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The hardest thing about maintaining ur online privacy are the people around you. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 1 point 6 months ago* (3 children)

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 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.

They don't have the capacity to monitor every single phone or conversation.

it does not take much processing power to search in SMS messages as they are sent. that's just very small plain text messages.

phone calls would be different, but unless it's volte, processing is easier than transmission, because of the very low bitrate.

If you just go about your life minding your business

"minding your business" means not protesting to leave a foreign country in peace. from a point of view, it's not our business.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    "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.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    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's silly. nobody is watching your messages scroll by on a screen. its mostly automated.

    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.

    like being a "terrorist": a peaceful protester for peace in Palestine. they are detaining people for attending those protests.

    but we are still very very far for that Orwell's 1984 type of surveillance, merely from a technology and capacity standpoint.

    we already have the technological capacity.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    Again. Reading a message is just a minuscule, and not even the most important part, of the process of surveillance. The infrastructure necessary to implement something like this is a lot larger than just the software and hardware necessary to automate data collection.

    And no, that infrastructure MOST DEFINITELY DOES NOT have the capacity to monitor everyone or even everyone who attended a protest. This is just a fact. The courts themselves would not have enough capacity.

    Why do they not arrest every single participant then? You think everyone that doesn't get arrested is because they use signal and all of those that got arrested used WhatsApp? That's just disingenuous.

    The technology exists, infrastructure not yet.

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