https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
When the government wants to oppress people, they surveil the activists trying to fight oppression.
FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#612There seems to be wild speculation about freedom of speech rights or hacking Signal. The FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff.
>The FBI simply i don't think an investigation by FBI has ever been "simply" to the subjects of such an investigation. And to show bang-for-the-buck the "simply reading chat" officers would have to bring at least some fish, i.e. federal charges, from such a reading expedition. In general it sounds very familiar - any opposition is a crime of impeding and obstruction. Just like in Russia where any opposition is a crim…
Don’t be disingenuous. The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
These groups are also documented to have harassed people who are _not_ federal officers under the mistaken impression that they are. That’s just assault. Probably stalking too. Anyone who participates in these groups will be committing crimes, and should be prosecuted for it.
If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#613With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced, it won't take more than a few minutes for FBI to start taking actions, IF they had anything tangible. This is just an intimidation tactic to stop people talking (chatting)
I'm never sure why people assume that Palantir is magically unlike the overwhelming majority of tech startups/companies I've worked at: vastly over promising what is possible to create hype and value while offering things engineering knows will never really quite work like they're advertised. To your point, but on a larger scale, over hyping Palantir has the added benefit of providing a chilling effect on public resi…
I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous.
As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw
[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using an…
> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people There is a difference between what you are seeing and what is actually happening. 99.9% of the time they are finding the right people, but "illegal alien was deported" is as interesting a news story as "water is wet".
The evidence goes strongly against your claims.
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that. If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.
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Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that. If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.
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Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The whole premise of the second amendment is about citizens being armed in order to resist/overthrow a government
No it isn't -- that's an ignorant myth. Madison was the last person in the world who would have endorsed overthrowing his new government ... the Constitution is quite explicit that that is treason and the penalty is death. The first use of the 2A was Washington putting down the Whiskeytown Rebellion.
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#618i suppose what he means is that the phones of protestors which have signal chat will be investigated. Assuming they dont have disappearing messages activated, and assuming any protestors willingly unlock their phones.
> willingly unlock their phones Or they are running any mainstream iPhone or Android phone, they've unlocked the phone at least once since their last reboot, and the police have access to graykey. Not sure what the current state of things is, since we rely on leaked documents, but my take-away from the 2024 leaks was GrapheneOS Before First Unlock (BFU) is the only defense.
Where has there been any allegations iPhone before first unlock has been bypassed?
GrapheneOS isn't quite as secure in the real world. Pixels continue to have baseband and OOBConfig exploits that allow pushing zero interaction updates, or system memory access.
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible. Until we learned that they were.
Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc. Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their Life…
That was not the sentiment, at least not in my experience. There was a far more pervasive and effective argument - if somebody believed that the government is spying on you in everything and everywhere then they're simply crazy, a weirdo, a conspiracy theorist. Think about something like the X-Files and the portrayal of the Lone Gunmen [1] hacking group. Three borderline nutso, socially incompetent, and weird unemployed guys living together and driving around in a scooby-doo van. That was more in line with the typical sentiment.
People don't want to be seen as crazy or on the fringes so it creates a far greater chilling effect than claims that e.g. the government is too incompetent to do something which could lead to casual debate and discussion. Same thing with the event that is the namesake of that group. The argument quickly shifted from viability to simply trying to negatively frame anybody who might even discuss such things.
Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
#620This is one of the reasons it's crucial that the next set of secure messaging systems does away with tying real phone numbers to accounts. One phone gets compromised and the whole network is identified with their phone numbers.
I haven't tried it, but Signal supports not sharing your phone number/just communicating with usernames: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/ You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
> You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
Which defeats the whole point. What if the FBI politely asks Signal about a phone number?