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Avoiding Oligarch Surveillance [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-11

Well, here we are again. More correctly, here I am again, while most of you have not had the experience of dodging corrupt law enforcement since Tea Party days. Roughly one in every seventeen residents of this country are undocumented, so they already have some skills for evading la migra. The rest of you are facing a “learn or burn” moment.

The first social movement I ever participated in was the Coffee Party back in 2009. The founders had produced a documentary called 9500 Liberty, which chronicled an eight week period wherein Virginia thought they’d “get tough” on immigration enforcement. It went about as well as anyone plugged into objective reality would have predicted. We’re about to get that same thing only on a national basis, and it will likely trigger a catastrophic wave of trouble, first with our table food supplies, then construction, then hospitality, and after that the malaise will broaden.

I’ve been publishing the Netwar Irregulars Bulletin on Substack since August of 2023. It’s full of “Tactics, techniques, and procedures for a whole of society response in the disinfo war against democracy”, and my experience in this area started with Project VIGILANT, clear back in 2009. There’s a precedent setting 1st Amendment case in Texas with my name on it, Rauhauser v. McGibney. The other party is an FBI informant, and one of my codefendants was murdered in 2021. The top suspect for that crime was the former counsel for the Proud Boys. There are a few people who have experiences more extreme than mine, but we’d all fit together on one narrow body airliner.

Millions of people, who can not (yet) explain the difference between activity that is clandestine as opposed to covert, are about to need to get up to speed because their safety depends on it.

Enough of the bona fides, let’s get after this before all y’all are wearing orange, and I don’t mean DailyKos swag …

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I write about this stuff pretty regularly, the 500th post in the last nineteen months was yesterday’s plea for Help due to my third COVID19 bout since April of 2024. If you can stand to know more than you ever wanted to know about you/your devices vs. the world, Defensive Measures on February 10th is a summary of articles about five terrible things you should immediately avoid, my personal shift from Linux to Apple, and some experiments with Raspberry Pi type machines.

This sort of technical material used to just appear in Tool Time, while my Substack’s front page was dedicated more to human factors. There are a galaxy of sites offering device security tips, but I was the guy with fifteen years of experience dealing with right wing hate groups, so I chose to differentiate along those lines.

Roughly a quarter of the people in my various chat rooms last October were reporters. Come November 7th a frigid wind carried them off, and except for occasional one on one greetings, that time is well and truly over. I suspect there will be a rising tied of European outlets developing American sources, but it’s not happening yet, at least not at the level I can see. Basically all of you should probably start paying attention to what journalists do in hostile environments, and then apply those things to yourselves.

You could just go Apple and use their journalist settings. I made the switch last fall, but I was driven by old Linux gear failing and some friends who gave me their one generation old castoffs. If I had nothing to do but wander in the shadows, I’d have a laptop running Qubes, a Google Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS, and I’d pack a Raspberry Pi 5 as an infinitely customizable firewall.

OK, so that’s thelow key pitch for my Substack. DK isn’t a technology site, there’s way too much other stuff going on, but here is one HUGE reason why everybody needs to pay closer attention. This article by the Biden 2020 campaign cyber response lead, Jackie Singh, was a complex read for me, and I’ve been in the telco business off and on since the late 1990s.

The Secret System Behind Every Call You Make Is About To Change Hands.

Here’s the red alert exec summary: All your phone activity are belong to the Koch Brothers.

Just like Musk buying Twitter, another portion of what has been a public common is now in the hands of oligarchs. The only good news here is that Signal is free and Faraday bags from Mission Darkness start at $25. If this news leaves you scared and confused, the very best thing you can do, for yourself and everyone around you, is to start moving your person to person comms to Signal. And be sure to set it to RELAY YOUR CALLS — that keeps some random snoop from calling you out of the blue and getting information about your location.

I write about this stuff like a lawyer would, step by step, appropriate detail for the audience, averaging about five posts a week. I think this is too niche and too frequent for DK, but I am going to try to show up here a bit more regularly, maybe do a weekly “reasons to throw away your phone” roundup or something.

I will read every comment made on this, but there may be a delay, since I’m fighting my third bout of COVID19 in ten months. I will answer questions to the best of my ability, I will likely point to prior writing I’ve done to back up those answers, and if someone turns up with a novel concern I’ll pick it apart and produce an article on it.

These are very scary, uncertain times, but there are things each of you can do, even if you’re not in some srs bsns activist role. For example, it would be great to see the organizations that do text alerts to their lists shifting from purely SMS to offering Signal as an option. I’ve never explored this area, but I am going to do that while I’m recovering. The sooner everybody exchanges painfully trackable PSTN numbers for the symbolic names that Signal provides, the safer we’ll all be.

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