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Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?

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Re: Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?

#91

If so, the solution may well be making more private speech more public, rather than making more public speech more private. Imagine if every email provider had an option to "publicize" next to the ability to star an email or email thread. It's the private, anti-free speech stuff that would be interesting to see up close. And I'm just talking about email communications.

That might take a while for the necessary changes to cultural norms to set in, and I'd think it would get a bit spicy in the meantime.

Spicy, Agreed.

"It's not what you say, but who you say it to" - that notion hasn't yet become normative as pre-crime and post-crime justice blend.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" in the tradecraft of oppression, that idea must be reversed.

Freedom-of-speech should not be taken for granted, likewise freedom-of-association. Use it or lose it.

Re: Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?

#92

I've always used a pseudonym. I have never felt free to speak my mind on the internet under my own name, the cancel mobs scared me away long before the state did

Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.

Re: Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?

#93
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that episode was a building clearance for a developer.

There are news reports about how the owner and property manager gave formal permission to ICE to search the building: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/02/04/chicago-... ; as well as additional reports in the months after the raid claiming that the building had been poorly-maintained and plagued by squatters for a long time previous to the raid: https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2025/11/07/judge-orders-tena…

> It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing.

Innocent children were marched out of their homes in the middle of the night by masked & unidentified Federal paramilitary troops with automatic weapons, who broke into the building by helicopter.

I will do everything in my power, for the rest of my life, to comprehensively politically disempower anyone who believes this is “ultimately a good thing.”

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