How about we treat people humanely?
How about we focus on the criminals and dangerous people first instead of getting people that have pending citizenship appointments. How about we don't grab people from hospitals, schools, and places of worship?
How about we try to get citizenship easier access for these folks who are clearly living and contributing successfully to our society?
How about we don't have masked thugs grabbing anyone of color off the street?
Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.
> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
See, this is exactly why I don't believe the things I read - his only actual conviction was for falsifying business records. (He is a convicted felon, though, that's indisputable).
Let’s say you’re a person of questionable immigration status who has lived in the US for a couple of decades, achieved some modest success - your own home, mostly paid for, a car or two, maybe even a small business.
Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.
Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.
Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.
If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.
Hate to break it to you, but people just simply dont care as much as you think they do. We have the right to own firearms for the purposes of protecting us against tyrany, but thats pointless when we cant even realize tyrany right outside our door.
This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse.
Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.
A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.
Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.
The big problem is, everyone is so very attached to their comforts in their daily lives that its a big cost for anyone to resort to violence.
This is why I am hoping that Trump will go through with fascist takeover of US, because at a certain point, the economy is going to tank, and then when people start actually hurting, then there will be way less on the line to lose.
Examples like Russia show that it's too late at that point, the grip of the state will be too large. Protestors just disappear in prison camps.
By the way, violence is not necessary at all. A large general strike is enough, when the whole economy comes to a standstill and stocks start to crash, the oligarchs are going to get worried.
> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.
I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?
Honduras leading up to the 2021 elections was able to oust an authoritarian president Juan Orlando Hernandez (the same recently pardoned by Trump) through peaceful protests - mostly targeted at blocking major roadways between cities with burning tires. This was a sustained campaign over months, I don't see US citizens as prepared for something like that honestly, but logistically that's a recent example that came to mind.
Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.
Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.
While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.
A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.
As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.
The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
I wouldn't describe 'safety' as the state of things after the last time feds glassed a right-wing adjacent group. When the feds 'glassed' Waco, a little known guy named Timothy McVeigh was there. He used it as inspiration to bomb a federal building at which there were 700+ casualties of which over 150 were deaths.
The feds were very much aware "Bundys" was not just the ranching family but a whole bunch of people and greater militia network. If they had glassed Bundy himself it would have been a total shit-show.
I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.
great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s
not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.
however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.
I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)
There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.
Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.
- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area
Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.
Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.
Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.
>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.
I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.
As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
If the threat is observation and tracking, you really want to turn off all radios, right? Cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC. Otherwise you are hoping some anonymization/obfuscation is preventing your signal from being correlated to those captured at other locations and times.
If the threat is self-incrimination after the fact, you also don't want to carry any device that is determining and persisting its own location info. Don't track your protest as a fitness activity on your GPS sports watch...
I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.
I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.
Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)
Typically that history is kept and it is kept for up to 20 years depending on which telco you look at. Those and the CDRs are gold for data mining and there are companies that specialize in doing just that.
It's insane if you think about it but the phone company knows as much or more about you than your mother or your spouse.
People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.
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Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.
yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?
edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.
if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.
security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.
there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
I'm not sure if she was a constitutional observer but saw some comments saying it. Seems like a honorable job to do in todays climate especially if you are looking to take a more active role after this. [1]
I feel like those of us in the technology sector have a obligation to assist in the counter balance to the police state that is rapidly building up. After all the executives of our companies have clearly chosen their side (Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg).
One idea is creating a site to track incidents, collect testimony, video evidence of events as they happen. If we can't be physically there to confront them at least we can share evidence and put it in front of as many eyeballs as we can. It wouldn't be a pleasant project, being a sin eater has its own costs. It would at least be something though.
Does anyone else have projects or ideas that can be contributed to?
I see this as a downstream issue of a greater issue needing to be solved.
Many American's risk homelessness and violence outside of the corporate world. The control over money used for housing and healthcare lies entirely within the hands of corporate intrests driven by these executives.
Until a viable alternative can be discovered for addressing housing and healthcare issues, no reasonable resistance amongst tech workers can be organized.
Many within the tech world, would love to build and produce technology that competes with the corporate interests you described, but lack secure housing or healthcare to do so.
Please note, that this does not require a 'solution' to the problem, but rather an alternative.
Consider joining your local Code For America chapter or contributing to whatever local group handles mutual aid. Civic coding and mutual aid will be vital in the near future.
There are plenty of opportunities but many rely on what are effectively "zero days" (some actually are) that aren't suitable for posting on a public forum.
Rather, go find leftist groups and get vetted to participate with them. You'll find like minded people, including other people working on technical countermeasures.
The groups are messy and sometimes incoherent (leftist infighting is a meme) but as of late they've become much more focused on a being pragmatic so nobody is going to make you quote marx or anything.
Donate to mutual aid organizations that provide legal advice and support. The Trump admin is breaking a ton of laws but they aren't breaking all of them. The legal system is more important now than ever. Making sure that people know what they can do to interfere with ICE is important. Funding legal teams for people detained by ICE is important.
Donate to mutual aid organizations that provide financial support. Somebody who is afraid to go to work because ICE might be there still needs to pay rent. An organization that funnels money to these people protects people.
Agitate for dems that give a shit. The way this ends is if dems win in 2026 and 2028 and actually take steps to punish the people who have committed these crimes and to dismantle the systems that enabled this in the first place. If instead we get the dems doing what Labor is doing and trying to be a just-slightly-less-evil nativist organization then we are fucking doomed. Documentation of these crimes will be important for making the libs unable to just say "well let's all move on" like they did in 2021.
I saw first hand the damage that was done by Elon's little purge.
I saw people who were actively trying to make the world better - heal the sick, feed the hungry, and help the unfortunate - blindly struck down from doing those goals by a tiny egotistical mans joke of a initiative.
I will personally never purchase or use anything from any of Elon Musk's companies ever again for the rest of my life and I push others to do the same and share their stories. This selfishness from a man with so much money and yet he only uses it for his own personal gain and to hurt others is disgusting.
Incorrect humans never take over the controls. An operator is presented with a set of options and they choose one, which the car then performs. The human is never in direct control of the vehicle. If this process fails then they send a physical human to drive the car.
> presented with a set of options and they choose one
> they send a physical human to drive the car.
Those all sound like "controls" to me.
"Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. "
So they built new controls that typical vehicles don't have. Then they use them. I fail to see how any of this is "incorrect." It is, in fact, _built in_ to the system from the ground up.
Semantic games aside, it is obviously more incorrect to call them "completely self driving" especially when they "ask for help." Do human drivers do this while driving?
I don't know what you're trying to prove here. Stopping safely and waiting for human input in edge cases is fine (Waymo). Crashing into things is not fine (Tesla).
If the US actually cared about retaining jobs for the people they would enforce ratios of onshore / offshore with heavy taxes if companies did not reach that ratio.
Companies don't want to pay US salaries, cost of living in the US are not going down, costs of engineering talent in India is cheaper, you can hire 2 devs for the cost of 1 US dev. Why would you ever have any US engineering devs?
It won't change organically unless the costs of India engineers goes up or the costs of US engineers goes down.
the US could just require indians be paid the same as US workers then companies would be incentivized to hire more from home. You are correct, it is far cheaper to hire indians due to tax incentivize and regulations
I've always wanted to do some small business, maybe an app but to get started feels so daunting. This information you provided is great and makes me feel like there's room to know more.
Are there any good places to grow this kind of knowledge?
How to use payment processors?
How to actually setup a business and get paid yourself?
I don't want to get into the whole founder ethos, I just want to make something and get paid for it.
Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.