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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is a topic that attracts LARPers. Remember that if things get spicy, you are not going to settings nerd your way out of a bad interaction with the police.

Tech advice for legal and illegal protests is pretty much diametrically opposite, and advice for countries like the United States is much different than for somewhere like Egypt.

It's complicated!

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The fact that rubber-hose cryptanalysis exists doesn't mean that cryptography is useless. While settings nerding is indeed probably of limited use if you have a direct encounter with authorities, settings nerding can prevent being caught up in a dragnet search for, say, every cell service subscriber present at a protest gone sour, just as ubiquitous cryptography probably can't keep you safe from dedicated NSA attention but can protect against warrantless dragnet fishing expeditions.

As pointed out elsewhere, the line between legal and illegal protest is very blurry and can shift rapidly; if anything, the only way to be sure you're not going to a protest that could eventually be classed as illegal is to never go to a protest, regardless of how pure your intentions are.

What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the protests are organized by people who do not care if you get hurt, arrested, or die. In the US, Russian operatives organize a lot of the protests that turn violent. They also organize the counter protests.

In other countries, protests are often organized by foreign entities. The organizers will have good opsec, but everyone else is just (metaphorically) cannon fodder as far as the organizers are concerned.

It's been this way for decades. The Soviet Union organized protests in other countries for pretty much its entire existence. The US helped the Polish anti-authoritarian Solidarity movement and several others.

> What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the protests are organized by people who do not care if you get hurt, arrested, or die.

I mean, that’s kind of a given even for the protests that are legitimate. They really only happen when people reach a point of no return, and the organizers are more likely to be fanatics in the first place.

I don't think that's really true. If you made a list of all the protests in the US that happened in the last, say, 70 years and threw a dart I think you'd almost certainly hit a protest that was mostly performative. Essentially people LARPing, to use the parent commenter's term.

Reputable sources or stop spreading fud

Try google?

These are some pretty obscene claims to make with absolutely no proof or citation.

While they were exaggerating by saying, "a lot of protests", certainly there have been some protests that have been organized by Russian agitators

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/russian-troll-...

Specifically, on that point they claimed "a lot of protests that turned violent," implying that Russian agitators were responsible for escalation. Unless the Russian agitators are members of the police, that seems very unlikely.

> While they were exaggerating by saying, "a lot of protests"

This 7 year old article mentions 60 protests for a single election https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/how-russia-secretly-...

Obviously the number has grown since then, and this only includes a subset of the protests known to be organized by Russian agents.

Huge shrug to that. Show me the evidence of the scale of it. 10%? 90%? There's an aspect of this reasoning that delegitimizes real protest movements, of which there are 'a lot', and of course there's a long history of 'a lot' of foreign geopolitical actors (including the US) of agitating actual grass-roots movements, muddying the waters even further.

At this point I think you're being less than honest with yourself. A group organizing 60 protests is organizing at scale because they want to create the perception of a movement.

> There's an aspect of this reasoning that delegitimizes real protest movements

Who cares? Our goal is to tell the truth, not to legitimize this or that. The fact is Russians organize a lot of protests in our country. And they're not the only ones who do.

> I think you're being less than honest with yourself

Are you sure that's me?

> A group organizing 60 protests is organizing at scale

Again: what scale? Are we talking all protests? Some? Half? What is "a lot"?

> > delegitimizes real protest movements

> Who cares?

You would, when the protest is about something that matters to you. The very thing that divides so-called Western democracy from the evil Russians is the right to organize, criticize, and protest against the government. When you can't do these things, you're living in an autocracy, something like, um... Russia?

I'll leave you to argue this one out with yourself.

Yes I'm quite sure

Have you considered reading any of the multiple reports put out every year about it? Or, I don't know, a history book?

Protester LARPers or police forensics LARPers?

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