> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/orbic.html
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...
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.
> 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...
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.
faraday pouch.
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.
Imagine if the child predators listed in the Epstein files were illegal aliens! Mind blown!
Should we introduce change to add [paywall] or something to paywalled links?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.