I mean…is that not assumed to be the default? Cell phone surveillance is pretty much just business as usual in this country is it not?
This is illegal without a warrant. And judges have been denying broad sweeping warrants that would cover such situations.
We are in different times. This administration doesn’t care about warrants.
It honestly doesn’t care about “illegal” much either 😅
never did. us three-letter-agencies have been buying data to get around pesky laws for a while now.
Pretty sure this kind of thing has been illegal since before Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, tbh. The US Government hasn’t cared about people’s privacy and the laws surrounding it for decades.
You’re assuming the ICErs give a shit about warrants, and they often do not.
Relying on the rule of law is reactive.
Ditching the phone is proactive.
Be Proactive.
pardon me, sir, but this is illegal withou-
click
hey! Uncuff me! This is illegal!
car door shuts
Hey! Let me out of this car!
vroooooom
Where are we going!? You can’t take me to jail!
arrives at jail
Dear family, they call this place prison, it looks like prison, and I’ve been issued what they’re calling a “lawyer”, but impossible as that may be considering they didn’t have a warrant, I can only deduce that I’ve been kidnapped by a vigilante to a remote location pretending to be a prison!
once again.
do not take your phone to a protest
And if you must, leave it off, ideally in a faraday cage/bag.
: takes off face and puts it in faraday cage:
And cover your damn face.
Even though most of the comments here point out the obvious that phones are a risk, this kind of journalism is still important for spreading awareness and documentation of illegal surveillance for the record
Yeah lemmy is mostly a left echo chamber, which is generally a net positive. But someone like my cousin who still gets their news from Facebook but might want to protest now they are thinking about their views would benefit from this journalism
Eh, it’s a center-left chamber at best. As evidenced by the extreme reaction to the far-left echo chambers.
By “far-left” you mean the pro-Russia and pro-China segment of this place? They seem more like government mouthpieces than people who actually support leftist policies (which don’t represent the policies of the Russian or Chinese government.
This place is also full of Blue MAGA liberals which I’d classify as right-wing at this point, so it seems there’s a whole spectrum of beliefs represented here.
also calling people blue maga is very disengenious, they arnt right wingers so please dont associate with them.
They certainly are right-wingers when the support candidates and policies that are wholly right wing. I don’t care if they think they’re leftists just because they’re voting Democrat. They’re just deluding themselves. This is the origin of the adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The Democrats haven’t represented the left in decades and now they’ve moved so far right that they’re aiding in genocide, fucking the working class, and prancing around the campaign trail with Dick Cheney
Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn’t “left” no matter how much they might think it is.
You ignore 50% of the political compass here - authoritarianism sucks just as much as fascism or unbridled capitalism.
At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn’t a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it’s a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)
And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it’s an
- right-nationalist (“rescuing” suppressed people from the evil Ukraine - that one is super ironic because it’s exactly the same argumentation Germany used with the Sudetendeutsche)
- authoritarian (arrests for holding up empty pieces of paper, drafting for the war - but only in the poor areas far away from Moscow) regime
- centered on cultural identity (anti-gay laws, “restoring the CCCP”, persisting propaganda comparing the Ukraine war with WW2, "we have to defend ourselves from NATO)
It’s pretty late, so i don’t repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i’m pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.
If .ml were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate hexbear, but they do.
Hexbear is specifically the shitpost refuge of displaced terminally-online /r/chapotraphouse diaspora and it’s hard to parse the layers of irony and in-joke and I’m not invested enough in that community to try and fairly represent it here. I’m not surprised that people have an aversion to it but the amount of space it takes up in some people’s head here is bonkers. The goals and culture are very different than .ml.
If you attend a protest, you need to read this and follow it:
If you’re in Washington as in this article, and need a lawyer after being arrested at a protest, the phone number is 206-OK-TRY-ME
Also: https://sls.eff.org/
Good read!
A lot of great info, but "If you choose to answer questions, be sure to tell the truth” is a mistake. Remember, anything you say “can and will be used against you.” Key word, against. Nothing you tell them will be used to help you. Remain silent.
Also don’t forget to actually verbally invoke your rights, being silent doesn’t invoke it in the US
the Court held that, unless and until a criminal suspect explicitly states that they are relying on their right to remain silent, their voluntary statements may be used in court and police may continue to question them. The mere act of remaining silent is not sufficient to imply the suspect has invoked their rights even when the suspect actually intended their silence to have that effect.
Something like: “I hereby invoke the 5th amendment right to silence, and I want to talk to a lawyer”
Practice memorizing numbers so your experience goes smoother.
Make sure you speak clearly with minimal slang, or they might willfully misinterpret what you’re saying to deny your rights. Like to think you want a lawyer dog.
Please dont take.your fucking phone to a protest. Buy a burner if you must.
You will be tracked. And spied on. And facial recognitioned. Etc.
I honestly thought this was common knowledge but obviously I was wrong. I get the need to video and document but damn. Don’t use your daily driver folks.
Hot take: Let the press document things, and leave the burner-phone stuff to security professionals. The press more or less requires attribution, so let them front that risk. Meanwhile digital anonymity starts at point-of-sale and is not easy for just anyone to pull off. The overwhelming majority of people are just better off just showing up “naked”.
Could AI be used to create a bunch of useless chatter in the airways that they would have to sift through and waste their time? Maybe use AI for actual good.
IMSI spoofing is a product of wireless telephony being an ancient (way-pre-internet) technology, and we’re long in an era where law enforcement (or in this case law-enforcement coded) investigators don’t have to obey laws, such as assuring due process, and unreasonable searches disqualifying evidence. Instead they’re hunting political enemies, and every prisoner of the United States is now a political prisoner.
It also means we don’t have to obey the law, and can start using all-frequency jammers in and around protests and ICE actions to level the playing field. (It will also interfere with regular infrastructure, but it’s not like ICE or the current regime gives half a fuck about that.
All-frequency jammers are older tech and easier to build than IMSI spoofers, and are highly illegal since so much of our commerce and communications depend on radio. But the current FTC has also been captured and is failing to do its job.
Any Amateur Radio enthusiast will know how to make a jammer. And current battery technology would assure you could make a handful that are portable and powerful enough to shut down blocks and blocks of municipal communication. This is playing pretty hardball, but then ICE isn’t playing by the rules.
I wonder if it would be possible to extend the capabilities of the software to triangulate the location of a a Stingray or other false tower with a few more of those devices working in concert in the same area.
So basically, one could go to ICE protest and troll with fake conversations about attack points and watch them scatter to control nonexistent issues.
might be better to have a bunch of gibberish with a few named places.
They might think it’s code and deploy there, and you’re not actually making a legitimate threat they could come after you for somehow.
better be VERY coded language that a jury would agree is innocent in nature and intent.
“Free Donuts, corner of 12th & Main. Tell no one.”
Yes, but they would probably arrest you instead.
You probably wouldn’t want to bring a phone to some types of events, but as the number of these events increase, the odds of you just happening to be close to such an event during the course of a normal day might increase. Maybe it’s best if we turn off 2g reception on our phones. No reason to be swept up in warrantless sweeps if not necessary.
I am once again recommending idcaboutprivacy
yeah pretty much never trust a public wifi without vpn. bring your own router. cell data is pwned. technics aren’t in their curriculums.
I mean who doesn’t know this cmon
and they criticize china for this bruh
IMSI catchers. It’s known at least for 10 years now, that they get used on protests in US.
I’m surprised it was finally acknowledged. The anamoliess were discovered in March and tested out at several smaller protests before the big ones.
Burner phone, but the power of photography is necessary. Don’t get faces, which isn’t usually too hard as everyone faces a single direction.
I know this sounds crazy in 2025, but you can still buy standalone digital cameras. You can even get discreet devices that record constantly.
I think the idea behind a phone with a camera is that your can immediately upload what you’ve got in case some thug with a badge takes your device and smashes it
