Comment by immibis
5 months ago
First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal. Having lots of phones (even in a rack-mount form factor) isn't illegal. Even if the phone network could conceivably be DoSed with that many phones all calling at once, it's not illegal unless you actually do that or intend to do it. And their other justification was that this equipment could be used to send anonymous or encrypted communications - that's not illegal either. Even this government hasn't gotten to the point of making encryption illegal.
<< First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal.
A lot of things are not, but US for a while has been on a path that suggests that whether something is legal or not is not the standard. The standard is basically, based partially on personal vibes.
Naturally, this comes years after it was normalized in banking, red flag laws and so on, so I suppose this is not a surprise, but I am surprised that people are making 'this is not illegal argument'.
In this setup, illegal does not matter. If it is suspicious, you are in trouble. For example, I invite you to look at DHS/FBI 'signs'[1][2] to report by private orgs:
- Producing or sharing music, videos, memes, or other media that could reflect justification for violent extremist beliefs or activities
Note the could and despair at the future we are gleefully approaching.
Anyway, I don't disagree with you on principle, but I want you to understand that the system behaves differently these days.
https://tripwire.dhs.gov/documents/us-violent-extremist-mobi... https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/counterterrorism/us-viol...
> Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal.
What about sending spam and threaths over one of these SIMs? I'm pretty sure that warrants legal action.
Have we actually established that they are used for sending spam? It's very likely, but the press release does not provide any evidence of that. All we know is that they could be used for spam.
And even if they are, if you provide a service and someone uses your service to send spam, that's not valid grounds for seizing all your equipment.
Spam is illegal? I'd love that to be true but I don't see any spam police under the current administration (who are prolific...spamers).
I stopped reading once the author claimed it was a lie because the SecSrv knew technical terms, then claimed it was a lie because they didn't know the technical terms. It's too early in the morning to be purposely confused.