Pretty much the title. I certainly believe Trump, Maga, the Military, and the Police will, sooner or later, probably sooner, get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists and leftists and imprison them. How organized and effective that attempt is I am less sure of.
To be very transparent, this is something I’m pretty sure I’d be on the hook for. I have a long log of anti trump, antifascist, left sentiments, and am 75% sure I’ll be disappeared at some point in the next 4 years as I have no plans of shutting up. The only reason I’m not 100% sure is because of how expensive it would be. But hey, maybe it’s less expensive than potentially losing power? So I don’t know.
Never? Not likely? Maybe? Very? Extremely? Definitely?
Thoughts?
Everyone’s like “it won’t happen” but I remember post-9/11 a specific Linux news site got hit with claims of radicalism and some folks who frequented the site got put on watch lists. For interest in Linux.
There was a reason folks like me were against all the surveillance from the PATRIOT Act back then, and this is why.
EDIT:
Similarly, the Bush admin had the FBI spying on Quakers, the only religious group that anti-violence is such a central tenet to their religion that they by default are considered conscientious objectors and cannot be drafted into the military without violating their beliefs.
Post-9/11 the government thought peaceful Quaker anti-war activists were dangerous.
That was post-9/11 in the War on Terror years… It can happen here.
Sources:
Linuxjournal gets “extra surveillance:”
Quakers being spied on by FBI:
Unless you’re doing actual organizing, unlikely. The DNC isn’t friendly towards Leftist orgs either, though MAGA groups themselves may become more millitant.
Personally, I would be worried if I was you. The first Trump term can’t be compared as he had some guardrails with his recommended cabinet picks from the traditional GOP. Now that those GOP members have been expelled from the party, those guardrails are no longer there. His cabinet picks are loyalists and is a stress test to weed out any non-loyalists in Congress.
His cabinet picks will have free will to do what they want as long as they do two things: 1) praise Trump for the popular things they accomplish and 2) take the fall or blame other groups if it’s not popular.
And it’s not the government coming after these groups that is most worrying. We all see the lengths regular citizens would go to right a perceived wrong. January 6 case in point.
We’ve all seen this film before. It doesn’t have a good ending.
Likely. The federal government has SharePoint sites with information gathered about journalists and other activists who are pro immigration. To my knowledge, these individuals have not officially been disappeared.
get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists
They already know exactly who you are. People dont understand how pervasive online surveilance and profiling is. AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone.
Ah yes, as always, the ever-knowing magical AI. Because all the secrets of the universe can be aggregated using just few multiline prompts to the ChatGPT.
You’re distrust of AI hype is fine, but you’re missing the point. OP said AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone, meaning it’s now far less labor intensive to take all of the data being gathered by SIGINT and turn it into reports. The amount of labor required to build 10M dossiers on mostly impotent randos makes it completely unfeasible, but with generative AI being able to quickly summarize a dataset, suddenly we can have shitty, somewhat lossy dossiers on every moron shitposter.
I’m pretty sure the capabilities were there before LLMs and the LLMs don’t add that much value relative to it’s cost.
Not chatGPT. But AIs are good at one single thing and that is pattern recognition. And there is a lot of data to train and use those AIs on. Decades of data from your PCs, phones and tablets is on NSA servers. And yes, the NSA did shit like recording you through your notebook camera or recording your phone calls with your first girlfriend.
AI will probably never replace human workers/engineers/artists/…, but sorting through your online history is exactly what AIs excel at.
Also Dragnet policies are used by the police for a long time now. This is pretty much just that. Imo the main question is more if they want to burn that data on this task, because once they do this some people will adjust and it will get harder to get new data.
