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 begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.
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.
As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.
The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.
The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.
Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.
> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?
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.
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.
I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)
There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.
Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.
- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area
Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.
Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.
>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.
As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
If the threat is observation and tracking, you really want to turn off all radios, right? Cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC. Otherwise you are hoping some anonymization/obfuscation is preventing your signal from being correlated to those captured at other locations and times.
If the threat is self-incrimination after the fact, you also don't want to carry any device that is determining and persisting its own location info. Don't track your protest as a fitness activity on your GPS sports watch...
Typically that history is kept and it is kept for up to 20 years depending on which telco you look at. Those and the CDRs are gold for data mining and there are companies that specialize in doing just that.
It's insane if you think about it but the phone company knows as much or more about you than your mother or your spouse.
I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.
I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.
Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)
People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.
[edit]
Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.
yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?
edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.
if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.
security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.
there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
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 begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.
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.
I've had similar thoughts for a while now.
As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.
The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
Look at the MOVE bombing, etc - if they wanted to glass the Bundys, they would have. Safety wasn't the reason they didn't.
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.
The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
Consider Michael Reinoehl.
A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.
Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.
> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?
Rosa Parks?
Non-state actor YPG fought off ISIS authoritarians and held off Assad authoritarian in Kurdish Syria.
> It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply.
... armed with guns and prepared to use violence.
[dead]
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.
Which you can just engage on your current phone.
Airplane mode often leaves bluetooth on, with all the tracking that enables.
On Android at least for now, you can use systemui tuner to pick what gets toggled for airplane mode: Cell, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, WiMAX.
No root needed
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.
I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)
Burners, which you never bring anywhere near your home, and which you do not drive your car to pick up.
Point and clicks with no internet connectivity. Practice unloading and reloading SD cards in came someone comes to destroy evidence
There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.
Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.
- Use a different device: tablet, or camera.
- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area
Phone on airplane mode and with location services disabled?
I doubt that would do anything…
Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.
Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.
>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.
As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
If the threat is observation and tracking, you really want to turn off all radios, right? Cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC. Otherwise you are hoping some anonymization/obfuscation is preventing your signal from being correlated to those captured at other locations and times.
If the threat is self-incrimination after the fact, you also don't want to carry any device that is determining and persisting its own location info. Don't track your protest as a fitness activity on your GPS sports watch...
>everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers
*trilateration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration
why not?
Buy a camera. And/or an audio recorder. Or pull the SIM out of an old phone and use that.
A phone with its SIM out is still registering with the network.
... and has an IMEI identifier.
Yes, and that's usually directly traceable to who the phone was first sold to.
Or to the subscriber who last registered it to a network with a SIM, even though the SIM is not there now.
Typically that history is kept and it is kept for up to 20 years depending on which telco you look at. Those and the CDRs are gold for data mining and there are companies that specialize in doing just that.
It's insane if you think about it but the phone company knows as much or more about you than your mother or your spouse.
I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.
I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.
Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)
Disposable film cameras and FRS walkie-talkies, I think.
FRS: family radio service, a broadcast communications technology, TIL:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service>
There are standalone pocket cameras.
Librem 5 phone has a hardware kill switch for the modem. The camera is not so great though.
People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.
[edit]
Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.
yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?
edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much
Being able to upload or stream is crucial so evidence doesn’t get confiscated
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.
if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.
security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.
there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
....cameras exist :)
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
Sure, just be careful not to fall into the trap of technosolutionism.
I have an Eye-fi SD card which can send photos via wifi. Wouldn't be too hard to make a receiver that send from a raspi or something automatically.
Seems they are discontinued but there are other options that work similar such as "EZ Share"
the world isn't perfect, you do what you can. Just take a small RunCam or something and keep in it your pocket and be discreet when you're using it.