What would be the best way to organize local protests online while remaining anonymous and reasonably private?

[gayhitler@lemmy.ml]

Go get involved and you’ll see pretty quick how people generally handle organizing. They’ll be some kind of low stakes event like a reading or art gallery or concert or something and people will say “come out to this protest tomorrow”.

If there’s a signal or something it’s not usually a necessary link.

All that is to say: don’t use computers to organize. If you want to use social media to raise awareness of an event that’s a different thing altogether.

[telorand@reddthat.com]

I don't agree with the overall logic of that first article. It makes a huge assumption that the CIA has influenced Signal, but as with F-Droid (who just received a grant from the same OTF), the funds go from Congress to the USAGM (formerly RFA) to OTF to regular folk, nonprofits, charities, etc.

The OTF is an independent nonprofit corporation, with its own set of board members, and they make their own decisions. Could they all be bought by the CIA to secretly fund backdoors in open source projects? I suppose, but that would be a possibility fallacy to imply: because it could, it therefore is.

Lots of money moves around the government, and even it doesn't always know where it all goes. People should be able to make informed choices, but paranoia and tinfoil aren't going to help anyone.

[asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev]

SimpleX or Briar

[yesbutnotreally@lemmy.world]

I also like how the “good alternatives” blog post shows a bunch of apps that basically have “less secure”, “not compatible” or “unstable” as caveats. Signal is (for now) still gold standard for messaging apps overall.

[ultragigagigantic@lemmy.ml]

Flash mob protests for 5-10 minutes then meet at a new location for the next one.

[telorand@reddthat.com]

It's also stupid easy to set up. I got my whole family to switch in two days.

I like the way SimpleX does everything much more, with the anonymous contact tokens, but Signal is still open source and doing things like local-only storage, ephemeral chats, password protection for the app, etc.

It's fair to keep an eye on any service that's centralized, but thus far, it's probably the best option out there for people who aren't technically-minded or otherwise don't have the patience to get into the weeds of some of those other apps.

[fantasticdonkey@reddthat.com]

Yeah Signal should be fine. Don’t use a picture, don’t use your name, activate disappearing messages, change your user name whenever you’re sharing your contact details. Never share your phone number, only the handle.

Activism is trust based, as others said it’s a lot word of mouth how you learn about things going on. The unfortunate reality is that depending on what kind of activism you’re doing there might be people infiltrating.

You have to be more careful if you’re e.g. a climate or pro-Palestine activist. This is my experience from Palestine activism, the Zionists actually send people speaking perfect Arabic into protestor groups in and outside of Palestine. They get the names & info on everyone, what their role is in the group, things they share, they use that to disrupt the activism, blackmail and jail people. So you might consider not sharing social media accounts and your real name either, the less the better. But that really depends on the kind of activism you’re doing and the kind of people you’re surrounded with. I would assume that climate activism might be equally dangerous. Although mind you my experience is also a dictatorship like scenario, or whatever you wanna call military occupation.

The infiltrator issue also sucks because it destroys trust, there have been cases where undercover cops lived a double life for years just to keep some group infiltrated but those are rare. And that’s why a lot of things are word of mouth, you get "in" over doing more work and building friendships with people.

[prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net]

This post on the subject of privacy may be relevant.

[justenoughducks@feddit.nl]

Cops will literally have long term relationships and marry the person they are spying on when it comes to eco-activism.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/19/undercover-policeman-married-activist-spy

The oil companies have such incredibly firm control over the worlds' police forces that they have cops have long term sexual relationships with people opposing their ecocide and spy on them the entire time.

[fantasticdonkey@reddthat.com]

Wow, fascists, whether corporate or colonial or otherwise nationalistic really know no boundaries.

In our case we had a guy in the group who claimed to be from a specific place I happen to know very well since I have friends from there and the dialect of the guy just didn’t match his story. This is something very specific to Arabic dialects though where every region, every city has their own dialect. It was very awkward to tell this to the others, because it just ruins the trust in the group.
That's why it’s often better to give menial tasks like putting up posters or painting banners to suspected infiltrators rather than put the accusation out there.

In general I’d recommend having several layers of communication and only let those in which seem trustworthy. If they start having sexual relationships with group members and become leaders of the group like in the article, well… No idea what to do in such a case, this is just crazy.