Well, it’s almost summer, otherwise known as “protest season.” Yesterday’s protests focused on the United States President, but there are plenty of other reasons to hit the streets and protest attacks on your rights. There’s a famous saying (of mine), “If you don’t fight for your rights, you won’t have any left.”
Normally this is a column/blog about computer security news, today we are looking at a slightly different angle, which brings us to a couple of articles about attending protests:
How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid
ACLU: Know Your Rights; Protester’s Rights
To be clear, I have a healthy dose of respect for individual law enforcement officers, generally speaking they are just people like you and me who happen to be doing a tough, thankless job. At the same time, it’s clear that when attending a protest, you will not be dealing with an individual officer but instead masses of police.
Also, the police will not deal with you individually, you are just one member of a crowd that the police may perceive as a threat. So whatever good interactions you’ve had with the police in the past go out the window in a protest setting.
The “No Kings” protests yesterday revealed the potential dangers of being involved in a chaotic protest scene. There was an apparently unrelated shooting in Salt Lake City last night with one victim:
There were numerous incidents in Los Angeles where protesters fired fireworks, threw rocks and concrete, sprayed gas and committed other attacks on the police. What started out as a peaceful protest was spoiled in Los Angeles by bad actors.
This is the number one rule of protests: when you see bad actors attacking the police (yesterday in Los Angeles, even a police horse was injured), get out immediately. Many a protest starts out peaceful but as we saw yesterday, there are some parties involved who intend to go far beyond just speaking their mind.
Most of us, whatever we think the country’s problems are, remain convinced there is a political solution to our problems. Not so for those who choose to commit violence at protests. Whether they are convinced of the need for physical violence to protest their rights, or they are just committing opportunistic violence, you don’t want to be anywhere near any violence at a protest.
So my advice for protesters, beyond what the Wired and ACLU articles talk about, is as follows:
- Stay near the edges of large crowds, do not let your exit path be blocked.
- If dealing with the police, keep your hands in plain sight at all times, do not reach into your pockets without communicating this to the police, for example when reaching for your wallet.
- Know the laws in your state about “stop and identify” practices, you may not be required to identify yourself.
- Don’t bring your phone with you, and if you must, keep it turned off unless you need it for an emergency.
- Set a pin code instead of biometric password so police can’t force you to unlock your phone.
- Get a “burner phone” — even if simply for taking pictures and video, it doesn’t necessarily need to be activated.
- Most important is situational awareness. When things start to go bad, get out. Go with your “sixth sense,” don’t wait for actual violence to break out.
- Always be emotionally calm with the police, keep your anger under control. You’ll have a chance to defend yourself in court if it comes to that, while you’re dealing with the police, it’s best to be inoffensive.
- Bottom line, if you have actually committed a crime, stop talking. Seemingly innocuous statements made in the heat of the moment “can and will be used against you in court.”
- Finally, if you are in a group of protesters and someone starts suggesting violent action, call them out and get away. It’s likely such a person is a plant, there’s quite a history in the United States of the police using undercover officers and informants to encourage / goad otherwise law-abiding citizens into taking illegal actions.
SECURITY IN THE NEWS — PROTEST EDITION
Hopefully something you read above will come in handy. Now, since this is a Security in the News column, let’s take a deeper dive into the technology, tactics and methods used to monitor and potentially suppress protests.
The first method of suppressing protests used by government is low tech. It’s the requirement to have a permit for protests that will, for example, take place in a roadway and block traffic. There are many cases where local governments try to stop protests from happening by putting up onerous costs or requirements to get a permit. Cities routinely deny permits for unwanted demonstrations. There are also many cases where the American Civil Liberties Union sued these governments and saw the court force the government entity to issue a permit that had previously been denied or retracted.
Historical Suppression of Political Opposition
Any study of government’s use of technology against their political opponents should start with COINTELPRO. Short for Counter-Intelligence Program, from 1956 to 1971 this program existed to use what can only be characterized as “dirty tricks” to suppress political opposition. These tricks included blackmail, planting false stories in the media, extensive surveillance and infiltration of perceived opposition groups in the United States. While most of the victims of COINTELPRO were on the left end of the political spectrum, these tactics were also used against the KKK and the National States Rights Party, among other right wing organizations that were targeted.
In the days before the advent of the Internet and “surveillance capitalism,” the tools of suppression included bugged phones, wiretaps, IRS audits, anonymous threatening letters, planting stories in the cooperative media, “warrantless surreptitious entries,” “surreptitious mail opening,” and “break-ins.”
Just because the COINTELPRO program was stopped doesn’t mean the tactics were abandoned. Here’s just one of many examples from the Wikipedia article on COINTELPRO, in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement:
‘…that the FBI acted improperly by collecting “information on people’s free-speech actions” and entering it into “unregulated databases, a vast storehouse of information widely disseminated to a range of law-enforcement and, apparently, private entities”‘
How Do You Know When a Politician is Lying
Without getting too far afield, so-called “conspiracy theories” are fueled a lack of trust in government. Recently I was in a seminar, and the person running the seminar continually referred to things he didn’t agree with as “conspiracy theories.” At one point the seminar leader equated people legitimately discussing climate change with people who believe in flat earth. He claimed that distrust in government is what fuels people’s willingness to believe in such theories as a flat earth.
I quickly pointed out several instances where we just can’t trust the government. Whether government simply gets important things wrong or government is actually knowingly lying to us, it’s clear that we just can’t believe everything we see and hear from government.
Let’s take a classic case. In March, 2013, the Senate Intelligence Committee was grilling James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), about the United States practices regarding surveillance on US citizens.
Sen. Ron Wyden asked DNI James Clapper at a March, 2013 hearing: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
DNI Clapper replied “No, sir.” He added “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly.”
We soon learned with the Snowden release that Clapper was lying. Now, there’s a claim out there that Clapper didn’t lie. It goes like this: The Senate Intelligence Committee knew that what Clapper said was untrue, so you can’t lie to someone who knows you are lying. This line of thinking (properly) calls out the Senate Intelligence Committee for not contradicting Clapper publicly. Effectively, both the Senate Intelligence Committee and Clapper conspired to keep the truth from the people of the United States.
What’s completely forgotten in this formula that “Clapper didn’t lie” is that the statement was heard by average citizen of the United States who had no way to know he was being deceived. It was only with the Snowden release that the truth came out.
Here’s a summary of the clandestine programs that Snowden blew the whistle on:
15 Top NSA Spy Secrets Revealed by Edward Snowden
On the surface, these clandestine programs violated US citizen’s rights. The truth coming out only served to increase distrust of government. Here’s an oldie but goodie about trusting government from the excellent Schneier on Security blog:
Conspiracy Theories and the NSA
Cell Phones, Social Media and Other Modern Tech
Fast forward to today. Compared to the 1960s and 1970s, today it’s easier than ever for the US government to conduct surveillance on it’s citizens, as we saw with the Snowden leak.
I’ll tell a quick story from a few years ago that opened my eyes about the ability of government to conduct surveillance. It was late at night and I watched a car in front of me nearly crash on the freeway. The driver was obviously drunk, or otherwise intoxicated. I followed at a distance and called the highway patrol.
I got the license plate and expressed that I didn’t want to follow the person any longer. The police dispatcher told me that was fine, because they could use traffic cameras to follow the progress of the vehicle!
Trump Is Rapidly Expanding the Surveillance State as Protests Grow
Let’s take a look at what surveillance is being used in today’s anti-Trump protests. Here’s a quote from law enforcement, from the article above:
A booming voice from a police helicopter hovering above the crowd announced, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.”
Speaking of cameras, are you a fan of autonomous driving cars? They unfortunately double as spies, as law enforcement has used camera footage from Waymo cars to prosecute protesters. No surprise that protesters were attacking and burning Waymo cars in the Los Angeles riot/protests.
Indeed as my story above about traffic cameras implies, we are under constant surveillance:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) … has worked with local police departments to turn networks of traffic cameras and automated license plate readers into a nationwide surveillance system that by 2022 was operating in cities home to an estimated 75 percent of the adult population, according to the Center on Privacy & Technology.
Here’s a story that details the many layers of surveillance being used:
The High-Tech Tools Police Can Use to Surveil Protesters
The two surprises in that article for me were the use of Stingray fake cell phone towers to collect SMS and other data, and the use of gait recognition technology. Apparently this is well advanced in China, and in the US to solve a Las Vegas casino robbery.
So far everything we’ve discussed in this article is talking about how government spies on its citizens. The problem with the modern world is that the citizens are making it easy to be surveilled.
There’s a famous quote that the biggest spy on the scene is our cell phones, usually attributed to John McAffee. Here’s a video of Joe Rogan interviewing Ed Snowden about how we enable spying on ourselves:
Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You (video)
Between the tracking devices we carry in our pockets and the information we voluntarily post about ourselves on the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past.
“Edward Snowden” by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY 2.0.