US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.
For anyone else wondering (particularly if you're accustomed to it) it looks like neither NY nor MN are two-party consent ones for recording things.
I find that quite crazy. Apparently no check whatsoever what the executive does.
( probably a three letter agency plant )
Accept that you aren't going to always outsmart infiltrators and guard your information silos accordingly. Have processes for auditing threats, removing members. Avoid creating large group chats or exposing names/ contacts without consent. Keep working groups small, and don’t include people who aren’t actively participating. Use encryption, use pseudonyms. Use the basic tools available (Signal, GrapheneOS, Tails, Tor, etc). Don’t retain things like chat history or files you don't need. Give people basic training on social engineering techniques, cyber security (or honestly just how to use a computer 101), operational security, and how to recruit.
Ultimately, retain a good legal defense. You probably aren't doing anything illegal anyway, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good lawyer and a plan… legal ground is shifting, and you will never have more resources than a motivated agency task force. Get a dash camera, and non-evil doorbell camera. Have a group of friends who will check in on you regularly. If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability.
Makes sense. Terrorist people acting against a normal government would need the same precautions as normal people acting against a terrorist government.
"If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"? Maybe with a lawyer? Maybe with a lawyer present? Maybe "illegal shit" is legal jargon I'm unfamiliar with?
> "If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
> Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"?
The answer to that question is extremely jurisdiction-dependent. That being said, in the US the statement you quote is almost certainly not illegal under current 1st Amendment jurisprudence. The main case of interest is Brandenberg v. Ohio [0], which held:
> Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
[0]: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
Organized crime deals with this stuff constantly. Meet in person. Vet everyone. Being willing to keep lips tight and risk imprisonment.
Posting all over BlueSky is just snitching on yourself. It doesn’t matter if protesting is a cornerstone of our democracy when those in charge don’t care. As the water heats up, protestors will need to reassess how they view their own actions.
The primary downside is that operating like this sucks. It’s inconvenient at best. It requires modifying your own behavior.
There's also counter-protesters which will attempt to agitate (they might argue the protesters agitated them) and cause problems.
So, largely protesters cannot be disciplined because not everybody there is actually in agreement as to why they're there.
--
That said. It's a public roadway. The proper punishment for driving poorly is a police citation not a bullet.
I think most people don't remember that US postal inspectors used to primarily concern themselves with the distribution of erotica. And most people probably still don't wonder "gee, why is the USPS able to email me a picture of whatever I'm about to get in my mailbox?" Answer: the USPS stores a high resolution, high-dynamic-range image of every single piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine. And let's just say that you should try opening up some of those images in an image editor and mess with the curves/levels...
Hoover's FBI was spying on damn near anyone who had a remotely liberal viewpoint. If your parents are dead, submit a records request to the FBI to find out if they had an FBI file. Decent chance that if they were liberal, the FBI has something on them. Here's another fun fact: a huge number of FBI agents are Mormons. Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.
During the "occupy wallstreet" era state cops posted a photo on social media from inside the state's "command bunker", of a projector screen showing the output from a laptop displaying some sort of live status map or the like. I don't remember what the event was. It was a web page. In the browser bookmark bar was the facebook page for the city's "Occupy Wallstreet" facebook group along with another group that was clearly a liberal/progressive FB group. The state has a surprising number of violent white supremacists and curiously, none of those were in the browser bar...
Many years later, right around the time of the George Floyd protests - someone near a college campus snapped photos of university cops loading one of their patrol vehicles - a pickup truck - with bricks - in a back alley.
They came up with some laughable excuse that their sharp-eyed officers spotted a bunch of loose bricks in a sidewalk a full block from University property and decided to scoop them all up to do a favor for the city. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight....
So what? I'm not a Mormon myself, but I've met and worked with a number of them in the federal government who are provably decent people. I imagine they abide by their oaths to protect and defend the constitution in about the same proportion as the general public. Do you have any evidence to the contrary besides their alleged 'idiot' status? To put it mildly, I think you're showing a bit of a bias here.
That is literally all it takes to mark a submission [flagged].
I'm just interested in some transparency: when I select "flag" I want to say why: a) this isn't a tech story b) this story is just self-serving advertising c) this story appears to have gamed itself to the front page d) this story is just a sign up page (I consider that misleading). e) the story doesn't match the headline, etc.
If I see a story flagged, I'd like to know why (headline doesn't match, self-promotion, etc).
I mean I get it if you were someone that is a part of the mass spying campaign, but I suspect there are none on HN.
I'm interested in both technology and more and more often the uses and consequences of technology which unavoidably drifts in the political sphere.
Not that I doubt you, it's just that I've only seen them talk about explicit flagging from users and weighting factors, which number of comments, number of downvotes, and comment tree shape fall under.
Political topics get a lot of user flagging and used to get a lot of explicit comment from users about their flagging because its politics which is understandable given such topics are almost always prominent in the mainstream media coverage.
The repeated takeaway I see is that they are still open for discussion on aspects of all that:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233617
This is the government trying to stop democracy from being subverted by sore losers. It was clearly stated in the GOP platform, the time to protest this was at the ballot box not with violent action and subversion against LEO's. Right?
> None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.
We need to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence gathered through means that weren't a part of legitimate criminal investigations. Introduce consequences for those who do the collection at the local, state, and federal level. Require these findings be destroyed. In other words, all of the stuff we didn't do when COINTELPRO was uncovered.
The more we do in the next two-to-three years, the less we'll have to worry about in the long run.
As Snowden demonstrated later, none of it mattered. This government has engineered itself to be for all intents and purposes immune from the will of the people. And that was back when the government at least pretended to care about the rules, and "checks and balances" and the like.
Remember the President has carte blanche power of pardon over all federal crimes and thanks to SCOTUS is themselves immune from prosecution for any crime committed in office. If you want that level of accountability for the government you have to start with a Constitutional convention and remake the entire system from the ground up.
Only if we allow it. It needs to be made an issue.
This month, Missouri had two things on the ballot that would have been a Trumpist's dream to get passed:
1) a revision of the state constitution to make any citizen-proposed ballot measure require a majority in each of the state's congressional districts to pass - which would have effectively killed citizens petitions for ballot measures.
2) introduction of a cap on property taxes and the introduction of a state sales tax, with the latter being aimed at eventually replacing the state income tax.
These were surefire things in a state that has gone to Trump three times, right?
Wrong. Both failed by over 75% in today's political environment. Almost nothing gets 75% of people to agree on it these days when put to a real ballot-box vote, but these did. Why? People don't like the idea of being shut out of government and having to pay more for things. Trumpism is, if nothing else, a promise to do both.
Find the pressure points, find the language that people speak, and don't let up on it for a damned second. You can do that with government accountability after all of this, and we must.
The truly terrifying thing is that entirely too many actually do cheer this madness on (and far worse). It's almost as if we've learned absolutely nothing from the mistakes of history (except maybe how to repeat them, only "bigger and better"). I guess we're gettin' a Dystopia, whether we want one or not...
I don't think they're actually proposing anything.
Literally the US has zero civil rights when it comes to privacy. There are so many loopholes and gotchas thanks to fear mongered panic laws that the government will never give up.
Every decade or so the government invents a new(or just reuses an old one) enemy, lately it's them brown islams, and Americans will happily give up another right.
Patriot act!
Actually one of these stories I found super amusing, apparently back in the day the Australian government got it into their head that all they really needed to break up the communist Indonesian government under Sukarno was a cunningly deployed pamphlet pointing out the contradictions in their philosophy.
So they made the pamphlet, had agents distribute it at a communism convention, and uh nothing came of it. Because everyone else there had similar pamphlets.