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.
Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
on 10 Jul 13:14
nextcollapse
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!
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 14:49
nextcollapse
You’re assuming the ICErs give a shit about warrants, and they often do not.
lemmy_acct_id_8647@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 15:20
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It’s endearing that you think that even matters anymore
The US Government only gives a shit when they are caught. You’d have a damn hard time trying to prove mass surveillance to a court even though we all know they do it.
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.
The perfect gift. Just remember to look at reviews before you buy and test the ones you have. They do vary a lot in how well they actually work (to the point that some are so useless it would almost have to be intentional)
HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 12:00
nextcollapse
Remember to leave your phones at home or turned off completely if you go to a protest
sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today
on 10 Jul 12:53
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Turned off completely isn’t off. You’d need to put it in a Faraday bag
Bytemeister@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 16:17
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Better yet, give it to a friend who isn’t attending the protest, and have them drive around with the phone. Pull it out and check some sites with it every few minutes, maybe send a few messages.
I attach raw chicken to my phone and let the racoons be my digital eyes for a few. They get fed, I get plausible deniability, and only a mild case of conjunctivitis!
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.
lemmy_acct_id_8647@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 15:19
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Nailed it. Am I being detained? Name and badge number? Am I free to go? This are the only questions to ask.
The only statement you give is one word after they say you’re not free to go: lawyer.
Call for a lawyer and don’t say another word.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 15:40
nextcollapse
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.
It’s correct. If you choose to answer questions, you should tell the truth. That should be preceded, in bold, “don’t fucking answer questions! If the police talk to you, shut the fuck up.”
zapzap@lemmings.world
on 10 Jul 12:41
nextcollapse
Kinda unexpected to see Straight Arrow News doing original reporting.
Deflated0ne@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 14:33
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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.
lemmy_acct_id_8647@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 15:17
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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.
dejected_warp_core@piefed.world
on 10 Jul 19:07
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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".
jim3692@discuss.online
on 10 Jul 16:19
nextcollapse
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.
Edit: also look into if MAC address spoofing. Not entirely sure which models of phones support that, officially or otherwise though.
jim3692@discuss.online
on 10 Jul 17:14
nextcollapse
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.
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.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 04:14
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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.
I’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.
LemmyThinkAboutThat@lemmy.myserv.one
on 11 Jul 05:26
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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.
imposedsensation@lemmynsfw.com
on 10 Jul 15:34
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How does one build a scanner to detect anomalies consistent with IMSI catchers?
RaoulDook@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 15:35
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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
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.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 19:34
nextcollapse
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn’t “left” no matter how much they might think it is.
There sure is, including “vanguardism” which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 21:12
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CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 22:27
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In what way would you classify the Chinese or Russian governments that these tankies support “communist?” That’s like believing that Nazis were a socialist party simply because that word is in the name.
Well that’s easy, I don’t. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying “this is a communist state that I fully endorse” doesn’t make sense to me. But I think there’s a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Jul 19:57
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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)
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Jul 01:54
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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.
At no point in here have I said that Russia isn’t a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You’re confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.
Pretty sure the one thing to say about fascism besides it being authoritarian is that it wants corporate control. Mussolini was debating calling it Corporatism.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 19:49
nextcollapse
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.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 23:14
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 00:39
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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.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
Engels wrote that in 1848, when The Communist Manifesto was published, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists while working-class movements that “proclaimed the necessity of total social change” denoted themselves communists.[54] This branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.[55] British moral philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed a form of economic socialism within free market. In later editions of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill posited that “as far as economic theory was concerned, there is nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies”[56][57] and promoted substituting capitalist businesses with worker cooperatives.[58] While democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, Marxists denounced it as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the proletariat.[59]
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 13:53
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The history of terms isn’t particularly relevant, though it is interesting. For example, “libertarianism” largely came from socialism, and “liberalism” largely meant “small government,” whereas today libertarianism is pretty close to what liberalism used to mean, and “liberals” are in favor of large government.
Here’s what I mean by each term:
socialism - “Democratic ownership of the means of production,” as in, the government runs the economy
Democratic socialism - large central government with a lot of subsidised services, like healthcare; the means of production are private owned, but heavily taxed
libertarianism - “subscribes to the non-aggression principle, emphasizes radical individual freedoms and minimal taxation” - government services should be minimized to prevent top down abuse
communism - the end goal of socialism, which is a stateless society where people share what they produce so everyone has enough (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need)
I think socialism as defined above is unworkable because bureaucrats will abuse their power, communism is unworkable because people are selfish, and Democratic socialism is tricky because a large state tends to restrict the freedoms of its people. That’s why I align with libertarianism, but am on the left end where I believe there should be wealth redistribution through something like UBI (I prefer Negative Income Tax), so you get most of the benefits of socialism (everyone gets what they need) without most of the bureaucracy (no application process other than tax return).
My position is that people are selfish because they’re raised in a society that rewards selfishness. There’s always going to be outliers but that’s the goal of vanguardism: someone needs to steer the ship while the generational change happens. I don’t know if that’s the best path forward but it is a path and might work better with more safeguards against a Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot type but that’s a hard conversation to have when people aren’t willing to to consider any element of communism.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jul 04:03
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Maybe. I think people are more selfish the larger the group gets. So if you’re a small tribe, most people will work for the good of the tribe, but if you’re able to easily move between tribes, there’s less downside to selfishness.
So my opinion is we should assume selfishness and design a society around it, and capitalism does a pretty good job at that.
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 23:18
nextcollapse
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 13:14
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Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 01:40
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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?)
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 13:31
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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.
I have serious practical concerns with anarchism, but that is certainly the ideal.
You should have serious practical concerns with everything. My practical concerns with libertarianism is what led me to social anarchism. For example:
Consumer protections should largely be unnecessary if the market is sufficiently competitive, and ending protectionism should provide that…
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition? Without government stepping in, why wouldn’t the largest companies create barriers that prevent competition? They can user their capital to undercut competitors until they can’t remain solvent, then increase prices far above cost. They can also buy out competitors before they are real competition. They can use their market dominance to demand suppliers to show their product more prominently, or to only show their product.
There are far too many ways the dominant company can curtail competition, and we’ve seen it played out many times even with our current system that Libertarians want to remove the guardrails from. For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
This is the kind of thing that led me to social anarchism. People are the important thing, not companies. We need a government that’s empowered to protect people, but that let’s people do what they want (assuming they don’t hurt other people). Ideally also we remove hierarchy from the companies and have them owned by employees or the people also. Letting them treat humans as a human resource (which is crazy that HR can be called that and people don’t see a problem) is the issue. Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 16:34
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Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition?
Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.
Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:
small, scrappy startup w/ an innovative idea
medium corp that expands its product line to corner a piece of the market
large corp that buys out competition and lobbies to raise the barrier to entry
mega corp that strategically uses subsidiaries to compartmentalize risk to not suffer consequences for bankruptcy
At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.
I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.
Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).
In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.
For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.
People are the important thing, not companies
Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.
How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.
My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.
I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’
I don’t know if you understand what protectionism is. Protectionism is favoring domestic production over foreign. I don’t think it has anything to do with your comment. The way you’re using it seems to be just not holding them accountable. That’s just capitalism though. They buy the legislators who create the justice system.
I agree larger corporations should face more scrutiny or liability. I’ve never seen a Libertarian express this opinion though. The standard libertarian position is: “The larger company earned its money and should be free to spend it how they wish, including molding the system to its desires. The Market decided they’re the most capable after all.”
I haven’t seen those originals disappear…
It happens. You probably wouldn’t notice it, but it’s constantly going on. It’s particularly bad for niche product. Things like charging cables or whatever, the market is large enough to support multiple products, and there’s only so far Amazon is willing to cut it and those are cost so little for anyone to make.
Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own.
A goal has to be something measurable, but sure. Yeah. That’s basically what I said. Improve lives (meaning happiness). That essentially implies freedom to persue what you want. I don’t know what else it could mean. However, it also need to include companies leaving people alone. The government isn’t the only source of authority influencing peoples lives, and we need a government to protect them.
Obviously, I haven’t dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I’m trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it’s transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.
I largely agree, but I think the key point of why anarchism (aka, removing hierarchy, not no government) is the way I went is because, with hierarchy, those with resources will always buy an advantage. We need a government that actually represents the people, which means it needs to be made of the people, not lifelong legislators. Some of that should be direct democracy where it can be, but rotating representatives chosen from regular people who serve temporary terms, so they can’t gather power, is ideal. As long as capital controls the government then capitalists will buy the system, and libertarians generally (not saying you specifically) argue this is part of the design and good, because they proved “they know best.”
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 05:22
nextcollapse
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
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 13:07
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The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
Aren’t the devs of Lemmy Marxist leninist or something and .ml is one of their instances?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 22:48
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That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jul 22:21
nextcollapse
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 11 Jul 00:00
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also calling people blue maga is very disengenious, they arnt right wingers so please dont associate with them.
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 00:09
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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
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 10 Jul 23:58
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the so-called left wing one are usually the ones we block , but they seem more like right wingers.
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.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
on 10 Jul 15:54
nextcollapse
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.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 16:14
nextcollapse
I know this sounds crazy in 2025, but you can still buy standalone digital cameras. You can even get discreet devices that record constantly.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
on 10 Jul 16:35
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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
FuckFascism@lemmy.world
on 10 Jul 22:47
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Would a burner phone be susceptible to this kind of attack?
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
on 10 Jul 23:25
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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.
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.
RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com
on 11 Jul 18:46
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I don’t understand the entire first half of your comment. The only explanation I have for how well received it was would have to be the last two sentences which resonated with people.
cashsky@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jul 02:40
nextcollapse
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.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jul 05:50
nextcollapse
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 [FCC] 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.
Sawblade02@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Jul 13:28
nextcollapse
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.
I understand it would be totally easy to triangulate if it were a single jammer, but would it be possible to triangulate a mesh of maybe half a dozen jammers. It seems like a headache to try to triangulate that because your signal strength would be all over the place.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jul 20:47
nextcollapse
At the point you already have a tense paramilitary operation clashing with protests in what is escalating towards lethal violence, I’m not sure finding wideband jammers will be the priority of responders in the area, at least not the first few times.
Though in times of peace and order, wideband jamming is, yes, a big no-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.
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Jul 03:56
nextcollapse
I mean who doesn’t know this cmon
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world
on 11 Jul 17:38
nextcollapse
Exclusive BREAKING NEWS: After careful consideration by the World’s top scientists from 1000+ top Universities, it turns out that WATER, H2O, the Wet Wet is, in fact, wet.
No fucking way! I’m gonna need about 100 articles about that, all explaining the exact same thing, but slightly too dumbed down to the point that it doesn’t actually tell me anything.
raynethackery@lemmy.world
on 12 Jul 00:57
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Then I’m just going to do my own Facebook research and come to my own conclusion.
Have you ever been to China? (I have, family is from there and lives there, Hong Kong, and Saigon). Because their crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than ours. Even Hong Kong, had like 5 homicides late year… (China is trying to take over the island). They have cameras EVERY. WHERE. Therefore, you can’t get away with crimes. Sucks it has to be that way… but don’t do a crime and don’t have to worry, common sense.
America is horrid right now, tear gassing peaceful protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets which some victims have been lost eye site because they were hit in the face, no affordable healthcare options, MASSIVE FALSE information, govt approving bills that only help the rich, etc. The thing that is the worse is that if we cannot use tear gas in WAR why the FUCK are we using it as a weapon for our own people… the policing force and govt is now being the citizens enemy!
Yes, China is horrid for workers but like the previous comment “evil is still EVIL!” Is it that much better in America when we have people living paycheck to paycheck, homeless, can’t afford anything, etc. most of us still can’t afford damn healthcare… so China vs America… BOTH ARE FUCKING EVIL in their own ways! Our country is a laughing stock, people are flooding out and NO ONE is visiting or wants to come here anymore. We are the ONLY country with a DECLINE in tourists… not even China had a decline… that’s embarrassing!
Basically, evil is still evil not matter the degree!
Yes, I’ve been there multiple times. I have seen people who went to jail for sending a political meme on a private WeChat group because Xi felt insulted. Even in the US which is in a huge democratic backsliding for years, it’s nowhere that bad. In China there’s also “massive false information” but the thing is, it’s all government-run propaganda only and the rest of the world’s media is blocked. In the US, you can read Al Jazeera if you don’t like the American media narratives. In China you can’t. In USA, you can use Lemmy to laugh about Trump’s fake tan. In China Lemmy is blocked and even if it wasn’t, laughing at Xi gets you in jail. There’s no political freedom in China, even if it’s in shambles in the US now, let alone countries with a working democracy like Switzerland.
Hong Kong is not mainland China, you picked one of the only two places (alongside Macau) that doesn’t have a censored internet in China. Regular Chinese need to pay $30 for a visa/entry permit to Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a different system than Mainland China. When taking about China, I am talking about mainland China and not a special administrative region of Hong Kong, obviously.
Regarding the economy (I’ve never mentioned it and it has nothing to do with democracy but ok), many people in China also can’t afford health care and are living paycheck to paycheck (or worse). China is not just Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Do you think 120 yuan pension is enough in the Chinese village near Chengdu? That’s what grandparents of one of my Chinese friend make. Asked her if that’s enough, she laughed and replied “of course not!”. Do you think they were able to before retiring, working their whole lives as farmers? Do you really think such people don’t live paycheck to paycheck and it’s USA-exclusive issue than China doesn’t have? Do you know how many months of a median wage you need to work for a house in any major city in China vs in the US (spoiler: it’s even longer than in the US).
Summing up: the political freedom is still lower in China than in any flawed democracy (as I stated before), and China also has its economic issues which you seem to neglect. Yes, USA has those too, but it’s still among the richest countries in the world. You would be better off in many European countries if you’re poor but not in China.
TheLoneMinon@lemmy.world
on 12 Jul 01:11
nextcollapse
One thing I’m noticing in these comments, and in a lot of comments threads is the “well yeah, duh. Everyone already knew that” and while I’m definitely in that camp and have done that myself, I am starting to wonder if there is danger there.
Like, this is a significant breach of privacy and trust and the kind of thing that we should be up in arms about. But we already assume the government is doing the worst movie villain shit imaginable, so when we have evidence of it we shrug it off as just another Tuesday.
Yeah, waters wet. We should still be alarmed when we see a puddle of it somewhere it shouldn’t be. (I don’t know if that analogy actually tracks but I’m sticking with it).
slaveOne@reddthat.com
on 12 Jul 01:27
nextcollapse
Like in a water cooled PC
KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca
on 12 Jul 01:32
nextcollapse
I think you can just assume at this point the US government does not care about the constitution or it’s people and will use any means necessary to collect data on those who wish to counter its growing authoritarian nature.
If you go to a protest, only take a burner phone or no phone at all. If you must take your phone, turn it off and Faraday cage it.
The US has become a failed state. Leave if you can. Things will only get worse before it completely implodes.
You’re not wrong, but these days the number of members of the public that truly cares (to point of taking action) about privacy is an extreme minority.
jeromyokc@lemmy.okla.social
on 12 Jul 02:10
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Saw a job posting yesterday to assist a contractor with installing a system used by police to monitor school camera feeds directly “to support law enforcement”. jesus fuck man
threaded - newest
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 😅
Edit: for themselves of course! Everyone else…
*so long as the perpetrator is of an appropriate skin tone or works for a government agency
insert Family Guy skin tone terrorist meme
Strangely, it does seem to care about under-age people.
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.
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!
You’re assuming the ICErs give a shit about warrants, and they often do not.
It’s endearing that you think that even matters anymore
It’s sad that people like you completely giving up are exactly why we are in an authoritarian slide.
They’re not giving up. They’re simply observing things that are happening.
Way to infer meaning, slugger.
If you think law enforcement violating the law doesn’t matter then I inferred nothing.
I think they don’t give a fuck if they’re violating the law. Why don’t you get tf out of here with your self righteous bullshit kiddo.
Fucking infighting bullshit.
Wow, you really quickly forgot how you started this of with a condescending apathetic statement.
Relying on the rule of law is reactive.
Ditching the phone is proactive.
Be Proactive.
The US Government only gives a shit when they are caught. You’d have a damn hard time trying to prove mass surveillance to a court even though we all know they do it.
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.
Faraday bags make great stocking stuffers.
The perfect gift. Just remember to look at reviews before you buy and test the ones you have. They do vary a lot in how well they actually work (to the point that some are so useless it would almost have to be intentional)
Remember to leave your phones at home or turned off completely if you go to a protest
Turned off completely isn’t off. You’d need to put it in a Faraday bag
Better yet, give it to a friend who isn’t attending the protest, and have them drive around with the phone. Pull it out and check some sites with it every few minutes, maybe send a few messages.
I attach raw chicken to my phone and let the racoons be my digital eyes for a few. They get fed, I get plausible deniability, and only a mild case of conjunctivitis!
Honestly, the real answer is to dress up like ICE and then be dicks to crows. Trump’s SS won’t be able to operate in your city for years!
Aww, but then I gotta be a dick to crows and I like the small army of two that I've amassed thus far! Even if they wouldn't know, I would know!
That’s okay, then you dress as yourself and be super nice to crows. It evens out.
We have much to learn of your wisdom!
This is one reason why I liked when you could physically remove the battery on phones.
If you attend a protest, you need to read this and follow it:
https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest
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.
Nailed it. Am I being detained? Name and badge number? Am I free to go? This are the only questions to ask.
The only statement you give is one word after they say you’re not free to go: lawyer.
Call for a lawyer and don’t say another word.
Also don’t forget to actually verbally invoke your rights, being silent doesn’t invoke it in the US
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.
@lemmy_acct_id_8647@lemmy.world
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.
slate.com/…/suspect-asks-for-a-lawyer-dawg-judge-…
Here’s a reminder of how to interact with police.
youtu.be/uqo5RYOp4nQ
It’s correct. If you choose to answer questions, you should tell the truth. That should be preceded, in bold, “don’t fucking answer questions! If the police talk to you, shut the fuck up.”
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: sls.eff.org
Kinda unexpected to see Straight Arrow News doing original reporting.
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".
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.
Edit: also look into if MAC address spoofing. Not entirely sure which models of phones support that, officially or otherwise though.
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.
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
BRIAR IS NOT ANONYMOUS
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.
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’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.
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.
How does one build a scanner to detect anomalies consistent with IMSI catchers?
github.com/EFForg/rayhunter
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.
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.
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.
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.
There sure is, including “vanguardism” which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.
<img alt="" src="https://i.imgflip.com/9zxcfm.jpg">
In what way would you classify the Chinese or Russian governments that these tankies support “communist?” That’s like believing that Nazis were a socialist party simply because that word is in the name.
Well that’s easy, I don’t. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying “this is a communist state that I fully endorse” doesn’t make sense to me. But I think there’s a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.
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
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.
At no point in here have I said that Russia isn’t a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You’re confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.
Pretty sure the one thing to say about fascism besides it being authoritarian is that it wants corporate control. Mussolini was debating calling it Corporatism.
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.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over 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.
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.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
The history of terms isn’t particularly relevant, though it is interesting. For example, “libertarianism” largely came from socialism, and “liberalism” largely meant “small government,” whereas today libertarianism is pretty close to what liberalism used to mean, and “liberals” are in favor of large government.
Here’s what I mean by each term:
I think socialism as defined above is unworkable because bureaucrats will abuse their power, communism is unworkable because people are selfish, and Democratic socialism is tricky because a large state tends to restrict the freedoms of its people. That’s why I align with libertarianism, but am on the left end where I believe there should be wealth redistribution through something like UBI (I prefer Negative Income Tax), so you get most of the benefits of socialism (everyone gets what they need) without most of the bureaucracy (no application process other than tax return).
My position is that people are selfish because they’re raised in a society that rewards selfishness. There’s always going to be outliers but that’s the goal of vanguardism: someone needs to steer the ship while the generational change happens. I don’t know if that’s the best path forward but it is a path and might work better with more safeguards against a Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot type but that’s a hard conversation to have when people aren’t willing to to consider any element of communism.
Maybe. I think people are more selfish the larger the group gets. So if you’re a small tribe, most people will work for the good of the tribe, but if you’re able to easily move between tribes, there’s less downside to selfishness.
So my opinion is we should assume selfishness and design a society around it, and capitalism does a pretty good job at that.
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.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
I just hate their app and refuse to use it
Oh it’s a terrible app, just the worst.
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 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?)
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 should have serious practical concerns with everything. My practical concerns with libertarianism is what led me to social anarchism. For example:
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition? Without government stepping in, why wouldn’t the largest companies create barriers that prevent competition? They can user their capital to undercut competitors until they can’t remain solvent, then increase prices far above cost. They can also buy out competitors before they are real competition. They can use their market dominance to demand suppliers to show their product more prominently, or to only show their product.
There are far too many ways the dominant company can curtail competition, and we’ve seen it played out many times even with our current system that Libertarians want to remove the guardrails from. For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
This is the kind of thing that led me to social anarchism. People are the important thing, not companies. We need a government that’s empowered to protect people, but that let’s people do what they want (assuming they don’t hurt other people). Ideally also we remove hierarchy from the companies and have them owned by employees or the people also. Letting them treat humans as a human resource (which is crazy that HR can be called that and people don’t see a problem) is the issue. Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.
Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:
At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.
I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.
Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).
In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.
I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.
Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.
How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.
My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.
I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’
I don’t know if you understand what protectionism is. Protectionism is favoring domestic production over foreign. I don’t think it has anything to do with your comment. The way you’re using it seems to be just not holding them accountable. That’s just capitalism though. They buy the legislators who create the justice system.
I agree larger corporations should face more scrutiny or liability. I’ve never seen a Libertarian express this opinion though. The standard libertarian position is: “The larger company earned its money and should be free to spend it how they wish, including molding the system to its desires. The Market decided they’re the most capable after all.”
It happens. You probably wouldn’t notice it, but it’s constantly going on. It’s particularly bad for niche product. Things like charging cables or whatever, the market is large enough to support multiple products, and there’s only so far Amazon is willing to cut it and those are cost so little for anyone to make.
A goal has to be something measurable, but sure. Yeah. That’s basically what I said. Improve lives (meaning happiness). That essentially implies freedom to persue what you want. I don’t know what else it could mean. However, it also need to include companies leaving people alone. The government isn’t the only source of authority influencing peoples lives, and we need a government to protect them.
I largely agree, but I think the key point of why anarchism (aka, removing hierarchy, not no government) is the way I went is because, with hierarchy, those with resources will always buy an advantage. We need a government that actually represents the people, which means it needs to be made of the people, not lifelong legislators. Some of that should be direct democracy where it can be, but rotating representatives chosen from regular people who serve temporary terms, so they can’t gather power, is ideal. As long as capital controls the government then capitalists will buy the system, and libertarians generally (not saying you specifically) argue this is part of the design and good, because they proved “they know best.”
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
The API changes were the last straw for me too, but I had been searching for a while because it felt very much like an echo-chamber. Lemmy does too, but at least the API is open.
Aren’t the devs of Lemmy Marxist leninist or something and .ml is one of their instances?
That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.
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
the so-called left wing one are usually the ones we block , but they seem more like right wingers.
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.
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 probably should have specified that
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
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I am once again recommending idcaboutprivacy
Can you fix the markdown of the second bullet point?
Done. Good lookin out.
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:
.
Instructions unclear; now I look like Nicolas Cage.
And if you have to make a call or text, use something encrypted.
Also voice over data sounds better anyway. Traditional phone calls sound like shit. Treat yo self.
And cover your damn face.
Cory Doctorow wrote a pretty entertaining book on the subject of tech vs politics.
craphound.com/attacksurface/
Also it’s well researched
pavelanni.github.io/…/attack-surface-tech.html
Would a burner phone be susceptible to this kind of attack?
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.
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.
You will have been recorded at the protest too. So the store recording gives away nothing new.
Sure but no phone also works.
IMSI catchers. It’s known at least for 10 years now, that they get used on protests in US.
So basically, one could go to ICE protest and troll with fake conversations about attack points and watch them scatter to control nonexistent issues.
Yes, but they would probably arrest you instead.
They’ll arrest you for looking at them.
Put pictures up of the team America characters and type, “derka derka, allah jihad. 103 blah St.”
When they get there, they’re confronted with nothing and the joke is obviously a joke.
Not that it would save you.
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.
Brave to think this will go before a jury.
“Free Donuts, corner of 12th & Main. Tell no one.”
You could then troll them even harder by giving them a real threat to scatter over.
Very bold…atlas.
Ummm, no shit!?
yeah pretty much never trust a public wifi without vpn. bring your own router. cell data is pwned. technics aren’t in their curriculums.
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.
I don’t understand the entire first half of your comment. The only explanation I have for how well received it was would have to be the last two sentences which resonated with people.
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 [FCC] 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.
I understand it would be totally easy to triangulate if it were a single jammer, but would it be possible to triangulate a mesh of maybe half a dozen jammers. It seems like a headache to try to triangulate that because your signal strength would be all over the place.
At the point you already have a tense paramilitary operation clashing with protests in what is escalating towards lethal violence, I’m not sure finding wideband jammers will be the priority of responders in the area, at least not the first few times.
Though in times of peace and order, wideband jamming is, yes, a big no-no.
Hide them and trigger them remotely.
Alternate between multiple devices and relocate every time you use it.
I bet you could waste a lot of their time with this.
Not true. Even pre ICE. Law enforcement is allowed to lie to you, but you cannot lie to them. The playing field is not level.
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.
I mean who doesn’t know this cmon
Exclusive BREAKING NEWS: After careful consideration by the World’s top scientists from 1000+ top Universities, it turns out that WATER, H2O, the Wet Wet is, in fact, wet.
No fucking way! I’m gonna need about 100 articles about that, all explaining the exact same thing, but slightly too dumbed down to the point that it doesn’t actually tell me anything.
Then I’m just going to do my own Facebook research and come to my own conclusion.
Where is the “water isn’t really wet” guy!?
Your comment is 8 hours old. He should be here by now!
and they criticize china for this bruh
Remember, they were really just admiring them 🫠
Reminds me of:
Samsung: “Apple Bad! They removed headphone jack and the charging brick.”
Also Samsung one year later: “sAvE tHe eNvIrOnMeNt 🤡”
Just a friendly reminder that China is still much worse than any flawed democracy when it comes to freedom
Just a friendly reminder that less evil, even if true, is still fucking evil.
Agree! I have family in China, Hong Kong, and Saigon, and you are correct evil is still evil just in different ways!
Have you ever been to China? (I have, family is from there and lives there, Hong Kong, and Saigon). Because their crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than ours. Even Hong Kong, had like 5 homicides late year… (China is trying to take over the island). They have cameras EVERY. WHERE. Therefore, you can’t get away with crimes. Sucks it has to be that way… but don’t do a crime and don’t have to worry, common sense.
America is horrid right now, tear gassing peaceful protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets which some victims have been lost eye site because they were hit in the face, no affordable healthcare options, MASSIVE FALSE information, govt approving bills that only help the rich, etc. The thing that is the worse is that if we cannot use tear gas in WAR why the FUCK are we using it as a weapon for our own people… the policing force and govt is now being the citizens enemy!
Yes, China is horrid for workers but like the previous comment “evil is still EVIL!” Is it that much better in America when we have people living paycheck to paycheck, homeless, can’t afford anything, etc. most of us still can’t afford damn healthcare… so China vs America… BOTH ARE FUCKING EVIL in their own ways! Our country is a laughing stock, people are flooding out and NO ONE is visiting or wants to come here anymore. We are the ONLY country with a DECLINE in tourists… not even China had a decline… that’s embarrassing!
Basically, evil is still evil not matter the degree!
Yes, I’ve been there multiple times. I have seen people who went to jail for sending a political meme on a private WeChat group because Xi felt insulted. Even in the US which is in a huge democratic backsliding for years, it’s nowhere that bad. In China there’s also “massive false information” but the thing is, it’s all government-run propaganda only and the rest of the world’s media is blocked. In the US, you can read Al Jazeera if you don’t like the American media narratives. In China you can’t. In USA, you can use Lemmy to laugh about Trump’s fake tan. In China Lemmy is blocked and even if it wasn’t, laughing at Xi gets you in jail. There’s no political freedom in China, even if it’s in shambles in the US now, let alone countries with a working democracy like Switzerland.
Hong Kong is not mainland China, you picked one of the only two places (alongside Macau) that doesn’t have a censored internet in China. Regular Chinese need to pay $30 for a visa/entry permit to Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a different system than Mainland China. When taking about China, I am talking about mainland China and not a special administrative region of Hong Kong, obviously.
Regarding the economy (I’ve never mentioned it and it has nothing to do with democracy but ok), many people in China also can’t afford health care and are living paycheck to paycheck (or worse). China is not just Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Do you think 120 yuan pension is enough in the Chinese village near Chengdu? That’s what grandparents of one of my Chinese friend make. Asked her if that’s enough, she laughed and replied “of course not!”. Do you think they were able to before retiring, working their whole lives as farmers? Do you really think such people don’t live paycheck to paycheck and it’s USA-exclusive issue than China doesn’t have? Do you know how many months of a median wage you need to work for a house in any major city in China vs in the US (spoiler: it’s even longer than in the US).
Summing up: the political freedom is still lower in China than in any flawed democracy (as I stated before), and China also has its economic issues which you seem to neglect. Yes, USA has those too, but it’s still among the richest countries in the world. You would be better off in many European countries if you’re poor but not in China.
One thing I’m noticing in these comments, and in a lot of comments threads is the “well yeah, duh. Everyone already knew that” and while I’m definitely in that camp and have done that myself, I am starting to wonder if there is danger there.
Like, this is a significant breach of privacy and trust and the kind of thing that we should be up in arms about. But we already assume the government is doing the worst movie villain shit imaginable, so when we have evidence of it we shrug it off as just another Tuesday.
Yeah, waters wet. We should still be alarmed when we see a puddle of it somewhere it shouldn’t be. (I don’t know if that analogy actually tracks but I’m sticking with it).
Like in a water cooled PC
I think you can just assume at this point the US government does not care about the constitution or it’s people and will use any means necessary to collect data on those who wish to counter its growing authoritarian nature.
If you go to a protest, only take a burner phone or no phone at all. If you must take your phone, turn it off and Faraday cage it.
The US has become a failed state. Leave if you can. Things will only get worse before it completely implodes.
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You’re not wrong, but these days the number of members of the public that truly cares (to point of taking action) about privacy is an extreme minority.
Saw a job posting yesterday to assist a contractor with installing a system used by police to monitor school camera feeds directly “to support law enforcement”. jesus fuck man