The affidavits supporting the applications to track Richardson claimed video showed Fort, Lemon, Richardson, and others “chanting with agitators.” Prosecutors have since conceded that Lemon and Fort did not chant. According to her lawyers, the government acknowledged that the false claim appeared in at least 15 warrant affidavits.
This administration has an impressive record of lying in order to manufacture charges against critics.
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
Literally just airplane mode. It's ended up being a rather excellent privacy toggle that operating systems have to implement well.
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
Yow, $70 a month is rather harsh. Honestly I'd rather just stick to Signal and avoid traditional calling/SMS and use HTTPS for everything over mobile data instead.
>GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
>GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks
This isn't just a GrapheneOS feature so you don't need a new ROM for it. Upstream Android provides this feature. Being enrolled in Google Advanced Protection program even forces it on. It is also available in iOS via Lockdown Mode. Just a great feature and I'm glad its broadly available.
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
Rayhunter is a great tool, but unfortunately, it is only a passive monitor for cellular state changes and not an active defense.
Modern Stingrays / IMSI catchers support all standards up to 5G. They easily exploit 4G networks and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployments.
The only effective active defenses include (a) using a device locked strictly to 5G Standalone (SA) mode with SUCI (Subscription Concealed Identifier) enabled, preventing fallback to 4G/3G/2G where identity spoofing is trivial, (b) keeping the device in airplane mode most of the time, only going online briefly from unpredictable, shifting locations, and (c) using custom cellular baseband firmware that can reject anomalies (like a tower suddenly appearing too close or lacking neighbor cell lists), though this requires custom building your own solution as ready-made consumer solutions are hard to find.
The last one can be achieved with Rayhunter, of course, but it would require some patching to Rayhunter and always carrying a mobile phone connected to the Rayhunter-supported Wi-Fi hotspot device.
Finally, intelligence mercenaries (and therefore LE agencies that source data from them) use warrantless network-side exploits like SS7/Diameter attacks to remotely query the core telecom routing system and harvest the location of the tower target's phone is currently using.¹ ²
> charged with conspiring to violate worshippers’ civil rights and interfering with religious worship at ... its pastors, David Easterwood, also led ICE’s St. Paul field office
Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
It is also illegal for ICE agents to execute a nurse and veteran in the street by shooting him in the back after taking away his gun but that doesn't seem to matter.
Amen. It's sickening how many people will just uncritically swallow the paper-thin narratives put out by the regime about "legality", without ever considering why and how the regime got involved with a given situation in the first place. We've being subject to rule by law, not rule of law - it went out the window when the Supreme Council decreed a "unitary executive", aka autocracy by any other name.
The right to protest and peacefully assemble doesnt give you the right to do it in private property. The church is church property its open to its members and generally the public but that doesnt make it a public place or public property. If you want to protest a store, you are free to do so on public property outside the store. You are not free to do so inside the store disrupting the purpose of the establishment. The store is private property they are within their rights to refuse your business as long as it isnt based on a protected class.
A church really isnt any different, their business is worship and offering a peaceful place for contemplation, reflaction and prayer. If you disrupt that they can and should ask you to leave and should you refuse that becomes the crime of tresspass.
If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
Exceptional irony in that somewhere within that church might be printed the line "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who tresspass against us". Probably within some book that isn't very important.
You have rights to assemble and protest, they have rights to assemble and worship. It’s all about trying to strike a reasonable balance between your competing rights.
What if they haven’t committed fraud? Do you believe the federal government should be allowed to harass elected officials for their speech?
In the trespass charges, local government could have handled it without costing you as much. It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars using dragnet surveillance, violating the rights of others caught in their net.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I'm just speaking hypothetically, of course. Otherwise the federal government ran by either party could just declare "fraud" or "show me your birth certificate" for 10 years without probable cause and keep repeatedly harassing the elected officials they disagree with.
> Interfering with religious worship is a federal offense
Pretty sure it's a misdemeanor offense in some states, but is not a federal offense. Open to reading the federal statute if you can cite one.
I can’t reply to your other comment so commenting here.
Thank you for being so civil, these discussions tend to get very heated very quickly.
You are right that it is a misdemeanor unless there was an aggravating factor but I don’t think that has been alleged. But it does seem to be a federal offense nonetheless if someone does violate the code below.
18 U.S.C. § 247
>intentionally obstructs, by force or threat of force, including by threat of force against religious real property, any person in the enjoyment of that person’s free exercise of religious beliefs, or attempts to do so
"The affidavits supporting the applications to track Richardson claimed video showed Fort, Lemon, Richardson, and others “chanting with agitators.” Prosecutors have since conceded that Lemon and Fort did not chant".
Depends on what you meant by "it" here, the prosecutors' have already conceded that at least some of their claims in the affidavit were false, so I would agree that it's hardly settled. (I haven't watched the video nor would recognize Richardson).
You're just thumping the table. It's illegal to discriminate against Jewish university students, too, but that doesn't mean that Trump's treatment of Columbia et al was justified. What do you think it means for an official to use the law as a weapon against his enemies?
Those of us that believe in preserving civil liberties argue that we should take away powers of the government so it is harder to bully people under the color of law --- the process is the punishment. I'm not sure why the left only cares about this topic now, and not when the left was in power. The Left had a lot of opportunities to take away government powers before Trump entered office.
Because "The Left" is not some unified body as you're making it out to be. Rather it consists of professional politicians who lean authoritarian, and the grassroots who lean libertarian. And the same basic dynamic exists on "The Right" as well. It is the professional authoritarians' main job to sell their respective grassroots tribes on justifications for the authoritarian actions of their administrations. Currently, it is "The Right" who is cheering on the authoritarianism (and quite voraciously!), so anybody earnestly interested in preserving civil liberties should be opposing "The Right". When the buntings change, "The Left" gets the power back, and is back to being the marketers for authoritarianism, then it will then become necessary to oppose "The Left". But of course to actually make any positive progress for civil liberties, it is necessary for the grassroots to hold their own politicians accountable rather than merely cheering when it is their team's at bat.
If you think that me calmly, accurately, and neutrally pointing out what's currently illegal is "thumping the table" then you're helpless, hopeless, and there'd be no point arguing with whatever point you're making here, as you'll interpret it as "violence" and me "attacking" you, I'm certain.
Reporting on an event is not the same as participating in it. The first amendment protects freedom of the press as much as it protects freedom of religion.
You can't participate in a mob that enters into religious worship and interferes with it. Lemon is on video interfering with religious service, and the pastor even personally asks him to stop. But even before then, he was no longer reporting on the event as soon as he went in with the mob and did his part to actively interfere.
A law was passed under President Clinton that made it illegal for protesters to interrupt religious services or impede access to an abortion clinic.
> The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a United States law that was signed by President Bill Clinton in May 1994, which prohibits the following three things: the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion, the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship...
Imagine if they went after the child predators listed in the Epstein files with the same amount of force they are going after journalists and critics of ICE.
>You must be able to demonstrate extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics through sustained national or international acclaim.
In an authoritarian regime like Trump's anyone who is deemed The Other ... gays, liberals, RINOs, ex-cabinet members, are Others and will be hunted by authoritarian a-holes.
Imagine your government being held hostage and blackmailed by a foreign power and your first thought is ideological nonsense funded and promoted by the same foreign power.
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulator against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
There, I fixed it for you. Now you can freely read and engage with the content of the article.
What will Stingrays do if a mobile device uses Starlink? There's no way the Feds are going to lose this ability to deploy Stingrays once Starlink Mobile comes around.
Stingrays don't care where the provider's towers are, they work by pretending to be their own, and (ideally for you if you are the person wielding one) causing your target's phone to connect to or through your antenna. The only way Starlink would help a target is if your phone rejects tower signals that are not mostly above you, or if Starlink Mobile would utilize something other than the 3GPP standards, both of which are unlikely unless they want to sell their own fully proprietary phones.
Current Starlink direct-to-mobile is proprietary. It's kind of the opposite: 5G NR NTN so far has required new chipsets which haven't found their way into phones yet, whereas Starlink's LTE has been deployed with firmware changes to existing phones.
98 comments
[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadSo who is going down for perjury?
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/03/19/ex-pa...
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
Only on SA and even there it is optional: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.36A.pdf
This isn't just a GrapheneOS feature so you don't need a new ROM for it. Upstream Android provides this feature. Being enrolled in Google Advanced Protection program even forces it on. It is also available in iOS via Lockdown Mode. Just a great feature and I'm glad its broadly available.
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
Modern Stingrays / IMSI catchers support all standards up to 5G. They easily exploit 4G networks and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployments. The only effective active defenses include (a) using a device locked strictly to 5G Standalone (SA) mode with SUCI (Subscription Concealed Identifier) enabled, preventing fallback to 4G/3G/2G where identity spoofing is trivial, (b) keeping the device in airplane mode most of the time, only going online briefly from unpredictable, shifting locations, and (c) using custom cellular baseband firmware that can reject anomalies (like a tower suddenly appearing too close or lacking neighbor cell lists), though this requires custom building your own solution as ready-made consumer solutions are hard to find. The last one can be achieved with Rayhunter, of course, but it would require some patching to Rayhunter and always carrying a mobile phone connected to the Rayhunter-supported Wi-Fi hotspot device.
Finally, intelligence mercenaries (and therefore LE agencies that source data from them) use warrantless network-side exploits like SS7/Diameter attacks to remotely query the core telecom routing system and harvest the location of the tower target's phone is currently using.¹ ²
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370809133_Attacks_t...
[2] https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/orbic.html
Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
You have a right to assemble and so do they, what you don’t have is a right to trespass. Use your head.
I guess we're raiding the homes of Congress members we simply disagree with, so Constitutional rights don't carry as much weight anymore.
A church really isnt any different, their business is worship and offering a peaceful place for contemplation, reflaction and prayer. If you disrupt that they can and should ask you to leave and should you refuse that becomes the crime of tresspass.
If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
The right to protest doesn’t give you or anyone the right to do so on private property and to also interrupt with religious practices.
Documenting yourself doing the above doesn’t allow you to get away with it.
In the trespass charges, local government could have handled it without costing you as much. It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars using dragnet surveillance, violating the rights of others caught in their net.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Interfering with religious worship is a federal offense, so I don’t think it could just be handled by the local government.
> Interfering with religious worship is a federal offense
Pretty sure it's a misdemeanor offense in some states, but is not a federal offense. Open to reading the federal statute if you can cite one.
Thank you for being so civil, these discussions tend to get very heated very quickly.
You are right that it is a misdemeanor unless there was an aggravating factor but I don’t think that has been alleged. But it does seem to be a federal offense nonetheless if someone does violate the code below.
18 U.S.C. § 247
>intentionally obstructs, by force or threat of force, including by threat of force against religious real property, any person in the enjoyment of that person’s free exercise of religious beliefs, or attempts to do so
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/247
Don Lemon does seem to be charged with Conspiracy Against Rights (18 U.S.C. § 241) and FACE Act Violation (18 U.S.C. § 248).
Unfortunately, even if they are, they often escape real consequences... https://apnews.com/article/trump-george-santos-commutation-p...
Depends on what you meant by "it" here, the prosecutors' have already conceded that at least some of their claims in the affidavit were false, so I would agree that it's hardly settled. (I haven't watched the video nor would recognize Richardson).
A law was passed under President Clinton that made it illegal for protesters to interrupt religious services or impede access to an abortion clinic.
> The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a United States law that was signed by President Bill Clinton in May 1994, which prohibits the following three things: the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion, the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship...
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Access_to_Clinic_E...
We've seen anti-abortion protesters found guilty and sentenced to prison under the same law in the past.
> Six pro-life activists convicted of federal FACE Act charges, face over a decade in prison
https://ewtn.co.uk/article-six-pro-life-activists-convicted-...
What if it is a mob of religious worshipers that are participating in the mob?
I definitely think abused loopholes should be reigned in and or eliminated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318
>You must be able to demonstrate extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics through sustained national or international acclaim.
Arts I guess?
In an authoritarian regime like Trump's anyone who is deemed The Other ... gays, liberals, RINOs, ex-cabinet members, are Others and will be hunted by authoritarian a-holes.
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
"a cell-site simulators"?
There, I fixed it for you. Now you can freely read and engage with the content of the article.