The subtitle doesn't make sense:
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
"a cell-site simulators"?
It’s literally just a typo, is it that hard to read past a single article-noun disagreement?
Yes, thank you. It's literally the first thing I read. Then I checked what 2bit site I was on only to find it was Wired...
The affidavits supporting the applications to track Richardson claimed video showed Fort, Lemon, Richardson, and others “chanting with agitators.” Prosecutors have since conceded that Lemon and Fort did not chant. According to her lawyers, the government acknowledged that the false claim appeared in at least 15 warrant affidavits.
Federal persecutors have always been biased towards the expedient viewpoints of corpos and other let-them-eat-cake perspectives (eg their snuffing of aaronsw). But this new regime is at the next level of not even giving a single flying fuck about operating in good faith. Truly a "hackers mindset" of putting whatever value is needed in a box to make the desired effect happen, which might be laudable except the only thing being hacked (off) is our Constitutional rights.
This administration has an impressive record of lying in order to manufacture charges against critics.
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
Judges are now no longer giving the DoJ the benefit of the doubt and actually scrutinizing the charges.
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> The affidavits ... Prosecutors have since conceded
So who is going down for perjury?
Presumably they're relying on mass pardons, like for the profligate self-enrichment, the open treachery of deliberately alienating our allies, the domestic terrorist gangs killing protestors, etc.
But it occurred to me the other day - pardons aren't some ineffable thing, but rely on the discretionary power of the executive (plus some dubious ability to bind future executives). But if we actually get the rule of law back at some point (ie no more sparkling autocracy aka "unitary executive theory"), then Congress should be able to make a law declaring that all those prosecutions need to be pursued. And it wouldn't be an ex-post-facto law because the illegal actions had already been illegal when they were performed, rather the only legal effect would be declaring that the executive (or ideally an independent agency) must perform the prosecution.
(edit: pardon power is mentioned in the Constitution - "[the President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment". But that would seem to apply to only some of the crimes. And one would hope that if we were at the point where there was a political mandate to take these traitors to task, an impeachment and conviction could be quite swift - there needs to be impeachments and criminal convictions for most of the Supreme Council as well)
Curious if there are counter measures for devices like Stingrays or IMSI catchers
You can build an IMSI-catcher-catcher out of an Orbic RC400L cellular hotspot and the Rayhunter software published by the EFF.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
Burner phone? No phone?
faraday pouch.
Yes there absolutely are!
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
Rayhunter is a great tool, but unfortunately, it is only a passive monitor for cellular state changes and not an active defense.
Modern Stingrays / IMSI catchers support all standards up to 5G. They easily exploit 4G networks and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployments. The only effective active defenses include (a) using a device locked strictly to 5G Standalone (SA) mode with SUCI (Subscription Concealed Identifier) enabled, preventing fallback to 4G/3G/2G where identity spoofing is trivial, (b) keeping the device in airplane mode most of the time, only going online briefly from unpredictable, shifting locations, and (c) using custom cellular baseband firmware that can reject anomalies (like a tower suddenly appearing too close or lacking neighbor cell lists), though this requires custom building your own solution as ready-made consumer solutions are hard to find. The last one can be achieved with Rayhunter, of course, but it would require some patching to Rayhunter and always carrying a mobile phone connected to the Rayhunter-supported Wi-Fi hotspot device.
Finally, intelligence mercenaries (and therefore LE agencies that contract them) use warrantless network-side exploits like SS7/Diameter attacks to remotely query the core telecom routing system and harvest the location of the tower target's phone is currently using¹ ². This doesn't even require sending legal DD requests to telcos to get target's cell tower.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370809133_Attacks_t...
[2] https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
Literally just airplane mode. It's ended up being a rather excellent privacy toggle that operating systems have to implement well.
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Lockdown Mode on iOS also disables 2G
>GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks
This isn't just a GrapheneOS feature so you don't need a new ROM for it. Upstream Android provides this feature. Being enrolled in Google Advanced Protection program even forces it on. It is also available in iOS via Lockdown Mode. Just a great feature and I'm glad its broadly available.
Yow, $70 a month is rather harsh. Honestly I'd rather just stick to Signal and avoid traditional calling/SMS and use HTTPS for everything over mobile data instead.
>GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
> Literally just airplane mode.
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/03/19/ex-pa...
Valuation has nothing to do with cash.
I appreciate this even handed take! Thanks
Should we introduce change to add [paywall] or something to paywalled links?
YMMV but https://web.archive.org/web/20261012130651/https://www.wired... and http://archive.is/KPP2r both work for me.
Should just ban paywalled links. Although it works fine for me.
For me it says “you read your last free article”
Banning all paywalls seems harsh. Some paywalls are perfectly readable in Reader Mode.
Careful you don't get busted for "hacking" the site with the reader mode button!
What will Stingrays do if a mobile device uses Starlink? There's no way the Feds are going to lose this ability to deploy Stingrays once Starlink Mobile comes around.
Do you think that Musk wants to become the dominate global cell provider and does NOT plan to use that information collection capability to enable his friends and hurt his enemies?
Yes?
Stingrays don't care where the provider's towers are, they work by pretending to be their own, and (ideally for you if you are the person wielding one) causing your target's phone to connect to or through your antenna. The only way Starlink would help a target is if your phone rejects tower signals that are not mostly above you, or if Starlink Mobile would utilize something other than the 3GPP standards, both of which are unlikely unless they want to sell their own fully proprietary phones.
Current Starlink direct-to-mobile is proprietary. It's kind of the opposite: 5G NR NTN so far has required new chipsets which haven't found their way into phones yet, whereas Starlink's LTE has been deployed with firmware changes to existing phones.
Probably the feds will just ask Starlink for the triangulated coordinates of their person of interest.
Exactly, it's not like Elon has been shy about using his toys for this admin.
Or any admin? I cannot recall any reporting of his companies refusing a lawful request.
Does CALEA allow Telcos to refuse?
Why wouldn't they do that in the case of other providers?
What if Starlink refuses?
Narrator: "They had already been doing it a decade by then."
Because they already have direct taps into the other cellular providers, also starlink will not say no lol. Elon is a puppet of this administration.
> charged with conspiring to violate worshippers’ civil rights and interfering with religious worship at ... its pastors, David Easterwood, also led ICE’s St. Paul field office
Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
Because it's so difficult to avoid protesting in a church huh? I get that you're partisan, but come on, have some common sense.
There are many churches that have needed protesting.
It's illegal in the United States to form or participate in a mob that interrupts worship service. It doesn't matter how right you think you are.
"It's illegal in the United States to form or participate in a mob that interrupts worship service"
What if it is a mob of religious worshipers that are participating in the mob?
Reporting on an event is not the same as participating in it. The first amendment protects freedom of the press as much as it protects freedom of religion.
For context:
A law was passed under President Clinton that made it illegal for protesters to interrupt religious services or impede access to an abortion clinic.
> The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a United States law that was signed by President Bill Clinton in May 1994, which prohibits the following three things: the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion, the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship...
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Access_to_Clinic_E...
We've seen anti-abortion protesters found guilty and sentenced to prison under the same law in the past.
> Six pro-life activists convicted of federal FACE Act charges, face over a decade in prison
https://ewtn.co.uk/article-six-pro-life-activists-convicted-...
Some people are wondering if the government has to prove it is a mob, or can just say that, and then do a bunch of illegal things once they assert it. And, whether if that turns out to be a lie, if there are consequences for lying. It would be nice to have clarity there.
The law in question calls out obstruction of religious services.
That narrative is what the Justice Dept alleges, but it’s far from settled. Don’t be disingenuous.
It's on video.
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You're just thumping the table. It's illegal to discriminate against Jewish university students, too, but that doesn't mean that Trump's treatment of Columbia et al was justified. What do you think it means for an official to use the law as a weapon against his enemies?
Those of us that believe in preserving civil liberties argue that we should take away powers of the government so it is harder to bully people under the color of law --- the process is the punishment. I'm not sure why the left only cares about this topic now, and not when the left was in power. The Left had a lot of opportunities to take away government powers before Trump entered office.
> we should take away powers of the government so it is harder to bully people under the color of law
This coincidentally makes it much easier for private parties to get away with illegal discrimination
Because "The Left" is not some unified body as you're making it out to be. Rather it consists of professional politicians who lean authoritarian, and the grassroots who lean libertarian. And the same basic dynamic exists on "The Right" as well. It is the professional authoritarians' main job to sell their respective grassroots tribes on justifications for the authoritarian actions of their administrations. Currently, it is "The Right" who is cheering on the authoritarianism (and quite voraciously!), so anybody earnestly interested in preserving civil liberties should be opposing "The Right". When the buntings change, "The Left" gets the power back, and is back to being the marketers for authoritarianism, then it will then become necessary to oppose "The Left". But of course to actually make any positive progress for civil liberties, it is necessary for the grassroots to hold their own politicians accountable rather than merely cheering when it is their team's at bat.
Trump is doing plenty of stuff that he has absolutely no legal authority to do, so I’m not sure why you think the law is some sort of roadblock.
he was acting as a journalist covering a protest. go lick a boot (earlier comment got flagged so im repeating the message)
Journalist 2nd, activist first. Also personal attacks are uncalled for.
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Amen. It's sickening how many people will eagerly repeat the paper-thin narratives put out by the regime about "legality", without ever critically considering why and how the regime got involved in a given situation in the first place. We're being subject to rule by law, not rule of law - it went out the window when the Supreme Council decreed a "unitary executive" above the law, aka autocracy by any other name.
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No they didn't.
First Amendment, anyone? The right to protest and have a free press?
I guess we're raiding the homes of Congress members we simply disagree with, so Constitutional rights don't carry as much weight anymore.
Congress members are not above the law, if they commit fraud then they should be investigated and prosecuted.
The right to protest doesn’t give you or anyone the right to do so on private property and to also interrupt with religious practices.
Documenting yourself doing the above doesn’t allow you to get away with it.
You have rights to assemble and protest, they have rights to assemble and worship. It’s all about trying to strike a reasonable balance between your competing rights.
The right to protest and peacefully assemble doesnt give you the right to do it in private property. The church is church property its open to its members and generally the public but that doesnt make it a public place or public property. If you want to protest a store, you are free to do so on public property outside the store. You are not free to do so inside the store disrupting the purpose of the establishment. The store is private property they are within their rights to refuse your business as long as it isnt based on a protected class.
A church really isnt any different, their business is worship and offering a peaceful place for contemplation, reflaction and prayer. If you disrupt that they can and should ask you to leave and should you refuse that becomes the crime of tresspass.
If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
Exceptional irony in that somewhere within that church might be printed the line "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who tresspass against us". Probably within some book that isn't very important.
What is the appropriate punishment for "tresspass?" How does it involve a federal law enforcement agency, and not local law enforcement instead?
> If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
I’m asking questions to better understand.
Imagine if they went after the child predators listed in the Epstein files with the same amount of force they are going after journalists and critics of ICE.
They do, but it's more of a "join our new sex trafficking club" dynamic than a prosecution.
Or collecting kompromat leverage
Imagine if the child predators listed in the Epstein files were illegal aliens! Mind blown!
Being an illegal alien is not actually the problem though. It’s being poor and/or a minority while also being an illegal alien
Yes, times are good if you are a hot escort, you can qualify for the einstein visa like our First Lady.
I have no problems with talented physicists being granted visas
Is Melania Trump a talented physicist?
Why else would they give her an Einstein visa?
corruption