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One thing I’m noticing in these comments, and in a lot of comments threads is the “well yeah, duh. Everyone already knew that” and while I’m definitely in that camp and have done that myself, I am starting to wonder if there is danger there.
Like, this is a significant breach of privacy and trust and the kind of thing that we should be up in arms about. But we already assume the government is doing the worst movie villain shit imaginable, so when we have evidence of it we shrug it off as just another Tuesday.
Yeah, waters wet. We should still be alarmed when we see a puddle of it somewhere it shouldn’t be. (I don’t know if that analogy actually tracks but I’m sticking with it).
I think you can just assume at this point the US government does not care about the constitution or it’s people and will use any means necessary to collect data on those who wish to counter its growing authoritarian nature.
If you go to a protest, only take a burner phone or no phone at all. If you must take your phone, turn it off and Faraday cage it.
The US has become a failed state. Leave if you can. Things will only get worse before it completely implodes.
You’re not wrong, but these days the number of members of the public that truly cares (to point of taking action) about privacy is an extreme minority.
and they criticize china for this bruh
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Just a friendly reminder that China is still much worse than any flawed democracy when it comes to freedom
Just a friendly reminder that less evil, even if true, is still fucking evil.
Agree! I have family in China, Hong Kong, and Saigon, and you are correct evil is still evil just in different ways!
Have you ever been to China? (I have, family is from there and lives there, Hong Kong, and Saigon). Because their crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than ours. Even Hong Kong, had like 5 homicides late year… (China is trying to take over the island). They have cameras EVERY. WHERE. Therefore, you can’t get away with crimes. Sucks it has to be that way… but don’t do a crime and don’t have to worry, common sense.
America is horrid right now, tear gassing peaceful protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets which some victims have been lost eye site because they were hit in the face, no affordable healthcare options, MASSIVE FALSE information, govt approving bills that only help the rich, etc. The thing that is the worse is that if we cannot use tear gas in WAR why the FUCK are we using it as a weapon for our own people… the policing force and govt is now being the citizens enemy!
Yes, China is horrid for workers but like the previous comment “evil is still EVIL!” Is it that much better in America when we have people living paycheck to paycheck, homeless, can’t afford anything, etc. most of us still can’t afford damn healthcare… so China vs America… BOTH ARE FUCKING EVIL in their own ways! Our country is a laughing stock, people are flooding out and NO ONE is visiting or wants to come here anymore. We are the ONLY country with a DECLINE in tourists… not even China had a decline… that’s embarrassing!
Basically, evil is still evil not matter the degree!
Yes, I’ve been there multiple times. I have seen people who went to jail for sending a political meme on a private WeChat group because Xi felt insulted. Even in the US which is in a huge democratic backsliding for years, it’s nowhere that bad. In China there’s also “massive false information” but the thing is, it’s all government-run propaganda only and the rest of the world’s media is blocked. In the US, you can read Al Jazeera if you don’t like the American media narratives. In China you can’t. In USA, you can use Lemmy to laugh about Trump’s fake tan. In China Lemmy is blocked and even if it wasn’t, laughing at Xi gets you in jail. There’s no political freedom in China, even if it’s in shambles in the US now, let alone countries with a working democracy like Switzerland.
Hong Kong is not mainland China, you picked one of the only two places (alongside Macau) that doesn’t have a censored internet in China. Regular Chinese need to pay $30 for a visa/entry permit to Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a different system than Mainland China. When taking about China, I am talking about mainland China and not a special administrative region of Hong Kong, obviously.
Regarding the economy (I’ve never mentioned it and it has nothing to do with democracy but ok), many people in China also can’t afford health care and are living paycheck to paycheck (or worse). China is not just Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Do you think 120 yuan pension is enough in the Chinese village near Chengdu? That’s what grandparents of one of my Chinese friend make. Asked her if that’s enough, she laughed and replied “of course not!”. Do you think they were able to before retiring, working their whole lives as farmers? Do you really think such people don’t live paycheck to paycheck and it’s USA-exclusive issue than China doesn’t have? Do you know how many months of a median wage you need to work for a house in any major city in China vs in the US (spoiler: it’s even longer than in the US).
Summing up: the political freedom is still lower in China than in any flawed democracy (as I stated before), and China also has its economic issues which you seem to neglect. Yes, USA has those too, but it’s still among the richest countries in the world. You would be better off in many European countries if you’re poor but not in China.
Bro found out that poverty exists everywhere
There are different levels of poverty. Poverty in Somalia and poverty in Scandinavia or Western Europe are two different levels of poverty that do not compare
Even though most of the comments here point out the obvious that phones are a risk, this kind of journalism is still important for spreading awareness and documentation of illegal surveillance for the record
Yeah lemmy is mostly a left echo chamber, which is generally a net positive. But someone like my cousin who still gets their news from Facebook but might want to protest now they are thinking about their views would benefit from this journalism
Eh, it’s a center-left chamber at best. As evidenced by the extreme reaction to the far-left echo chambers.
Disagree, it’s pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that’s not really left, it’s a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women’s vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I’m even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they’re socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I’m talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Yes, but that is no reason to disparage socialism itself. In authoritarian socialism, it is the authoritarian part that sucks.
Democratic socialism isn’t socialism though, it’s capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to “real” socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn’t yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they’re unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn’t seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.
But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use “Nazi” way too liberally, and it’s really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there’s only so much nuance I’m going to put into a comment, but for “tankie,” I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn’t make Russia and NK “good.”
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.
Aren’t the devs of Lemmy Marxist leninist or something and .ml is one of their instances?
That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.
By “far-left” you mean the pro-Russia and pro-China segment of this place? They seem more like government mouthpieces than people who actually support leftist policies (which don’t represent the policies of the Russian or Chinese government.
This place is also full of Blue MAGA liberals which I’d classify as right-wing at this point, so it seems there’s a whole spectrum of beliefs represented here.
also calling people blue maga is very disengenious, they arnt right wingers so please dont associate with them.
They certainly are right-wingers when the support candidates and policies that are wholly right wing. I don’t care if they think they’re leftists just because they’re voting Democrat. They’re just deluding themselves. This is the origin of the adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The Democrats haven’t represented the left in decades and now they’ve moved so far right that they’re aiding in genocide, fucking the working class, and prancing around the campaign trail with Dick Cheney
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.
You ignore 50% of the political compass here - authoritarianism sucks just as much as fascism or unbridled capitalism.
At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn’t a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it’s a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)
And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it’s an
- right-nationalist (“rescuing” suppressed people from the evil Ukraine - that one is super ironic because it’s exactly the same argumentation Germany used with the Sudetendeutsche)
- authoritarian (arrests for holding up empty pieces of paper, drafting for the war - but only in the poor areas far away from Moscow) regime
- centered on cultural identity (anti-gay laws, “restoring the CCCP”, persisting propaganda comparing the Ukraine war with WW2, "we have to defend ourselves from NATO)
It’s pretty late, so i don’t repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i’m pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn’t “left” no matter how much they might think it is.
Anarchism isn’t the only way to be a leftist.
So basically, one could go to ICE protest and troll with fake conversations about attack points and watch them scatter to control nonexistent issues.
better be VERY coded language that a jury would agree is innocent in nature and intent.
Brave to think this will go before a jury.
You gotta make them work hard to kill you.
I mean…is that not assumed to be the default? Cell phone surveillance is pretty much just business as usual in this country is it not?
This is illegal without a warrant. And judges have been denying broad sweeping warrants that would cover such situations.
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We are in different times. This administration doesn’t care about warrants.
It honestly doesn’t care about “illegal” much either 😅
Edit: for themselves of course! Everyone else…
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Please dont take your fucking phone to a protest. Buy a burner if you must.
You will be tracked. And spied on. And facial recognitioned. Etc.
In some countries, like Greece, you can’t use an unregistered phone number.
Since phone numbers are tied to people’s identities, does it really matter whether you use a burner or your main?
Then don’t take a phone. If you’re an organizer who needs to communicate, get a wifi/bt only tablet, look up mesh networks that use bluetooth and wifi, learn encryption and learn code words.
It’s trivial to jam any wireless network. All jamming is it to flood the rf range with loud static. But you can still take measures to keep from being spied on.
Edit: also look into if MAC address spoofing. Not entirely sure which models of phones support that, officially or otherwise though.
We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.
As long as it’s a self contained communication version and doesn’t require using the meshtadtic phone app
I’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.
I used to watch The Hated One, who has also made similar recommendations for strikes. He has suggested the use of Briar, as it can fallback to Bluetooth connectivity.
However, I mostly wanted to point out that burner phones is not the answer for everyone. People need to be familiar with their local laws to stay safe.
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Isn’t Bluetooth a bad idea because it’s bouncing off nearby phones and reporting your position?
Honestly, I think it’s best to put it (preferable a burner phone and not your everyday phone) in a faraday bag and don’t use it unless absolutely necessary and if you want to take photos/video, buy a 2000s era digicam from eBay.
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Would a burner phone be susceptible to this kind of attack?
Yes, but then you get rid of it immediately. Also, don’t activate it or have it on at home or any other place that can be associated with you. Only do so after paying with cash and at the location where you’re going to use it then dispose of it.
You will be recorded while paying for the phone. This won’t bring you any anonymity.
wear a mask, nondescript clothing, pay with cash, and don’t bring your phone to the store
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If you attend a protest, you need to read this and follow it:
Good read!
A lot of great info, but "If you choose to answer questions, be sure to tell the truth” is a mistake. Remember, anything you say “can and will be used against you.” Key word, against. Nothing you tell them will be used to help you. Remain silent.
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