If anyone reading this happened to reblog my link to the reddit thread on r/DataHoarder about archiving the Capitol Hill riots: please let me know, and preferably link me to it.

Ironically, that post has fallen off my blog, and I’m currently unable to locate it. Unsure if it’s been memory holed, or more likely, I simply deleted it accidentally like an idiot… Pulling back to back to back all-nighters with scant sleep and maximum stress can do that sometimes… No need to attribute to malice, what is more likely stupidity.

EDIT: after poking over multiple blogs which I recall reposting the link: I’m leaning toward some shithead at tumblr HQ removing it because they’re too dumb to actually read the full/fucking article before being triggered and nuking the thing.

“Congress must end this lawless practice and require the government to get a warrant for our location data, regardless of its source.”

Digital rights advocates reacted with alarm to a report published Friday detailing how Defense Intelligence Agency analysts in recent years bought databases of U.S. smartphone location data without first obtaining warrants…

Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a “free speech” alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company. But now it appears DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients — including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler…

With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the U.S. Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups. Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however…

Analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) have purchased databases of U.S. smartphone location data in recent years without a warrant, agency officials wrote in a memo to a top Senate Democrat.

DIA analysts have searched American location data five times in the past 2 ½ years, according to the document released Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Oregon Democrat had asked the agency whether it was interpreting the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States to mean that obtaining data from a third-party broker rather than a phone company does not require a warrant…

The attempt to reverse a democratic election in a classic quiet coup in America has now turned ugly and noisy. On the very same day as Joe Biden condemned the coup, he nominated Victoria Nuland as under secretary of state for political affairs: the same Victoria Nuland who clumsily revealed in a captured call that then vice president Joe Biden would be willing to “midwife” the Ukrainian coup.

This is the generation of the quiet coups. The coups that cloak themselves in the guise of democracy. Coups that use, not bullets, but democracy to undermine democracy. These coups either disguise themselves as the legal and constitutional workings of a country’s democratic bodies, or they disguise the minority that silently lost in the voting booth as an amplified mass democratic movement in the street.

These are the silent coups that destroyed democracy and crippled countries from Venezuela, Brazil, Honduras and Paraguay to Egypt, Ukraine and, perhaps, recently, Peru…

No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” “treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU…

According to a CNN report, Trump submitted to Republican national security hawks and abandoned clemency for the NSA whistleblower and the WikiLeaks founder

[…] WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden were not offered clemency because Trump “did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he’s convicted during his Senate trial.”

[…] NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who was the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act under Trump, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou pursued pardons. They were effectively denied as well…

An Open Letter From Laura Poitras

January 14, 2021

On Monday, November 30, 2020, I was fired from First Look Media, an organization I co-founded. My termination came two months after I spoke to the press about The Intercept’s failure to protect whistleblower Reality Winner and the cover-up and lack of accountability that followed, and after years of raising concerns internally about patterns of discrimination and retaliation…“

Continue Reading here:

https://www.praxisfilms.org/open-letter-from-laura-poitras/

“Openings provided by iOS and Android security are there for those with the right tools.”

This is a Wired article… Thus, one should not expect in-depth technical detail or meaningful analysis.

The full report cited by Wired – written by cryptographer, and security researcher, Dr. Matthew Green – is available here:

https://securephones.io/

It’s advised to read the full report as it contains technical overviews on how these systems operate.

—+—

Also recommended is this October 2020 report from Upturn, covering the issue more broadly and at great length:

“Mass Extraction: The Widespread Power of U.S. Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones”

Motorola MDT 9100

More info on the Mobile Data Terminal is available here:

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/mdt/index.htm

“Arbitrary government is to moral life what plague is to the body.”

– Benjamin Constant (Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government. 1815. p. 78; ed. 2003)