Phones should be turned off or left at home anyways when protesting. Here are my 10 commandments for engaging in protests:
1: never bring your wallet/ID. If you need to buy things, bring cash
2: either shut off your phone or leave it with your wallet. Recording police violence can be useful, in that case get the aclu app, a burner phone with the app, or an action camera
3: never speak to police under any circumstance
4: you can beat the charge but you can't beat the ride
5: bring water, it's more useful than for just drinking
6: bring hats, sunglasses, etc to avoid being identified by the state if it gets violent
7: wear good running shoes
8: know your rights, both federal and local, and when to use them
9: take out any contact lenses in case police use tear gas
10: stay aware of your surroundings; listen to picket line enforcers/community organizers
But lawmakers agreed to the bill late Wednesday as Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insisted the bill would affect only “dozens of cases a year.”
Precisely why it should not be passed! That's not a good reason at all. It's not worth eroding people's rights if it only affects a few cases in my personal opinion. It shows that the law doesn't need to exist in the first place.
Also... what kind of argument is that? It may be dozens a year but once it is normalized with those dozens, it will become few dozens and on and on it goes.
Not a general slippery slope argument, but rather, it's clear how it makes future erosion easier.
Today: People named Joe who live at this address can be harassed freely and that's perfectly legal.
Tomorrow: It's not so extreme! Look, see, we've never universally respected these rights anyway. There are cases where we legally ignored them. We're just expanding existing rules to cover more cases.
The UK already fell to the multinational capitalist greed machine. Looks like France is falling, too. Any and all means to squash the protest of citizens of the society that might hurt the gdp output of the beloved economy.
Because everyone seems to have forgotten, an economy is supposed to be a tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of society. When a society lives in service to, and is harmed for the benefit of the economy, your society is ass backwards.
What's extra scary is the thought that there will be no stories coming out about how this is abused. Not to say that it won't be, just that the stories that will come out will be how scary the world is and how the police are the only ones keeping everyone safe. Meanwhile some cop is watching someone sleep, or shower, or anything else in the privacy of their own home.
During the 2020 protests in Portland, Or the US Marshalls flew a plane equipped cell phone snooping equipment over downtown for hours every day. The equipment acts as a mock cell tower so mobile phone traffic in the area gets routed through their tools before going to an actual tower. It also collects data from wifi in the area, in addition to whatever unknown abilities it has. This was around the time anonymous federal agents were picking up people off the streets in white vans and hiding in bushes shooting pepperballs at people walking by.
I've never been so happy to have the ability to root my phone and flash a new OS onto it. This shit is absolutely insane, I'm surprised there isn't more eyes on this from non-profits globally.
This is the same government that says using an ad blocker, vpn, custom rom, linux and or encrypted messaging service puts you at higher suspicion of being a terrorist.
I see them enacting these policies now as the large number of pro labor protests fighting the government all over the country on pensions “reform”.
Read the article. Title is clickbait. It's only with approval from a judge. You know, alternatively they could just arrest and imprison the person, which is what every country is doing. Not saying it's without worrying, but there's important nuance that most are missing.
P.S.
Absolute extremist attitudes like "nobody should be able" and so on, have absolutely no place in modern society. There's always nuance. Libertarianism doesn't work, and laws must be enforced. It sucks, but when there are forces that want to hurt people and destabilize societies, you can't go by the rule that everyone is a saint. The world will punish this attitude.
Yes, the world isn't perfect, but for ducks sake, quit sensationalizing anecdotes and representing them as "this always happens". That's dishonest.
So? Even with a warrant, thats not a power that people should have. No one, warrant or not, should be able to remotely activate your phone/camera/etc and monitor it. The fact that power exists means smart phones are an even bigger personal safety and privacy threat than they already were.. and if police can do it with a warrant, then there are gonna be people who figure out how to do it without one and for far more malicious reasons.
I live in France. The government here is using every single tool they have to prosecute radical leftists and environmentalists while ignoring the fact that more than 60 % of the police force has fascist adjacent ideals. I do not want these people spying on me, period. This is not some libertarian horseshit, trust me.
They better riot fast. Normalized camera peeking will change the tone there very quickly.
People will be stuffing their phones into couches or running water and shit, and some AI will be able to detect patterns of surveillance evasion and they won’t even have to do anything official about it just send the surveillance avoider a message in the form of a camera turning to follow them or something like “hey, we noticed you’re being sus”.
And then there will be huge incentive slope toward not avoiding surveillance. So people will have to fall back on hiding their thoughts.
And the mental strain will be enormous. And that will sap their fight.
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