back
100 comments
> The records also showed undercover agents surveilling a virtual meeting at Hunter College in New York [...] ; a meeting at a labor center in Minneapolis

> The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.

For anyone else wondering (particularly if you're accustomed to it) it looks like neither NY nor MN are two-party consent ones for recording things.

> He said it was also notable that DHS was using administrative subpoenas, which don’t require judicial authorization, to obtain records.

I find that quite crazy. Apparently no check whatsoever what the executive does.

well, per the executive. not that surprising. check out COINTELPRO.
You are familiar with how the Trump administration does things, right?
regime* FTFY
What measures can protesters take against this? With agents actively infiltrating groups, it seems impossible to prevent this level of spying.
Vet /screen everyone. Cross check personal references, have an onboarding period before introducing new members to anything sensitive, do background checks if you’re concerned about it. There are already experienced community leaders and activists in your network; ask them how they establish trust. Teach people to think more critically about how and why they trust information and people. Make vetting part of recruitment and onboarding processes, and make recruitment work a self sustaining perpetual process with a team of people to support it. After you establish trust, use it. Ask around for feedback about new members.

Accept that you aren't going to always outsmart infiltrators and guard your information silos accordingly. Have processes for auditing threats, removing members. Avoid creating large group chats or exposing names/ contacts without consent. Keep working groups small, and don’t include people who aren’t actively participating. Use encryption, use pseudonyms. Use the basic tools available (Signal, GrapheneOS, Tails, Tor, etc). Don’t retain things like chat history or files you don't need. Give people basic training on social engineering techniques, cyber security (or honestly just how to use a computer 101), operational security, and how to recruit.

Ultimately, retain a good legal defense. You probably aren't doing anything illegal anyway, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good lawyer and a plan… legal ground is shifting, and you will never have more resources than a motivated agency task force. Get a dash camera, and non-evil doorbell camera. Have a group of friends who will check in on you regularly. If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability.

So compartmentalization, limiting blast radius... that sounds oddly familiar.
IANAL but is CircuitSeuss not committing a crime here by giving the advice:

"If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."

Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"? Maybe with a lawyer? Maybe with a lawyer present? Maybe "illegal shit" is legal jargon I'm unfamiliar with?

Know what is and isn't legal protest and keep a sharp eye on anybody offering a hookup to explosives / rocket launchers, etc.

( probably a three letter agency plant )

Take playbooks from large criminal organizations. Protesting may not be criminal, but it is increasingly being treated as such.

Organized crime deals with this stuff constantly. Meet in person. Vet everyone. Being willing to keep lips tight and risk imprisonment.

Posting all over BlueSky is just snitching on yourself. It doesn’t matter if protesting is a cornerstone of our democracy when those in charge don’t care. As the water heats up, protestors will need to reassess how they view their own actions.

The primary downside is that operating like this sucks. It’s inconvenient at best. It requires modifying your own behavior.

How does organised crime recruit new members if it can't advertise?
I think if all protesters really just protested (and nobody tried smashing ICE cars tail lights, physically blocking their vehicles, and damaging officers' hearing), that would go a long way helping prevent this. So the measure protesters can take is to discipline their ranks.
So, if you go read through all the FBI reports about Black Lives Matters you find references to OMGs. Apparently a lot of various organizations like Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs will use large events like protests as cover.

There's also counter-protesters which will attempt to agitate (they might argue the protesters agitated them) and cause problems.

So, largely protesters cannot be disciplined because not everybody there is actually in agreement as to why they're there.

--

That said. It's a public roadway. The proper punishment for driving poorly is a police citation not a bullet.

How will you stop a federal agent from showing up and and smashing some cars to generate bad will? You know protests are open for anyone to join, yeah?
ranks?
Especially since it isn't spying.
I'm no lawyer, but sure sounds a lot like entrapment as much as spying
Unconstitutional domestic spying in the US is a tale as old as time. Time and time again, the "patriots" can't help themselves. Gotta "protect the nation" by...uh...completely throwing out core constitutional rights. And they're surrounded by people who also have no problem with it.

I think most people don't remember that US postal inspectors used to primarily concern themselves with the distribution of erotica. And most people probably still don't wonder "gee, why is the USPS able to email me a picture of whatever I'm about to get in my mailbox?" Answer: the USPS stores a high resolution, high-dynamic-range image of every single piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine. And let's just say that you should try opening up some of those images in an image editor and mess with the curves/levels...

Hoover's FBI was spying on damn near anyone who had a remotely liberal viewpoint. If your parents are dead, submit a records request to the FBI to find out if they had an FBI file. Decent chance that if they were liberal, the FBI has something on them. Here's another fun fact: a huge number of FBI agents are Mormons. Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.

During the "occupy wallstreet" era state cops posted a photo on social media from inside the state's "command bunker", of a projector screen showing the output from a laptop displaying some sort of live status map or the like. I don't remember what the event was. It was a web page. In the browser bookmark bar was the facebook page for the city's "Occupy Wallstreet" facebook group along with another group that was clearly a liberal/progressive FB group. The state has a surprising number of violent white supremacists and curiously, none of those were in the browser bar...

Many years later, right around the time of the George Floyd protests - someone near a college campus snapped photos of university cops loading one of their patrol vehicles - a pickup truck - with bricks - in a back alley.

They came up with some laughable excuse that their sharp-eyed officers spotted a bunch of loose bricks in a sidewalk a full block from University property and decided to scoop them all up to do a favor for the city. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight....

What happens if you mess with the curves/levels?
> Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.

So what? I'm not a Mormon myself, but I've met and worked with a number of them in the federal government who are provably decent people. I imagine they abide by their oaths to protect and defend the constitution in about the same proportion as the general public. Do you have any evidence to the contrary besides their alleged 'idiot' status? To put it mildly, I think you're showing a bit of a bias here.

Why is this flagged ?
Because in the past nine hours some number of HN users clicked on the [flag] option under the submission title.

That is literally all it takes to mark a submission [flagged].

This sentence pretty much says it all:

> None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.

COINTELPRO, part two.

We need to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence gathered through means that weren't a part of legitimate criminal investigations. Introduce consequences for those who do the collection at the local, state, and federal level. Require these findings be destroyed. In other words, all of the stuff we didn't do when COINTELPRO was uncovered.

The more we do in the next two-to-three years, the less we'll have to worry about in the long run.

"We" did do all of that when COINTELPRO was uncovered, at least ostensibly. We had committees, we changed laws, we established judicial ovesight, we "reformed" the system.

As Snowden demonstrated later, none of it mattered. This government has engineered itself to be for all intents and purposes immune from the will of the people. And that was back when the government at least pretended to care about the rules, and "checks and balances" and the like.

Americans have zero muscle to stand up for the people who actually care for this country.
What muscle and who "actually care", can you expand on what you're proposing?
A significant portion probably support it.
Seems like the government has a clear mandate from the voters to take such action against those who wold try to prevent the mandated actions from being carried out.

This is the government trying to stop democracy from being subverted by sore losers. It was clearly stated in the GOP platform, the time to protest this was at the ballot box not with violent action and subversion against LEO's. Right?

That's not what a mandate is you tedious twit. The government DOES NOT have a carte blanche to do whatever the bloody hell it likes, and certainly not mass spying! "The time to protest was at the ballot box" The time to protest is all the damn time. Do you even care at all about privacy rights or are you a garden variety bootlicker?
Small wonder.
The US has surveilled political factions that they've considered potentially subversive or corrupt machine politics - right and left wing - for ages. RICO prosecutions against politically motivated corruption are long overdue, and should definitely land on both parties because the grift seems to be the order of the day. But that doesn't happen without actual investigation of the political machine - and incidental local low level conspirators are mostly patsies for the people calling the shots. I applaud the protestors for wanting to change things, but shake my head at the naivete of thinking that being a martyr for the Instagram cameras is the way to do it.
I have no idea where Americans get the idea that this isn't standard operating procedure at this point.

Literally the US has zero civil rights when it comes to privacy. There are so many loopholes and gotchas thanks to fear mongered panic laws that the government will never give up.

Every decade or so the government invents a new(or just reuses an old one) enemy, lately it's them brown islams, and Americans will happily give up another right.

Patriot act!

Imagine being so hungry for power that you justify this.
Imagine being such a sucker that you think it's remotely justified.
I mean, they've been saying they were going to do this. They didn't even try to hide it. Independent journalists have been covering it for a year or more.
Freedom.
Not really a new phenomenon.

Actually one of these stories I found super amusing, apparently back in the day the Australian government got it into their head that all they really needed to break up the communist Indonesian government under Sukarno was a cunningly deployed pamphlet pointing out the contradictions in their philosophy.

So they made the pamphlet, had agents distribute it at a communism convention, and uh nothing came of it. Because everyone else there had similar pamphlets.