Further advice regarding civil disobedience:
LEAVE YOUR PHONES AT HOME. Write down some numbers in case you get arrested—or better yet, memorize them. There are journalists there for documenting. And there will be plenty of other people that don’t follow this advice. Leave anything they could use as leverage over you and your cohorts away. Don’t bring ID. Don’t bring anything except what you need for the action. It’s not worth the risk.
ETA: also, any of you with a new car? DONT DRIVE THAT SHIT TO ANY MEETING OR PROTEST. They’re spying on you. Don’t post about it. Don’t use any unencrypted messaging service to coordinate it—WhatsApp is not safe. Signal and probably some other less common ones are the only ones safe enough. Ride a bike there, stash it in a conveniently hidden spot. Bring a change of clothes, plan escape routes, plant the change of clothes either hidden on your escape route or wear them under your plain clothes. Cover tattoos. Leftist activists are not safe. And literally the rest of your life could depend upon how well protected you have made yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/10/felony-charges-pipeline-protesters-line-3
So many states have pretty quietly passed laws to make you a felon for protesting. Even peacefully. And to make you a fuckin corpse. In the south especially, a few states were writing “go ahead, run over any protester in the road” laws.
Be smart. Be safe. Have a plan. Have a contingency plan. This isn’t “fuck around with the blunt end of the justice system and find out” territory, in 2024 US, it’s time to be as safe as you can while doing what’s right. Because doing what’s right is criminalized. Heavily.
If you’re going somewhere where you think you might be at risk, IMHO, it’s probably just easier to turn your phone off. Android and iOS both require a non-biometric passcode after boot.
Or, if you want to keep your phone on, enable lockdown mode on Android, or tap power 5 times on iOS to require a non-biometric password at the next unlock.
It’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22565926/police-law-enforcement-data-warrant
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
IMHO, it’s nuanced.
It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
I think the fact that we are able to record everything that happens and automatically upload it seriously outweighs what you are saying.
The only reason cops get in trouble is only because people are filming. If it’s not caught on camera, it didn’t happen in the eyes of the law if it’s just our word against a cops.
The concern with bringing your phone is that police have subpoenaed cell providers to force them to turn over cell tower records. The police then used the lists of cell phones connected to those towers to track down protestors.
You shouldn’t bring your phone to a protest because it could end with police kicking your front door in three weeks after the protest has wrapped up.
And completely cover any tattoos. Even more identifiable than your face, honestly.
you can always modify your tattoos, you can’t modify your face once it’s identified. I saw a man literally draw a face on his face before attending a protest. He looked ridiculous but perfectly “defaced”.
I’ve also read about some blackBlocs getting identified, where i live, through their shoes. Police photographed people before and after the movement and their shoes are used as identifying information.
There is always the oldBloc who put their faces and names behind their words and proudly struggle through unions.
it’s already may 1st here. They will be out in about 10 hours. May the force be with them.
Maybe get a dumb burner phone with no personal data on it. You could potentially keep your main phone in a secret/secure pocket.
No. Several Jan 6 participants tried burners and they still got caught because the burners were still linked to their movements and activities and their personal phones were unusually unused/off/immobile for the amount of time the burners were used. You would have to expend a lot of effort to make sure your burner was completely disconnected from yours and your phone’s location, as well as making sure your phone showed signs of appropriate activity in your absence.
Not so easy.
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance if one is not doing really stupid shit like logging in to one’s personal social media accounts from one.
If however it’s an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they’re going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just “use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations”.
You can’t just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can’t just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.