Arresting everyone is expensive and requires lots of people on the ground. This is worse because it instantly marks every participant (that brought a cell phone), and there's no telling how those people will be discriminated against in the future. It allows consolidation of power in a smaller minority than physical responses and provides less visceral imagery for the populace to be outraged over.
The fear is that the rate at which escalation occurs is tightening significantly, especially with regards to the mobilization of a civilian populace.
It stands to reason that the rate at which escalation occurs directly correlates with the usage of violence by a government, and that the correlation is with the rate of escalation rather than the maximum level of tension.
Or, more to the point, the level of violence applied by a government depends on how quickly shit hits the fan rather than how badly of a mess there is.
If shit hits the fan in America, it will hit it very quickly.
I think it's "cute" when people in other countries can actually fight the police.
If there was even the smallest "attack" on police in the US, every person at the riot would be dead, beaten and imprisoned, or hunted down, which is why this never happens fortunately.
Have you seen the police at demonstrations this decade? They are para-military equiped. Body armor, fully automatic weapons, even mini-tanks from decommissioned iraq/afghan military use. I am not exaggerating.
> police everywhere can now just record the phone numbers
I remember that the dutch police some years ago already used so called "sms-bombs" to contact mobile phone subscribers that were around a crime scene months before.
It is simply inherent in the technology. You wear a mobile phone? (not even smart) So you are traceable with all consequences.
The solution? In any case not technical in nature. We will see.
My friend (I don't know him in person, we work together remotely) told me that he has 3 cell phones: one at home, one at the work-place and one always turned-off in his car (for emergency). He doesn't wear a cell phone with him. When someone wants to contact him he/she calls him on one of his home/work phones judging from the day time, if he doesn't answer the call he calls back when he reaches home/work place and sees unanswered calls.
Two years ago when he told me this I thought he is a tinfoil-hat paranoid person but now I know he is right.
He's not being paranoid enough. A guy with a cellphone that never leaves the home? Any decent data analysis software should flag such an odd behavior. If one's not willing to fully disappear off the map, the safest behavior is to provide "boring" data in order to blend in with the crowd.
But if you hang out just a little bit with pot heads in eastern Europe you know the best solution is to turn off your phone and take the battery out when you don't want people tracing you or lightening to your conversations.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. i.e. even in flight mode, the baseband processor is still powered and will passively listen for cell-tower requests, so presumably it can still be told to wake up?
I know its true of phones that are "off" without the battery removed - stands to reason it applies in flight mode too.
Technically this isn't true, at least not as a blanket statement regarding all phones.
Since the power button is a 'soft' switch, controlled by the phones operating system, it's possible that a phone can be compromised so that even if it appears to be 'off' it is actually still powered up and listening to the cell network, but this is in no way a 'standard' feature. The same attack vector/vulnerability is present for flight mode, a compromised phone can lie and report that the radio is off when malicious software is using it.
Removing the battery is a mechanism to preclude any possibility of your phone being exploited, and may be appropriate depending on your risk tolerance and/or threat model.
I've not seen any evidence this is the case without explicit tampering with the phone (i.e. installing spyware which then fakes the 'off' state in software).
Flight mode does not make you untraceable - it just makes your phone less useful.
If you're doing something illegal, or talking to someone about something illegal, leave your phone at home, and use your $15 dumbphone with an unregistered throwaway sim.
That's a good idea. You won't be able to stream something live anymore, though, but I guess either you record it and later upload it to websites, or some people will have to take the chance to stream it.
Get a burner phone, even from a different country. I have a Russian and French sim cards and keep your phone off unless you really need to make a call.
It can be technical in nature, but the society needs to request it from the carriers and also the government to allow them to have such high security in place, and not allow them to wiretap and have access to everything. When the government says "but we need access to everything to catch a criminal". The society must respond "Oh yeah? Well screw you - I think my privacy is more important, and I want better end-to-end security for my conversations and metadata".
The solution can be political, too, and it would certainly help, but I think it's a lot less sustainable from government to government.
I know! In the US you have "free speech" zones. You can get fenced in and say whatever you like. How is that any better? We have governments that are entrenched and don't want to change. They use their powers and then the majority of people are shocked when they find out.
I don't think the world has changed much since WWII, just that the crimes are more nuanced and better hidden.
> But I guess this indicates police everywhere can now just record the phone numbers of everyone in the area to mark people for "watching".
Combined with the "meta-data" collected by the NSA, they can easily probalistically identify the core members of any dissident group to focus their national security efforts on.
I do not seem to recall reading stories about mass incarcerations at OWS or similar pseudo-protest spots.
I do agree that the conventions should not be afforded public protection, however those two conventions are an extension of the ruling party. The one percent are more than willing to have us foot their bills.
This comes from Soviet Union's militia mentality that people aren't enemies. It already changes as Ukraine (and other former republics) fully converges to democracy.
It was a post-notification that used historical geo-information like who was in a particular cell tower's coverage area. It only came out before the law enacted to counter what is going on kicked in. A man was shot and killed a few hours ago by Kiev police[1]. Now an APC is deployed[2] while both police[3] and protestors[4] trade Molotovs.
Here is a live feed of the scene, which is essentially an on-going street battle now[5].
edit: Video of the police scuffling with citizens in the street during the man's shooting then dragging his body away, along with an interview with the man that filmed it was submitted and published by the BBC[1].
US police would just start beating you and throwing you into pens, if you are lucky you won't get coated in pepper spray or hit by a sound cannon.
Watch the DNC and RNC conventions next year for examples with their multi-million dollar taxpayer funded "security".
But I guess this indicates police everywhere can now just record the phone numbers of everyone in the area to mark people for "watching".