Encrypted, Not Invisible: How Protest WhatsApp Chats Became Evidence

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3 responses

1. 

   April 4, 2025

   Prince

   This honestly has little to do with encryption, or invisibility –
   The protesters were, or were going to be, in the streets anyway, and I don’t think they would have had invisibility cloaks….
   The group chats were just accessed somehow, and the police can claim to using any number of legal methods to access them (even if they used illegal means) there’s no way of proving otherwise since there would have been at least 100 ways to access the chats.
   Infiltrators, informants, sellouts, plus obviously the more nefarious were all at play – so encryption is the last thing that any protester think as relevant.

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2. 

   April 4, 2025

   Make America Great Again

   Heads up: If you or someone you know intends to go and study in the USA

   Rubio Orders U.S. Diplomats to Scour Student Visa Applicants’ Social Media

   https://archive.ph/VwQ9y

   Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats overseas to scrutinize the social media content of some applicants for student and other types of visas, in an effort to bar those suspected of criticizing the United States and Israel from entering the country, U.S. officials say.
   Mr. Rubio laid out the instructions in a long cable sent to diplomatic missions on March 25.
   The move came nine weeks after President Trump signed executive orders to start a campaign to deport some foreign citizens, including those who might have “hostile attitudes” toward American “citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles.”
   Mr. Trump also issued an executive order to begin a crackdown on what he called antisemitism, which includes deporting foreign students who have taken part in campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
   Mr. Rubio’s directive said that starting immediately, consular officers must refer certain student and exchange visitor visa applicants to the “fraud prevention unit” for a “mandatory social media check,” according to two American officials with knowledge of the cable.
   The fraud prevention unit of an embassy’s or consulate’s section for consular affairs, which issues the visas, helps screen applicants.
   The cable described the broad parameters that diplomats should use to judge whether to deny a visa. It cited remarks that Mr. Rubio made in an interview with CBS News on March 16: “We don’t want people in our country that are going to be committing crimes and undermining our national security or the public safety,” he said. “It’s that simple, especially people that are here as guests. That is what a visa is.”
   The cable specifies a type of applicant whose social media posts should be scrutinized: someone who is suspected of having terrorist ties or sympathies; who had a student or exchange visa between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024; or who has had a visa terminated since that October date.
   Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking about 250 hostages. That ignited a war in which Israel has carried out airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza that have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health ministry estimates.
   The dates specified by Mr. Rubio in the cable indicate that one of the main aims of the social media searches is to reject the applications of students who have expressed sympathy for Palestinians during the war.
   The cable also states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
   Such wording could spur foreign citizens to self-censor many kinds of speech to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting a visa.
   And U.S. consular officers could find it difficult to judge an applicant’s past statements and social media posts, especially if they do not know the proper context.
   Some foreign citizens who have a critical view of U.S. policies might forgo applying for a visa, which is a stated preferred outcome of Mr. Rubio’s.
   The requested visa types that would set off extra scrutiny are F, M and J — student and exchange visitor visas, the cable said.
   The details of the cable were first reported by The Handbasket, an independent news site.
   A State Department spokesperson, when asked for comment, said the agency did not discuss internal deliberations. They pointed out that in 2019, the department changed visa application forms to ask for information about social media accounts.
   On Tuesday, the former president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, told reporters that the U.S. government had sent him an email saying it was suspending a visa in his passport that had allowed him entry to the United States. Weeks ago, Mr. Arias said on social media that Mr. Trump was behaving like “a Roman emperor.” Mr. Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is the most prominent foreign citizen to have his visa revoked so far.
   As a senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio pressed the Biden administration’s State Department, run by Antony J. Blinken, to cancel the visas of students involved in campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Since becoming secretary of state in late January, Mr. Rubio has revoked perhaps 300 or more visas, many of them belonging to students, he told reporters last Thursday. He said he had been signing letters daily revoking visas.
   “My standard: If we knew this information about them before we gave them a visa, would we have allowed them in?” he said. “And if the answer is no, then we revoke the visa.”
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3. 

   April 4, 2025

   MAGA

   The internet is awash on go advice on countermeasures to follow when participating in protests

   against:

   – facial recognition

   – phone searches

   – phone-based surveillance

   – interception of mobile phone signals decoy base stations

   etc

   No one needs to be learning the hard way.

   There is always a good chance of inside threats and so the protest planning must always have good mitigation measures in the case one of their own is out to betray the group. I know nothing about these cause that’s not part of my world, but for those who go that way they need not go blindly. There is a bunch of learning to do if one is to keep ou of harm’s way

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