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Hypothetical: If you had a law enforcement agency spying/harassing you, what would you do? If they would make it hard to prove?

technobabbler 5y ago
Make a web series out of it and livestream it? Have your viewers vote on what kind of donuts to send? Silly, but probably a better choice than becoming the next Ted Kaczynski.
pengaru 5y ago
As someone who experienced something along these lines through some kind of sloppy guilt by association (frequently computed from a cafe a drug dealer operated out of when he got busted), I don't even have to answer hypothetically. Ignored it, made sure my ducks were in a row, and basically waited for them to lose interest - budgets for such individual surveillance are presumably finite. Eventually the most visible manned surveillance ceased occurring, IIRC it lasted at least a few months. It was a very annoying experience. But the population-wide omnipresent automated surveillance is a different beast entirely. When it involves manpower actually watching and following someone it can't last forever. I'm sure people are regularly being caught up in mass location and communications metadata surveillance nets thanks to their phones being in the vicinity of criminal activity like whore houses and/or illegal drug dens. The cost is so low for sustaining that kind of thing it's basically an honor system from where I'm sitting that they ever stop.
- 2xpress 5y ago
  One way to make it less likely to get caught up in a mass-location harvesting case is to disable GPS on phone, especially on a non-de-googled Android phone. I'd also recommend paying with cash whenever that is an option. Another biggie is not to vote for politicians supporting public surveillance laws, and to cast an abstention vote when no anti-public-surveillance candidate is available. The abstention sends a signal to other prospective candidates that the election-winning politicians are not un-defeatable by a candidate better aligned with the voters who abstained.

technobabbler 5y ago

Make a web series out of it and livestream it? Have your viewers vote on what kind of donuts to send? Silly, but probably a better choice than becoming the next Ted Kaczynski.

pengaru 5y ago

As someone who experienced something along these lines through some kind of sloppy guilt by association (frequently computed from a cafe a drug dealer operated out of when he got busted), I don't even have to answer hypothetically. Ignored it, made sure my ducks were in a row, and basically waited for them to lose interest - budgets for such individual surveillance are presumably finite. Eventually the most visible manned surveillance ceased occurring, IIRC it lasted at least a few months. It was a very annoying experience. But the population-wide omnipresent automated surveillance is a different beast entirely. When it involves manpower actually watching and following someone it can't last forever. I'm sure people are regularly being caught up in mass location and communications metadata surveillance nets thanks to their phones being in the vicinity of criminal activity like whore houses and/or illegal drug dens. The cost is so low for sustaining that kind of thing it's basically an honor system from where I'm sitting that they ever stop.

2xpress 5y ago
One way to make it less likely to get caught up in a mass-location harvesting case is to disable GPS on phone, especially on a non-de-googled Android phone. I'd also recommend paying with cash whenever that is an option. Another biggie is not to vote for politicians supporting public surveillance laws, and to cast an abstention vote when no anti-public-surveillance candidate is available. The abstention sends a signal to other prospective candidates that the election-winning politicians are not un-defeatable by a candidate better aligned with the voters who abstained.