> don't take identifiable pics of people without consent
Hard disagree. Public events are public events. My conclusion, based on experience at street protests, historic trends, and current political events, is that there have been significant actions by provocateurs over the past decade or more, and particularly in Portland in 2020. Taking and posting pictures of these people is an important act. It the internet age makes this tactic impossible, it will be a huge win.
The upside is nonexistent anyway: the state is photographing everyone at these events, so you taking an additional photo does not change the risk surface for anyone with regard to state retaliation.
As another Portlander, disagree with exceptions: surveillance footage made it harder to identify people from top down angles, and it meant that a lot of people had their charges dismissed because of that. (I will need to look it up.) The bigger risk to a protest movement, I would argue, is an opposing agent provocateurs trying to get people doxxed. That risk to more people outweighs getting minority of provocateurs shut down.
(On the other hand, you’re also right that agent provocateurs are old COINTELPRO-era tactics used by the state and right wingers against protest movements.)
When it comes to tactics to keep yourself safe when protesting, there aren’t ultimately too many hard beliefs to be had, especially when the right are perfectly happy to collaborate with the state.
I can definitely see this perspective. I'm a bit torn myself on the public event section. The second consideration is, yes they are filming, but just because someone is filming it's not necessarily a useful picture (blurry, low res, bad angle, obstructions, etc). Your picture might be useful especially since you may be closer to the action.
I mean there’s two sets of social norms here, right? Set one is that whenever you see the first person advocating or starting to break windows or start fires or do something else illegal, you all point at the guy and chant “fed, fed, fed” until he slinks away in shame or maybe shove him out of the crowd and into the police lines and let the cops handle him. The other set of norms is that when you see people do those things, you don’t snitch. Various protesters will adopt either set of norms.
Maybe you’d argue that the second set of protesters are actually feds; I won’t argue the point because I prefer the first set of norms myself.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
- Log files found on Ulbricht's laptop with entries corresponding to the murder-for-hire events
- Bitcoin transaction records showing payments
- Messages between DPR and vendors/users about the situations
The court found this evidence admissible as:
- Direct evidence of the charged offenses
- Proof of Ulbricht's role as site administrator
- Evidence of Ulbricht's identity as DPR
- Demonstration of his willingness to use violence to protect the criminal enterprise
The court determined that while prejudicial, the probative value of this evidence outweighed any unfair prejudice, particularly since the government would stipulate no murders actually occurred.
Except the government blocked a codefendant from testifying that Ross wasn't the current DPR. The person who set up the fake murder was a Secret Service agent who went to federal prison. The target, Curtis Green, said the alleged diary was suspect. The court also kept out the role of the two convicted federal agents, not to mention 8+ other federal employees who committed crimes or unethical behavior.
And an indictment is not proof that the allegations are real or not manipulated. US Attorneys are a deeply amoral group, they don't care about truth or justice, just winning at any cost.
> I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein
It is clear as mud. We now know:
* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.
* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.
* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.
...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?
Given the farcical nature of those allegations and all that we now know, including that others with access to the Dread Pirate Roberts account assert that the DEA agent making the allegations (who is himself now in prison for attempting to steal some of the silk road bitcoin) had access as well, it will be wonderful if DoJ attempts to bring charges, just to further clear Ross' name.
There are not a shred of evidence that Ross ever had the slightest thing to do with those conversations, and it seems much more likely that the DEA used the DPR account to frame him.
It's baffling to me that there are actually comments on Hacker Gosh Darn News of all places suggesting that Ross justly belonged in prison.
He successfully created a tool to undermine one of the most unjust and predatory policies of the US State - the policy of drug prohibition.
He's a damn hero. I don't understand why Trump, who most of the time seems like a simply awful human being with no end of appetite for state power, has chosen to do this, but I'll certainly take it.
It's beyond obvious that voting and other mechanics of representative rule have not succeeded at simple policy change such as ending prohibition. I look forward to several decades of truth trumping power in the form of the internet undermining states, until the asinine mode of political organization known as the nation state is deprecated entirely.
It's hard to know why he wouldn't - he conspired to have people killed, and facilitated illegal activity, i.e. the sale of all sorts of drugs. You might be saying "well, drugs shouldn't be illegal", or even, "well, conspiring to kill people shouldn't be illegal", but they were illegal at the time.
Seems like a legal slight-of-hand, and also unjust and unethical and absolutely ripe for government abuse.
He was punished for the crime of attempting or conspiring to commit murder. Without ever having been found guilty in a trial by jury of his peers determining beyond reasonable doubt that the facts met said crime.
> While I'm against the federal government having this sort of control,
To take this position - which is certainly the virtuous one on long time-scales, you have to also take it in the case of content you abhor.
I have the utmost sympathy for wanting a life free from the message for which tiktok is the medium, but using the ring of power will only cause is to deepen an entrench more.
This gets the causality backwards. TikTok et al. is the ring of power and not banning or regulating it will cause the negative side effects on civic society to deepen, further speedrunning the death of liberalism and the very freedoms you're trying to protect. This is the clichéd paradox of tolerance. Sometimes you have to do seemingly illiberal things, like locking up murderers, or breaking up concentrated media ownership, or banning free speech when it comes to defamation and libel, etc., to protect the liberal project from destruction. Social media, especially large platforms owned by single people, is so new that the law just hasn't had time to catch up. As the law finally catches up, don't interpret that as an assault on liberal values. It's not.
The argument that "TikTok et al. is the ring of power", rather than the state, which insists on armed conquest and control of the planet and seems to have not a shred of foresight about the long-term implications of the evolution of the internet, is simply not persuasive.
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but tiktok will never hurt me.
You see, this is where I think libertarians get it so wrong. They are focused on the state as the problem. But the way I see it, the problem is the conditions and antecedent causes that lead to the state becoming authoritarian. Libertarians are so focused on attacking the state but they just aren't effective at preventing state power misuse, because they don't understand the deep causality that leads to these bad outcomes. If you have antecedent causes like: high inflation, rampant crime unchecked by a liberal state, concentrated media ownership, a toxic information landscape, a population that isn't educated, extreme inequality, etc -- you will get authoritarianism, guaranteed, and there is no amount of small-government ideology that will be able to overcome the population's desire for a strongman personality. History teaches us that you must use state capacity to attack the antecedent causes, paradoxically it is the only way to prevent an authoritarian state.
>In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was that "we all get older and smarter"
...and then he wrote Mother American Night, which is way more radical and prescient than his declaration. If you are suggesting that John Perry's work tended toward statist notions of internet control later in life, you are mistaken.
Barlow's vision is alive and well. Go to a Billy Strings show and talk to bluegrass hacker hippies that ride the rail there. Or a good traditional Grateful Dead cover band. Or go to one of the more regen/cypherpunk ethereum events (GFEL, Regens Unite, Schelling Point, etc).
John Perry has tons of fans who came up through his songs and have since connected those dots.
Hard disagree. Public events are public events. My conclusion, based on experience at street protests, historic trends, and current political events, is that there have been significant actions by provocateurs over the past decade or more, and particularly in Portland in 2020. Taking and posting pictures of these people is an important act. It the internet age makes this tactic impossible, it will be a huge win.
The upside is nonexistent anyway: the state is photographing everyone at these events, so you taking an additional photo does not change the risk surface for anyone with regard to state retaliation.
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