Have you guys also noticed this? I’m not talking about “Oh my family isn’t privacy conscious” I honestly get that for ur average moms and pops, they don’t know any better.
the problem is with how these big tech companies effectively poisoned the everyday Joe to think that handing over ur data like a good boy is the norm and breaking out is “weird” and “too much”, this blame also goes on Hollywood.
Yesterday my friend called me " Mr robot" for just taking my privacy seriously I thought it was funny.
some people also fired their single neuron and told me “People only do this when they have something to hide”
These remarks that I face from time to time really highlights the mentality of the general society where if you break out of the norm, even if it doesn’t harm them, they would find a way to make off handed remarks about it almost like they’re dissatisfied that you’re fighting.
It’s good to be conscious about these things, but it’s also important to have a correct analysis of the threat level.
Do you have a good reason to believe authorities might be monitoring your phone specifically out of the hundreds of millions of people the could pick from? They don’t have the capacity to monitor every single phone or conversation. They will have their own threat analysis and only put you under that type of surveillance if you are or if you have the potential to become an active threat to them.
If you just go about your life minding your business then you can be certain the feds aren’t reading your sms.
It’s true that better safe than sorry, but at the same time you can’t let safety paralyse you and stop you from acting.
Remember that woman who was arrested because her phone indicated she was at a house that was burgled at exactly that time? Police just do a dragnet. Turns out she just drove by the house as it was happening.
In the above example, imagine someone did an anti Israel terror attack in the area. Everyone mentioning such things will be found via dragnet searches and who knows if you just happen to have been nearby when it happened while also making suspicios SMS messages.
Dragnets are profoundly likely to catch innocent people. Protect yourself from them however you can. That should be in everyone’s threat model.
they don’t have to monitor any specific phone. that would be like, collecting the info but throwing away most of it. if they are doing something, they are monitoring at the provider level.
it does not take much processing power to search in SMS messages as they are sent.
phone calls would be different, but unless it’s volte, processing is easier than transmission, because of the very low bitrate.
“minding your business” means not protesting to leave a foreign country in peace. from a point of view, it’s not our business.
“Capacity” doesn’t merely regard hardware. Right now in the US, the number of active LE officers is outnumbered 400 to 1. Meaning each police officer/FBI agent would have to keep an eye on 400 people at a time to get to the kind of surveillance state that many think is already here (it’s not). The situation is similar if not worse in the rest of the western world. The UK is seeing record low numbers of LE officers, so low that the government changed the law few years ago to allow people with face tatoos in the force lol.
They do monitor individual “Profiles” when they have justifiable reasons for it. Monitoring aprofile can include everything, phone monitoring, social media monitoring, physical monitoring. But again, you must have been cause of serious worry for them to start such investigations on you.
In most cases simply attending a protest, which is protected by the constitution, would not amount to that kind of surveillance, even for the simple fact of lack of officers to monitor every attendant to the protest.
Again I’m not saying this stuff doesn’t happen. It does happen, sometimes officers can pick on you and make stuff up to justify it, the use of AI models for this type of operations is gonna makes things worse for sure, and the way trump is using ICE as his personal paramilitary group also doesnt help, but we are still very very far for that Orwell’s 1984 type of surveillance, merely from a technology and capacity standpoint.
Right now the people that are monitoring every single of your actions are big tech, not police or governments. And what I’m arguing is simply that safety should not come at the cost of action. Because that’s also how they get you, either by arresting you or by making you so afraid that you won’t rise up against them. They win in both cases.
I speak for me personally now when I say that even though I’m a privacy advocate, my priority is to try make change even at the cost of putting myself in risky situations, that’s actually why I am a privacy advocate. It’s not a tool I use to hide from the system, it’s a tool I use to keep myself safe as I go against the system.
Yeah i see that.
im fine if the gov knowing i went to that protest. Im proud to attach my face to it. However comms over sms becomes an issue when we decide to go to an illegal protest, which will become more and more of an issue over the next decade, at least in my country.
So by establishing the general rule of secure communications for political activism, i hopefully avoid a friend making the blunder of sending a photo/talking about a protest that was explicitely said to be illegal and punishable by a fine or worse.
Until you show up at (or even just walk by) a Palestine protest, and then you’re on the list and your text messages are fair game.
That’s true, I’m not saying that never happens. I’m just saying one should evaluate the likelihood of something happening, not just the risk itself, or you might end up depriving yourself of useful experiences and interactions, de facto letting the feds win without even actually doing anything.
Again even in that case I would ask myself, why would they pick me out of the other million people that were at the same march?
Unfortunately the line between safety and self-destroying paranoia, isn’t that thick.