Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

This is a fact I try to bring up often… It’s a truly disturbing piece of information

Also, they’re struggling to survive without enough supplies, they’re being cut off from the Internet and power in part so they can’t get their message to the world, and they couldn’t kick out Hamas if they wanted to - they have no organization or individual power to actually do that

So it’s worth considering…who is this message for?

I’d only argue that conspiracy is the wrong word… It’s more like speculation

But yeah… I’m sitting in horror right along with you

I don’t think Vance could be the new figurehead - he’s so easily hated that they had to hide him away for months after he was accused of fucking a couch

Not that they wouldn’t try, but I don’t thing the maga cult transfers to anyone on the playing field right now

But again, hacking is a tool when they want to go after something in particular - a single lemmy server is minuscule. Even the full scale of everyone on lemmy is a very small target… They might go after it if they have specific reason to, but they’re unlikely to do so when there’s plenty of work to be done on bigger platforms

Oh, I mean the US president - if Canada became a state, Elon would be eligible

Conspiracy theory? They’ve posted proposals for it on their website. They want to exclusively use for inter-Bank transactions, although you could read it to imply they want to replace fractional reserve banking with it, possibly even globally

It’s deeply concerning, because they don’t need this at all for banking as it exists now, and if the global banks use the same system they’d have an insane amount of control over the global economy - they could use this system to more directly control the exchange rate of currencies, which they already use to force austerity and outside investment on resources

The conspiracy really kicks in when you start to question if they’re trying to crash the USD and a global recession to do something like this… And for the last few years they’ve been giving very weird answers to questions like that

The NSA doesn’t generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don’t hand over what they have easily

But, if you have physical access to a device, there’s always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors

She probably even has a butterfly tattoo on her ankle. Tren de Aragua confirmed, no need to investigate further

Be careful what you say - don’t call for violence, definitely don’t make threats of violence against specific figures, especially ones in office, and as a general rule don’t spread personally identifying information

Past that? Let’s say there’s a crackdown. They’re going after low hanging fruit to instill fear. By nature, the fediverse is hard to tie back to individuals… But if they’re looking for you individually, they can find you

I wouldn’t worry too much. Dissatisfaction is insanely high… They’re more likely to do a great firewall and kill the fediverse long before they bother looking into lemmy accounts

Elon is a Canadian citizen by birth. So if Canada becomes a state, he would qualify to be president (and theres precedent for this)

That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me - like yeah, Trump wants to push for territorial expansion, and Canada does have a lot of natural resources, but Canada isn’t an easy nut to crack

The other theory I buy into is the northern passage. Climate change is going to open up new shipping lanes in the artic, so Canada and Greenland both would be strategically located to control it - add in Panama, the hooties (sp?) and he’s consistently pushing control of key shipping lanes

On one hand, crispr isn’t safe. And life is not something people have a right to create - that tremendous imposition should be met with a responsibility

On the other hand, life is treated as cheap almost everywhere. If we’re going to force people to justify their right to exist, why not take a chance on their genetics to improve the species?

I mean, this was risky science, but not reckless. At some point we need to start fixing our genome, or we’re just going to poison ourselves to extinction

Anonymous released a video saying that musk has no idea what he’s doing and he’s crippling security, and that they will “strike when they’re weakest, so be ready”

That could mean a lot of things, but in my daydreams they get into the banking system and just really just fuck it all up. Just make a total mess of it

Okay, but that’s kinda my point… It’s bad messaging

You provided a reason not to “do”, regardless of what you meant by that.

We don’t need to hesitate, it’s not the time to be careful. MAGA doesn’t function on the openings we create - they create their own openings, their own lies about what the left is

We can’t be like the Democrats - the people don’t want the adults in the room who carefully avoid breaking things. The majority hates the Democrats more than ever

The people want change. They want a movement that will make enemies. That’s what most of the right wants too - they want to stop Trump and Musk, they want free healthcare, they want to afford housing, and most of all they want to hope for a better future

We need to move fast without hesitation to fight back, otherwise we’ll never keep up. We don’t need to worry about breaking things - things are plenty broken already.

We’ll fix them and patch up the holes, but first we have to win

Okay, then in that light, do you still think we need to be cautious in having the courts appoint people outside the executive branch to enforce their orders?

Like I said, I don’t think you’re on the wrong side, but I think this is a bad take. This is one of the last checks on Trump’s power, and no telling if it’s actually used… But it seems like caution is the absolute last thing we need to be advocating for right now

Because now you don’t have to run wires from the existing network to the new WiFi, you just plop them both in the new location!

But then if you want the access points to act like one WiFi network so walking around doesn’t reset all your connections, all you have to do is run cables to the new WiFi access points from the original signal, unplug them from Star Link, then wire starlink into the main uplink as a fail over or something! Easy!

Illegal strike

One of the worst combination of words in the English language. So you can quit, 75% can quit at once (which was apparently the end result here), but you can’t no show and demand better conditions?

I prefer the second picture, but angled back 30°

I don’t think you’re on the wrong side, I think you’re advocating to hold back on using a tool that can be used, right now, to mitigate some of the most terrible shit that can be done to a group of people by a government

But even forgetting what’s at stake… Do you think there are no checks on this power? Do you think it isn’t used already? There was a case last year where a judge ordered a custom bat mobile or something, and was unhappy he hadn’t received it yet. The local cops flew across state lines and seized one in front of the judge in line. The judge ended up balking at using this legal argument, but it was discussed, and the opinion was that the judge had no legal basis for it anyways. I don’t remember the resolution, but the judge was in danger of losing his robes over it

There’s petty tyrants everywhere… The police are generally enablers of it to start with. Judges are still beholden to oversight, aside from the supreme court apparently

And back to where we are… Things aren’t just going to go back to normal in two or four years. We’re over the cliff, they’re disappearing people and throwing them into what legally classifies as torture with no due process. They’re trampling over the courts and the constitution - there’s no going back from that, only forward

This isn’t the time to tiptoe carefully around. It’s not time to come up with reasons to let them continue to act, even if there’s problems to work out later

Fuck that. That monkey paw bullshit is how the courts were stacked in the first place… Because Democrats are too busy pretending to be the adults in the room to recognize the game has changed

We have to use the tools we’re given, or we hand a self described King all power

Not to mention, if this was a tool MAGA had use of, they’d use it with or without precedent