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 post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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This is illegal without a warrant. And judges have been denying broad sweeping warrants that would cover such situations.
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...
*so long as the perpetrator is of an appropriate skin tone or works for a government agency
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pardon me, sir, but this is illegal withou-
click
hey! Uncuff me! This is illegal!
car door shuts
Hey! Let me out of this car!
vroooooom
Where are we going!? You can't take me to jail!
arrives at jail
Dear family, they call this place prison, it looks like prison, and I've been issued what they're calling a "lawyer", but impossible as that may be considering they didn't have a warrant, I can only deduce that I've been kidnapped by a vigilante to a remote location pretending to be a prison!
Pretty sure this kind of thing has been illegal since before Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, tbh. The US Government hasn't cared about people's privacy and the laws surrounding it for decades.
Relying on the rule of law is reactive.
Ditching the phone is proactive.
Be Proactive.
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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.
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.
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once again.
do not take your phone to a protest
And cover your damn face.
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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.
I honestly thought this was common knowledge but obviously I was wrong. I get the need to video and document but damn. Don’t use your daily driver folks.
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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.
might be better to have a bunch of gibberish with a few named places.
They might think it's code and deploy there, and you're not actually making a legitimate threat they could come after you for somehow.
"Free Donuts, corner of 12th & Main. Tell no one."
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You probably wouldn't want to bring a phone to some types of events, but as the number of these events increase, the odds of you just happening to be close to such an event during the course of a normal day might increase. Maybe it's best if we turn off 2g reception on our phones. No reason to be swept up in warrantless sweeps if not necessary.
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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).
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I mean who doesn't know this cmon
IMSI catchers. It's known at least for 10 years now, that they get used on protests in US.
I wonder if it would be possible to extend the capabilities of the software to triangulate the location of a a Stingray or other false tower with a few more of those devices working in concert in the same area.
Could AI be used to create a bunch of useless chatter in the airways that they would have to sift through and waste their time? Maybe use AI for actual good.
IMSI spoofing is a product of wireless telephony being an ancient (way-pre-internet) technology, and we're long in an era where law enforcement (or in this case law-enforcement coded) investigators don't have to obey laws, such as assuring due process, and unreasonable searches disqualifying evidence. Instead they're hunting political enemies, and every prisoner of the United States is now a political prisoner.
It also means we don't have to obey the law, and can start using all-frequency jammers in and around protests and ICE actions to level the playing field. (It will also interfere with regular infrastructure, but it's not like ICE or the current regime gives half a fuck about that.
All-frequency jammers are older tech and easier to build than IMSI spoofers, and are highly illegal since so much of our commerce and communications depend on radio. But the current [FCC] has also been captured and is failing to do its job.
Any Amateur Radio enthusiast will know how to make a jammer. And current battery technology would assure you could make a handful that are portable and powerful enough to shut down blocks and blocks of municipal communication. This is playing pretty hardball, but then ICE isn't playing by the rules.
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Remember to leave your phones at home or turned off completely if you go to a protest
Turned off completely isn't off. You'd need to put it in a Faraday bag
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Exclusive BREAKING NEWS: After careful consideration by the World's top scientists from 1000+ top Universities, it turns out that WATER, H2O, the Wet Wet is, in fact, wet.
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