>Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.
I once thought like you. You do not need to go to extreme lengths to make things difficult and that is what is important. The fact is that the 3 letter agencies are increasingly fucking with normal people in a race to the bottom. Do not be defeatist - that only hurts everyone. The more people protecting themselves the safer everyone is from these people. If people just give up on privacy it puts a spotlight on normal people protecting themselves. The current state of which is so bad I have trouble putting it into words.
I think their comment is rightly pointing out that if a TLA or other state intelligence actor takes an interest in you specifically, they can do quite a bit of classic spycraft that is considerably more expensive i.e. direct surveillance. No alternative handset OS will protect you from an agent who bugs your house, or someone firing a polonium pellet into your leg from a modified umbrella.
I would recommend 'Adapt! On a New Political Imperative' by Barbara Stiegler. The movement away from classical liberalism has been going on for far longer and was by design. It is very important to explicitly separate traditional or classical liberalism from neoliberalism when discussing these things. And just to be pedantic the term liberal should also absolutely be avoided when discussing anything involve impacts from the "new left" movement.
>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens
IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.
Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.
I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
The political quadrant is more important than ever compared to the mess of one-dimensional politics :
Right wing is economic (neo) liberals, while fascists are top wing center : these will (like a century ago) gladly use left-wing policies and rhetoric if they bring them the power they crave above all else. Or ally with corporations when convenient.
While societal liberals are on the bottom wing, and regularly clash with anti-liberal socialists/communists (left center, but also left top).
(Proto-Antifa used to ally with Nazis to beat up Social Democrats, until Stalin had decided to change direction, it's wild how both the name and flag are still reused today despite that dirty history...)
If you rotate burner sims you are probably mostly fine but yeah with enough effort they can do a larger geo analysis with the IMSIs. Only IMSI (the sim id) is in the clear on LTE afaik so you might be okay if you are not otherwise of interest.
Just turning the phone off and wrapping it tight in aluminum foil is almost certainly better.
They can and do have the ability to MITM traffic though. There is not anything to stop someone with the hardware from doing it and everyday that passes it seems the rules matter less and less.
Sim swapping seems easy to detect based on anomalous patterns. And it's not a question of effort. If the data is there to allow links to be made, an algorithm can be designed to make those links. Then it's zero effort.
This is dumb advice that doesn’t match any kind of realistic threat model. It’s like something you saw in a movie I think.
The entire modern game is very literally, don’t be interesting and don’t do weird shit that normal people wouldn’t do. It’s a needle in a haystack problem so don’t go and start creating a really weird signature of whatever it might be: behaviour, communication, RF emissions etc. The anomaly is the signature and has been for about 20 years now.
So are you in the “no phone at protests” camp? Because it’s impossible to attend a protest and “act normal” because by definition you’re engaging in abnormal behavior and that’s exactly why they’re logging all the phones there
I think you can still go to a protest with a phone just fine honestly.
The fact that there are a lot of people there is actually the strength of it.
I’d probably think carefully about what you want to use it for and what I had on there though. I wouldn’t recommend bringing a device with a a bunch of incriminating evidence to an event like that.
I think a good threat model is just operate on the assumption that maybe someone stops you and asked to look at your phone. Go ahead and also assume that they will ask at the most inconvenient point in the day also. Act accordingly and I wouldn’t anticipate much in the way of trouble from having one.
Also, look at it through the eyes of the opposition, what are their goals here…
1. Fix the signal to noise ratio in a crowd
2. Identify people
3. Map out networks
And your goal is to not to be “invisible” (you can’t anyways) but to be uninteresting. They aren’t the same thing and the difference is important.
For the overwhelming majority of people I don’t think there is much yet to worry about in simply attending a protest (Assuming you’re a citizen and you act sensibly because otherwise that’s an entirely different threat model and you probably shouldn’t be there at the moment).
But I would leave you with this bit of advice also… they very much want you to think they are the all knowing, all seeing and ever present 50ft tall enemy. That isn’t true. There is also no shortage of people who really seem to get off on pretending things are more dangerous than they really are but that shit turns into paranoia real quickly and then people become terrified to do anything or you start making bad decisions. Fight both of those things when you run into them.
You can and should feel good about getting out in the streets at the moment, it’s not going to get easier the longer it goes on just be sensible.
>For the overwhelming majority of people I don’t think there is much yet to worry about in simply attending a protest (Assuming you’re a citizen and you act sensibly because otherwise that’s an entirely different threat model and you probably shouldn’t be there at the moment).
That seems a tad naive. I think being recorded by local/Federal agencies at a protest, especially one critical of current government actions, is a legitimate concern. Especially since those tools are being brought out specifically for the protest, not because they are looking for some murderer that happens to be a block away from you.
Also, the word "yet" is doing a lot of work there. Considering that data can be stored indefinitely with little oversight, there is little to stop police from searching through the database and looking for "targets of interest" like phones that showed up to multiple protests.
Being at a protest is already known to make you interesting, which is why those tools are being brought out in the first place, why police are "friending" protest organization FB pages to gather membership data, etc. Keeping yourself out of databases that could be used later to jam you up is reasonable. There is also no way for police to tell who has a phone and who doesn't at a protest, so you aren’t highlighting yourself anymore by not bringing your phone (or turning it off), unlike say wearing a mask and sunglasses to reduce facial recognition visually highlights you.
Thanks, that was a very thoughtful comment and you basically read my mind, in that I have become so paranoid that I’m afraid to go to a protest. And I can definitely see how that plays right into their hand. I think there is definitely a lot of room for messaging like yours because it seems like now many are becoming aware of the surveillance situation which is good but at the same time can result in a form of learned helplessness.
It’s a weird new world for sure out there and honestly everyone is going through this.
Even the CIA had to stand up a whole new department years ago when the realised they even with all of their tradecraft and gadgets they couldn’t even move around London without the Brits knowing about it and had to totally change how they did business as a result. It’s not just an average protestor on the street problem at all.
I think a big part of the problem comes from this idea that you’re trying to be invisible and you keep running into all these new layers of problems all the damned time.
Maybe I’m using E2EE apps but the people I’m talking with take screenshots and run them through co-pilot or put them into their iCloud backups or a million other scenarios. It just feels like such an unwinnable game sometimes that you can very easily and convincingly get yourself to a place where you feel overwhelmed and you just freeze which is such a trap in and of itself.
I’d recommend keeping the illegal activity side of things extremely fucking low to non-existent personally and everything else will become much simpler as a result. It’s much easier to just not have evidence than trying to hide it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do things with a sense of purpose though. There are many ways to frustrate the opposition, to tie up their resources, to send them on wild goose chases, to wear down their morale that are all firmly in the legal category.
Very good advice. I make a big effort to stay on the good side of the law as like you I have a healthy respect for their abilities. I’m also interested in your last couple sentences there about sending them on wild goose chases. It reminds me of a YouTube video I watched recently about a way to send AI data scrapers into an infinite hall of mirrors filled with randomly generated text. Not something I have the time to cook up at the moment but I found it amusing. At the same time it’s not hard for me to imagine how easy it would be to pass laws that make such efforts to poison AI a felony.
Couldn’t I just grab a Baicells eNB off eBay and point it at my own Open5GS installation and passively sniff IMSIs of users scanning around anyways that try to attach and reject? It feels like I could build some kind of “sniffer” fairly easily these days as well.
I once thought like you. You do not need to go to extreme lengths to make things difficult and that is what is important. The fact is that the 3 letter agencies are increasingly fucking with normal people in a race to the bottom. Do not be defeatist - that only hurts everyone. The more people protecting themselves the safer everyone is from these people. If people just give up on privacy it puts a spotlight on normal people protecting themselves. The current state of which is so bad I have trouble putting it into words.