This is just a cellular version of a guy with a megaphone calling on people to disperse. BTS is the megaphone.
The problem is not in the technology. It isn't even all that useful to the regime. They already know where the protesters are. The problem, as always, is in the baton they hold in the other hand.
I disagree. When they use a megaphone they don't know who the people are, as they are telling them to disperse. Now they have exact lists of who participated. Every person's name is in that list. They can target them individually one by one, home by home, if the revolution fails to overthrow the government, now.
Also, when you build authoritarian systems, they are going to be used by authoritarians, sooner or later. It's like saying it's ok to have a censorship infrastructure, like the Great Firewall, as long as it's not owned by the people with "batons in their hands", sort of speak.
Yeah, except that once you have a system that is an authoritarian's dream, it seems pretty damn hard to stop people like that from abusing it. And ultimately, you can only stop them with revolutions - violent revolutions, in most cases. I'd rather people wouldn't have to go that far to not be oppressed by their government.
When they use a megaphone they don't know who the people are
Of course they do. Communists had been kicking people out of universities, withholding passports from protesters, and organizing mass internments back in the 80s and before.
They'd take pictures and ask around the opposition circles. Or arrest a few people and make them give up the rest. Not to mention willing, paid, or coerced informers planted in the invigilated organizations. And you can bet many people working for security forces in Ukraine today remember those times and techniques well.
There have been authoritarian regimes as far back as written history goes. We here like the tech angle, but let's not attach too much weight to it. It's a great story, I upvoted, but technology is not crucial.
That something is possible does not detract from the weight of making it orders of magnitude easier. Noting participants and tracking them down later has always worked ... but tech verging on applying those actions classic actions automatically and instantly is very significant. Used to be it could take days/weeks/months to "get" some of the participants; now we're not far (if not already there) from correlating cellphone tracking, face recognition, etc to automatically freeze their funds (credit/debit included), suspend driver's licenses, issue arrest or "person of interest" warrants, and otherwise disrupt & hinder the bulk of participants before they even leave the protest site ... maybe not outright arrest & prosecution, but pushing back hard with little/no human involvement.
Communists had been kicking people out of universities, withholding passports from protesters, and organizing mass internments back in the 80s and before.
The same as their counterparts in Capitalist Democratic America of the same time period.
The technology and the ideological bent are both irrelevant I'd say. With the exception that technology has just made the process a whole lot easier and has greater potential for abuse. All the old things are true, but now there are new, faster, more advanced methods to use!
It's not an issue of where the protesters are, it's who the protesters are.
I'm getting increasingly concerned that (USA in particular) police focus on staying out of the way and, so long as things don't escalate much, letting the situation run its course ... while documenting the participants by any means, so they can be individually & quietly apprehended & prosecuted later. Cell phone metadata, face recognition from video recordings, license plates, etc - all can be applied to identify who was involved, accusing them of all sorts of crimes just for being present if not for particular documented transgressions.
Much easier to apply the baton later when the mob can be handled as lone individuals. Gotta know who though, and that's not hard now.
It's certainly known that they do the tracking part - in the UK as long as a decades ago you'd see police at demonstrations with cameras catching as many faces as possible (and weren't secretive about their purposes). What they then did with that information could range on a scale from nothing to conspiracy theory level, I'm not sure.
I don't know per se. I've heard some vague references to it. Main point is it's so possible & compelling I'm having a hard time believing it's not happening. Some things are, in fact, not well known despite our firehose-style media.
The problem is not in the technology. It isn't even all that useful to the regime. They already know where the protesters are. The problem, as always, is in the baton they hold in the other hand.