It's been so turbulent lately, that it's hard to register events that would have blown our minds if so many things didn't also happen around the same time. Remember when Israel made a bunch of pagers explode indiscriminately across Lebanon and Syria? So many things going on, one worse than the other, that it is hard to stop and really consider the implication of these single events fully.
> “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities."
> “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...
But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.
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 no sim card is sufficient enough. You can check its signature by using your laptop as a IGW and capturing traffic to see if any apps or services ping anything.
If you want off grid comms, meshtastic devices are very nice, me and my wife use LilyGo Tdeck pluses for comms and finding each other at festivals. The portable modems are also nice because you can use them for GPS for your phone vs built in location services.
It's most certainly not. Phones connect to a cell tower even without a SIM to make emergency calls. The phone can still be tracked and it's not a difficult leap from there to identify the owner of the phone.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/08/google-to... [1] https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/16/are-there-fourth-amendm...
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?
You typed out how awful the situation is, and how you cannot trust anything, and then ask why it's eerie? I feel like you answered your own question before you even asked it.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Consider Michael Reinoehl.
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?
... armed with guns and prepared to use violence.
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.
No root needed
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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...
*trilateration
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'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)
[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.
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
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
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
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/
Seems they are discontinued but there are other options that work similar such as "EZ Share"
https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter
> Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well.
And
> bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over bluetooth mesh networks. no internet required, no servers, no phone numbers.
I think it's rapidly, finally, entering the realm of political viability.
There's such a long list of things one could say that about.
In this instance the "representation matters" thought process seems to bear out.
Folks talk about aspiring to role models who look like them. People also react strongly when this sort of thing happens to someone who looks like them.
The fact that US culture chooses to identify with people of the same colour is telling, though I don't know, maybe that's a human thing and my country is too homogeneous for me to think otherwise.
We had a sincere relationship, but we both agreed that our marriage, while genuine, was earlier than it would have otherwise been other than logistics of an trans-Pacific romance.
We stayed together 5 years, then separated/divorced, amicably. In the midst of all that I missed a USCIS filing date.
I was out of status briefly, but also in a situation where I was ostensibly entitled to stay (USCIS would have to demonstrate a belief that the marriage was under false pretences), so I hired an immigration attorney to straighten things out (which basically involved filing paperwork that I needed to file, and a letter from her and one from me explaining why I missed it.
She did make the comment to me during all that though that I had no cause for concern above and beyond that, quote:
"I hate that I can say it, but the reality is you're both 'the right color' and a high-earning male. USCIS has you so far down the list of their priorities for reconciliation you could stay here decades before them calling you to account".
And I'd suspect as an immigration attorney, she likely had first-hand experience of same.
// i know pretty much zero details of what happened and it will be impossible to get any actual facts that are not politicized for weeks
But the underlying point that about 35% of Americans just fundamentally do not seem to value civilization is a problem that has to be worked around.
I don't know, I don't think it's normally assumed that when someone dies (or more to the point is murdered) in a very public way we all immediately deserve to know every thing about them.
I don't know what you're talking about really. What I mean to say is the rest of this comment is incoherent to me.
Not sure what your point is other than volume of information available increases over time.
new ideas are constantly being published, and popular ones gain momentum by being shown to more people. as the idea gets saturated, the popularity gets overshadowed by the time based downranking.
if the idea is still popular though, in this case that ice murdered some woman as part of their shock and awe campaign, variations are going to show up such as "legal observer" and "mother of a three year old"
<< murdered
shot/killed
<< as part of their shock and awe campaign
law enforcement operation
<< its voting algorithm and attention economy itself
Sure, and yet we have people skilled in manipulating both for their own ends.
<< random citizen
She was a not some random citizen; I would have been addressing it differently if that was the case. Now, if you have a stomach for it, we can go over what kind of citizen she was.
Shouldn't the fact that ICE shot a woman trying to leave the scene be enough?
You see what you want to see, which is kinda revealing if you ask me.
<< Shouldn't the fact that ICE shot a woman trying to leave the scene be enough?
No. It is not enough. Reasonable person would be unlikely to find themselves in that position, which begs a simple question:
What was her reason for being there?
If you can answer that, we can start having a conversation. Until then, she is not some rando at the wrong place at the wrong time.
<< but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove
This is not exactly how any of it works, at all. I am not being difficult man, but I don't get to, say, block FBI caravan, because I don't think they deserve 'that' presumption ( quotation, because I am not certain what it refers to ).
I similarly don't get to tell DEA, ATF, and multiple other agencies to just fuck off, especially if I encounter them in the wild.. doubly so, if I was attempting to track them that day..
The real question then becomes:
Why do you think you get to pick and choose, who can enforce the laws of the land upon you?
More importantly, whose authority would you accept?
Good luck out there friend. I am not sure what you meant to say, but it may be a good idea to stop here for both of us. I see no reason to continue this further.
Within a lot of our lifetimes, this was the norm. Are these devices so useful that put up with carrying a tracking / listening device on us at all time?
"Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even when it's offline, in power reserve mode, and after power off"
Settings > Apple Account > Find My > Find My iPhone
I do not of know a single person in my extended family/professional network/social circle who has had location tracking or app eavesdropping directly impact their life. The only impact I’ve seen is via advertising exposure.
(For me) The convenience of Google Maps for navigation, and messaging for communication, is too beneficial. The _impact_ of these technologies as surveillance tools _in my life_ is hypothetical.
yet. that's always the problem with such a strong declarative. things are not finished to be so finite
I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh.
2025 showed that you can't just go "ok, it's over now, we'll go back to business as usual" (like I know the limp-wristed Dems will want to do) or it'll repeat after every other election until it's successful. You just cannot have this many people constantly being convinced they live in this alternate reality for much longer without civilization collapse.
But I think it's gone too far and we're witnessing the fall of the empire in real-time. I'm just hoping that fall won't screw up the rest of the world too much, but I'm pretty sure it will.
Recent events have brought this into sharp focus.
This is really the glue that holds it all together -- that we and our allies haven't even had to think about these things for our entire lives up until now.
I hate to be hyperbolic, but I fear that fear of these things will soon become a looming presence in our lives. For the rest of our lives. And kids' lives. And grandkids' lives.
Gambling, influencing, day trading, kick out the immigrants, anything works as long as it can promise to change your life for the better.
The fact that the fascists want to kill people for being brown doesn't change this.
Please know there are people across the aisle that view it differently. When things calm down, talk with them and learn. Nobody wins when we insist the world is only as we alone view it.
No. Democrats always take the high road and what has that gotten them? A fascist regime and a political movement (MAGA) that floods the zone with bullshit when the gestapo does something bad.
Republicans stormed the capitol, killed police officers, and delayed the election process. What happened to them? Some lackeys got put in jail, and no one at the top faced consequences. Trump then pardoned all of those criminals for their service. Crickets from MAGAts and Republicans.
Laying your weapon down while someone keeps hitting literally just results in you ceasing to exist. Trump and all of his cabinet members are openly vile and called the woman who was shot a domestic terrorist before her body was even cold. Same situation with Charlie Kirk: they were calling the shooter a radical leftist before the body was cold. Meanwhile Dems are asked to disavow every action if it's even somewhat related to them and to "talk and learn"... yeah no that window has passed.
Hold your side accountable for the insane lies, corruption, and awful things they do first then maybe we can talk about reaching across the aisle.
EDIT: stop deluding yourself into thinking you're a "center right" voter too. It's obvious from previous interactions and your post history that you're drinking the MAGA koolaid.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/violation-constituti...
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/exiled-obama-adm...
How should I talk with her to learn things?
Frankly, I'm absolutely fucking sick of leaders within the GOP saying that a woman is a domestic terrorist trained in using cars as weapons after an ICE goon murders her. Call me when the republicans send Trump to the gallows. Then I'll consider opening my heart up.
Then I listened to the Vice President claiming she was an "unhinged left-wing lunatic", that she had been radicalized and that she was trying to hurt the ICE agent, and thus she deserved to be shot. A complete, abject lie trying to justify this murder, when everyone saw in the videos she was clearly trying to escape, and no agent was on her path.
EDIT: looking at your comment history, it seems like you are trying to justify her assassination too. We are not friends, no friend of mine attempts to rationalize away the murder of innocents by masked brownshirts. I hope you can escape this death cult sometimes soon, then maybe we could find common ground.
If you see a video that shows the car making contact with the agent will you agree she should have stopped?
I’ll respond to reasonable arguments with polite and logical discussion.
It’s entirely possible to prosecute the heads of all of these horrific things into the stone age, comb through internal data and throw every agent who’s murdered someone in jail, and not punish everyday people who just cast a vote.
I’ll take the odds for vindictiveness.
First, as someone else observed in a sibling reply: "I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh." That's worth keeping in mind.
Second, when one says one wants "maximally vindictive candidates", whether intended or not, it implies behaving more like the party in power. Be careful what you wish for.
Third, related to the second point, if a comment can be interpreted in favor of either side, that may suggest it leaves something to be desired.
Following the principle of charity, perhaps "vindictive" is the wrong word. Perhaps all that's needed are candidates who'll enforce the law.
All in all, if anyone is being "dense" here, I'm not sure it's me. Do you own a mirror?
It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing." It is anti-insight.
Do you really believe that's being "vindictive", though? If so, why?
That's a big part of the problem: people characterize following the law as being "vindictive", and comparable to actual vindictiveness. It's a big part of why the Democrats have been so unwilling to hold anyone to account.
> It is not insightful to say "oh isn't this the same thing that the fascists are doing."
Wanting vindictiveness is absolutely the same thing the fascists are doing. Part of what I'm pointing out is that we should characterize the actions that are needed in a more rational way.
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.
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 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.
The cycle-of-reprisals is a separate point. In a two-party system, transfer of power means change. The minority party will always paint that as reprisal, so if you judge by who-complains-the-loudest, they will look the same. The churn of claims and counter-claims by politicians in the media has become a game with very predictable behaviors.
But if you look at actions, IMO they behave very differently.
I think the reason we are in the situation we are in now is that the last administration wasn't nearly retaliatory _enough_ after J6
Jailing Hitler sure stopped his movement in its tracks! Or maybe we should have gone even further and set a precedent for to jail people for decades for having "dangerous" political opinions?
Trump would have lost in 2024 if he was running from prison for his crimes against the country.
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.
One side is doing all the bad things and the other is simply struggling to stop them. Being cynical helps nothing.
But regardless of my opinions of the parties in question, I was talking about the constant threat of partisan retaliation.
> Only one side
If you're going to use that tired old trope, maybe Reddit is a more suitable
place for you. Thanks for reminding me to add it to my blocklist though.
trump mind you, is nuremburging non-voters. they dont exactly have side beyond trying to work and eat
It’s a country founded off of reject zealots. What do you expect?
Sounds like if you're denying location permissions to shady apps (why would you allow in the first place?), you're probably fine.
Why do you need 100 apps? Moreover why do you need 100 apps that have location permissions? Both android and ios makes it easy to tell which apps have location permissions. The list should be a very small list, and limited to "while using app".
>and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out.
I'm not claiming that nobody is getting picked up by data brokers. The fact that they're in business implies that there's enough people careless enough to make it a viable business. But what I am claiming that such tracking isn't too hard to avoid. You can see some people in this thread who think otherwise, thinking that they need to go of the grid or switch to burner phones, when they all need to do is spend 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
You don't. But a high percentage of the population will install apps for the sake they've been offered to install it.
I use eBay, I get bombarded by eBay telling me to install their app for 10% off. I use Gmail for work, if I don't use their app, I have the search engine to tell me to use their app. Facebook is an app, WhatsApp is an app too. Bejeweled Deluxe is an another app and $Reality_TV_show wants you to install their app. Your local supermarket has an app to give you % off your shopping list and probably not to far off in the future oxygen will be an app.
Some venue for a ticket for that odd one-off gig requires an app and every single restaurant order at the table has different app. You're then forced to install the app to use your Dishwasher, Fridge, TV, WiFi Router. I bought a new heater as my old one broke this winter and if I desire to configure WiFi for it, you guessed it I have to install an app.
And that's how you you end up with 100 of apps that are never really used, leaking information, spying on you and never deleted because people don't. I bought Christmas presents and I was unable to track delivery information without installing an app, I had forgotten about that until now. Thanks for reminding me you, can watch me delete it. That again is how you end up with apps.
We use discord at work and when I walk past co-workers screens they are within multiple of dead discord servers. They never leave and it's not just discord I've seen people idling in dead channels on IRC. I just question why and walk away as if the server is dead, I leave.
Hanging on to things that are never needed again is what we are best at it seems. FOMO?
> 1 minute to check the location permissions list.
Most users are not you and I, they don't know about permissions. They just want to accomplish what they set out to do. And if you do remove that permission; that app refuses to co-operate frustrating the user, nagging them until they do re-enable that permission.
It's now rather than how it used to be. Smart humans using a dumb phones, the now is dumb humans being used by smart phones.
* With sympathy to those who are actually mute/non-verbal, that must suck.
https://www.amazon.com/Means-Control-Alliance-Government-Sur...
https://reason.com/2026/01/08/you-have-the-right-to-record-i...
Rules for thee and not for me...
GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.
>and an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto. This should be done by everyone to avoid the possibility of mass surveillance, not only people who have something to hide from a three-letter agency.
No, it's much harder than just "an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto". You need to practice proper opsec. There's no point getting an anonymous sim when you then turn around and then use it as a 2fa number for your bank, or carry it around with you every day.
You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy." The point of a FOSS system is that the user fully controls it, and can install apps privately from any source.
If you're talking about not being able to install third party apps, aurora store doesn't require an account and works fine on stock android. Most other basic functionality works fine too, eg. camera, calls, browsing, maps.
The Play Store is not the only issue with stock Android devices. Google dependencies run with high privileges and the device is constantly communicating with Google servers for one reason or another. You do not own a Google device for all intents an purposes. The main contribution of Graphene here is that it strips out the proprietary blobs and optionally provides an environment to run Google's libraries with unprivileged access.
The point is you have to leave Google with both for it to do much good
> an anonymous SIM paid for with cash or crypto
i think these already have you screwed. that anonymity is going to be superficial at best. you will be recorded making these purchases, and tracked to your identity
I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
I don't think anyone who actually is at risk, or cares about risk, is going to be overconfident about their security because some HN commenter said "you're probably fine".
>What apps are "shady"?
Depends on your paranoia level. I'd say first party apps (eg. apple/google maps/weather) are probably fine. Google has the additional caveat that they record location history and therefore might be subject to geofence warrants. If you think iOS/Android is backdoored then all phones are off limits.
>How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?
They're whatever ad SDKs can get their hands on. If the app has location permissions, it's that. Otherwise it's something like geoip. At the end of the day it's just third party code running in some app's sandbox. If the app can't get it, the SDK can't get it either.
>I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.
What other plausible mechanism are there then? wifi/bluetooth scanning requires location permissions since forever ago.
This type of problem needs to be fixed on the society level.
Alternatively, broadcast a hidden SSID WiFi AP via an enabled RPi and use only devices that's have WiFi. Hand them out to people for free to increase the spread.
Attach magnets to the RPi's and go rogue by sticking them to buses, cars and trains et cetera to increase range.
Yes, 100%. Meshtastic and Meshcore both do this, but I'd recommend Meshcore. Here in the Seattle area we have a network that fairly reliably delivers messages from Canada through the Seattle metro area all the way down to Portland. Fully encrypted with dual key cryptography. Meshcore uses a different strategy than Meshtastic, which enables Meshcore to work more reliably. To see what's happening in your area for Meshcore see https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map
Is very fun to set up a repeater for under $50 and see a noticeable difference in the coverage area. Is a fun technical project that combines the best of hiking/walking/driving geocaching style, ham radio (but without a license requirement), antenna building, and more. I'm getting acquainted with people in my neighborhood too which is a bonus.
Figuring out what hardware to buy that'll actually work can be a challenge, to get started search amazon for "heltec v3" and make sure you get something that includes a battery, and you'll see 2-packs of radios for $60. There's a web flasher at the above link that'll put the software on the radios for you.
ECB, issues with key generation, key negotiation, seldom authenticated data, ...
It definitely works better than MT but please stop lauding it for its cryptographic properties ;)
It's at the bottom of their TODO, under the heading "V2 protocol spec".
Don't do this!
The BSSID is still visible, and is the unique identifier any trackers will be looking for anyway. Also making the SSID hidden just means the AP isn't broadcasting it, any listeners can still see the SSID whenever any client interacts with the AP.
You learn something new everyday.
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)."
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 the evidence out even if the device is damaged/destroyed" and "messaging/coordinating/comms". The anti-phone/pro-camera side also had good points, saying that those things also make it easier to track/identify you. The choice between those two options is definitely not clear-cut, and it is all about individual tradeoffs and risk assessment.
But if you are rocking something that's essentially a wearable Faraday cage that block all signals (I am just assuming it works exactly as stated, without attempting to judge its efficacy), what's the point of bringing (an essentially fully offline) phone in the first place, as opposed to bringing a camera with zero connectivity?
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.
Really??
You can take it out of your pocket and use it to communicate.
Don't let them!
Privacy advocates have been fighting this battle for decades, but they have been utterly defeated because, by and large, people don't and can't be made to care about privacy until they learn the hard way (and when it's too late) why it's so important.
ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree
Did you know that women's period was tracked by propietary smartphone apps?
There goes your freedom.
I mean, FFS, what kind of principled third-party invites the authoritarian "opposition" candidate as the keynote speaker to their convention?
Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after centuries of bloodshed that we are far removed from, and people forget why anybody cared about such abstract principles to begin with.
Contrary to common misconception, you don’t lose your tech bro man card if you join them!
The best part is that you also shed the physics-defying libertarian viewpoints that largely make no sense.
eh at least it's being seen
Be sure to read their other DHS coverage
Email concerns to mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They can reverse autokills or help find alternative links.