The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15 from the woods, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto and Meagan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison. Maricela Rueda, another demonstrator, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Benjamin Song, who fired the gun at the police officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison

The ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved leftwing zines and other materials at the request of Rueda, his wife, after she was arrested. Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday.

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30 years for moving some pamphlets.

desolate

  • none [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    18 hours ago

    an appropriately dedicated group could probably spin up their own encrypted messaging system?

    this is completely unrealistic. Its hard enough to find a few people with whom one has sufficient agreement and trust to organize with. A requirement that one or more of those people being competent enough to write their own encrypted messaging system from scratch? And everyone is able or willing to sideload it on their devices without introducing some other security issue. That isn’t a matter of commitment, it is a matter of luck. The kind of luck which is unevenly distributed through geography, class, gender, race etc.

    All that aside from the fact that even if you are organizing in an elite area and this is plausible (if not likely), it does absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand. I just read the linked article, is there another one that indicates a technical problem with signal?

    Every comment in this thread proposing technical solutions, it sounds like living in a comic book or something. We should start passing a hat around now for commissary donations to all the hexbears who are about to be locked up because they thought they could outsmart fascism with some clever python or kotlin.

    • Hermes [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      17 hours ago
      an appropriately dedicated group could probably spin up their own encrypted messaging system?
      

      this is completely unrealistic.

      For reference, nation state level actors still fuck this up. And expecting a group of <10 people to be able to outperform the CIA is a bit of a stretch.