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My understanding is that when someone is arrested in Iran, other activists try to shut down that person's social media accounts in order to prevent Iranian auth
by toni 4y ago
My understanding is that when someone is arrested in Iran, other activists try to shut down that person's social media accounts in order to prevent Iranian authorities going through his/her profiles and gather more incriminating evidence against them. Isn't that what is happening here?
- RektBoy 4y agoI don't think, if you want arrest somebody, you would crawl everything as a part of acquiring evidence before it.
- paranoidrobot 4y agoI believe suspending their account also blocks access to private messages. It would also prevent their account being used to access any private accounts they may follow.
- toni 4y agoThe arrests are not premeditated. They arrest you first, then ask questions
- kjkjadksj 4y agoHow do they even know who to arrest if they supposedly collect evidence after the fact?
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThere is no due process in authoritarian states. Being suspected by someone on the police that you might hold subversive views is enough to get you arrested, tortured, and murdered.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoRight, but as soon as they suspect someone they probably run tools like these. They can be ran faster than it takes to find someone and throw then in a van for sure.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoIf you are an authoritarian state you don't give too much worry about that, if you grab the wrong person "oh well another day another murder." It's about terror and control, not about justice. If you think that's bad wait till you see what the Khmer Rogue did in Cambodia. The precious framework of individual rights, a relatively functioning justice system, and constitutional guarantees may not be perfect here in the US of A, there are issues, and those rights are still being eroded, and we have work to do, but people who draw comparisons between places like the US and China or Iran clearly have no idea what they are talking about, and it's a decent chance they may in fact be part of state sponsored psychological warfare apparatuses.
- MaxPock 4y ago
- andrewinardeer 4y agoDo you have intimate knowledge of Iranian policing playbooks or intinate knowledge of Iranian activists playbooks or are you guessing?
- registeredcorn 4y agoI'm not sure why your being downvoted (or whatever it's called on here). It's a legitimate question. It looks like one person in here claims to have some amount of knowledge on the matter, but it would be good to get some kind of confirmation in either direction before endorsing one tactic, or another.
- iampuero 4y agoThis is probably a very US-centric (or insert-your-country-here-centric) viewpoint that does not hold true everywhere else in the world. Even if it does, it would be idealistic to assume these things continue to hold true during moments of crisis for a state..
- lupire 4y agoIt's not idealistic, it's basic spycraft. Grab what you can before people know they need to hide it.
- bzbarsky 4y agoIn some countries, you arrest people first, then find/manufacture evidence later.
- slim 4y agowe (activists) actually ask social media platforms to suspend the account and publicize it. to avoid the activist being tortured to extract passwords. twitter is doing the right thing
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoSo actually trying to “help” by getting Twitter to reverse the suspension, may actually be the worst thing you can do to him and his fellow activists. Yet another example of how good intentions aren’t enough. You need to fully understand the situation before you act, especially when dealing with a situation that is different from what you are familiar with.
- shswkna 4y agoGood comment that should be on the top. Like another comment said, the suspension might even be to protect him. The thing is we don‘t know either way.
- mehdix 4y agoYes, I stand corrected. I can't edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- O__________O 4y agoYes, this most like is what happened, linked to a news source here to independently support this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106622
- jstarfish 4y agoThis stinks of false-flag psyops. A guy is quietly abducted by an authoritarian regime. Naturally, the smart response would be for "activists" to "help" him by erasing all public record of his existence.
- O__________O 4y agoPlease feel free to provide evidence of how deleting the accounts has made anyone less safe.
- bhelkey 4y agoFolks use Twitter for tweets and for DMs. I have no knowledge here but this could be an attempt to remove all private messages.
- mehdix 4y agoI did not know this. It is fine, then. Also another comment mentions blocking access to DMs, which makes sense. I was unable to edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation. Thanks.
- slim 4y agomaybe @dang can help with this. it's an urgent situation
- mehdix 4y agoI wrote him to edit the top-level comment. Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- avgcorrection 4y agoJust paving the road with some good intentions.
- alex_young 4y agoIt may be a good idea to flag this entire submission until some other action can be taken. It's not great to have all of this discussion about social profile circumvention in the open IMO.
- bioemerl 4y agoI'm doing my part!
- willcipriano 4y agoActivists are apparently unfamiliar with how the internet works: [web archive link redacted] Hopefully the authorities in Iran are similarly ignorant
- toni 4y agoI think the authorities are stupider than what you think. When they arrest someone in a demonstration, they will confiscate their phone and open the apps on the device. If the account is inactive, they can not see anything. May I ask you to delete your comment if that is not a problem? You basically gave the regime an evidence we said the activists are trying to hide away.
- willcipriano 4y agoIf I was kidnapped, beaten and probably in a mass grave don't you dare take down what I said that put me in that position. (Frankly we may be in that spot sooner than you think in the US) That's exactly what the regime wants, to shut him up. He gave his freedom at a minimum, probably his life to say what he said, the least we can do is listen to him.
- toni 4y agoThe suspension is temporary. Presumably when the person is released, Twitter will reinstate the account. The other reason for suspension is to not compromise DMs and followers. But I also understand your point of view in not wanting to delete it.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- decremental 4y agoSo in this hypothetical scenario they don't know about the Internet Archive but they do happen to browse Hacker News? This probably isn't their first rodeo. I'm sure they're aware of the archives that exist.
- wisnoskij 4y agoThat sounds stupid. Iran is an official government agency, they can just ask twitter or some ally like UAE or China to hand over all the information in a form a lot easier for searching through than logging into their account.
- wpietri 4y agoWhat evidence do you have that Twitter will comply with a request like that from Iran? Even when redirected via a government that doesn't have anything to do with the account?
- lupire 4y agoTwitter hired KSA spies that helped kill Jamal Khashoggi. Twitter "compliance" is irrelevant because they have no internal data security.
- oneplane 4y agoThey have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in. Keep in mind that business operations and server locations (and incorporation locations) are not the same thing. If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever. This is obviously not great if you have a set of less-restrictive and more-restrictive laws that contradict each other. And it's not great if values, politics and rights in general aren't compatible. As much as we can disagree with what mass-murdering authoritarian regimes are up to, unless we go to war (after we have already applied all the sanctions we can think of) there isn't much you can do about it.
- potency 4y agoSo practically speaking, what will happen if Twitter ignores Iranian law and allows IPs from that country to use their platform anyway? I don't think the US govt will enforce Iranian law for them...
- 4y ago
- benevol 4y agoThis makes no sense. When governments go after their targets, they gather all they can as soon as they define them as targets. Twitter, on the other hand, is known to be a massive censor, just like Youtube/Google.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe Iran situation is in a lot of flux, so while that may be possible when being methodical about one person, it is less so if you are trying to rapidly detain hundreds or thousands per day.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoThey probably have a script that creates an archive of all social media posts. Not hard to do. As soon as you have a name to point it to you can run this sort of tool.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoYou would think the regime already did this before the arrest