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.
That’s essentially a death sentence.
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Nazi collaborators, like Solzhenitsyn, recieved more lenient prison sentences than this.
Do you have more info about him being a Nazi collaborator? I knew he made most of the story up but didn’t know about Nazi collaboration
this is what I have but I don’t have a better source for it
best Internet comment award, 2008:
Solzhenitsyn was a Nazi propagandist in the 1940’s and affirmed that the war against Nazism was avoidable and a compromise with Hitler possible. That was why he was sent to a labor camp, for being a traitor.
His hatred for Jews that became public knowledge in recent years may explain his Nazi sympathies. Predictably, he was also a great fan of the Spanish fascist dictator Franco, whom he went to support when his regime began to totter. He appeared on Spanish TV to plead with Spaniards to remember the “freedom” they enjoyed under Franco while Soviet citizens were “enslaved” by socialism.
Solzhenitsyn was never a dissident but enjoyed the full support of Nikita Khruschev when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which Khrushchev used as propaganda material during his purge of Stalinists.
Nazi lover, Jew hater, monarchist: No wonder he became the darling of the West.
The fact that their use of Signal was successfully presented as proof of terrorist intent should be extremely alarming to everyone.
Signal
US-origin open source messaging client
That would be an easy target for Cellbrite devs to find a lot of vulnerabilities. Can’t wait for Matrix devs to react to Signal encryption scandal
What do you mean by this?
The punishment for the protesters exceeds the lengthiest prison sentences given out for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
All of whom were pardoned, by the way. I guess the moral here is that leftists should start overthrowing the government instead of just protesting it.
I think non-Americans sometimes underestimate the amount of state repression here. Pity anyone who is targeted by the “justice system”, because it is the goddamned terminator. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until your life is ruined.
Unless the accused is a pedophile billionaire, of course.
Death to amerikkka.
of course
Many people are saying it
Whether the US or the UK any action, including peaceful or insignificant, will mark you as a terrorist now. And while sentences like this might have some chilling effect they also is ensure there’s no reason to try and work within the law or allow yourself to get caught. Especially in America, if I was armed at an action and the cops moved in I think I’d be unloading every bullet towards them but my last one.
People need to fully realize that you cannot organize through text messages or even Signal, the only way to be sure of maintaining opsec is no real names, no faces ever visible during the action, and no digital communication about the action or between members. These days it’s like you have to be Solid Snake to get away with anything, and he didn’t even have to face the level of surveillance we have now.
It will have a chilling effect for a lot probably, but these sentences will just ensure that the serious ones make it count hopefully. In the Three Body Problem novels, they had to operate knowing the enemy could observe every single thing they did at all times, so they had a person secretly assigned to coordinate efforts, but without ever telling anyone or making it clear that they were a leader of the resistance. It felt like a hint for people in the near future.
People managed to organize before cell phones. Its called you set a meeting and everyone attends in person as agreed. Discuss IRL and then dont change your plans.
Call phones have really lowered the general ability of anybody to commit to anything. Before SMS became prevelant you could set social or political meetings weeks in advance. Like July 16 at 2pm, in the park. I’ll bring ___, you’ll research ___,whatever other tasks. And everyone just plan for that. Maybe confirm the night before with a phone call (also planned in advance). Now everything requires 50 text messages to nail people down.
Call phones have really lowered the general ability of anybody to commit to anything.
“Are we still on? I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t heard from you”
SHUT UP SHUT UP JUST COME TO THE THING WE FUCKING PLANNED
Nearly every time I’ve attempted to push irl meetings at least one person has claimed it is ableist (even with masks) or classist (harder for some to travel). I still try though…
Like at all?? Wow.
Maybe get a decent Bluetooth speaker phone thingy? Get your own or the org can pay, which is mote than justified as a cost of accomidation to avoid ablism. The people who can’t or dont want to attend in person can participate remotely that way, same as they do now. Since the tech has become available and normalized I have attended various events set up that way. Need to practice using it before rolling out, and start with a committee or something small to work out technical issues.
Then make it so attending the meeting in person has social benefit like pre and post chit chat, maybe hangout or food sometimes. Make a pan of brownies to share. Or shoplift cheese and dates. the informal waiting around time is important as well as business. (Unless your meetings are extremely meandering.) Those who attend in person will have more coherency due to being physically present with each other. Which will incentivise attendance.
Depending on your organizational context, could possibly try to work around the ablism by supporting people to attend if possible such as organizing transportation either by carpooling or paying cab fare for people who truely cannot make it otherwise. (Just an example.) A hardship travel fund.
Another strategy is to rotate the meeting location around rather than defaulting to somewhere “central” which typically favors those who live in the city. The downtown people then need to have some commitment to occasionally going “far away” to a suburb or neighboring town, to share the burden of travel. And finding suitable meeting space can be difficult anywhere. But you learn a lot about your surroundings and create relationships while searching for them.
Idk what kind of group you’re in, where or with whom, so may or may not be exactly applicable. All the above is very doable though. IMO planning meetings is a foundational skill for any organizer/activist/revolutionary individual or group. It is not out of reach for anybody. It always includes some sort of thinking such as the above no matter the context. It is never a matter of just announcing a time and location you feel like and everyone just stops their life to obey. Planning meetings, including logistically difficult ones, is a way to learn about how to think about balancing the conflicting needs of various people, to do things fairly. And practical tasks like securing a venue, communicating to everyone, setting up and tidying after. Depending on your membership these are all things that people may have never done before, in which case they should all learn. They are skills of democracy.
No I mean strictly in person for things that are particularly sensitive. No online option. I understand it is a burden but it’s also a trade-off not just a cost, and the benefits are increasingly worth it.
They should be able to suggest ways to make things accessible to them, like as above examples.
I have worked with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. The idea of being 100% unable to attend any meeting, ever, is implausible. Someone who smacks down such a proposal without trying to work it out is abusing good will.
I don’t think the people making such claims will enjoy what the “justice” system has in store for them.
Every real org with enough people will inevitably have members that overly focus on their own hardships and weaponize them when convenient. Handling them can be challenging because they often do good work despite the toxicity and because consciousness around these topics is often limited or liberal. This site, while not an org, sometimes struggles with tokenizing logic, for example.
I’m saying this because there is not an appeal to be made that can always make every person happy or mollified. For example, in the past I’ve suggested hardship funds, adding locations near them to the rotation, meeting outdoors while still masking (I actually prefer this). Eventually an org has to decide whether they want to alienate a self-centering member or work around them and it can really go either way depending on context.
Too true, it’s annoying as hell. I’m gonna start using carrier pigeons for messages and broadcast a numbers station.
The key is that you can’t act in this way and “want to get away with it.”
This attitude is an extremely good example of why the average proletarian doesn’t take left-wing action seriously in the U.S., if my last decade of personal and organizational interviews and conversations are to be of any particular insight.
They know that if they step out, their neck is on the line, and have absolutely no trust for leftists who are not willing to put their neck out there on the line first, publically and repeatedly. The proletariate are not stupid, they know what is at stake here, and the level of violence that can and will be used to protect it, but often activist leftists don’t act as though they under that level of threat of violence. The words they say and picture of the world they paint do not match the level and fervor of action they take, when they decide to take action. It feels like they treat it as a social media game.
Op-sec is essential, but even more essential for the movement is, if you get caught, to stand by your convictions.
Not to try to downplay the tragedy and unfairness here, it fucking sucks to see this, but given the analysis, what exactly am I supposed to expect?
I’m not fully sure I understand what you mean, are you saying that since the state will crack down so hard on them regardless of what they do, these groups shouldn’t waste time with these sorts of “solidarity protest” actions and just actually start doing genuinely revolutionary action, since the punishment is the same either way?
Correct, in part.
If they truely believe that the bourgeois state is the monstrous entity that they portray it as (which btw it is), then there are two rational options, either ducking your head down and going about your life hoping that if you stay in line the state will not come for you OR commiting to a truely revolutionary actiom that actually shakes the foundations of state apparatus. Anything in-between means that they don’t actually think the state is as monstrous or as dangerous as they portray it as. It’s not a fallacy of maximization, it is a matching of rhetoric with rational action.
Proletarians, no matter their education level, but particularly for the factory-educated, are extremely sensitive to this kind of stuff because they live this disconnect between rhetoric and action from ownership on a daily basis. Ownership will come out with a huge display of rhetoric and then never actually act in accordance to that level of rhetoric.
I remember hearing how during the Civil Rights Movement, those organizers that so-called revolutionaries think they’re too radical for would not allow people to participate in those protests until they wrote their will. Any potential protestor had to seriously content with the fact that even with the mildest protest that they could fucking die and their affairs had to be made in order should they be murdered by the state.
Yeah, this, exactly this. Those were some people whose actions matched their rhetoric.
Actual paper, hand writing, wax seal. Pre-established protocols of communication and codes. You can make single use shared cyphers that have instructions on which cypher to use in the message itself. Change the code throughout the message, and burn the printed cypher, burn the message.
Do you really think there is any “trick” to evade this prosecutorial attitude? The reblious intentions of the victims can be clearly demonstrated by the actions at the protest. Everything else is just decoration.
Realistically, I find it unlikely that most any group of 5 or 10 or more people would be able to exercise perfect discipline and discretion required for this to work. I also dont know what kind of information would be transmitted this way? Its not like the rosenburgs passing scientific information. Its easier to just have an IRL meeting.
Anybody involved in this stuff has to be aware that there is a 1 in 3000 chance that they will be executed or life made hell indefinitely. Quit smoking/vaping now, it’ll make incarceration easier.
Lot of assumptions about my comment here. I’m simply sharing a non-digital mode. There’s no tricks to avoid conviction, the trick is to not get caught.
But you’ve hit the nail on the head with the usefulness of methods like this, it’s much more efficient to meet in person and that should be the go to.
I’m personally not doing anything that requires this level of detail in the first place because there’s little to no risk in the work that I do. If I were, I wouldn’t be spending time on here.
Also, I don’t vape or smoke.
You can make single use shared cyphers
These are called one time pads for anyone who isn’t familiar. It is actually an incredibly simple technique which can be done with pencil on paper if needed.
If they key of a one time pad is truly random and never reused, it’s the only kind of cypher that’s impossible to break no matter how much time and computing power one has.
(Of course, a smart attacker would try to go around it, like for example infiltrating the OS to get to the message whilst cleartext, but that’s a different story)
The downside is, of course, that that the one time pad key is as long as the message plus it has to be real random data, not the kind of thing you get out of a pseudo-random number generator (like the rand() function in C and similar).
The downside to full anonymity that I can see is it’s easier to get infiltrated. One of the best defenses is being friends with your comrades, knowing where they work and live, meeting their kids, their family, etc. Of course that doesn’t always work (like that FBI informant who took down Fred Hampton’s chapter of the Black Panthers), but I’d hate to surrender a feeling of community to maintain full opsec.
Of course if you just mean at the action, which now that I’m rereading your comment I think is what you meant, then ya, I agree. Still makes it hard to organize if we can’t use digital communication tools and they can, though. Sucks doing all this in a futuristic dystopia. We’ll have to adapt like the revolutionaries of old did to their time periods.
True about anonymity, I didn’t necessarily mean never know who you’re working with, if it’s your true homies and family there’s probably less risk but yeah like with Fred Hampton, there are a lot of ways the feds can pressure people close to you. If someone is told they would get sentenced to 30 years in prison if they don’t help the investigation it’s a tough bargain to go against them.
It really does suck
I read books from guerilla fighters like Che Guevara talking about the disadvantage in regards to having to work in the shadows, weaponry, organization and funding. It’s wild how much more power the state security forces have gained. But the revolutionaries fighting an evil state will gain the sympathies of the people which is an advantage, as well as the sheer number of potential fighters, always much greater than the state’s numbers if they can be organized sufficiently.
no digital communication about the action or between members
I would think that, surely, it should be possible to establish a secure method? It’s one thing to not be able to use existing platforms, but an appropriately dedicated group could probably spin up their own encrypted messaging system?
Edit: ok, I see what you mean, they used the simple fact that the protesters used signal as part of the evidence against them. I was thinking in terms of securing your plans rather than protecting actors, which is of course also vital.
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.
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.
Screenshots are still a thing. The tradeoffs are real for secure messaging. At a certain point, someone has to see that packet A got sent from IP x.x.x.x to IP y.y.y.y. beyond that, metadata is hard to keep safe. Who messaged who when. The ways to make it more obscure, more encrypted, but at the end of the day you still have vectors that information can escape through. The biggest one is that a person you send message to takes a screenshot. Even if you secure everything so so much, you can’t make it so someone can read it but can’t record it. Take a picture of it, etc.
Check out briar, it does a pretty good job for a messenger, but tradeoffs are tradeoffs (e.g. recipient must be online to deliver messages). Also simplex ive heard good things about.
Many people aren’t aware that their notifications are also, by default, delivered through cloud servers. The notification message contents might be exposed through that. Though privacy focused apps like Signal do employ some attempt at countermeasure by sending blank pings which then trigger an on-device retrieve of the message.
Yup. Notifications are such a shitshow. Everything with tech is a shitshow. The solutions to problems create their own problems (e.g. p2p to avoid servers, but now you have to have your device online to receive messages, so you put an always on device on your home network to always get messages (basically a bounce device), but now you have an unsecured device that isnt on your person so if your threat involves police reading your messages well gosh you better hope they dont break in to your home. Next thing you know youre writing a bash script to constantly detect changes in the accelerometer, and when they exceed a certain threshold delete all messages and
dd -if /dev/null -of /dev/sda, and then youre hooking it up to a random unsecured telnet connection to a seismology center to make sure its actually cops busting down your door and not an earthquake so you dont accidentally lose your messages, and finally you get it all set up perfectly and dont put it on the table gingerly enough and trigger the script, wiping the drive, and you give up and then it turns out your friend uses an old unsecured android version so the cops just got all the group messages from a random traffic stop and now your in jail awaiting trial for terrorism and ok ok at this point I’m just being hyperbolic and taking the piss a little.)
I mean, if the person you’re communicating with is directly compromised in that way, you’re fucked. They could just as easily be brought in to testify against you directly, or report on your activities to intelligence agencies, or whatever you’re concerned about, no screen capture necessary. That’s not really a technology issue.
they can pwn phones without finding a benedict arnold or infiltrating the group. or get over-the-shoulder from a surveillance camera, good thing we don’t have millions of those around everywhere.
Re screenshots, people dont have to be compromised to take screenshots. “This message will go away and I want to remember it cause my memory isnt that good, I’ll screenshot it”. But yea if someone is directly working against you you’re fucked. Most issues are social, not technological
gotta do your coordination in an online game and speak in code.
or stomach the division and you can probably just openly talk about shooting some government buildings.
Yeah true, it is possible, I shouldn’t say never use digital comms, I mainly meant if you want to be sure that the message won’t be intercepted or read back to you in court. Even if you have your own encrypted system, a person could be compromised and share the messages with authorities, or there could be some kind of other monitoring like a camera watching your screen. I just have trouble trusting that there isn’t some kind of backdoor that could expose you that we don’t know about yet. I doubt these people were thinking it was going to be that serious of an event though, it sounds like it wasn’t exactly that planned out.
Also worth considering the precedent here that just using encrypted messaging was used as evidence against them, which is really super fucked.
I dont really understand why there is discussion of alternative methods of encoded comms. Any or all of them are equally as “suspicious”.
code might be better than encryption for a while. imagine a lawyer trying to explain to a jury that “girl dinner 6-7 mogging the rizzless” really meant blowing up ted cruz’s house
Damn it, my cell has to get a new code now. Thanks a lot.
100 years for self defense
30 years for moving some pamphlets.
B-b-but! That’s illegal! Those people have rights!!!
Not good folks.
I could make a joke about trots, but it’s a fucked situation, so you’ll have to imagine me saying it instead.
Võ Thi Thang jpg
^this
if the goal to demonstrate solidarity, letters and loudspeakers seem safer, if the goal is to impose costs on the state, the healthcare of ice agents is bankrolled by the state; draw your own conclusions at what the tactic should be with the above and risk tolerance.
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