Be mindful of local risks. In trying to end the Stop Cop City protests, the Georgia attorney general has declared all of these self-protection tactics to be criminal intent. Not bringing your phone to be tracked at the protest, or bringing a burner, is enough to get arrested in Georgia.
https://georgiarecorder.com/2024/02/12/georgia-ag-claims-not-having-a-phone-makes-you-a-criminal/
Granted, it’s just a scare tactic, and I don’t think any of this would hold up in court. But simply being arrested for something like this is enough to ruin some people’s lives.
I’m not trying to dissuade anyone at all, but I think people should know what they’re getting into. This AG has his eyes on the governor’s mansion, and he’s going completely off the rails to make a name for himself.
Thats not going to hold up in court. But, yes, police will make up reasons to illegally detain you
They already dropped the charges against the bail fund organizers, but prosecuting them was never the point. They still scared a bunch of people, and tied up resources in their legal defense.
Also, I would not be surprised if Georgia was just the testing ground for these tactics.
That’s what police do all over the US.
For sure, but they’re escalating tactics.
Should really be prefaced by: Don’t bring your phone. Write the phone number you plan to call if arrested on your lower arm in sharpie. If for some reason you have to bring your phone, read the following.
Even if your phone is OFF, it can still track you from the towers and transmit your audio (this is documented in court cases bringing down the mob). It’s built into the chips themselves, at a lower level than the operating system. Do not bring your phones to protests.
holy shit, what court cases?
I’m not sure of the specific case numbers but searching brings up many sources, e.g. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/ (2006)
This isnt an issue if your phone is in airplane mode and does not have a Sim card in it
Matrix and XMPP don’t hide metadata (who you’re talking to, when, and how often). This is OK if your users are all on the same private server that you self-host/trust. But in practice most users will be on the Matrix equivalent of Gmail, and you’ll be sending this metadata to the largest server in plaintext for every conversation involving one of those users.
I also have trouble where iOS “instant” notifications in SimpleX aren’t delivered–hopefully this gets fixed.
In this case, I think it matters that you can selfhost a server under your control. And to potentially have redundant servers. Maybe even disabling federation to be sure the big ones don’t get the metadata.
Also while the court ordrs have shown that Signal doesn’t collect much metadata now, it does not mean it is not capable of it - which is what matters in a life-threatening situation. Like, all the traffic goes through a single point - there is still trust involved.
