thecrash

There are indeed some really bad people out there, and some of the worst ones use their positions within institutions like police departments to avoid accountability.

I'll see your conspiracy theory and raise you one: What if the feds fund tech privacy projects specifically so that people like you won't trust them, and instead embrace privacy nihilism?

This is a known strategy of the Kremlin, by the way. They fund opposition groups which protest them, and then leak the fact of that funding so that people who are genuinely upset at the Kremlin get confused about who is captured opposition and who is legitimate.

It can be a signal in some cases, but funding sources are not a reliable way to make a conclusion about a group's motivations.

Decreases what info Signal needs to collect and retain about a user. When using an SMS verification as a proof, Signal needs to log the phone number, because if they didn't, one spammer could use one phone number to create 10^99 accounts.

When using payment as proof, they can verify that payment occurred, validate the account and then immediately forget about the transaction. One spammer would still have to pay 10^99 times to create that many accounts.

enough metaphors though. Here is what I think probably actually happened, based on the multiple accounts I've read:

"Give us the PIN for your phone"

"I don't want you to search my phone, and I want to talk to my lawyer"

"If you don't comply, you're going to be in a lot of trouble"

"Can I please just go, I don't want to answer questions or be searched"

"If you don't comply we will seize your phone and detain you indefinitely until we can unlock your phone!"

"I want my lawyer."

"Just tell us the PIN and you'll be on your way. Otherwise it's gonna be bad."

"Look if I have no choice my PIN is 1234, but I don't want you searching my phone without my lawyer present."

...

"Hey! We tried to search your phone and the phone wiped itself! You're going to prison for destruction of evidence!"

I have tested them, that's what I'm saying! The belief that the authorities are completely unrestrained in their power serves authoritarianism. Creating this belief is in fact a major priority for the current regime.

This is not to say that things aren't bad, or abuses never happen. But if people fail to exercise the actual power and rights they do have, under a mistaken belief that they have no power and no rights, then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You are incorrect, US border patrol can not arrest you for refusing to decrypt your phone (if you are a citizen). It is not considered obstructing a search to refuse to provide a password. This is not "autistic" speculation about legal technicalities, there are many many examples which support this. The worst they can do is seize the device.

It doesn't sound like this person pressed any buttons. They were pressured to provide a PIN or be delayed and further harassed. They obliged, and agents decided to enter it to attempt a warrantless search of the phone.

It's not stated, but probably we can assume the person didn't ask for his phone to be searched - probably he asked NOT for it to be searched, at least based on his multiple requests to talk to his lawyer.

Considering those factors, I'd say border patrol is more responsible for wiping the phone than the person.

It's important to note that there are very many Jews in the world who are not Zionist and many Jews in Israel who disagree with the Palestinian genocide.

They're not the majority, but there are still a lot of them.

Attacking civilians has always been "controversial". As a civilian myself, I would be pretty worried if this changed.

It's scary that you bring up the question of whether Rene Good was under arrest or not at the time she was killed. As if it were legal or justified to execute people for failing to cooperate with their own arrest. It's scary because you're not the only person who believes this - many in ICE and other police agencies hold this belief, and by repeating it you encourage them to kill again.

That's the trouble though - those friendly neighborhood sites can generally be assumed to be appropriate for kids, but if we create the expectation that they must ensure they are appropriate for certain age brackets simply by virtue of being online, those sites will cease existing.

Instead of running their own websites, they'll migrate to a platform like Facebook. That way Meta handles the burden of moderation and the legal complaints for the inevitable moderation failures.

I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.

Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.

This case is not important because of Greenpeace, it's important because of the implications for free speech in the US. They are not being bankrupted because they took the wrong stance on nuclear, they're being bankrupted for supposed defamation and incitement against a major energy corporation.

This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.

Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.

Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement. But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.