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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Immigration can be enforced without murdering, gassing and viciously assaulting bystanders. Never mind the violations of human rights (like sending deportees to hellholes like CECOT), lying about citizen observers and continually having lawsuits tossed by grand juries.
It's a rogue agency with no accountability that will continue to cause untold harm while making everyone less safe.
I don't care what you think is viable anymore, because the current US immigration enforcement authorities are themselves criminals and murderers. Until Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino are in prison jumpsuits, I will never support the enforcement of US immigration laws and wholeheartedly endorse all lawful efforts to obstruct it.
It was not originally my ultimate position! During the Biden administration I was on exactly the opposite side: we have to enforce immigration law, it can't be subject to a heckler's veto, because if the government tells voters they're not allowed to have the immigration laws they want they're just going to elect a different government that allows it. I was heavily considering voting for Nikki Haley if she won the primary, and I think e.g. Canada and the UK are quite wise to see what's happening in the US and be more open to the idea of strict enforcement.
But Trump and his minions have worked hard to radicalize me over the past year, constantly arguing that everyone who personally dislikes Trump should be miserable and fear his wrath. They succeeded, so I no longer respect their authority and support all lawful efforts to obstruct anything they try to do. Perhaps in the future there will be a government I consider legitimate; if they can root out all of the goons Trump planted in DHS, I would endorse their authority to enforce immigration law again.
There's always been immigration and periodically it leads to scare mongering by people who don't like certain kinds of immigrants in their countries. Humans have migrated across the planet for tens of thousands of years.
There's always been immigration and periodically it leads to scare mongering by people who don't like certain kinds of immigrants in their countries. Humans have migrated across the planet for tens of thousands of years. There's nothing new about this.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're right, my short comment was densely packed with meaning. Let's unpack.
First, as someone else observed in a sibling reply: "I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh." That's worth keeping in mind.
Second, when one says one wants "maximally vindictive candidates", whether intended or not, it implies behaving more like the party in power. Be careful what you wish for.
Third, related to the second point, if a comment can be interpreted in favor of either side, that may suggest it leaves something to be desired.
Following the principle of charity, perhaps "vindictive" is the wrong word. Perhaps all that's needed are candidates who'll enforce the law.
All in all, if anyone is being "dense" here, I'm not sure it's me. Do you own a mirror?
Trying and punishing members of the Trump administration for their crimes is not the same as sending people to concentration camps for having a color of skin that Miller hates.
It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing." It is anti-insight.
> Trying and punishing members of the Trump administration for their crimes is not the same...
Do you really believe that's being "vindictive", though? If so, why?
That's a big part of the problem: people characterize following the law as being "vindictive", and comparable to actual vindictiveness. It's a big part of why the Democrats have been so unwilling to hold anyone to account.
> It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing."
Wanting vindictiveness is absolutely the same thing the fascists are doing. Part of what I'm pointing out is that we should characterize the actions that are needed in a more rational way.
Entering a loop of one team getting in and instantly trying to Nuremberg the other team is partially why America is so polarized. It's a never ending loop of punishment and sadism.
I don't buy the 'both sides' POV except in the longest historical view. Right now it's just not true.
One team is a feckless collection of timid hesitators who is trying to defend a social welfare policy from 70 years ago, and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet.
>One team is a feckless collection of timid hesitators who is trying to defend a social welfare policy from 70 years ago
What is this referring to?
>and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet.
>It's just not the same.
What does this have to do with gp's claim about cycle of reprisals by both parties? It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.
I was responding the effort to paint the two sides as equal.
The cycle-of-reprisals is a separate point. In a two-party system, transfer of power means change. The minority party will always paint that as reprisal, so if you judge by who-complains-the-loudest, they will look the same. The churn of claims and counter-claims by politicians in the media has become a game with very predictable behaviors.
But if you look at actions, IMO they behave very differently.
> What does this have to do with gp's claim about cycle of reprisals by both parties? It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.
I think the reason we are in the situation we are in now is that the last administration wasn't nearly retaliatory _enough_ after J6
>I think the reason we are in the situation we are in now is that the last administration wasn't nearly retaliatory _enough_ after J6
Jailing Hitler sure stopped his movement in its tracks! Or maybe we should have gone even further and set a precedent for to jail people for decades for having "dangerous" political opinions?
While I agree that the question of "are we jailing this person for their political opinions" gets into skeevy areas, if we refuse to enforce laws just because elections and politics are involved we might as well not have any laws that involve elections and politics (and I don't think "lawlessness starts at the top" is a recipe for a healthy society).
> It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.
Then I suppose the situation will get worse? I don't understand the point of your analysis. This isn't a situation where people are swatting away olive branches - the Trump administration works hard to ensure that their political opponents are furious at them. They repeatedly state, in a variety of contexts, that they have no interest in finding common ground with the other party: it's good that you're miserable if you don't agree with their political objectives, and if you get in their way you deserve to be shot.
A consequence of that large political movement and its leaders is that numerous people have been murdered. MAGA can't wash its hands of the consequences of its beliefs and actions.
There were hundreds of prosecutions. Then SCOTUS declared the president immune. Then the bad guy got reelected and pardoned everyone. Then started launched truly malicious prosecutions of political enemies. Cases which thankfully are dying due to lack of merit.
One side is doing all the bad things and the other is simply struggling to stop them. Being cynical helps nothing.
The current Republican government is frankly almost identical to past Democratic ones in effect, it's just that the Republicans lack tact and the competence to cover things up.
But regardless of my opinions of the parties in question, I was talking about the constant threat of partisan retaliation.
I'm curious why you edited your comment? To appear more rational while making irrational tropes?
> Only one side
If you're going to use that tired old trope, maybe Reddit is a more suitable
place for you. Thanks for reminding me to add it to my blocklist though.
Why is it impossible for most people (more specifically Americans in my experience) to act in good faith during political discussion? You can't even admit wrongdoing or poor phrasing without them twisting your words or deliberately misunderstanding you.
we just saw the biden admin not do that, and the polarization only grew. They very specifically slow walked their investigation into trump's treason, so they wouldnt have to Nuremberg him.
trump mind you, is nuremburging non-voters. they dont exactly have side beyond trying to work and eat
The two sides aren't remotely the same. One side has become authoritarian and shifted far to the right. The current administration is seeking to undermine liberal democracy to give the executive all the meaningful power to enact Christian nationalism. It's also a cult of personality where the president can do no wrong, and anyone who defies him gets sent death threats.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> “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...
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.
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.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/08/google-to... [1] https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/16/are-there-fourth-amendm...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Consider Michael Reinoehl.
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?
... armed with guns and prepared to use violence.
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.
No root needed
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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...
*trilateration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration
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'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)
[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.
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
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
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
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/
Seems they are discontinued but there are other options that work similar such as "EZ Share"
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.
I think it's rapidly, finally, entering the realm of political viability.
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 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.
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".
And I'd suspect as an immigration attorney, she likely had first-hand experience of same.
// 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
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.
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.
Not sure what your point is other than volume of information available increases over time.
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"
<< 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.
<< 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.
Shouldn't the fact that ICE shot a woman trying to leave the scene be enough?
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.
<< 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?
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.
It's a rogue agency with no accountability that will continue to cause untold harm while making everyone less safe.
But Trump and his minions have worked hard to radicalize me over the past year, constantly arguing that everyone who personally dislikes Trump should be miserable and fear his wrath. They succeeded, so I no longer respect their authority and support all lawful efforts to obstruct anything they try to do. Perhaps in the future there will be a government I consider legitimate; if they can root out all of the goons Trump planted in DHS, I would endorse their authority to enforce immigration law again.
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?
"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 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.
yet. that's always the problem with such a strong declarative. things are not finished to be so finite
I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh.
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.
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.
Gambling, influencing, day trading, kick out the immigrants, anything works as long as it can promise to change your life for the better.
The fact that the fascists want to kill people for being brown doesn't change this.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If you see a video that shows the car making contact with the agent will you agree she should have stopped?
I’ll respond to reasonable arguments with polite and logical discussion.
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.
I’ll take the odds for vindictiveness.
First, as someone else observed in a sibling reply: "I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh." That's worth keeping in mind.
Second, when one says one wants "maximally vindictive candidates", whether intended or not, it implies behaving more like the party in power. Be careful what you wish for.
Third, related to the second point, if a comment can be interpreted in favor of either side, that may suggest it leaves something to be desired.
Following the principle of charity, perhaps "vindictive" is the wrong word. Perhaps all that's needed are candidates who'll enforce the law.
All in all, if anyone is being "dense" here, I'm not sure it's me. Do you own a mirror?
It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing." It is anti-insight.
Do you really believe that's being "vindictive", though? If so, why?
That's a big part of the problem: people characterize following the law as being "vindictive", and comparable to actual vindictiveness. It's a big part of why the Democrats have been so unwilling to hold anyone to account.
> It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing."
Wanting vindictiveness is absolutely the same thing the fascists are doing. Part of what I'm pointing out is that we should characterize the actions that are needed in a more rational way.
One team is a feckless collection of timid hesitators who is trying to defend a social welfare policy from 70 years ago, and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet.
It's just not the same.
What is this referring to?
>and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet.
>It's just not the same.
What does this have to do with gp's claim about cycle of reprisals by both parties? It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.
The cycle-of-reprisals is a separate point. In a two-party system, transfer of power means change. The minority party will always paint that as reprisal, so if you judge by who-complains-the-loudest, they will look the same. The churn of claims and counter-claims by politicians in the media has become a game with very predictable behaviors.
But if you look at actions, IMO they behave very differently.
I think the reason we are in the situation we are in now is that the last administration wasn't nearly retaliatory _enough_ after J6
Jailing Hitler sure stopped his movement in its tracks! Or maybe we should have gone even further and set a precedent for to jail people for decades for having "dangerous" political opinions?
Trump would have lost in 2024 if he was running from prison for his crimes against the country.
Then I suppose the situation will get worse? I don't understand the point of your analysis. This isn't a situation where people are swatting away olive branches - the Trump administration works hard to ensure that their political opponents are furious at them. They repeatedly state, in a variety of contexts, that they have no interest in finding common ground with the other party: it's good that you're miserable if you don't agree with their political objectives, and if you get in their way you deserve to be shot.
One side is doing all the bad things and the other is simply struggling to stop them. Being cynical helps nothing.
But regardless of my opinions of the parties in question, I was talking about the constant threat of partisan retaliation.
trump mind you, is nuremburging non-voters. they dont exactly have side beyond trying to work and eat
It’s a country founded off of reject zealots. What do you expect?
Sounds like if you're denying location permissions to shady apps (why would you allow in the first place?), you're probably fine.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Means-Control-Alliance-Government-Sur...
https://reason.com/2026/01/08/you-have-the-right-to-record-i...
Rules for thee and not for me...
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.
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.
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 is you have to leave Google with both for it to do much good
> 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
I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
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.
This type of problem needs to be fixed on the society level.
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.
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.
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".
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.
You learn something new everyday.
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)."
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?
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.
Really??
You can take it out of your pocket and use it to communicate.
Don't let them!
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.
ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534581
Did you know that women's period was tracked by propietary smartphone apps?
There goes your freedom.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61952794
I mean, FFS, what kind of principled third-party invites the authoritarian "opposition" candidate as the keynote speaker to their convention?
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.
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.
eh at least it's being seen
Be sure to read their other DHS coverage
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