He later made a second post:

Previously I made a post with some advice on keeping safe from post facto retribution by LE, citing my own (deeply regrettable) experience as a military intelligence analyst. This will be an addendum.

instead of a set of directions to take on faith, I want to give you information about how and why LE targets people, how they think about this process, and what gives them a hard time. I also want to give you the vocabulary to talk about these issues without sounding like LARPers, and know how to google them. Then you can make your own decisions.

Methods of collection

As someone on the other side of these tools, (and as someone who paid for them) you should know what they are:

VISINT, meaning visual intelligence: aerial photography, CCTV, and police video. These are used to identify faces, license plates, tattoos, and groups of people.

HUMINT, meaning human intelligence: undercover cops, informants, and interrogations. Besides trying to get your name or social media info, these people are trying to get you arrested, which is the best way of identifying you.

SIGINT, very broadly referring to Signals Intelligence: IMSI catchers (Stingrays) identify phones in the area. You stick it in a van and drive around (kind of like war-driving). Now you have a list of people who broke curfew. Tower dumps happen after the fact, via cell carrier, who are more than happy to sell you out to the police. Third party apps with backdoors may also be handing over your location, although this is difficult to prove. Lastly, Dirtboxes can do just about everything a stingray can do, but they can also listen in on your conversations/texts.

WEBINT/OSINT, meaning web intelligence and open source intelligence, but often used interchangeably: This is usually an automatic survey of social media, journalism. It doesn't matter if you use the hashtag or not.

If you live in a major city, the above are not just possibilities, they're certainties, (yes -- even the illegal ones). The question is, will you appear in the data? Keep in mind that the real-time surveiled area is much larger than the ground covered by police. For a rule of thumb, double the radius covered by the drone/plane's flight circuit (not the helicopters).

Methods of Analysis

Here are the two main ways analysts use and combine these methods to identify targets:

Region-of-interest:

This means that you start with a list of locations and see who was there, using the tools described above

This is probably what you are most familiar with, because much of it happens on the scene. What you don't see is what happens after the fact. Computer programs and analysts pour over the data for months afterwards, looking for faces, phone-numbers, and license plates. Even if there is nothing directly tying you to the protest, a chain of evidence is enough. Example: face (captured on video) -> social media (cross referenced) -> phone # (via backdoor) -> identity

Person-of-interest:

This means that you start with a list of people and see where they were.

What list? Well, you are a person of interest if you:

are a known member of a radical org

have been arrested recently for demonstrating

post publicly about radical politics

An example of how this might work: After a phone call to the NSA and some data-wrangling, an analyst types a simple query: Where were the phones of every DSA member in the city located the nights of May 29-June-05? 30 were at the protests. 60 were in the suburbs, and 5 moved towards downtown until 20:00, when they were shut off. Now those 5 are at the top of the list.

This is my answer to those who want to faraday their phones or turn them off during the protest. Leave it on and at home.

If you have a burner that you believe you can trust, I have to ask -- has the burner ever been overnight in your apartment? Do you frequently carry the burner with your regular phone? Have you accessed your google account through the burner? If so, and if you are a person of interest, then you will be identified.

As an aside, you can expect cell service to be cut if you come close to posing a real threat. So why rely on it?

Network analysis

This means that you start with a group of people and break it down into groups of mutual connections. This can be passive (eg automatically comparing your follows with other people's follows) or active (infiltrating your group or interrogating a member). They are not looking for evidence, just for targets.

Who is a target?

While local police will target you for lawlessness and disorder, the FBI is more likely to target you for being charismatic, cooperative with others, and intelligent. LEOs believe that they know how to deal with 'animals' (ignore current events for a moment). But they are terrified of competent leaders.

Defending yourself

Imagine that you have a 'protest identity' and a real identity. We can say, definitionally, that you have been identified once there is an observable intersection between the two. The fact that much of this evidence is inadmissible in court is a triviality, (Google "parallel construction"). Anyway, the protesters from ferguson never made it to court.

The fool-proof solution is complete compartmentalization of the protest from the rest of your life: Superman goes into an alley. Clark Kent comes out. That's the goal, anyway. Leaving your phone at home, your car FAR away or at home, and covering your face completely, gets you 90% of the way there. See the other post for the rest.

I realize that some of you are veteran organizers, and find this separation counter-intuitive or cumbersome. I'm not in a position to talk about organizing, only intelligence, so I don't know what to tell you, other than to describe what you are up against and let you decide. Your country is about to get a lot scarier for leftists, so please consider what I'm saying.

Feel free to pm with questions, or comment with corrections.

Solidarity