Comment by firefax
1 day ago
Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth.
You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the word about the protest or action.
Presumably the phones are tapped?
People have been claiming for years that US phone calls are subject to routine computer analysis (Echelon); these days that's a relatively cheap thing to do with LLMs.
I suspect the literal runners solution is what's happening, although that's also very dangerous when the police control the streets.
And don't forget the whatsapp group chat classic: secure communications where at least one person in the group is leaking them.
>Presumably the phones are tapped?
If you simply list a location and time, it's hard to suss out whether it's a coffee or a protest. And there's a limit on how many people can be surveilled in real time, with the focus probably being on organizers not attendees. You're correct it's a possibility, but as a practical matter they can't listen to everyone, all the time -- but the key is to organize some "event" that overwhelms the regime, or days or weeks later they will possibly get around to your intercept and give you grief, yes.
But if the internet has been cut off and the bodies are piling up, sometimes you might choose to take a calculated risk.
> You can combine the phone tree with literal runners
And I thought Mirror’s Edge world was too far fetched back in 2008. But, apparently, it’s the reality now or where things are headed after all.
Using couriers, and not phones, was largely how bin Laden escaped capture for so long. Took months to track a courier back to him.
Radio stations too. The US civil rights movement sometimes used radio DJs to call people out for protests.
I've read that pirate radio is still a big part of protest movements and Mapuche resistance in Chile.
ClearChannel and Spotify certainly changed that potential!
"Stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."