A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.
Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.
“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.
That's a good point, they'd definitely just subpoena your bank records. If crypto is used properly, it can be nigh impossible to trace, though. Bitcoin isn't very private at all on the blockchain, but if you send over lightning network, my understanding is that it becomes effectively impossible to track, unless your adversary controls enough lightning network nodes to track the payment as it bounces between nodes. They wouldn't need to control the whole path, but they would need to control nodes VERY close to origin and destination, ideally the adjacent nodes, and enough of those in the middle to be reasonably sure they can accurately follow the money. The lightning network doesn't leave a detailed ledger behind, so only way to trace a payment is to be involved in its processing, which means controlling the nodes the money passes through on its way to the recipient.
Of course, that's way too obscure and unknown for the vast majority of people, so I don't see a nonprofit succeeding that way these days. Maybe if crypto actually does get mainstream, but that's still a pretty big if.