How to secure your phone before attending a protest
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T [email protected] shared this topic
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If you can, leave your phone at home
That's it! There's the answer!
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Of course! It's so obvious!
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The Hated One is another good resource on these topics. The guy is a paranoid and has an extreme threat model, but the information is still on point. Worth watching and sharing.
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Don't take your phone to a protest
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"But how will I livestream my protest against Elon on X with out my phone?"
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What a boring dystopian article. It’s sad, but necessary.
purchase and use a burner phone instead, and only turn it on when you’re at the site of the demonstration
This should be the de facto response. In addition, I’d suggest not using your personal phone for any protest related communications and stick with burners no matter how much you may trust the organizers.
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The EFF also has an article: https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest
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Back when I had Amazon smile, the donations went to the EFF. This makes me happy it went to a worthy cause.
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Write down your name and ICE information with a sharpie on your body. Use a rugged phone case.
Don’t bother going to peaceful protests, they don’t work against post-truth authoritarian governments.
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Got a specific video you could suggest from them?
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Its a balancing act. You shouldn't be recording tiktoks and doing the carlton.
But there is a lot of value in organizers being able to communicate. If you see a fat white kid with an assault rifle, you let people know. Same with when the paddy wagons roll in.
And there is a LOT of value in being able to make it clear to the cops that you are recording before they decide to "teach some people a lesson".
I chat about this with my activist buddies a lot. And one thing we are increasingly realizing is that there is a LOT of value in convincing even a mid-tier IRL streamer to come out. Yeah, they are fucking obnoxious when they are trying to yell to chat. But it is someone who is high enough profile that they won't immediately have their gear destroyed AND privileged enough that they won't even realize that is an option until it is too late. At which point the decision as to how to handle the escalation is already happening.
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How To be Anonymous In A Protest | Burner Phone Tutorial
I think this one is pretty good. Pretty good explanation of how a protester might leave digital information and what to do about it.
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And ideally, ask a friend to use it and do recordable things on it, like making social media posts or taking pictures, that records the phone’s location. That way, the phone has a recorded history of you being elsewhere, while you’re at the protest. An alibi.
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Just an aside that Paddy wagons is pretty racist.
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Every sourcing I have seen comes more from the UK as a way to shorten patrol and the argument that it is an ethnic slur against Irish people is similar to "cracker" in that.. can you REALLY be that racist against the oppressors?
But tweaked anyway. Thanks.
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Yeah racism doesn't apply to whypepo
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Irish people were actually considered "non-white" throughout most of the history of race as a concept. They were only recently recategorized by racists when they felt their numbers dwindling and decided to expand the tent a little.
Irish people have suffered from a history of explicitly racist oppression; calling them "the oppressors" flies directly in the face of history. Their skin colour may be white, but the history of their relationship with race as a power structure is far more complex.
This does not mean that it's impossible for Irish people to be racist themselves, or for Irish people to embrace "white" as an identity. Race is complicated; that's exactly why trying to adopt simplistic attitudes to it never works.
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The guide seems to be aimed at attendees, rather than organizers and media. If someone is showing up to add their voice to the protest, then leaving their phone at home is an ideal way to minimize their footprint.
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Hmm if it's a smartphone, their location can still be tracked even if they're not recording videos for social media. I've never attended a protest, but one of my younger siblings has. I agree with the author here: don't take a smartphone with you. If you need to go to a protest, and it's a charged topic (i.e. people have been fired or detained for it), take a dumb phone and make calls once you're considerably away from the protest's meeting site. Or, buy a burner phone for use only at the meeting site. If video footage is that big of a deal, take an old-fashioned video camera to record.
