I'll see your conspiracy theory and raise you one: What if the feds fund tech privacy projects specifically so that people like you won't trust them, and instead embrace privacy nihilism?
This is a known strategy of the Kremlin, by the way. They fund opposition groups which protest them, and then leak the fact of that funding so that people who are genuinely upset at the Kremlin get confused about who is captured opposition and who is legitimate.
It can be a signal in some cases, but funding sources are not a reliable way to make a conclusion about a group's motivations.
>Signal is for protecting opposition groups that help in regime change operations
SMS registration flow is trivially blocked in places where regimes are controlling telecom infra. And Twilio is unreliable in dozens of places for non-political reasons. Signal is very first-world centric from this point of view.
Decreases what info Signal needs to collect and retain about a user. When using an SMS verification as a proof, Signal needs to log the phone number, because if they didn't, one spammer could use one phone number to create 10^99 accounts.
When using payment as proof, they can verify that payment occurred, validate the account and then immediately forget about the transaction. One spammer would still have to pay 10^99 times to create that many accounts.
You buy a Mullvad scratch card on Amazon and you redeem the token string.
Mullvad also offer the option to put your card number into the Mullvad website, and I'm sure many privacy conscious people would be very reluctant to do that.
Card payments these days leave far too big a trail. The bank knows, the intermediary (e.g. Stripe) knows, and the merchant (e.g. Mullvad) has to keep records for accounting/tax requirements.
It's still often cheaper (and faster) to grab a one-time verification number than to go through payment-based verification. Especially for anything that only needs a single SMS confirmation.
You are incorrect, US border patrol can not arrest you for refusing to decrypt your phone (if you are a citizen). It is not considered obstructing a search to refuse to provide a password. This is not "autistic" speculation about legal technicalities, there are many many examples which support this. The worst they can do is seize the device.
You're free to test them. See what they do when you say "it's not deleted. It's just inaccessible until I cooperate." Because it's identical in their eyes. People who confidently say "the government can't do that" rarely have a good day. They end up sharing a cell with the person in the article this discussion is about.
And we're living in an era where immigration enforcement can shoot Americans without penalty. It just makes the claims that the government can't arrest someone come across as naive.
That's precisely what happens in totalitarian states, which the USA has been for a while now, but the propaganda keeps telling how much freedom there is so people didn't even notice.
I have tested them, that's what I'm saying! The belief that the authorities are completely unrestrained in their power serves authoritarianism. Creating this belief is in fact a major priority for the current regime.
This is not to say that things aren't bad, or abuses never happen. But if people fail to exercise the actual power and rights they do have, under a mistaken belief that they have no power and no rights, then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It doesn't sound like this person pressed any buttons. They were pressured to provide a PIN or be delayed and further harassed. They obliged, and agents decided to enter it to attempt a warrantless search of the phone.
It's not stated, but probably we can assume the person didn't ask for his phone to be searched - probably he asked NOT for it to be searched, at least based on his multiple requests to talk to his lawyer.
Considering those factors, I'd say border patrol is more responsible for wiping the phone than the person.
It's important to note that there are very many Jews in the world who are not Zionist and many Jews in Israel who disagree with the Palestinian genocide.
They're not the majority, but there are still a lot of them.
I never advocated attacking civilians. If you are suggesting that the Iranian military uses civilian human shields, then maybe you should reconsider which side you support.
It's scary that you bring up the question of whether Rene Good was under arrest or not at the time she was killed.
As if it were legal or justified to execute people for failing to cooperate with their own arrest. It's scary because you're not the only person who believes this - many in ICE and other police agencies hold this belief, and by repeating it you encourage them to kill again.
Yeah I get that. I understand that a car is really a deadly weapon, and the officer in a split second could not know for sure if the intent was to attack.
But the question of whether Renee decided to do manslaughter in her last seconds is still critically important to Renee
That's the trouble though - those friendly neighborhood sites can generally be assumed to be appropriate for kids, but if we create the expectation that they must ensure they are appropriate for certain age brackets simply by virtue of being online, those sites will cease existing.
Instead of running their own websites, they'll migrate to a platform like Facebook. That way Meta handles the burden of moderation and the legal complaints for the inevitable moderation failures.
I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.
Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
But by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized.
This is a known strategy of the Kremlin, by the way. They fund opposition groups which protest them, and then leak the fact of that funding so that people who are genuinely upset at the Kremlin get confused about who is captured opposition and who is legitimate.
It can be a signal in some cases, but funding sources are not a reliable way to make a conclusion about a group's motivations.
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