First things first. Anonymity is key. Nothing demonstrates this better then the identification and prosecution of the Jan 6th rioters. I'm not here to comment on the morality of the events that took place on that day, but it clearly demonstrated the fact that political actors can leverage the surveillance apparatus to find and punish their adversaries. So what are some of the mistakes the J6 folks made that we can learn from?

1. They didn't cover their faces. In the post-COVID world, it is completely acceptable to wear an N95 mask in public. That is be the bare minimum precaution anyone attending a controversial political event should take to avoid identification. It won't make it impossible to identify you in recordings, but it will certainly make the job harder. If it's OK for ICE to anonymously terrorize people and avoid the consequences of their actions, then it is OK for you as well. Turn about is fair play.

2. They recorded each other and posted it all over social media. I know we want to spread awareness of our cause and get the support of the people watching at home, but they basically created an distributed all of the evidence the Biden administration needed to find and apprehend them. So if you're at an event, try not to implicate the people around you. Blur unmasked faces in photos and videos before posting them. These people are you political allies, after all. You have to protect each other.

3. Mobile device tracking. Most people don't think about it but your mobile phone is basically a homing beacon indicating your approximate (sometimes precise) location at all times. Even if you have disabled location services on your phone, your carrier knows which tower you are connected to. This can be enough to prove that you attended an event. If the NSA doesn't already have access to this information, the government can easily subpeona your carrier for it.

4. Metadata. As Edward Snowden showed us, while the government doesn't always have access to the content of our communications, it is easy for it to acquire the metadata: who we communicated with and when. This sort of information can be used to determine who a device belongs to based on who it has been used to communicated with. If you use a device to communicate with your spouse, children, friends, coworkers and neighbors, then it is easy to infer that this device belongs to you. Then if the device has been targeted by authorities after a protest, it won't take them long to track you down.

Here I have laid out some of the basic threats that protesters face. In later posts, I will dig into how to mitigate them. Stay tuned.

#Activism #Protest #Privacy #Safety #Anonymity #SurveillanceCapitalism #SelfDefense