[SR2Z]

Unless they compel people at gunpoint (which prevents the government from bringing a case), they will probably not have much luck with this. As soon as a user sets up a passcode or other lock on their phone, it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.

It's much more likely that the government convinces one member of the group chat to turn on the other members and give up their phone numbers.

[midasz]

> 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.

[ncallaway]

Yes, but I’m not going to unlock my phone with a passcode, and unlike biometric unlock they have no way to force me to unlock my phone.

The district courts will eventually back me up on this. Our country has fallen a long way, but the district courts have remained good, and my case is unlikely to be one that goes up to appellate courts, where things get much worse.

There’s an important distinction: the government doesn’t care about what it is allowed to do, but it is still limited by what it is not capable of doing. It’s important to understand that they still do have many constraints they operate under, and that we need to find and exploit those constraints as much as possible while we fight them

[direwolf20]

They are capable of putting you in prison until you unlock your phone, or simply executing you.

[tclancy]

Feels like the latter would be counter-productive unless there's an app for that.

[ncallaway]

They are, but again, district courts have been pretty good, and I would be out of jail in <30 days, unless my case goes up on appeal.

And if I die in jail because I won’t unlock my phone: fuck ‘em, they’ll have to actually do it.

I don’t plan on being killed by the regime, but I don’t think I would’ve survived as a German in Nazi Germany, either. I’m not putting my survival above everything else in the world.

[dylan604]

Looks that way from the inside as well.

[nyc_data_geek]

Yes and all of the credulous rubes still whinging about how they "can't imagine" how it's gotten this bad or how much worse it can get, or how "this is not who we are" at some point should no longer be taken as suckers in good faith, and at some point must rightly be viewed as either willfully complicit bad faith interlocuters, or useful idiots.

[dylan604]

Learning about WWII in high school, I often wondered how the people allowed the Axis leaders gain power. Now I know. However, I feel we're worse for allowing it to happen because we were supposed to "never again".

[nyc_data_geek]

Agreed. To see "Never Again" morphed into "Never Again for me, Now Again for thee" has been one of the most heartwrenching, sleep depriving things I've witnessed since some deaths in my family.

[Zak]

Watching it in real time, I still don't understand it. I could see how Trump won the first time around; Hillary Clinton was unpopular with most people outside of her party's leadership, but the second just seems insane. The kinds of things that would happen were obvious to me, and I am no expert.

[dylan604]

Two party system. As many people didn't like Hillary, clearly there were a lot of people unhappy with Biden->Harris. When you don't like the current admin's direction and/or their party, there's only one other party to select. I think there were plenty of voters that truly did not believe this would be the result of that protest vote.

[mikkupikku]

Not the second time, the third time. Remember that Biden whooped Trump's ass once and could have whooped his ass a second time, but the donor class (career retards) got cold feet when they were forced to confront his senility, and instead of letting the election be one senile old man against another senile old man, they replaced Biden with the archetype of an HR bitch. I hope nobody thinks it a coincidence that the two times Trump won were the two times he was up against a woman. Americans don't want to vote for their mother-in-law, nor for the head of HR. And yes, that certainly is sexist, but it is what it is.

I just pray they run Newsom this time. Despite his "being from California" handicap, I think he should be able to easily beat Vance by simply being a handsome white man with a white family. Vance is critically flawed and will demoralize much of the far right IFF his opponent doesn't share those same weaknesses.

[causalscience]

Worse, I often wondered how some people collaborated. Now I know that many people would rather have a chunk of the population rounded up and killed than lose their job.

[nyc_data_geek]

"Whoever can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

etc, etc. So it goes

[ModernMech]

You have to remember that "the government" is not a monolith. Evidence goes before a judge who is (supposed to be) independent, and cases are tried in front of a jury of citizens. In the future that system may fall but for now it's working properly. Except for the Supreme Court... which is a giant wrench in the idea the system still works, but that doesn't mean a lower court judge won't jettison evidence obtained by gunpoint.

[short_sells_poo]

The courts may (still) be independent, but it feels like they are pointless because the government just wholesale ignores them anyway. If the executive branch doesn't enforce, or selectively enforces court judgements, you may as well shutter the courts.

[ModernMech]

I would say if you ever want to prosecute these people, then you're going to need a mountain of evidence. Having all these court decisions they flagrantly violate for 4 years is going to great evidence at their trials. It may not give us much solace now, but all of their defenses are going to rest on intent, and it's going to be helpful in proving their state of mind that they willfully defied federal court orders, lied to judges, etc. Because they control all the evidence of their own criminality within the Executive branch, we should expect a lot of it will be destroyed when they are gone. Establishing independent records now through court proceedings will preserve those records past the administration end date.

[cperciva]

Evidence goes before a judge

What evidence went before a judge prior to the two latest executions in Minneapolis?

[gruez]

There's a pretty big difference between getting killed in an altercation with ICE, and executing someone just because they refuse to give up their password.

[direwolf20]

Not really. ICE breaks into your home — remember they don't need a warrant for this. Demands to see your phone. It's locked. Holds a gun to your head and demands you unlock it. You refuse. Pulls the trigger.

Does it really seem that far–fetched when compared to the other ICE murders?

[gruez]

>Does it really seem that far–fetched when compared to the other ICE murders?

No, not really, because in the two killings you can vaguely argue they felt threatened. Pointing a gun to someone's head and demanding the password isn't anywhere close to that. Don't get me wrong, the killings are an affront to civil liberties and should be condemned/prosecuted accordingly, but to think that ICE agents are going around and reenacting the opening scene from Inglorious Bastards shows that your worldview can't handle more nuance than "fascism? true/false".

[mothballed]

They haven't for a long time, just that most of the time they were doing things we thought was for good (EPA, civil rights act, controlled substance act, etc) and we thereby entered a post-constitutional world to let that stuff slide by despite the 10th amendment limiting the federal powers to enumerated powers.

Eventually we got used to letting the feds slide on all the good things to the point everything was just operating on slick ice, and people like Trump just pushed it to the next logical step which is to also use the post-constitutional world to his own personal advantage and for gross tyranny against the populace.

[direwolf20]

If civil rights are unconstitutional, you don't have a country.

[anon7725]

The civil rights acts had firm constitutional grounding in the 14th and 15th amendments.

[mothballed]

14th and 15th amendments were binding on government. The civil rights act was binding on private businesses, even those engaging in intrastate trade.

The civil rights act of 1875, which also tried to bind on private businesses, was found unconstitutional in doing so, despite coming after the 15th amendment. But by the 60s and 70s we were already in a post-constitutional society as FDRs threatening to pack the courts, the 'necessities' implemented during WWII, and the progressive era more or less ended up with SCOTUS deferring to everything as interstate commerce (most notable, in Wickard v Filburn). The 14th and 15th amendment did not change between the time the same things were found unconstitutional, then magically constitutional ~80+ years later.

The truth is, the civil rights act was seen as so important (that time around) that they bent the constitution to let it work. And now much of the most relied on pieces of legislation relied on a tortured interpretation of the constitution, making things incredibly difficult to fix, and setting the stage for people like Trump.

[mrWiz]

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.

[OhMeadhbh]

social engineering for the win.

[heavyset_go]

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.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

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.

[XorNot]

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.

[thewebguyd]

> 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.

[direwolf20]

Cellebrite can break into every phone except GrapheneOS.

[thewebguyd]

Cellebrite still requires the device to be confiscated. So if they are trying for mass surveillance, they'll have to rely on phishing or zero day exploits to get their spyware on the device to intercept messages. These tend to get patched shortly after being seen in the wild (like the recent WhatsApp one), so they need to decide if its worth it to burn that zero day or not.

[xmcp123]

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.

[hedayet]

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

[ddtaylor]

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

[neves]

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

[pixl97]

https://xkcd.com/538/

[janalsncm]

This is accurate, but the important point is that threatening people with wrenches isn’t scalable in the way mass surveillance is.

The problem with mass surveillance is the “mass” part: warrantless fishing expeditions.

[OhMeadhbh]

hunh. we haven't even started talking about stingray, tracking radios and so forth.

[fruitworks]

it is difficult to wrench someone when you do not know who they are

[heavyset_go]

Someone knows who they are and they can bash different skulls until one of them gives them what they're looking for.

[fruitworks]

Who is someone?

[pixl97]

I mean they have a lot of tools to figure out who you are if they catch you at a rally or something like that. Cameras and facial identification, cell phone location tracking and more. What they also want is the list of people you're coordinating with that aren't there.