Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

I'm getting a vibe from this thread that some posters think they're disagreeing with each other, but it's not apparent to me what they're disagreeing about beyond a matter of rhetorical emphasis. The passion is expected and good but let's all make sure we're channeling it properly and not talking past each other.

If what everyone agrees on is,

1) plainclothes cops are infiltrating these protests with specific plans to instigate violence, to hurt and kill people,
2) that documented fact is different from the KKK propaganda line about supposed "outside agitators" stirring up the docile blacks, and infiltration goes hand-in-hand with spreading that KKK line,
3) plainclothes infiltrators do not make everything confrontational or every act of community self-defense that happens out there a cop plot, and it's stupid to accuse people who acknowledge and plan for infiltration of saying that,

then you're right.

If someone doesn't understand each and every one of those points to be true then I'm not sure why they're even posting here, so maybe you're right, maybe they do.

Which means that anyone who's trying to conflate the documented fact about cops with the KKK line about "outside agitators" in bad faith should check themselves because they know better.

cars posted:

If what everyone agrees on is,

1) plainclothes cops are infiltrating these protests with specific plans to instigate violence, to hurt and kill people,
2) that documented fact is different from the KKK propaganda line about supposed "outside agitators" stirring up the docile blacks, and infiltration goes hand-in-hand with spreading that KKK line,
3) plainclothes infiltrators do not make everything confrontational or every act of community self-defense that happens out there a cop plot, and it's stupid to accuse people who acknowledge and plan for infiltration of saying that,

everyone here knows all this and we're all just excited to yell at each other. haven't had a thread where we all got rowdy for a while so each of us has to assume everyone else is stupid for a couple minutes as a fun icebreaker

c_man posted:

an important point of synthesis, imo, is that the police/fash/etc are "outside agitators" in the primary sense of acting as a military occupation force that kills for fun, in addition to infiltrating resistance groups with a diverse group of tactics that don't map usefully generalized large scale actions or political lines. and further that this is by design, for loosely the same reason that the NYT will often publish people who arent totally in line with the average editorial opinion, since the way that they maintain relevance is by tactically and strategically influencing the perimeter of acceptable discourse

if i've ever used the phrase "outside agitators", the police are 100% what i have in mind

sovnarkoman posted:

where is the americancivilwarlivemap already

pogfan1996 posted:

The cop wreckers have shown that if voice voting works along Occupy lines then they can absolutely cripple the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization and make it unpleasant to be a part of.

god you just gave me a flashback, must have annoyance ptsd from the insanity of strarry-eyed earnest occupy organizers trying to get a crowd of thousands to do mass consensus decision making. what an utterly useless fucking circus that was

So if people are wondering why the twee campouts were skipped this time and everyone went straight to setting cop cars on fire, isn't just about anger and resistance, it's also about time management and self respect.

the rhizzone

toyot posted:

you talkin about my post? yea the enemy works the angles. voice-vote is a defense against Tommy Troop martyring the windows of the funko pop shop for a reddit post or whatever.

when all of the white peopl are at the funeral of the funko pop shop mourning we can walk up and be really snarky. like. "oh boy! not the funko pop shop! fuck! god... danng!!!!! fuck! i love funko pops!" but then be like, secretly, making fun of them

pogfan1996 posted:

colddays posted:

I think this round of uprisings is gonna end fairly soon, but it's already been incredible prep for the next round. Who knows where we'll be by the end of the decade? Hopefully with a party that can really lead.



Idk like I’m seeing cops murdering people, nazis murdering people, confederate monuments torn down, and Washington DC in flames, this thing has some legs

plus with like a quarter of the country now unemployed, the albatross of "prior commitments" has been loosed from many necks

dimashq posted:

.

agreed

BOFAnshen posted:

I took a p bare bones search on levine's blog and on that particular blog post this seemed to be the most egregiously unsafe thing about tor “Tor is known to be insecure against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic entering and exiting the anonymity network. Quite simple and efficient techniques can correlate traffic at these separate locations by taking advantage of identifying traffic patterns. As a result, the user and his destination may be identified, completely subverting the protocol’s security goals.” Which honestly, idk I'm not the smartest person but doesn't sound like a whole lot of information could be gathered with this method.

Then maybe you should read his book. About half of 'Surveillance Valley' is dedicated to this question. Tor is nevertheless maintained and written by mortals. As Levine says:

It was a baffling argument. Tor was not “a law of physics” but computer code written by a small group of human beings. It was software like any other, with holes and vulnerabilities that were constantly being discovered and patched. Encryption algorithms and computer systems might be based on abstract mathematical concepts, but translated into the real physical realm they become imperfect tools, constrained by human error and the computer platforms and networks they run on. After all, even the most sophisticated encryption systems are eventually cracked and broken. And neither Lee nor anyone else could answer the bigger question raised by my reporting: If Tor was such a danger to the US government, why would this same government continue to spend millions of dollars on the project’s development, renewing the funding year after year? Imagine if, during World War II, the Allies funded the development of Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine instead of mounting a massive effort to crack the code.

Levine answers his own question about the funding of the TOR project. It grows out of an initiative of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (bringing you Voice of America and Radio Free Asia). In most early years 90% of TORs budget is from the pentagon in one way or another. The goal of the project is this:

To truly hide spies and soldiers, Tor needed to distance itself from its Pentagon roots and include as many different users as possible. Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, agents of foreign intelligence services, terrorists.

A critical mass of normal user is needed to cover up the tracks of Amerikkan spies, the intended purpose of the TOR browser.

BOFAnshen posted:

It seems basically true to me that the us government would not have a system with gaping backdoors just to honeypot people, because then those backdoors could be used against them by their own enemies.

Now this is a flexible logic, a balance that could be undone, but still safer then nothing.I took a p bare bones search on levine's blog and on that particular blog post this seemed to be the most egregiously unsafe thing about tor “Tor is known to be insecure against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic entering and exiting the anonymity network. Quite simple and efficient techniques can correlate traffic at these separate locations by taking advantage of identifying traffic patterns. As a result, the user and his destination may be identified, completely subverting the protocol’s security goals.” Which honestly, idk I'm not the smartest person but doesn't sound like a whole lot of information could be gathered with this method.

A whole lot of information could be gathered with that method.

The other thing about TOR, the way it was explained to me, is that it has this one liiiittle tiny theoretically unlikely flaw where if someone has compromised or outright owns and controls a sufficient number of the many nodes TOR routes through, critical information to further isolate and trace a connection could be collated over time from the occurrences where the compromised nodes all line up. Particularly easily if that someone could also observe entrance and exit from the network as above. And uhhhhhh guess what the major world power that funds TOR and provides TOR with material resources has access to?

The US internal security culture has an institutional obsession with the idea of encryption that is completely perfect except for a backdoor that they control, during the Clinton 2016 campaign she showboated about the idea and at the time a bunch of cryptography nerds harumphed "hogwash! impossible! stupid!" and sure, if you're thinking strictly in terms of the mathematics of cryptography a one time pad is perfectly unbreakable and that's all there is to it. But that's thinking about the problem too narrowly.

They don't compromise the data encryption itself because they don't need to: they transcend the problem by controlling the infrastructure. They're quite content to sit back holding all the other cards learning which people with something to hide are trusting in their program to communicate secretly, and where, and with whom... All of that is extremely valuable information. This is what you're not seeing about "it doesn't make sense to distribute an encryption method with a giant backdoor that could be used against you," when the backdoor is strategic ownership and/or unmitigated direct access of physical infrastructure you don't have to worry very much about suddenly or unknowingly losing control. That access doesn't exist for anyone else because it's a backdoor predicated on a power relationship instead of coding.

Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

amerikkka having a totally normal one

General Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, walking the streets of Washington DC right now. Briefly spoke to say he is observing the situation. pic.twitter.com/fHcYOTYMzN

— Shabtai (@velvetart) June 2, 2020

Here’s the audio of the US secretary of defense referring to American streets as the “battle space” pic.twitter.com/SmqynReHTC

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) June 1, 2020

pogfan1996 posted:

colddays posted:


I think this round of uprisings is gonna end fairly soon, but it's already been incredible prep for the next round. Who knows where we'll be by the end of the decade? Hopefully with a party that can really lead.



Idk like I’m seeing cops murdering people, nazis murdering people, confederate monuments torn down, and Washington DC in flames, this thing has some legs

There's a lot of energy but no organization, and that organization isn't gonna get built in the heat of the moment. The overwhelming mass of the uprisings took the whole system by surprise at first, but now they're clear on the fact that this is on a different scale, and they're getting out the things they prepared for this moment while the masses haven't prepared the capability to handle those things. We, as a class, can't even confidently distinguish organic actions from pig infiltration through the fog right now.

Next time around, and maybe it'll be next year or in 5 years but I think it'll be relatively soon, we'll use the lessons from our failures today to win more. In the in-between time, we'll build the organization that isn't possible to construct on the spot. Like you said in the OP, what's going on now wouldn't be possible without the long grinding work done since the last round of rebellion over racist killings. The next one won't be possible without long grinding work after this one.

Edited by colddays (June 2, 2020 03:17:44)