What a silly thing to say! And one that feeds right into the facts that Trump's first administration was "investigated and punished for political reasons" even before it was in power!

What a silly thing to say! And one that feeds right into the facts that Trump's first administration was "investigated and punished for political reasons" even before it was in power! What nonsense!

Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity. It was enshrined in the First Amendment as a fundamental check on the federal government in order to recognize the natural right of a self-governing people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What is not something that should be gone casually – or really at all – is an attempt to engage in insurrection with black bloc or globalized intifada insurgency tactics to prevent the enforcement of law.

Protesting is a fundamental human right and obligation. It is something that you should do as casually as you would voting, volunteering, and taking out the garbage: something you do from time to time when the moment demands it.

See also: https://enwp.org/Chilling_effect

> Protesting is not something you should do "casually”

Neither is violently undermining our Constitutional order.

These folks should be on notice that they will be prosecuted. If we played by Trump’s book, we’d charge them with treason and then let them appeal against the death penalty for the rest of their lives.

>The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs.

To observe them, and prevent them from committing crimes. Which if it isn't legal, is moral as all get out.

"Jobs" Nurmberg lol. Not an argument.

These groups exist to observe and document the actions of federal agents and share that information with their communities. That is constitutionally protected activity.

>Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law

What i saw on video is ICE executing 2 American citizens. The existing law already prohibits that, so what changes you're talking about?

> The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.

If that's the case, then why has no one been prosecuted on those grounds?

That's true for any system where you have contacts linked. Same thing happens when you have names and avatars.

If you don't want to link your contacts... don't link your contacts...

But this doesn't have the result that the GP claimed. The whole network doesn't unravel because in big groups like these one number doesn't have all the other contacts in their system.

For people that need it:

  | Settings 
  |- Chat
  | |- Share Contacts with iOS/Android <--- (Turn off)
  |- Privacy
  | |- Phone Number
  | | |- Who Can See My Number
  | | | |- Everybody
  | | | |- Nobody <----
  | | |- Who Can Find Me By Number
  | | | |- Everybody
  | | | |- Nobody <----
  | |- App Security
  | | |- Hide Screen in App Switcher <---- Turn on
  | | |- Screen Lock <---- Turn on
  | |- Advanced
  | | |- Always Relay Calls <-----

Some of these settings are already set btw

No. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454478

Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.

Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.

pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.

the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.

Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.

Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else.

I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".

The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!

There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.

It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.

In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.

They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.

Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when.

In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest.

Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.

I've generally held this position, but assume a sufficient combination of models could do a lot more than was possible before.

Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".

But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.

That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.

What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.

They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)

The evidence goes strongly against your claims.

[Citation needed.]

Which is not much different than how the January 6th people were caught.

As ever xkcd holds true - https://xkcd.com/538/

Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.

There aren't a lot of things I would claim Russia is a leader in, but state sponsored hacking and spying on its own people would both definitely make the list. That's not to say no one has cracked it, but if the Russians couldn't do it there aren't many who could.

The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.

The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.

Recommendations to the private sector don't condone violating security and retention laws for people working in the public sector.

I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:

> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.

Come on, man. We're talking about classified information, not general OPSEC advice. I worked in a SCIF. Literally every piece of equipment, down to each ethernet cable, has a sticker with its authorized classification level. This system exists for a reason, like making it impossible to accidently leak information to an uncleared contact in your personal phone. What Hegseth did (and is doing?) is illegal. It doesn't even matter what app is used.

In past instances where Signal has complied with warrants, such as the 2021 and 2024 Santa Clara County cases, the records they provided included phone numbers to identify the specific accounts for which data was available. This was necessary to specify which requested accounts (identified by phone numbers in the warrants) had associated metadata, such as account creation timestamps and last connection dates.

Which of those links actually say that your phone number is private from Signal? If anything, this passage makes it sound like it's the reverse, because they specifically call out usernames not being stored in plaintext, but not phone numbers.

>We have also worked to ensure that keeping your phone number private from the people you speak with doesn’t necessitate giving more personal information to Signal. Your username is not stored in plaintext, meaning that Signal cannot easily see or produce the usernames of given accounts.

> it'd be extremely non trivial

Extremely non trivial. What I'm hearing is "security by obfuscation".

If you follow the X chatter on this, some folks got into the groups and tracked all the numbers, their contributions, and when they went "on shift" or "off".

I don't really think Signal tech has anything to do with this.

Your point is correct but irrelevant to this conversation.

The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that.

The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.

Is there any reason they didn't use email? It seems like something that would have been easier to keep some anonymity., while still allowing the person to authenticate.

I have no idea if that was true 20 years ago, but it's not true now. XMPP doesn't have this problem; your host instance knows your IP but you can connect via Tor.

Briar and Session are the better encrypted messengers.

I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.

I think the deal is you marry the strong crypto with a human mediated security process which provides high confidence the message sender maps to the human you think they are. And even if they are, they could be a narc. Nothing in strong crypto prevents narcs in whom ill-advised trust has been granted from copying messages they're getting over the encrypted channel and forwarding them to the man.

And even then, a trusted participant could not understand they're not supposed to give their private keys out or could be rubber-hosed into revealing their key pin. All sorts of ways to subvert "secure" messaging besides breaking the crypto.

I guess what I'm saying is "Strong cryptography is required, but not sufficient to ensure secure messaging."

Yes. Cheap–identity systems such as Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to this, and your only defence is to not give out your address as they are unguessable. If you have someone's address, you can spam them, and they can't stop it except by deleting the app or resetting to a new address and losing all their contacts.

SimpleX does better than Session because the address used to add new contacts is different from the address used with any existing contact and is independently revocable. But if that address is out there, you can receive a full queue of spam contacts before you next open the SimpleX app.

Both Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to storage DoS as well.

There are a lot of solutions to denial of service attacks than to collect personal information. Plus, you know, you can always delete an account later? If what Signal says is true, then this amounts to a few records in their database which isn't cause for concern IMO

> which prevents the government from bringing a case

Genuinely, from outside, it seems like your government doesn't give a damn on what they are and aren't allowed to do.

They'll just threaten to throw the book at you if you don't unlock your phone, and if you aren't rich, your lawyer will tell you to take the plea deal they offer because it beats sitting in prison until you die.

All they have to do is pretend to be a concerned neighbor who wants to help give mutual aid and hope that someone in the group chat takes the bait and adds them in. No further convincing is needed.

If you aren't saving people's phone numbers in your own contacts, signal isn't storing them in group chats (and even if you are, it doesn't say which number, just that you have a contact with them).

Signal doesn't share numbers by default and hasn't for a few years now. And you can toggle a setting to remove your number from contact discovery/lookup entirely if you are so inclined.

> it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.

I'm sure the Israeli spyware companies can help with that.

Although then they'd have to start burning their zero days to just go after protestors, which I doubt they're willing to do. I imagine they like to save those for bigger targets.

There are multiple companies that can get different amounts of information off of locked phones including iPhones, and they work with LE.

I’m also curious what they could get off of cloud backups. Thinking in terms of auth, keys, etc. For SMS it’s almost as good as phone access, but I am not sure for apps.

or convince one member of a group chat to show their group chat...

I'm confident the people executing non-complaint people in the street would be capable of compelling a citizen.

Or just let the guy to enter the country after unlocking her phone.

Which is just a redux of what I find myself saying constantly: privacy usually isn't even the problem. The problem is the people kicking in your door.

If you're willing to kick in doors to suppress legal rights, then having accurate information isn't necessary at all.

If your resistance plan is to chat about stuff privately, then by definition you're also not doing much resisting to you know, the door kicking.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Is the message on storage zero'd out or just deleted?

It's worth noting that the way Signal's architecture is set up, Signal the organisation doesn't have access to users' phone numbers.

They technically have logs from when verification happens (as that goes through an SMS verification service) but that just documents that you have an account/when you registered. And it's unclear whether those records are available anymore since no warrants have been issued since they moved to the new username system.

And the actual profile and contact discovery infra is all designed to be actively hostile to snooping on identifiable information even with hardware access (requiring compromise of secure enclaves + multiple levels of obfuscation and cryptographic anti-extraction techniques on top).

Note that Threema has had a recent change in ownership to a German investment firm. Supposedly nothing will change but I can’t help but be wary

The literal point of civil disobedience is accepting that you may end up in jail:

"Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."

-- Letter from the Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr: https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/201Stuff/F14/B%20SophistSocr...

> protestors behaving legally or practicing civil disobedience can still have their lives ruined by people in power.

They surely can. But the point was more than the people in power don't really need Signal metadata to do that. On the lists of security concerns modern protestors need to be worrying about, Signal really just isn't very high.

This is the price we pay to defend our rights. I would also expect any reasonable grand jury to reject such charges given how flagrantly the government has attempted to bias the public against protesters.

Palantir steps in indeed

If they could arrest people for what they've been doing, they would have already arrested people. And they have arrested a few here and there for "assault" (things like daring to react when being shoved by an annoyed officer), but the thing that's really pissing DHS off is that the protesters and observers are not breaking the law.

Conspiracy requires an agreement to commit an illegal act, and entering into that agreement must be intentional.

> make it seem like the participants have access to some sort of ALPR data to track vehicles

The whole reason cops love ALPR data is anyone's allowed to collect it, so they don't need a warrant.

I was replying specifically to this:

> This seems like a good example of that being enough metadata to be a big problem

I was not saying it's not a problem that the feds are doing this, because that's not what I was replying to.

That seems like a weak argument.

I mean, carrying a weapon is a 2nd amendment right, but if I bring it to a protest and then start intimidating people with it, the police going after me is not "Government intimidation of the practice of constitutional rights".

Protesting is a constitution right, but if you break the law while protesting, you're fair game for prosecution.

> Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother ..."

Aside: I see similar attitudes when I mention I use VPN all of the time

Never fear, the 2nd amendments days are numbered too. Trump just said 'You can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns' (the 'in' in this context being 'outside')

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-you-cant-have-gu...

Fed

Nothing about the 2nd amendment legalizes shooting law enforcement officers.

This has always been the absurdity of the moronic claims of the 2nd amendment being to overthrow government tyranny: You may own the gun legally, but at no point will your actions be legal. If you've decided the government needs to be overthrown, you are already throwing "law" out the window, even if you have a valid argument that the government you are overthrowing has abandoned the constitution.

Why the fuck do you need legal guns to commit treason? Last I checked, most government overthrows don't even involve people armed with private rifles!

If you are overthrowing the government, you will need to take over local police stations. At the moment, you no longer need private arms, and what you are doing isn't legal anyway.

Meanwhile, every single fucking time it has come up, the gun nuts go radio silent when the government kills the right person who happens to own a gun. Every. Single. Time.

It took minutes for the "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" people who raised a million dollars for Kyle Rittenhouse to defend himself for driving to a protest in a different state while armed to the teeth to of course get to shoot someone to turn around and say "Actually bringing a gun to a protest makes you a terrorist and you need to be shot". Minutes. They have also put up GoFundMes for the guy who executed that man.

If you are too scared to stand up to your government without a fucking rifle, you have never been an actual threat to your government, and they know that.

That's a strange take. It also feels like exactly what they are hoping to have happen. Encouraging gun violence is not something condoned, so not sure why you are posting that nonsense. Are you an agitator?

https://archive.ph/copyn

It wasn’t paywalled for me, BTW.

Not sure what difference that makes, it's not like the current regime limits their actions to respect constitutional bounds.

Sure. Can you give me an example of something that's illegal to say in a group chat that coordinates legal observers?

As mentioned by someone else, they just need to take the phone of a demonstrator to access their signal groups.

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/new-leaks-on-police-phone...

Indeed, as sibling commenter notes, it's not to prevent ICE from doing their jobs. Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP. Observers are there to

1) get the name & some other info from the person being abducted so that their family can be contacted

2) record the encounter so that ICE/CBP has some check on their behavior, or legal action can be taken in the future to prosecute them for violence and destruction of property

3) recover the belongings of the person abducted and ensure family/friends can get these things, as often wallet, cell phone, shoes, coat, and vehicle (even still running) are left behind

4) get a tow truck for any vehicle left behind, preferably from one of the tow services that is towing for free or low cost

4) connect family/friends with legal resources, if needed, or simply let them know that their lawyer needs to get to the Whipple Building ASAP

None of those things are illegal. In some of the small rural towns in Minnesota, there aren't observers there, and the phones/vehicles/wallets of people kidnapped from Walmart are just... left in the parking lot, in the snow. It adds insult to injury to have your phone & wallet gone, your car window smashed in, and a big fee from the municipal towing lot if you're a US citizen who is then released from detainment 12 hours later. And if you're not a US citizen but you have legal status, you want your family to get an attorney working ASAP to ensure you're not flown to Texas -- because if you're flown to Texas, even in error, you need to get back on your own (again without your wallet/phone/etc if those things didn't happen to stick with you).

Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.

> The goal is to prevent ICE / BP from doing their jobs.

No. The goal is to protest ICE / BP doing their jobs in criminal ways.