- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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I mean who doesn’t know this cmon
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.
Yes/no.
The data processing capabilities they have will far FAR outweigh anything you can effectively achieve with AI spam at your scale.
Even if you got thousands to participate, it wouldn’t really be all that much.
Remember, these are agencies already doing data processing on social media, meaning they’re already setup to analyze billions of messages a day.
Texting is so low volume it’s almost comical, and people that are trying to poison the well stand out and become easy to filter.
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.
From an RF enthusiast,
Wideband jamming will get a lot of attention very quickly and is extremely easy to triangulate with handheld hardware and a couple of hours of training. I’d recommended against doing that.
if you’ve ever used a radar detector you know, people drive like they are always being watched. not often in my experience. doubt these dolts are real sophisticated. fear is their main weapon.
yeah pretty much never trust a public wifi without vpn. bring your own router. cell data is pwned. technics aren’t in their curriculums.
Ummm, no shit!?
So basically, one could go to ICE protest and troll with fake conversations about attack points and watch them scatter to control nonexistent issues.
“Free Donuts, corner of 12th & Main. Tell no one.”
better be VERY coded language that a jury would agree is innocent in nature and intent.
Brave to think this will go before a jury.
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.
Yes, but they would probably arrest you instead.
IMSI catchers. It’s known at least for 10 years now, that they get used on protests in US.
Would a burner phone be susceptible to this kind of attack?
Sure but no phone also works.
Yes, but then you get rid of it immediately. Also, don’t activate it or have it on at home or any other place that can be associated with you. Only do so after paying with cash and at the location where you’re going to use it then dispose of it.
You will be recorded while paying for the phone. This won’t bring you any anonymity.
You will have been recorded at the protest too. So the store recording gives away nothing new.
wear a mask, nondescript clothing, pay with cash, and don’t bring your phone to the store
Wear gloves, rinse the fingerprints off the money, wait for it to dry, then use it to buy stuff
Blowdry your beard, moisturize your hands and use a kangaroo scrotum purse.
once again.
do not take your phone to a protest
And cover your damn face.
And if you must, leave it off, ideally in a faraday cage/bag.
: takes off face and puts it in faraday cage:
I am once again recommending idcaboutprivacy
Can you fix the markdown of the second bullet point?
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
I probably should have specified that
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.
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.
the so-called left wing one are usually the ones we block , but they seem more like right wingers.
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.
I left because of the api changes and the excessive censorship (rip r/watchpeopledie my beloved) and it’s general hatred towards ita mobile website
It depends on where you draw the line for “the center.” I’d agree it’s leftist for America, but it’s center-left on a global scale. You’ll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It’s kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like “guillotine the rich” (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don’t see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn’t, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as “center left.”
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I’m left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what’s left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn’t be telling people how to live or what they can or can’t do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don’t want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They’ll argue they don’t agree with slavery, but what’s the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)
anarchist
I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.
I started life as a conservative, mostly because I bought into the lie that they actually wanted smaller government. Ron Paul got me excited because he actually wanted smaller government, but seeing him get trashed by the establishment pushed me out. Around that time I found Penn Jillette (libertarian anarchist), and he really resonated with me.
I dislike the Libertarian Party, but I have liked individuals within it, and that generally seems the most likely party to actually make a difference (i.e. get on a debate stage so people can hear a different perspective). My ballot is all over the place though, with a mixture of Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and sometimes a random third party if the candidate is good.
But yeah, I just want to be left alone, and if we need a government (I think we do), it should be limited to protecting us from each other and ensuring everyone has the necessities. Other than that, business should be largely unrestrained and unprotected (limited liability should end after a certain size, execs should be arrested if they break the law, etc), and there should be strong support from government to protect privacy. Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that, but consumer protections should be provided by the AG leading lawsuits against companies.
I think “classical liberal” is the better term for me, but “libertarian” gets the message across pretty well, and I identify with the NAP underpinnings of the ideology. I’m registered with the party to increase the stats of third parties to hopefully encourage electoral reform (end FPTP), not because I think they’re great.
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.
I just hate their app and refuse to use it
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. You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as a swearword.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats, because they may get it in their head that these are the things to destroy just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Yes, but that is no reason to disparage socialism itself. In authoritarian socialism, it is the authoritarian part that sucks.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.
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.
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn’t “left” no matter how much they might think it is.
Anarchism isn’t the only way to be a leftist.
There’s an awful lot of space between authoritarianism and anarchism.
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.
How does one build a scanner to detect anomalies consistent with IMSI catchers?
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.
Amen!
Digital camera + SD card (about $100) and save the little plastic container that came with the SD card in case you have to swallow it.
In some countries, like Greece, you can’t use an unregistered phone number.
Since phone numbers are tied to people’s identities, does it really matter whether you use a burner or your main?
Then don’t take a phone. If you’re an organizer who needs to communicate, get a wifi/bt only tablet, look up mesh networks that use bluetooth and wifi, learn encryption and learn code words.
It’s trivial to jam any wireless network. All jamming is it to flood the rf range with loud static. But you can still take measures to keep from being spied on.
We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.
As long as it’s a self contained communication version and doesn’t require using the meshtadtic phone app
I used to watch The Hated One, who has also made similar recommendations for strikes. He has suggested the use of Briar, as it can fallback to Bluetooth connectivity.
However, I mostly wanted to point out that burner phones is not the answer for everyone. People need to be familiar with their local laws to stay safe.
Its for censorship resistance, but, in order for the mesh network to be able to identify each other’s device and initiate connections, by design it transmits your bluetooth MAC address to all your contacts, even those added via the internet.
Isn’t Bluetooth a bad idea because it’s bouncing off nearby phones and reporting your position?
Honestly, I think it’s best to put it (preferable a burner phone and not your everyday phone) in a faraday bag and don’t use it unless absolutely necessary and if you want to take photos/video, buy a 2000s era digicam from eBay.
Right, Briar is not anonymous btw
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”.
