Telegram, Twitter & Thee
Assuming, of course, you already threw away your cell phone.
What a difference a week makes. Throw Away Your Cell Phone was on November 27th, and now here we are to discuss a service you can NOT trust for the future.
And before that we’ll cover the reasons you are going to get professionally paranoid, just as I’ve become.
Join The Resistance:
There are a variety of people out there who are making noises about “The Resistance”. As near as I can tell, this involves various flavors of political organizing they already find familiar, and even at this late date most of them won’t talk to me. They’re still creatures of the machine, they have at best an intellectual understanding of what it means to have a corrupt government pursuing them.
The very first thing I ever did in this area was during Iran’s Green Movement in 2009. When the photos and video stopped coming we wondered what had happened. Then a bit later we learned the Basij caught the people in country who were gathering and transmitting a record of the abortive revolution. There were no survivors. Having no one to talk to about this experience, there were many things I avoided doing for years. Not a PTSD thing, but it did … weigh on me.
Some things I’ve done and seen since then include:
Freshly minted nonprofits looted by informants, left with no recourse.
Medical personnel at Occupy camps systematically assaulted by law enforcement.
Phone ringing off the hook because some high profile goofball you fought with dropped dead from a heart attack in the middle of last night’s “debate”, twelve years later still facing corrupt law enforcement attention for this.
Consoling someone about the pets that died when their home was torched.
Suicides every single year.
Making health & wellness check call for a veteran who was already dead by the time the police finally got there.
Suicide was the official explanation, but a couple of us were told things about the scene, in case anyone ever showed knowledge of the details, the police knew they’d never encounter that, but that one of us might.
Court house assaults.
Court house bomb threats.
Fake documents used to procure arrest warrants.
Most of that is either government corruption, or hate groups being coddled by law enforcement.
The vast majority of you lack the situational awareness and hardening needed for what I would consider to be relatively mild conflict. This is what happens when things get bad and resistance digs in its heels. We’re headed this direction at a pretty good clip and I don’t have the heart to watch another generation get chewed up 10x worse than Green Movement/Arab Spring/Occupy did.
Telegram:
Ukraine was invaded by Russia ten years ago and has been in a life and death struggle since the spring of 2022. The Telegram app was created in Russia and while their operations have nominally moved to Dubai, nobody with any sense believes that.
But a lot of people with not much sense, far too many of them on the Ukrainian side of the line in eastern Ukraine, are still using Telegram.
The last thirty four months have featured endless conversations about and with those Ukrainians, all about how to get them to shift to something that isn’t owned by the enemy. I myself have a Telegram account, but it was created for a Google Voice number that routed to a burner phone and it lives in a virtual machine that has a fail closed VPN. I might have made various entities curious in the time I’ve had it, but they do not know my origin IP, and I’m not personally subject to air strikes(yet).
Now look at this nonsense:
Ukraine bans official use of Telegram app over fears of Russian spying
Finally the situation got some desperate, the Ukrainian government even banned Telegram … two months ago. Trying to get people to do things in their own best interest is well nigh impossible.
Twitter:
I think we’re in a little bit better place with Twitter. There was a mass exodus to Bluesky and Mastodon after Musk purchased Twitter in late 2022. My @nealr@mastodon account dates to 2017 and I was a bit miffed I didn’t get a Bluesky invite until about 125,000 users, but now nrauhauser is in the first 1% of users. Both have spasms of right wing hate group activity and they deal with some bot activity, but it’s dramatically better than the cesspool Twitter has become.
When I say “better” I don’t mean that it’s an echo chamber with which I agree, it means they are Responsible Social Media, as defined by Anders Puck Nielsen.
Here are just some of the reasons you need to wipe your Twitter account, make it protected, and then permanently lock yourself out of it.
It’s infested with bots.
The service has degraded to the point it’s no longer useful for breaking news.
The media there are fleeing in a high profile fashion.
You’re giving up your activity times and associates to large corporate players.
The owner will certainly violate your 4th Amendment rights.
Being already quite hardened, I didn’t take this advice myself until March of this year. Since then I’ve seen alerts on my name as a small pack of obsessive ankle biters try to form a pyramid so one of them can leap high enough to clear my boot leather.
And now that corporate and government power are fusing, there’s no excuse to remain.
Conclusion:
I have largely been sitting quietly and focusing on commercial work since the election. I have a good idea of what’s coming and no patience for millions of n00bs who suddenly feel compelled to act. Caution has to be instilled, and that instilling comes from watching those you know become casualties.
Four years of law enforcement tooling changes to deal with right wing extremism just let go with a bang, and the public personalities associated with it are frantically trying to fend off retribution. These nascent resistance groups who want people to give up an email and a phone number so they can get twice a week fund raising pitches are going to get subverted or taken out. I’m keeping my interest in this academic; going out with a pack of clumsy, noisy pups is not the secret to successfully hunting upland game.
I toy with the idea of making a subscribers only security wisdom stream on here … but then there’d be a list of names and payment information. So I guess I just leave things as they are and hope someone gets some value out of this. I’m not really sure what I’m going to do for 1st quarter 2025, or if the quarterly topic stuff is even going to continue. I may do some sort of generally applicable defensive thing, given the volume of fraud I’m seeing.
There will never be a better time than now - go protect your account, announce that you’re leaving, put up a forward address to Bluesky or Mastodon, and then get on with it. You aren’t going to reach the perfect moment to do it, there will always be something calling you back. Remove your email, change your password to a random string, and don’t save it. And thusly will you be freed of that hazard …
Lol.