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ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

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Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#131
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but people just simply dont care as much as you think they do. We have the right to own firearms for the purposes of protecting us against tyrany, but thats pointless when we cant even realize tyrany right outside our door.

This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse. Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often…

Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.

Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.

While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.

A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#132

Why isn't any one independently using this same information to track ICE officers? I'm sure they all carry phones.

Well first off, it is very expensive. Vendors that supply to DHS and DOD have to be selective about who they sell their services to as well. Citizen-developed services to track ICE are routinely shut down by Apple and Google.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#133
post #78
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an old point and shoot (20x optical zoom) and a SIM-free phone that has never been used in my name for anything.

Analog recording and viewing may need to become the state of the art given how low the bar has become to manipulate digital media

great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s

not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.

however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#134

I wish this country had a libertarian right that cared one iota about widespread suppression of civil liberties instead of only whining about taxes.

The dirty secret about American politics is that people care about any of that stuff only to the extent that it supports their actual ideological goals. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, state's rights, all of it. They want it for them, and don't care if anybody else has it _at best_, and actively want to take it away from others at worst. Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after c…

Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#135
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the 'both sides' POV except in the longest historical view. Right now it's just not true. One team is a feckless collection of timid hesitators who is trying to defend a social welfare policy from 70 years ago, and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet. It's just not the same.

>One team is a feckless collection of timid hesitators who is trying to defend a social welfare policy from 70 years ago What is this referring to? >and the other team believes their volatile leader is infallible and will direct revenge at whatever they are pointed to by the latest 3am tweet. >It's just not the same. What does this have to do with gp's claim about cycle of reprisals by both parties? It can be simulta…

> It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.

Then I suppose the situation will get worse? I don't understand the point of your analysis. This isn't a situation where people are swatting away olive branches - the Trump administration works hard to ensure that their political opponents are furious at them. They repeatedly state, in a variety of contexts, that they have no interest in finding common ground with the other party: it's good that you're miserable if you don't agree with their political objectives, and if you get in their way you deserve to be shot.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#136
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its important to not be hyperbolic in these times. The two technologies ICE uses rely on permission for apps tonuse geolocation data for advertising purposes. Same reason you start seeing ads for local things when you travel. Technically they can subpoena cell records to see which towers your phone connects to, but this is not viable for multiple people. For privacy, if you care, having a rooted degoogled phone with…

Nevertheless, it's eerie that we are even having this discussion today. I didn't say "scary" because I'm far away from these events, but definitely uncomfortable - I know, the "events" may approach sooner or later my location too...

There’s millions of people who have been dealing with this daily for the last few decades. The sim swap networks and VPN/TOR users across the world live like this.

When I was in Iraq it was basically expected that all of your communications are totally pwnd, if you live in China you’re totally pwnd.

Cell trackers like described in the article have been in use for the last 15 years by police and law-enforcement inside the US.

why you think its eerie?

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#137
post #59

M.I.A.'s clothing brand is looking real good now. There are others but hers was the first I heard about. Seems like the waist bag would be critical for activists. From the Ohmni website: "...fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."

>"[...] fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)." But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point? Other comments mentioned valid points about tradeoffs of using an offline camera vs. a phone, with pro-phone arguments listing things like "being able to livestream and get th…

> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?

I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.

It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.

A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.

There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#138
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an old point and shoot (20x optical zoom) and a SIM-free phone that has never been used in my name for anything.

> SIM-free phone Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.

That's why you also need to enable airplane mode.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dirty secret about American politics is that people care about any of that stuff only to the extent that it supports their actual ideological goals. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, state's rights, all of it. They want it for them, and don't care if anybody else has it _at best_, and actively want to take it away from others at worst. Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after c…

Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".

It was power-lust dressed as ideology, the latter largely to make it attractive to a larger, and highly gullible, it turns out, cohort.

Re: ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it took was a white mother (and US citizen) getting shot in broad daylight. As much as I hate to admit it, a large enough segment of the population needed something blatant like this to care.

Odd. I thought she was a legal observer. It is funny how quickly the narratives changed given how little traction was gained on 'observer' status.

most people are more than one thing.
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