Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking | Hacker News Reader

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking

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63 pointsccppurcell13 comments

Bullets. It exposes you to bullets.

Factory reset an old phone and leave it in airplane mode.

If it get "lost" or "stolen" you aren't out much, and it doesn't contain any personal information. If "law enforcement" gets their hands on it the only data it has is the IMEI and maybe wireless MACs, enough to ID you based on previous use but they would have to contact telecos and request the info. Current "law enforcement" seems too chaotic to spend time tracing the owner of an empty phone.

I'm not an expert in digital footprint-hiding, but it's probably a good idea to replace / remove the SIM card as well. A factory reset will leave data laying around, just not accessible through "normal" means.

Or just buy a cheap point-and-shoot, and stick a giant SD card in it:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=...

That's seems like an all-around better option than trying to make an old phone work like a point-and-shoot camera.

On any modern phone, your phones user partition is encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted by a key stored in the CPU. When you factory reset, what's happening is basically the key in the CPU is deleted, then re-created. At that point the data on your partition is random noise, so a new encryption key is derived and used to format the partition.

Even better, modern Android then encrypted your personal data with yet another layer based on your password/key/pattern you use to unlock your device. Many layers.

Retrieving that data would be incredibly hard even for a nation state unless the encryption used was deliberately backdoored, and even then once the device TRIM's the space (which it likely does prior to formatting) that data is gone on a hardware level.

(TL;DR Can't move the memory chip to a new device, and even if you backdoor the OS you still need the users password)

For a detailed discussion about phones, personal data and anonymity, there is a good book written by a former police officer: Michael Bazzell (2024) Extreme Privacy: What It Takes To Disappear, fifth edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Privacy-What-Takes-Disappear/...

I thought it would expose you to death.

Seems like uninformed bull. Your recording is protected by the usual copyright. It may not be used without permission except as permitted by law. If the law is being violated, sue the heck out of the state.

Now if you post it on social media, make sure you read the content privacy policy. They often suck.

It's also illegal to summarily execute citizens on the street. That isn't stopping anyone.

The law today DOES NOT protect you against the government.

Only protection can protect you. If that’s the law then so be it, and if it’s not then so be it. But do not be surprised when your story of litigation fails to shield you from anything.

If you think an institution that doesn't respect the sanctity of life is going to respect copyright of all things you've lost the plot entirely.

> Your recording is protected by the usual copyright. It may not be used without permission except as permitted by law. If the law is being violated, sue the heck out of the state.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure "except as permitted by law" allows for a lot of use by law enforcement "without [your] permission." And even if it didn't, it may not do you a damn bit of good. Lawsuits take a long time.

Also, it's pretty clear that ICE employs a lot of incompetent, poorly trained, and/or dangerous people.

If it weren't for the opening sentence, I'd swear this comment was meant to be sarcastic. So now I'm left with the question of how the hell someone could post this with a straight face.

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