping directly impact their life.
yet. that's always the problem with such a strong declarative. things are not finished to be so finite
>The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.
Sounds like if you're denying location permissions to shady apps (why would you allow in the first place?), you're probably fine.
If you install 100 apps on your phone, and 50% are participating in the kind of ad network that this data is sourced form, and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out. The math is on the trackers' side, not the users'.
Why do you need 100 apps? Moreover why do you need 100 apps that have location permissions? Both android and ios makes it easy to tell which apps have location permissions. The list should be a very small list, and limited to "while using app".
>and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out.
I'm not claiming that nobody is getting picked up by data brokers. The fact that they're in business implies that there's enough people careless enough to make it a viable business. But what I am claiming that such tracking isn't too hard to avoid. You can see some people in this thread who think otherwise, thinking that they need to go of the grid or switch to burner phones, when they all need to do is spend 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
You don't. But a high percentage of the population will install apps for the sake they've been offered to install it.
I use eBay, I get bombarded by eBay telling me to install their app for 10% off. I use Gmail for work, if I don't use their app, I have the search engine to tell me to use their app.
Facebook is an app, WhatsApp is an app too. Bejeweled Deluxe is an another app and $Reality_TV_show wants you to install their app. Your local supermarket has an app to give you % off your shopping list and probably not to far off in the future oxygen will be an app.
Some venue for a ticket for that odd one-off gig requires an app and every single restaurant order at the table has different app. You're then forced to install the app to use your Dishwasher, Fridge, TV, WiFi Router. I bought a new heater as my old one broke this winter and if I desire to configure WiFi for it, you guessed it I have to install an app.
And that's how you you end up with 100 of apps that are never really used, leaking information, spying on you and never deleted because people don't. I bought Christmas presents and I was unable to track delivery information without installing an app, I had forgotten about that until now. Thanks for reminding me you, can watch me delete it. That again is how you end up with apps.
We use discord at work and when I walk past co-workers screens they are within multiple of dead discord servers. They never leave and it's not just discord I've seen people idling in dead channels on IRC. I just question why and walk away as if the server is dead, I leave.
Hanging on to things that are never needed again is what we are best at it seems. FOMO?
> 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
Most users are not you and I, they don't know about permissions. They just want to accomplish what they set out to do. And if you do remove that permission; that app refuses to co-operate frustrating the user, nagging them until they do re-enable that permission.
It's now rather than how it used to be. Smart humans using a dumb phones, the now is dumb humans being used by smart phones.
* With sympathy to those who are actually mute/non-verbal, that must suck.
You should install the absolute minimum amount of apps possible and should prefer a website whenever you can. And, of the apps you do install, install them from trusted open source repositories, and allow them the absolute minimum permissions to do whatever you need them to do. They're tools for you.
The book Means of Control by Byron Tau goes deep into this realm. I thought I knew all the methods and sources and this book opened my eyes to even more goings on.
Just leave your phone at home and bring a plain old small digital camera, agree ahead of time with friends on when and where to meet up. It's interesting to me and i guess showing my age that this isn't self evident to everyone everywhere.
I suspect the old school stuff is generally less monitored. I think some of the cheap Baofeng radios support AES256 encryption. I think that's technically only legal with a business license from the FCC or some such, but I'd be a lot less worried about an FCC fine than having my phone tracked. There's probably some quick keypresses to clear the encryption config so it looks like it was on plaintext.
Do not use devices that can be trivially tracked through the cell network, or that can be surveilled by big tech. This means a device bought anonymously, a free/libre OS like Graphene, no Google/Facebook/Apple spyware apps, and an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto. This should be done by everyone to avoid the possibility of mass surveillance, not only people who have something to hide from a three-letter agency. If you really have something to hide, then the cellular network shouldn't be used at all.
>Do not use devices that can be trivially tracked through the cell network, or that can be surveilled by big tech. This means a device bought anonymously, a free/libre OS like Graphene
GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.
>and an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto. This should be done by everyone to avoid the possibility of mass surveillance, not only people who have something to hide from a three-letter agency.
No, it's much harder than just "an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto". You need to practice proper opsec. There's no point getting an anonymous sim when you then turn around and then use it as a 2fa number for your bank, or carry it around with you every day.
> GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.
You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy." The point of a FOSS system is that the user fully controls it, and can install apps privately from any source.
>You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy."
If you're talking about not being able to install third party apps, aurora store doesn't require an account and works fine on stock android. Most other basic functionality works fine too, eg. camera, calls, browsing, maps.
> If you're talking about not being able to install third party apps, aurora store doesn't require an account and works fine on stock android. Most other basic functionality works fine too, eg. camera, calls, browsing, maps.
The Play Store is not the only issue with stock Android devices. Google dependencies run with high privileges and the device is constantly communicating with Google servers for one reason or another. You do not own a Google device for all intents an purposes. The main contribution of Graphene here is that it strips out the proprietary blobs and optionally provides an environment to run Google's libraries with unprivileged access.
The point about de-Google'd Android vs your insistence on GrapheneOS is that by the time you are using Google's libraries, like Maps, Play Services, or their notification service (Firebase, IIRC), you've already lost. GrapheneOS is not dramatically better than de-Google'd Android if you're still sending all your notifications through Google, as well as your location and things like contacts
The point is you have to leave Google with both for it to do much good
> insistence on GrapheneOS is that by the time you are using Google's libraries, like Maps, Play Services, or their notification service (Firebase, IIRC), you've already lost.
Graphene offers the option of sandboxing Google apps should you want them. The usual setup is a second user profile with all the Google stuff in it. My main profile only contain FOSS apps and nothing passes through Google's servers. I use the Google profile for the maps with a dedicated account maybe once a month when driving somewhere unfamiliar.
i think these already have you screwed. that anonymity is going to be superficial at best. you will be recorded making these purchases, and tracked to your identity
Then you're going to take it home for >8 hours per day, and to your job several hours per day, and likely call at least one or two of your important contacts. At which point that's the ball game - the pool of people that live in the immediate vicinity of your building, and work in the immediate vicinity of your job site, and call your partner / parents / kid, is made up of pretty well exclusively you
See my other comment. At least in this particular case the databrokers are getting the data from apps themselves. If you don't grant location permissions to shady weather/transit/delivery apps, you should be safe.
Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky. What apps are "shady"? How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?
I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
>Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky.
I don't think anyone who actually is at risk, or cares about risk, is going to be overconfident about their security because some HN commenter said "you're probably fine".
>What apps are "shady"?
Depends on your paranoia level. I'd say first party apps (eg. apple/google maps/weather) are probably fine. Google has the additional caveat that they record location history and therefore might be subject to geofence warrants. If you think iOS/Android is backdoored then all phones are off limits.
>How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?
They're whatever ad SDKs can get their hands on. If the app has location permissions, it's that. Otherwise it's something like geoip. At the end of the day it's just third party code running in some app's sandbox. If the app can't get it, the SDK can't get it either.
>I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
What other plausible mechanism are there then? wifi/bluetooth scanning requires location permissions since forever ago.
One way to minimize the info they gather is by using a dumb phone. I have a flip phone running some RTOS that doesn't allow any kind of apps and doesn't have GPS, meaning the only trace it leaves is any cell activity
The true answer is: Hold your politicians accountable for this at every level, including at the "boring" local level and on all levels all the way up to the top.
This type of problem needs to be fixed on the society level.
Not use any device that has GSM/LTE, or Bluetooth.
Alternatively, broadcast a hidden SSID WiFi AP via an enabled RPi and use only devices that's have WiFi. Hand them out to people for free to increase the spread.
Attach magnets to the RPi's and go rogue by sticking them to buses, cars and trains et cetera to increase range.
Are there decent wifi communicators on the market? I looked into some Lora projects for this but they never seem to actually ship or get past prorotypes
> Are there decent wifi communicators on the market? I looked into some Lora projects for this but they never seem to actually ship or get past prorotype
Yes, 100%. Meshtastic and Meshcore both do this, but I'd recommend Meshcore. Here in the Seattle area we have a network that fairly reliably delivers messages from Canada through the Seattle metro area all the way down to Portland. Fully encrypted with dual key cryptography. Meshcore uses a different strategy than Meshtastic, which enables Meshcore to work more reliably. To see what's happening in your area for Meshcore see https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map
Is very fun to set up a repeater for under $50 and see a noticeable difference in the coverage area. Is a fun technical project that combines the best of hiking/walking/driving geocaching style, ham radio (but without a license requirement), antenna building, and more. I'm getting acquainted with people in my neighborhood too which is a bonus.
Figuring out what hardware to buy that'll actually work can be a challenge, to get started search amazon for "heltec v3" and make sure you get something that includes a battery, and you'll see 2-packs of radios for $60. There's a web flasher at the above link that'll put the software on the radios for you.
The BSSID is still visible, and is the unique identifier any trackers will be looking for anyway. Also making the SSID hidden just means the AP isn't broadcasting it, any listeners can still see the SSID whenever any client interacts with the AP.
Hidden SSIDs are generally much worse for privacy than non-hidden ones, since all stations (clients in 802.11 terminology) need to constantly go around yelling "hey, is SSID abc available?" while they're not connected to any SSID.
M.I.A.'s clothing brand is looking real good now. There are others but hers was the first I heard about. Seems like the waist bag would be critical for activists.
From the Ohmni website:
"...fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."
>"[...] fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."
But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
Other comments mentioned valid points about tradeoffs of using an offline camera vs. a phone, with pro-phone arguments listing things like "being able to livestream and get the evidence out even if the device is damaged/destroyed" and "messaging/coordinating/comms". The anti-phone/pro-camera side also had good points, saying that those things also make it easier to track/identify you. The choice between those two options is definitely not clear-cut, and it is all about individual tradeoffs and risk assessment.
But if you are rocking something that's essentially a wearable Faraday cage that block all signals (I am just assuming it works exactly as stated, without attempting to judge its efficacy), what's the point of bringing (an essentially fully offline) phone in the first place, as opposed to bringing a camera with zero connectivity?
There's levels, for some, no-phone is the safest only route, for others, this could be a good solution. There's vids on her site showing how it works, it's very nice.
> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.
It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.
A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.
There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.
Well first off, it is very expensive. Vendors that supply to DHS and DOD have to be selective about who they sell their services to as well. Citizen-developed services to track ICE are routinely shut down by Apple and Google.
"can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer" sounds strangely like what was reported to be happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Penlink is in Israel. I think there is a good chance this tech was developed and used in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians and is now being resold to law enforcement here.
I suppose I'm showing my age here, but Stingrays/IMSI-catchers have been around and in use for decades by both federal and local governments, and the problem of mass surveillance is not particularly an ICE problem. In my lifetime, the level of surveillance of the population has increased so dramatically that I'm not sure that younger people actually understand what it was like to live in a world where your every move wasn't monitored, recorded, and archived.
Privacy advocates have been fighting this battle for decades, but they have been utterly defeated because, by and large, people don't and can't be made to care about privacy until they learn the hard way (and when it's too late) why it's so important.
You can still be location-tracked with a dumb phone. Yes, even if the phone has no GPS. Any communication with the network gives away your location to the "right" people.
Pocket Faradays cages (and metallic clothes) exist. In the end if you use as a landline phone substitute it's almost a hardware issue and software would be just testimonial there.
I’d like to personally thank the tech billionaires for inflicting a domestic paramilitary force on the US population under the guise of “enforcing immigration”. Now they have access to the same surveillance tools used by the IDF to track and murder innocent civilians with plausible deniability.
The dirty secret about American politics is that people care about any of that stuff only to the extent that it supports their actual ideological goals. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, state's rights, all of it. They want it for them, and don't care if anybody else has it _at best_, and actively want to take it away from others at worst.
Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after centuries of bloodshed that we are far removed from, and people forget why anybody cared about such abstract principles to begin with.
Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".
It's been building for a long time; it's not recent per se, just accelerated.
2025 showed that you can't just go "ok, it's over now, we'll go back to business as usual" (like I know the limp-wristed Dems will want to do) or it'll repeat after every other election until it's successful. You just cannot have this many people constantly being convinced they live in this alternate reality for much longer without civilization collapse.
But I think it's gone too far and we're witnessing the fall of the empire in real-time. I'm just hoping that fall won't screw up the rest of the world too much, but I'm pretty sure it will.
More to the point, it's the collapse of the carefully balanced entente around things like WMD and war crimes that will be our undoing.
Recent events have brought this into sharp focus.
This is really the glue that holds it all together -- that we and our allies haven't even had to think about these things for our entire lives up until now.
I hate to be hyperbolic, but I fear that fear of these things will soon become a looming presence in our lives. For the rest of our lives. And kids' lives. And grandkids' lives.
No we got to this point because the hope for a better future evaporated. People are thirsty for answers. Any answer to this question will have a big following.
Gambling, influencing, day trading, kick out the immigrants, anything works as long as it can promise to change your life for the better.
Quite the opposite actually. Democrats have been so complacent with the proto-fascists for so long, that republicans will now justify murdering a mother in broad daylight, filmed under 3 angles clearly showing she is fearing for her life. The solution to fascism is not compromise and weakness.
Please know there are people across the aisle that view it differently. When things calm down, talk with them and learn. Nobody wins when we insist the world is only as we alone view it.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. She regularly texts my family things like how my other aunt, who is disabled, should kill herself rather than take medicaid money. She has told her daughter, who has attempted suicide twice, that she'd be better off dead than be bisexual. She texts us things about how every somali person in the US is going to get what is coming to them.
How should I talk with her to learn things?
Frankly, I'm absolutely fucking sick of leaders within the GOP saying that a woman is a domestic terrorist trained in using cars as weapons after an ICE goon murders her. Call me when the republicans send Trump to the gallows. Then I'll consider opening my heart up.
No. Democrats always take the high road and what has that gotten them? A fascist regime and a political movement (MAGA) that floods the zone with bullshit when the gestapo does something bad.
Republicans stormed the capitol, killed police officers, and delayed the election process. What happened to them? Some lackeys got put in jail, and no one at the top faced consequences. Trump then pardoned all of those criminals for their service. Crickets from MAGAts and Republicans.
Laying your weapon down while someone keeps hitting literally just results in you ceasing to exist. Trump and all of his cabinet members are openly vile and called the woman who was shot a domestic terrorist before her body was even cold. Same situation with Charlie Kirk: they were calling the shooter a radical leftist before the body was cold. Meanwhile Dems are asked to disavow every action if it's even somewhat related to them and to "talk and learn"... yeah no that window has passed.
Hold your side accountable for the insane lies, corruption, and awful things they do first then maybe we can talk about reaching across the aisle.
EDIT: stop deluding yourself into thinking you're a "center right" voter too. It's obvious from previous interactions and your post history that you're drinking the MAGA koolaid.
The onus is on you to explain how Obama's terms are relevant to what ICE is doing now. Did Obama:
- post AI videos mocking immigrants?
- open a facility called Alligator Alcatraz?
- say "homegrowns are next" when talking about deportations?
- immediately call victims of ICE violence domestic terrorists?
- deport people to a labor camp (CECOT)?
- send ICE into cities of his political opponents to cause property damage, stoke tensions, detain people, and execute them? (see: Chicago, Minneapolis, etc.)
- allow ICE commanders to throw up Nazi salutes?
There is no decency; cruelty and theatrics are the point. This admin is on a revenge tour and is using ICE as their secret police force. If that's not obvious by now, you should get out of the MAGA bubble and improve your media diet.
The ACLU called Obama a monster, and they call Trump a monster, too.
Obama set the precedent, I agree Trump added childish and cruel rhetoric. ( But the use of ICE is the same with Obama and Trump. )
I do not agree on Nazi actions, etc. That’s exaggeration and it’s not useful.
So do we agree that on the deployment and tactics of ICE that Obama and Trump are roughly equal? If you don’t condemn Obama, is it fair to say you don’t condemn the use of ICE to deport?
> But the use of ICE is the same with Obama and Trump.
> So do we agree that on the deployment and tactics of ICE that Obama and Trump are roughly equal
No, they're not the same as I've demonstrated. I'll ask again: did Obama do those things above? You can keep pretending that "ICE is only there to deport people" but as reality has shown, that's not true. They show up to events to intimidate, they tear gas and shoot protestors, etc. all the while cabinet members cover for their abhorrent behavior because the cruelty is the point.
This conversation is obviously going nowhere so I'll let you keep living in fantasy land and obfuscating with "but Obama!!" like usual. Maybe you'll repent one day.
Look at the points I mentioned and tell me how they're the same. I don't contest that law enforcement does awful things with their power, but this administration emboldens them is the difference.
> I do not agree on Nazi actions, etc. That’s exaggeration and it’s not useful.
What? You disagree with the actions but it's also exaggerated?
> deployment and tactics of ICE that Obama and Trump are roughly equal
Answer this for me: did Obama send ICE agents into cities as retribution? Did he send ICE agents into schools, hospitals, protests, etc.[0]?
If ICE agents are known to abuse detainees, then why would you want them in sensitive areas? By that metric, these administrations are not even close to being the same.
I talked to these people minutes ago, on the thread about the murder. Trumpists are finding ways to rationalize this assassination. Just like they did Jan 6, the bombings of fishing boats near Venezuela, the other exactions ICE committed, Trump being Epstein's closest friend, etc.
Then I listened to the Vice President claiming she was an "unhinged left-wing lunatic", that she had been radicalized and that she was trying to hurt the ICE agent, and thus she deserved to be shot. A complete, abject lie trying to justify this murder, when everyone saw in the videos she was clearly trying to escape, and no agent was on her path.
EDIT: looking at your comment history, it seems like you are trying to justify her assassination too. We are not friends, no friend of mine attempts to rationalize away the murder of innocents by masked brownshirts. I hope you can escape this death cult sometimes soon, then maybe we could find common ground.
It’s entirely possible to prosecute the heads of all of these horrific things into the stone age, comb through internal data and throw every agent who’s murdered someone in jail, and not punish everyday people who just cast a vote.
They already are. Playing nice and hoping the other side will come to their senses and return to normalcy doesn’t make sense when they’ve already shown you they will try to destroy you regardless.
When I first heard the advice to ditch your phone when you go a protest, I thought maybe that's a little extreme. But it's a real threat. We already knew post Snowden there is an extensive big brother apparatus. We saw post 911 that all rights can be taken away in the name of counter-terrorism. Now with a government that's operating outside the law and labeling peaceful protesters as terrorists, I don't think we can rely on telcos to protect our identity. The mass surveillance will fingerprint a device, and the telco will know your name so it's not at all an extreme precaution to ditch your phone.
Basically: if it has a modem in it, it can be used against you in some way. Phones, routers, cars, public signs, cameras.
It's been so turbulent lately, that it's hard to register events that would have blown our minds if so many things didn't also happen around the same time. Remember when Israel made a bunch of pagers explode indiscriminately across Lebanon and Syria? So many things going on, one worse than the other, that it is hard to stop and really consider the implication of these single events fully.
Indiscriminately?
Yes, seemingly so. I guess we'd have to wait for full investigations to conclude before saying for sure, but sure looks like it.
> “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities."
> “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...
I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon? That's not a tool a normal consumer uses, it's only used by people to evade phone surveillance. I think it sounds like a high probability that anyone receiving one of these pages in Lebanon is part of Hezbollah.
> I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon?
But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.
Is this a SoP in wartime?
That's not a very realistic standard for a wartime covert operation.
Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it? Maybe these "wartime covert operations" need to read up on Human Rights and figure out a way to work within it?
Sounds like a unilateral disarmament, which is not how to win a war. Hamas and the like have no concern with human rights of course.
I mean in the case in Lebanon they knew. They sold those pagers to Hezbollah.
They only discriminated to the extent to which the specific product they went after correlated with the people they actually wanted to kill.
The locations of the detonations were indiscriminate, the intended targets were not.
Its important to not be hyperbolic in these times.
The two technologies ICE uses rely on permission for apps tonuse geolocation data for advertising purposes. Same reason you start seeing ads for local things when you travel.
Technically they can subpoena cell records to see which towers your phone connects to, but this is not viable for multiple people.
For privacy, if you care, having a rooted degoogled phone with no sim card is sufficient enough. You can check its signature by using your laptop as a IGW and capturing traffic to see if any apps or services ping anything.
If you want off grid comms, meshtastic devices are very nice, me and my wife use LilyGo Tdeck pluses for comms and finding each other at festivals. The portable modems are also nice because you can use them for GPS for your phone vs built in location services.
> phone with no sim card is sufficient enough
It's most certainly not. Phones connect to a cell tower even without a SIM to make emergency calls. The phone can still be tracked and it's not a difficult leap from there to identify the owner of the phone.
Strikes me as almost negligent to say to "not be hyperbolic" and then completely downplay exactly how they can track you in the real world.
I keep forgetting this is no longer a tech forum, so i miss things that i think would be understood.
You obviously have to enable airplane mode, and have it on by default.
That may be true for this specific use case, but the protection on bigger services could be easily rolled back. E.g., law enforcement was able to ask Google for "tell me everyone who was in this specific area during this time" [0] and is still able to ask "give me everyone who searched for a specific term" [1].
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/08/google-to... [1] https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/16/are-there-fourth-amendm...
Nevertheless, it's eerie that we are even having this discussion today. I didn't say "scary" because I'm far away from these events, but definitely uncomfortable - I know, the "events" may approach sooner or later my location too...
There’s millions of people who have been dealing with this daily for the last few decades. The sim swap networks and VPN/TOR users across the world live like this.
When I was in Iraq it was basically expected that all of your communications are totally pwnd, if you live in China you’re totally pwnd.
Cell trackers like described in the article have been in use for the last 15 years by police and law-enforcement inside the US.
why you think its eerie?
> why you think its eerie?
You typed out how awful the situation is, and how you cannot trust anything, and then ask why it's eerie? I feel like you answered your own question before you even asked it.
It’s only eerie if it isn’t common
Half the country learned this after January 6. The other half is learning it now, apparently.
If we all ditch our phones then how will we record the abuses of power?
Hate to break it to you, but people just simply dont care as much as you think they do. We have the right to own firearms for the purposes of protecting us against tyrany, but thats pointless when we cant even realize tyrany right outside our door.
This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse.
Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.
Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.
Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.
While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.
A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.
I've had similar thoughts for a while now.
As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.
The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
Look at the MOVE bombing, etc - if they wanted to glass the Bundys, they would have. Safety wasn't the reason they didn't.
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.
The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
Consider Michael Reinoehl.
A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.
Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.
> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?
Rosa Parks?
Non-state actor YPG fought off ISIS authoritarians and held off Assad authoritarian in Kurdish Syria.
> It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply.
... armed with guns and prepared to use violence.
I have an old point and shoot (20x optical zoom) and a SIM-free phone that has never been used in my name for anything.
> SIM-free phone
Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.
That's why you also need to enable airplane mode.
Which you can just engage on your current phone.
Airplane mode often leaves bluetooth on, with all the tracking that enables.
On Android at least for now, you can use systemui tuner to pick what gets toggled for airplane mode: Cell, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, WiMAX.
No root needed
Analog recording and viewing may need to become the state of the art given how low the bar has become to manipulate digital media
great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s
not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.
however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.
I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)
Burners, which you never bring anywhere near your home, and which you do not drive your car to pick up.
Point and clicks with no internet connectivity. Practice unloading and reloading SD cards in came someone comes to destroy evidence
There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.
Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.
- Use a different device: tablet, or camera.
- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area
Phone on airplane mode and with location services disabled?
I doubt that would do anything…
Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.
Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.
>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.
As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
If the threat is observation and tracking, you really want to turn off all radios, right? Cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC. Otherwise you are hoping some anonymization/obfuscation is preventing your signal from being correlated to those captured at other locations and times.
If the threat is self-incrimination after the fact, you also don't want to carry any device that is determining and persisting its own location info. Don't track your protest as a fitness activity on your GPS sports watch...
>everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers
*trilateration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration
why not?
Buy a camera. And/or an audio recorder. Or pull the SIM out of an old phone and use that.
A phone with its SIM out is still registering with the network.
... and has an IMEI identifier.
Yes, and that's usually directly traceable to who the phone was first sold to.
Or to the subscriber who last registered it to a network with a SIM, even though the SIM is not there now.
Typically that history is kept and it is kept for up to 20 years depending on which telco you look at. Those and the CDRs are gold for data mining and there are companies that specialize in doing just that.
It's insane if you think about it but the phone company knows as much or more about you than your mother or your spouse.
I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.
I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.
Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)
Disposable film cameras and FRS walkie-talkies, I think.
FRS: family radio service, a broadcast communications technology, TIL:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service>
There are standalone pocket cameras.
Librem 5 phone has a hardware kill switch for the modem. The camera is not so great though.
People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.
[edit]
Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.
yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?
edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much
Being able to upload or stream is crucial so evidence doesn’t get confiscated
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.
if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.
security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.
there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
....cameras exist :)
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
Sure, just be careful not to fall into the trap of technosolutionism.
I have an Eye-fi SD card which can send photos via wifi. Wouldn't be too hard to make a receiver that send from a raspi or something automatically.
Seems they are discontinued but there are other options that work similar such as "EZ Share"
the world isn't perfect, you do what you can. Just take a small RunCam or something and keep in it your pocket and be discreet when you're using it.
whenever this topic comes up, I like to point people to EFF's Rayhunter.
https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter
> Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well.
And
https://bitchat.free/
> bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over bluetooth mesh networks. no internet required, no servers, no phone numbers.
Dissolve ICE. Prosecute and/or disallow all ERO agents from any future public service positions.
A decade ago I put this stance into my LinkedIn profile tag line, and was a little surprised how many engineers reached out to praise that decision.
I think it's rapidly, finally, entering the realm of political viability.
All it took was a white mother (and US citizen) getting shot in broad daylight. As much as I hate to admit it, a large enough segment of the population needed something blatant like this to care.
It's not flattering to the US that the mother who was murdered needed specifically to be white for people to care.
> It's not flattering to the US
There's such a long list of things one could say that about.
In this instance the "representation matters" thought process seems to bear out.
Folks talk about aspiring to role models who look like them. People also react strongly when this sort of thing happens to someone who looks like them.
The problem is that you can slice representation every which way. It could be "I only identify with 6'3" males who live in Idaho and like trains", or it could be "I identify with humans".
The fact that US culture chooses to identify with people of the same colour is telling, though I don't know, maybe that's a human thing and my country is too homogeneous for me to think otherwise.
Don't worry, it's worse. Half the country has branded her as a terrorist, and her killer as a hero.
It's not. I was a "90 day fiance" immigrant (the concept, not the show).
We had a sincere relationship, but we both agreed that our marriage, while genuine, was earlier than it would have otherwise been other than logistics of an trans-Pacific romance.
We stayed together 5 years, then separated/divorced, amicably. In the midst of all that I missed a USCIS filing date.
I was out of status briefly, but also in a situation where I was ostensibly entitled to stay (USCIS would have to demonstrate a belief that the marriage was under false pretences), so I hired an immigration attorney to straighten things out (which basically involved filing paperwork that I needed to file, and a letter from her and one from me explaining why I missed it.
She did make the comment to me during all that though that I had no cause for concern above and beyond that, quote:
"I hate that I can say it, but the reality is you're both 'the right color' and a high-earning male. USCIS has you so far down the list of their priorities for reconciliation you could stay here decades before them calling you to account".
Most K1 applications are approved, most are female, most are not white. I doubt your case would have been any different had you not been a "'the right color' and a high-earning male".
She wasn't referring to K1 visas specifically, she was referring to USCIS and how they'd prioritize dealing with enforcement actions against people in non-compliance with their visa obligations.
And I'd suspect as an immigration attorney, she likely had first-hand experience of same.
The K1 approvel rate seems a decent proxy instead of 1 lawyer's opinion. Acceptance went up during V1 of the current administation. https://visagrader.com/visa-approvals-and-refusals/K1
Jamaica, not known for having lots of people with pale skin, has basicaly same approval rate as Germany. https://visagrader.com/visa-approvals-and-refusals/K1/jamaic...
https://visagrader.com/visa-approvals-and-refusals/K1/german...
Would be unlikely that the USCIS radically changed their approach when dealing with paperwork messups for populations if these different countries while apparently approving applications at basically the same exact rate.
You're not understanding. This has nothing to do with the K1 visa. Or approval rates. I came from a low risk country.
This is about adjustments of status, for any visa, and people who fall out of compliance and are in a period of being "unauthorized" to be/stay/work in the country.
And sorry, given ICE's mandates, ruled temporarily okay by SCOTUS, that color of skin, accent, name are effectively "probable cause" for detention, I'd say her perspective is absolutely aligned with current enforcement priorities.
I think you are not understanding me. My contention is adjustments of status snafus isn't going to be much different than K1 approval rates in terms of how people are treated. It seems by the numbers, people are treated the same as it relates K1 whether they come from a "right skin color" country or not. Why is that going to be wildly different when it comes to minor issues?
Video analysis is depressing: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis...
I wonder what conclusion the FBI's investigation will come to because it sure doesn't look good for ICE to me. Best case, those two agents get sentenced to life for murder but the damage is done and a life taken. If the officer fired two shots and she died at the scene then it seems reasonable to me the bullets didn't go through the windshield and, instead, went through her rolled down window while she was turning away from the officer. If that's the case then I'm predicting riots everywhere over the next couple weeks.
// i know pretty much zero details of what happened and it will be impossible to get any actual facts that are not politicized for weeks
Zero chance they will get life. Maybe they will get promoted. https://rollcall.com/2023/08/24/capitol-police-promotes-offi...
I don't want to be a doomer, but I think the FBI is highly unlikely to do an honest good-faith investigation here.
Given that this administration appointed the head of the FBI due to his loyalty to Trump, the most likely reason they took over the investigation is to shield ICE from any accountability.
The US FBI now seems to act much as the National Enquirer does, as a "catch and kill" tool.
In the case of the Enquirer, this was through buying exclusive rights to inconvenient stories and refusing to publish them. In the case of the FBI, it's by claiming exclusive jurisdiction over incidents and quashing or impeding independent investigation.
See "Former National Enquirer boss breaks his silence on 'catch and kill' as lead witness in Trump trial" (2024) <https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/media/national-enquirer-catch...> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_kill> (concept) and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_Kill> (Ronan Farrow book).
Looking at the video in the link GP provided, it is obvious first shot went through the windshield. The others went through the side window.
This administration’s FBI is run by podcasters and completely incompetent.
Not incompetent, but operating as intended: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46554438>
The windshield shows a single bullet entry.
Trump watched the video in front of a bunch of reporters and said "meh". Nothing will change for 3.5 years minimum. 40% of the country thinks he's doing great, and a greater percentage of those 40% vote vs the people who vote from the other group.
If midterms go well, and the special elections last November suggest they may, then at least we may be able to blunt some of the harm.
But the underlying point that about 35% of Americans just fundamentally do not seem to value civilization is a problem that has to be worked around.
The only way elections will change anything is if the Senate flips to 2/3 control by the Dems. I doubt enough GOP will vote to convict to reach 2/3. So even if a 51% House impeaches, it will go no further. We've already seen this scenario. Twice.
You have it backwards. Police shooting a white person will get less attention than if they were not white.
Odd. I thought she was a legal observer. It is funny how quickly the narratives changed given how little traction was gained on 'observer' status.
most people are more than one thing.
Are they now? If so, where is the carefully nuance bio of Good? Why do I get choreographed and weirdly aligned responses from various online profiles ( my 'observer' note )? The answer is obvious: there are points to be made by strategically aligning her verious 'more than one thing' portions of persona to match a narrative, which, but I repeat myself, is very, very tiring.
> where is the carefully nuance bio of Good?
I don't know, I don't think it's normally assumed that when someone dies (or more to the point is murdered) in a very public way we all immediately deserve to know every thing about them.
I don't know what you're talking about really. What I mean to say is the rest of this comment is incoherent to me.
BS. And I do not say this lightly. When it fits a given narrative, media has no issue or qualms in publishing anything and everything related to a given person they find online. It is only when they selectively release it over days that you just know how well the person does not fit the script, as it were.
She can be both, she will become lots of things over time depending on agenda. Her background was decidedly under-reported, for a few justifications, including preventing a preferred audience from sympathizing with the victim.
Not sure what your point is other than volume of information available increases over time.
You do have a point. My point is that we are constantly a part of informational warfare and it is getting old. I would love nothing more than people to look at it all with a cold eye and say something akin to: oh, I recognize this pattern. Instead, I attempts of various power centers to frame it in a way beneficial to them. Some of us are rather tired of this.
its not some pattern of abuse by shady actors manipulating opinions youre noticing, its voting algorithm and attention economy itself.
new ideas are constantly being published, and popular ones gain momentum by being shown to more people. as the idea gets saturated, the popularity gets overshadowed by the time based downranking.
if the idea is still popular though, in this case that ice murdered some woman as part of their shock and awe campaign, variations are going to show up such as "legal observer" and "mother of a three year old"
basic correction below:
<< murdered
shot/killed
<< as part of their shock and awe campaign
law enforcement operation
<< its voting algorithm and attention economy itself
Sure, and yet we have people skilled in manipulating both for their own ends.
But why is your own framing exempt from the analysis? The idea that you should see a murder and "look at it all with a cold eye", to try and dispassionately understand whether it might have been justified, is a non-obvious idea that's quite advantageous to power centers that expect to be shooting people frequently.
Am I suggesting that you do not do it? Hardly. That said, I am simply not buying my newly assigned martyr.
Again, this concept of "newly assigned martyr" you have is not something that fell from heaven fully formed. It was shaped and given to you by what you call "power centers" - ones which are currently running the United States government! - because they think this framing is beneficial to them. I'm going to stop the conversation here before I start coming up with unwise insults, because it's just infuriating that you can't turn this critical eye on yourself and the informational warfare you're subject to.
Who says I can't? In any event, before you go, why, exactly, is it infuriating?
What's infuriating is that you are acting as an agent of the government, defending their murder of a random citizen, but perceive yourself and frame yourself as a dispassionate observer who's interested in the media dynamics of how different descriptors get attached to people. I don't know if you started off like this, or if you're so deep in DHS propaganda that you can't find your way out, and right now I don't care to find out.
The difference between us that I know exactly what ( and even why ) I advocate for: keeping the system stable.
<< random citizen
She was a not some random citizen; I would have been addressing it differently if that was the case. Now, if you have a stomach for it, we can go over what kind of citizen she was.
Sounds like, "What kind of American are you?" from the Jesse Plemmons character in the Alex Garland Civil War movie.
Shouldn't the fact that ICE shot a woman trying to leave the scene be enough?
<< Sounds like, "What kind of American are you?" from the Jesse Plemmons character in the Alex Garland Civil War movie.
You see what you want to see, which is kinda revealing if you ask me.
<< Shouldn't the fact that ICE shot a woman trying to leave the scene be enough?
No. It is not enough. Reasonable person would be unlikely to find themselves in that position, which begs a simple question:
What was her reason for being there?
If you can answer that, we can start having a conversation. Until then, she is not some rando at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I fundamentally disagree that ICE deserves that presumption. They have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be unreasonable people who want to hurt others. I'm sure there's a story they'll tell about why it was totally legal to shoot her, but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove that there was she was doing something so terrible they had no choice.
Hm, as with taxes, do we get to choose which federal enforcement agency we are willing to submit to? Not going to lie man, it is a fascinating frame of mind to me and I am absolutely willing to talk to you about it if you wanna go that route.
<< but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove
This is not exactly how any of it works, at all. I am not being difficult man, but I don't get to, say, block FBI caravan, because I don't think they deserve 'that' presumption ( quotation, because I am not certain what it refers to ).
I similarly don't get to tell DEA, ATF, and multiple other agencies to just fuck off, especially if I encounter them in the wild.. doubly so, if I was attempting to track them that day..
The real question then becomes:
Why do you think you get to pick and choose, who can enforce the laws of the land upon you?
More importantly, whose authority would you accept?
They just shot another couple in Portland. I get to tell them, and you, to fuck off as much as I'd like. I encourage you to get on board with the right side of this issue while you have the chance.
<< while you have the chance.
Good luck out there friend. I am not sure what you meant to say, but it may be a good idea to stop here for both of us. I see no reason to continue this further.
I think you know precisely what I meant to say. There will come a time when the stain of having supported these murderers will be inescapable. At best you'll live in fear that your life will be ruined forever if anyone ever makes a viral post with strategic quotes from your 2026 commentary. You still have a chance to escape that fate if you want to.
Best of luck in your endeavors. As noted above, it would be wise for you to stop now before you say something very, very unnecessary. I urge you to reconsider this path.
If you are actually issuing a threat and feel confident nonetheless, feel free to post it in plain English for everyone to see.
That said, in spirit of kumbaya hand holding, I would like to offer you a chance to look at the reality around you.
If you look at the released cam video, the only thing that is clear that Renee was not an innocent bystander.
Good luck out there man.
https://x.com/AlphaNews/status/2009679932289626385
I urge you to pull yourself out of the radicalization spiral you're in. This video shows an innocent victim whose murderer will be prosecuted and convicted. He calls the victim a "fucking bitch" at the end, I'm genuinely baffled what twists of logic you're using to not see this.
I would emphasize since you mentioned it that I don’t intend any sort of threat. Despite the murderers’ best efforts, we do still live in a free country with free speech. Supporting murder is a terrible thing to do, and I will never in this lifetime hold the hand of someone who does, but it isn’t a crime and doesn’t deserve anything other than deep and enduring shame.
What kind of citizen was she, comrade?
Friend, we are not comrades. Still, good luck out there. I am no longer engaging in this topic.
So you did it when Obama ( and the current ICE management ) were handling deportations?
He did say 10 years ago so...
So this is getting to be pretty real and pretty scary. How many of you have actually considered just not using your mobile phone any longer? Turning it off, only powering it on when you need it, and not bringing it when you leave your home?
Within a lot of our lifetimes, this was the norm. Are these devices so useful that put up with carrying a tracking / listening device on us at all time?
FYI, powering off your iPhone does not prevent it from being tracked. It continues to broadcast a low-power Bluetooth signal other Apple devices will relay to iCloud.
"Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even when it's offline, in power reserve mode, and after power off"
Settings > Apple Account > Find My > Find My iPhone
I really dream of doing it. I gave it a soft-run a few years back when mine was stolen and it was really hard. Not just creature comforts and habits like GPS etc but even things like so much of the modern world assumes you have a phone on you. Things like parking, event tickets, restaurant QR code menus (thankfully this one seems to be actually getting better though.)
My only comment is being able to call emergency services wherever you are is very useful. Pre-cell phone times was just hoping there was a landline somewhere. And you weren't able to get instructions from the operator and be with a fallen person at the same time.
Can't you just put your phone in a shielded bag, and take it out if you need to use it?
Yes, but this feels like the modern equivalent of wearing a tin foil hat :/
more like the equivalent of wearing a bullet proof vest
Just one anecdotal perspective:
I do not of know a single person in my extended family/professional network/social circle who has had location tracking or app eavesdropping directly impact their life. The only impact I’ve seen is via advertising exposure.
(For me) The convenience of Google Maps for navigation, and messaging for communication, is too beneficial. The _impact_ of these technologies as surveillance tools _in my life_ is hypothetical.
> I do not of know a single person in my extended family/professional network/social circle who has had location tracking or app eavesdropping directly impact their life.
yet. that's always the problem with such a strong declarative. things are not finished to be so finite
Anecdotally, Joseph from 404 does not use a mobile phone at all.
>The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.
Sounds like if you're denying location permissions to shady apps (why would you allow in the first place?), you're probably fine.
If you install 100 apps on your phone, and 50% are participating in the kind of ad network that this data is sourced form, and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out. The math is on the trackers' side, not the users'.
>If you install 100 apps on your phone
Why do you need 100 apps? Moreover why do you need 100 apps that have location permissions? Both android and ios makes it easy to tell which apps have location permissions. The list should be a very small list, and limited to "while using app".
>and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out.
I'm not claiming that nobody is getting picked up by data brokers. The fact that they're in business implies that there's enough people careless enough to make it a viable business. But what I am claiming that such tracking isn't too hard to avoid. You can see some people in this thread who think otherwise, thinking that they need to go of the grid or switch to burner phones, when they all need to do is spend 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
> Why do you need 100 apps?
You don't. But a high percentage of the population will install apps for the sake they've been offered to install it.
I use eBay, I get bombarded by eBay telling me to install their app for 10% off. I use Gmail for work, if I don't use their app, I have the search engine to tell me to use their app. Facebook is an app, WhatsApp is an app too. Bejeweled Deluxe is an another app and $Reality_TV_show wants you to install their app. Your local supermarket has an app to give you % off your shopping list and probably not to far off in the future oxygen will be an app.
Some venue for a ticket for that odd one-off gig requires an app and every single restaurant order at the table has different app. You're then forced to install the app to use your Dishwasher, Fridge, TV, WiFi Router. I bought a new heater as my old one broke this winter and if I desire to configure WiFi for it, you guessed it I have to install an app.
And that's how you you end up with 100 of apps that are never really used, leaking information, spying on you and never deleted because people don't. I bought Christmas presents and I was unable to track delivery information without installing an app, I had forgotten about that until now. Thanks for reminding me you, can watch me delete it. That again is how you end up with apps.
We use discord at work and when I walk past co-workers screens they are within multiple of dead discord servers. They never leave and it's not just discord I've seen people idling in dead channels on IRC. I just question why and walk away as if the server is dead, I leave.
Hanging on to things that are never needed again is what we are best at it seems. FOMO?
> 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
Most users are not you and I, they don't know about permissions. They just want to accomplish what they set out to do. And if you do remove that permission; that app refuses to co-operate frustrating the user, nagging them until they do re-enable that permission.
It's now rather than how it used to be. Smart humans using a dumb phones, the now is dumb humans being used by smart phones.
* With sympathy to those who are actually mute/non-verbal, that must suck.
You should install the absolute minimum amount of apps possible and should prefer a website whenever you can. And, of the apps you do install, install them from trusted open source repositories, and allow them the absolute minimum permissions to do whatever you need them to do. They're tools for you.
Not really, if weather apps are sharing the location as it says, then a lot os people are unkowingly allowing theses apps to collect the location.
404 continues to do great work.
They can monitor you but according to this administration you can't even record ICE's activities legally.
https://reason.com/2026/01/08/you-have-the-right-to-record-i...
Rules for thee and not for me...
The book Means of Control by Byron Tau goes deep into this realm. I thought I knew all the methods and sources and this book opened my eyes to even more goings on.
https://www.amazon.com/Means-Control-Alliance-Government-Sur...
Any tips on how to avoid this? I suppose those tin foil signal blockers might be useful?
Just leave your phone at home and bring a plain old small digital camera, agree ahead of time with friends on when and where to meet up. It's interesting to me and i guess showing my age that this isn't self evident to everyone everywhere.
I suspect the old school stuff is generally less monitored. I think some of the cheap Baofeng radios support AES256 encryption. I think that's technically only legal with a business license from the FCC or some such, but I'd be a lot less worried about an FCC fine than having my phone tracked. There's probably some quick keypresses to clear the encryption config so it looks like it was on plaintext.
Do not use devices that can be trivially tracked through the cell network, or that can be surveilled by big tech. This means a device bought anonymously, a free/libre OS like Graphene, no Google/Facebook/Apple spyware apps, and an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto. This should be done by everyone to avoid the possibility of mass surveillance, not only people who have something to hide from a three-letter agency. If you really have something to hide, then the cellular network shouldn't be used at all.
>Do not use devices that can be trivially tracked through the cell network, or that can be surveilled by big tech. This means a device bought anonymously, a free/libre OS like Graphene
GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.
>and an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto. This should be done by everyone to avoid the possibility of mass surveillance, not only people who have something to hide from a three-letter agency.
No, it's much harder than just "an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto". You need to practice proper opsec. There's no point getting an anonymous sim when you then turn around and then use it as a 2fa number for your bank, or carry it around with you every day.
> GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.
You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy." The point of a FOSS system is that the user fully controls it, and can install apps privately from any source.
>You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy."
If you're talking about not being able to install third party apps, aurora store doesn't require an account and works fine on stock android. Most other basic functionality works fine too, eg. camera, calls, browsing, maps.
> If you're talking about not being able to install third party apps, aurora store doesn't require an account and works fine on stock android. Most other basic functionality works fine too, eg. camera, calls, browsing, maps.
The Play Store is not the only issue with stock Android devices. Google dependencies run with high privileges and the device is constantly communicating with Google servers for one reason or another. You do not own a Google device for all intents an purposes. The main contribution of Graphene here is that it strips out the proprietary blobs and optionally provides an environment to run Google's libraries with unprivileged access.
The point about de-Google'd Android vs your insistence on GrapheneOS is that by the time you are using Google's libraries, like Maps, Play Services, or their notification service (Firebase, IIRC), you've already lost. GrapheneOS is not dramatically better than de-Google'd Android if you're still sending all your notifications through Google, as well as your location and things like contacts
The point is you have to leave Google with both for it to do much good
> insistence on GrapheneOS is that by the time you are using Google's libraries, like Maps, Play Services, or their notification service (Firebase, IIRC), you've already lost.
Graphene offers the option of sandboxing Google apps should you want them. The usual setup is a second user profile with all the Google stuff in it. My main profile only contain FOSS apps and nothing passes through Google's servers. I use the Google profile for the maps with a dedicated account maybe once a month when driving somewhere unfamiliar.
> a device bought anonymously
> an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto
i think these already have you screwed. that anonymity is going to be superficial at best. you will be recorded making these purchases, and tracked to your identity
Then you're going to take it home for >8 hours per day, and to your job several hours per day, and likely call at least one or two of your important contacts. At which point that's the ball game - the pool of people that live in the immediate vicinity of your building, and work in the immediate vicinity of your job site, and call your partner / parents / kid, is made up of pretty well exclusively you
See my other comment. At least in this particular case the databrokers are getting the data from apps themselves. If you don't grant location permissions to shady weather/transit/delivery apps, you should be safe.
Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky. What apps are "shady"? How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?
I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
>Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky.
I don't think anyone who actually is at risk, or cares about risk, is going to be overconfident about their security because some HN commenter said "you're probably fine".
>What apps are "shady"?
Depends on your paranoia level. I'd say first party apps (eg. apple/google maps/weather) are probably fine. Google has the additional caveat that they record location history and therefore might be subject to geofence warrants. If you think iOS/Android is backdoored then all phones are off limits.
>How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?
They're whatever ad SDKs can get their hands on. If the app has location permissions, it's that. Otherwise it's something like geoip. At the end of the day it's just third party code running in some app's sandbox. If the app can't get it, the SDK can't get it either.
>I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
What other plausible mechanism are there then? wifi/bluetooth scanning requires location permissions since forever ago.
One way to minimize the info they gather is by using a dumb phone. I have a flip phone running some RTOS that doesn't allow any kind of apps and doesn't have GPS, meaning the only trace it leaves is any cell activity
The true answer is: Hold your politicians accountable for this at every level, including at the "boring" local level and on all levels all the way up to the top.
This type of problem needs to be fixed on the society level.
Not use any device that has GSM/LTE, or Bluetooth.
Alternatively, broadcast a hidden SSID WiFi AP via an enabled RPi and use only devices that's have WiFi. Hand them out to people for free to increase the spread.
Attach magnets to the RPi's and go rogue by sticking them to buses, cars and trains et cetera to increase range.
Are there decent wifi communicators on the market? I looked into some Lora projects for this but they never seem to actually ship or get past prorotypes
> Are there decent wifi communicators on the market? I looked into some Lora projects for this but they never seem to actually ship or get past prorotype
Yes, 100%. Meshtastic and Meshcore both do this, but I'd recommend Meshcore. Here in the Seattle area we have a network that fairly reliably delivers messages from Canada through the Seattle metro area all the way down to Portland. Fully encrypted with dual key cryptography. Meshcore uses a different strategy than Meshtastic, which enables Meshcore to work more reliably. To see what's happening in your area for Meshcore see https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map
Is very fun to set up a repeater for under $50 and see a noticeable difference in the coverage area. Is a fun technical project that combines the best of hiking/walking/driving geocaching style, ham radio (but without a license requirement), antenna building, and more. I'm getting acquainted with people in my neighborhood too which is a bonus.
Figuring out what hardware to buy that'll actually work can be a challenge, to get started search amazon for "heltec v3" and make sure you get something that includes a battery, and you'll see 2-packs of radios for $60. There's a web flasher at the above link that'll put the software on the radios for you.
Really wish more people would get on the Meshcore train here locally. Everyone just picked up meshtastic and looked no further.
Meshcore's crypto is interesting.
ECB, issues with key generation, key negotiation, seldom authenticated data, ...
It definitely works better than MT but please stop lauding it for its cryptographic properties ;)
It's at the bottom of their TODO, under the heading "V2 protocol spec".
> a hidden SSID WiFi
Don't do this!
The BSSID is still visible, and is the unique identifier any trackers will be looking for anyway. Also making the SSID hidden just means the AP isn't broadcasting it, any listeners can still see the SSID whenever any client interacts with the AP.
Hidden SSIDs are generally much worse for privacy than non-hidden ones, since all stations (clients in 802.11 terminology) need to constantly go around yelling "hey, is SSID abc available?" while they're not connected to any SSID.
I was ultimately taking the piss, it'll be radical if someone actually did but I had no idea it caused wifi pollution from this.
You learn something new everyday.
M.I.A.'s clothing brand is looking real good now. There are others but hers was the first I heard about. Seems like the waist bag would be critical for activists.
From the Ohmni website:
"...fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."
>"[...] fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."
But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
Other comments mentioned valid points about tradeoffs of using an offline camera vs. a phone, with pro-phone arguments listing things like "being able to livestream and get the evidence out even if the device is damaged/destroyed" and "messaging/coordinating/comms". The anti-phone/pro-camera side also had good points, saying that those things also make it easier to track/identify you. The choice between those two options is definitely not clear-cut, and it is all about individual tradeoffs and risk assessment.
But if you are rocking something that's essentially a wearable Faraday cage that block all signals (I am just assuming it works exactly as stated, without attempting to judge its efficacy), what's the point of bringing (an essentially fully offline) phone in the first place, as opposed to bringing a camera with zero connectivity?
There's levels, for some, no-phone is the safest only route, for others, this could be a good solution. There's vids on her site showing how it works, it's very nice.
You can put it in your pocket and go somewhere else with less of a chance you'll be tracked
> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.
It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.
A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.
There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.
> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
Really??
You can take it out of your pocket and use it to communicate.
Why isn't any one independently using this same information to track ICE officers? I'm sure they all carry phones.
There have been isolated cases of protestors using Grindr and other location-based apps to highlight ERO agents in enforcement areas.
Well first off, it is very expensive. Vendors that supply to DHS and DOD have to be selective about who they sell their services to as well. Citizen-developed services to track ICE are routinely shut down by Apple and Google.
So make a real website and not an App.
They're building 1984. They're building the Social Credit system they claimed China was building.
Don't let them!
"can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer" sounds strangely like what was reported to be happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Penlink is in Israel. I think there is a good chance this tech was developed and used in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians and is now being resold to law enforcement here.
I suppose I'm showing my age here, but Stingrays/IMSI-catchers have been around and in use for decades by both federal and local governments, and the problem of mass surveillance is not particularly an ICE problem. In my lifetime, the level of surveillance of the population has increased so dramatically that I'm not sure that younger people actually understand what it was like to live in a world where your every move wasn't monitored, recorded, and archived.
Privacy advocates have been fighting this battle for decades, but they have been utterly defeated because, by and large, people don't and can't be made to care about privacy until they learn the hard way (and when it's too late) why it's so important.
https://archive.ph/HYbBG
Related:
ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534581
Richard Stallman was right. Buy a dumbphone, an actual one. Call's, SMS', nothing else.
Did you know that women's period was tracked by propietary smartphone apps?
There goes your freedom.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61952794
You can still be location-tracked with a dumb phone. Yes, even if the phone has no GPS. Any communication with the network gives away your location to the "right" people.
it can, but it's significantly harder. With good enough opsec the info leaked through cell activity is practically negligible
Pocket Faradays cages (and metallic clothes) exist. In the end if you use as a landline phone substitute it's almost a hardware issue and software would be just testimonial there.
Wait until they find out what Google Location Services collects.
I did a deep dive into gemini privacy decs and apparently google is now also into the financial credit score business.
"They" already know about google location services. But this article isn't about what google collects.
I’d like to personally thank the tech billionaires for inflicting a domestic paramilitary force on the US population under the guise of “enforcing immigration”. Now they have access to the same surveillance tools used by the IDF to track and murder innocent civilians with plausible deniability.
I wish this country had a libertarian right that cared one iota about widespread suppression of civil liberties instead of only whining about taxes.
Na, the libertarian right just wants to make money without laws first... then be authoritarians.
Its collapse / take-over / mask-off over the last decade (interpretations vary) has been very disappointing.
I mean, FFS, what kind of principled third-party invites the authoritarian "opposition" candidate as the keynote speaker to their convention?
The dirty secret about American politics is that people care about any of that stuff only to the extent that it supports their actual ideological goals. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, state's rights, all of it. They want it for them, and don't care if anybody else has it _at best_, and actively want to take it away from others at worst.
Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after centuries of bloodshed that we are far removed from, and people forget why anybody cared about such abstract principles to begin with.
Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".
It was power-lust dressed as ideology, the latter largely to make it attractive to a larger, and highly gullible, it turns out, cohort.
Good news! There’s a progressive left that cares very much about widespread suppression of civil liberties!
Contrary to common misconception, you don’t lose your tech bro man card if you join them!
The best part is that you also shed the physics-defying libertarian viewpoints that largely make no sense.
Paywalled.
The most maximally vindictive candidates are earning my votes in the coming election.
> most maximally vindictive candidates
I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh.
It's been building for a long time; it's not recent per se, just accelerated.
2025 showed that you can't just go "ok, it's over now, we'll go back to business as usual" (like I know the limp-wristed Dems will want to do) or it'll repeat after every other election until it's successful. You just cannot have this many people constantly being convinced they live in this alternate reality for much longer without civilization collapse.
But I think it's gone too far and we're witnessing the fall of the empire in real-time. I'm just hoping that fall won't screw up the rest of the world too much, but I'm pretty sure it will.
More to the point, it's the collapse of the carefully balanced entente around things like WMD and war crimes that will be our undoing.
Recent events have brought this into sharp focus.
This is really the glue that holds it all together -- that we and our allies haven't even had to think about these things for our entire lives up until now.
I hate to be hyperbolic, but I fear that fear of these things will soon become a looming presence in our lives. For the rest of our lives. And kids' lives. And grandkids' lives.
No we got to this point because the hope for a better future evaporated. People are thirsty for answers. Any answer to this question will have a big following.
Gambling, influencing, day trading, kick out the immigrants, anything works as long as it can promise to change your life for the better.
pussy-footing and reaching across the isle never did anyone of good conscience any good.
I think you and the GP are using completely different definitions of "revenge".
Cost of living and social media. Populists are a symptom.
Imprisoning fascists who break out laws and shoot people dead is good.
The fact that the fascists want to kill people for being brown doesn't change this.
Center/right voter here. I believe you are correct.
Quite the opposite actually. Democrats have been so complacent with the proto-fascists for so long, that republicans will now justify murdering a mother in broad daylight, filmed under 3 angles clearly showing she is fearing for her life. The solution to fascism is not compromise and weakness.
We live in different worlds, friend.
Please know there are people across the aisle that view it differently. When things calm down, talk with them and learn. Nobody wins when we insist the world is only as we alone view it.
Yeah, nah. No friendship here.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. She regularly texts my family things like how my other aunt, who is disabled, should kill herself rather than take medicaid money. She has told her daughter, who has attempted suicide twice, that she'd be better off dead than be bisexual. She texts us things about how every somali person in the US is going to get what is coming to them.
How should I talk with her to learn things?
Frankly, I'm absolutely fucking sick of leaders within the GOP saying that a woman is a domestic terrorist trained in using cars as weapons after an ICE goon murders her. Call me when the republicans send Trump to the gallows. Then I'll consider opening my heart up.
> talk with them and learn
No. Democrats always take the high road and what has that gotten them? A fascist regime and a political movement (MAGA) that floods the zone with bullshit when the gestapo does something bad.
Republicans stormed the capitol, killed police officers, and delayed the election process. What happened to them? Some lackeys got put in jail, and no one at the top faced consequences. Trump then pardoned all of those criminals for their service. Crickets from MAGAts and Republicans.
Laying your weapon down while someone keeps hitting literally just results in you ceasing to exist. Trump and all of his cabinet members are openly vile and called the woman who was shot a domestic terrorist before her body was even cold. Same situation with Charlie Kirk: they were calling the shooter a radical leftist before the body was cold. Meanwhile Dems are asked to disavow every action if it's even somewhat related to them and to "talk and learn"... yeah no that window has passed.
Hold your side accountable for the insane lies, corruption, and awful things they do first then maybe we can talk about reaching across the aisle.
EDIT: stop deluding yourself into thinking you're a "center right" voter too. It's obvious from previous interactions and your post history that you're drinking the MAGA koolaid.
Read these. Were you this upset when Obama was using ICE? If not, why?
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/violation-constituti...
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/exiled-obama-adm...
The onus is on you to explain how Obama's terms are relevant to what ICE is doing now. Did Obama:
- post AI videos mocking immigrants?
- open a facility called Alligator Alcatraz?
- say "homegrowns are next" when talking about deportations?
- immediately call victims of ICE violence domestic terrorists?
- deport people to a labor camp (CECOT)?
- send ICE into cities of his political opponents to cause property damage, stoke tensions, detain people, and execute them? (see: Chicago, Minneapolis, etc.)
- allow ICE commanders to throw up Nazi salutes?
There is no decency; cruelty and theatrics are the point. This admin is on a revenge tour and is using ICE as their secret police force. If that's not obvious by now, you should get out of the MAGA bubble and improve your media diet.
You didn’t answer the question.
The ACLU called Obama a monster, and they call Trump a monster, too.
Obama set the precedent, I agree Trump added childish and cruel rhetoric. ( But the use of ICE is the same with Obama and Trump. )
I do not agree on Nazi actions, etc. That’s exaggeration and it’s not useful.
So do we agree that on the deployment and tactics of ICE that Obama and Trump are roughly equal? If you don’t condemn Obama, is it fair to say you don’t condemn the use of ICE to deport?
> But the use of ICE is the same with Obama and Trump.
> So do we agree that on the deployment and tactics of ICE that Obama and Trump are roughly equal
No, they're not the same as I've demonstrated. I'll ask again: did Obama do those things above? You can keep pretending that "ICE is only there to deport people" but as reality has shown, that's not true. They show up to events to intimidate, they tear gas and shoot protestors, etc. all the while cabinet members cover for their abhorrent behavior because the cruelty is the point.
This conversation is obviously going nowhere so I'll let you keep living in fantasy land and obfuscating with "but Obama!!" like usual. Maybe you'll repent one day.
The ACLU condemned Obama for his use of ICE. Many times.
If you condemn Trump, it is only logical to condemn Obama for doing largely the same thing. The ACLU does.
Heres an ACLU article that discusses both:
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrol-wa...
You're being disingenuous by saying things like:
Look at the points I mentioned and tell me how they're the same. I don't contest that law enforcement does awful things with their power, but this administration emboldens them is the difference. What? You disagree with the actions but it's also exaggerated? Answer this for me: did Obama send ICE agents into cities as retribution? Did he send ICE agents into schools, hospitals, protests, etc.[0]?If ICE agents are known to abuse detainees, then why would you want them in sensitive areas? By that metric, these administrations are not even close to being the same.
0: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/ero-outreach/pdf/10029.2-policy.p... (hint: no he didn't - "Enforcement Actions at or Focused on Sensitive Locations")
Obama set the precedent, didn’t he?
The ACLU calls Obama a monster.
Now it’s time to fish or cut bait. Do you condemn Obama for using ICE as described in the many articles I have shared?
Obama didn't use ICE to crack down on dissent or to sexually abuse minors, so no. He didn't set precedent for the ways they're being used now.
I talked to these people minutes ago, on the thread about the murder. Trumpists are finding ways to rationalize this assassination. Just like they did Jan 6, the bombings of fishing boats near Venezuela, the other exactions ICE committed, Trump being Epstein's closest friend, etc.
Then I listened to the Vice President claiming she was an "unhinged left-wing lunatic", that she had been radicalized and that she was trying to hurt the ICE agent, and thus she deserved to be shot. A complete, abject lie trying to justify this murder, when everyone saw in the videos she was clearly trying to escape, and no agent was on her path.
EDIT: looking at your comment history, it seems like you are trying to justify her assassination too. We are not friends, no friend of mine attempts to rationalize away the murder of innocents by masked brownshirts. I hope you can escape this death cult sometimes soon, then maybe we could find common ground.
What if their maximally vindictive traits just makes them want to use the same invasive tools and techniques?
Like today?
It’s entirely possible to prosecute the heads of all of these horrific things into the stone age, comb through internal data and throw every agent who’s murdered someone in jail, and not punish everyday people who just cast a vote.
They already are. Playing nice and hoping the other side will come to their senses and return to normalcy doesn’t make sense when they’ve already shown you they will try to destroy you regardless.
Compared to the alternative of staying on our current path of American fascism and WW3?
I’ll take the odds for vindictiveness.
Yeah I get into a more Jacobin and less Girondin mindset every week that goes by.
Careful, without any further qualification you just endorsed Stephen Miller.
[flagged]
Please don't use abusive terms like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I submitted this three hours earlier but apparently my links are now shadow-banned?
eh at least it's being seen
Be sure to read their other DHS coverage
404media links are shadowbanned, not necessarily yours. They have been for years, people vouch for them to bring them back from the dead.
404 Media has a fairly hard paywall, though Archive Today occasionally works.
Email concerns to mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They can reverse autokills or help find alternative links.