First things first. Hexbear makes my life bearable sometimes. I don’t use an account because I don’t like how addicted to social media I get sometimes and I’m afraid of pissing people off, because although I consider myself an ML, I come from a very conservative family where I unknowingly say bad things about idpol.
Anyways. As a very drunk man (bad very bad day first time drinking in months - not an alcoholic), do you think the US government monitors hexbear? Like if I browse it without a VPN do you think I become a POI, serious, if not stupid, question?
Again, thank you for being a shining beacon in my day surrounded by people who justify genocide, political violence against the global south, and endless enterprise. I really am grateful even if I’m not the best Marxist. You’ve taught me about donbas, about the struggles of north Korea, the toils of Iran among so much more
Edit: As a still drunkman someone asked me about idpol. I uh can't see ur messages here but I can on my Lemmy client.
uh to make myself clear not in an Obama way - I find nick Mullen stuff funny. It makes me feel bad because of the punching down so i avoid it. and I might do things that are unintentionally mean, forgetting to use the correct pronouns (like genuinely I hardly meet with my enby friends so my mind just defaults to calling someone female presenting she rather than the preferred they. I do try to correct but sometimes I'm so absent minded that I'd rather not upset anyone.
I am trying to self crit so I'm OK with being dunked on I guess. But I isolate BC I don't wanna upset ppl. Its harder to express my intentions online when I mess up. @lemmmygradwontallowme
There have been some reports from NGOs that monitor online extremist groups that include us. They're definitely watching and I'm sure being here puts you on some kind of list. But it's also just not that consequential; I've always been a lot more concerned about local pigs and the far right going after communists in 2024 (still unlikely) than the feds. I do live outside the US though so maybe that plays a role
This. Like 90% of the high twch spying, when you look at how the feds found out, it was actually just a snitch or self incrimination.
I doubt it for the simple reason that there hasn't been any substantial organizing on this site.
I don't think it's like a specific watchlist for hexbear. I'm just spitballing, but my guess is that EVERYONE is being monitored. And everybody is basically in an Edge Graph Database of connections based on where they go, what sites they visit, what they say, who they communicate with, what purchases they make, etc... And when a certain number of highly suspect connections all coincide on a specific individual, that raises them above a threshold that probably gets their name/database entry put in front of a living being to investigate.
Now, that's assuming the Alphabet agencies are reasonably up to date with their tech. Which they probably are. The NSA has always been very big on vacuuming up as much data as they can, after all. But if they're not and they're just outsourcing to Meta and other groups, well, these sorts of databases Do Exist on private servers... So it's really a matter of who's doing the processing and for what purpose.
The government probably monitors Hexbear but also probably doesn't care because there is basically zero left wing violence in the US and hasn't been for decades. We're not a real threat to them in any capacity
They need left wing scapegoats to both sides things sometimes. Also they're fascist cops and hate us for existing.
for internet shitpost sites like this it's probably low priority but will still get flags on certain things likely. Aside from that though this isn't accurate. Uhuru have been being COINTELPRO'd as we speak and the radical leaders of BLM movement before the corporate billionaire funded NGO BLM(tm) took over were all murdered with no suspects being named by the pigs. Darren Seals was found shot in a burning car; and he was railing against the opportunist liberal BLM financed by Soros-and-co. that was highjacking the movement and having the media fixate on them, while he was also organizing Black voters to vote Republicans in to shake the Democrats into listening. In the 2016-2017 protests and charlottesville and such there was serious surveillance and repression of leftists as much as there was also FBI infiltration of right wing orgs. The pigs even murdered a few. They also more recently pressed RICO charges against the 'stop cop city' protestors to round any and all of their supporters up on racketeering charges and were doing deep surveillance about that; to say nothing of the surveillance and repression over Palestine protests and anti-zionist groups including in college campuses.
Socialism is never not a threat to the ruling class. And all left-wing activities are inherently antagonistic to capital (anti-imperialism, labor organizing, tenant unions, revolutionary groups, prison organizing, prison abolition and police defunding, etc). The pigs regularly brutalize torture and kill socialists and liberation organizers who are imprisoned. Kevin Rashid Johnson just participated in a hunger strike for over a month earlier this year over it, and their abuses of him and preventing his medical care. And socialism has grown exponentially in the last decade, more than the last 35 years. They're not blind to this.
Yeah, at minimum they're scraping posts to a file somewhere. They've got enough resources to set a system to flag key words or pheases and have someone check if we're about to pull the big communism lever once in a while.
idk I really doubt the feds give a shit about us given how small we are and that we're adjacent to a podcast but regardless it's always good to practice opsec.
As best I understand it, there's little in the way of active, real-life-person-looking-with-their-eyes monitoring but a whole lot of computer-programmes-looking-for-combinations-of-keywords monitoring, which then gets flagged and kicked up to actual people. The sheer quantity of data doesn't really allow for any other method. So, in the same way it's safer to use Linux not because it's 100% secure but because bad actors are going to go after the easier target of Windows users, we're less of a priority than, like, the websites and discord groups where people idolize school shooters or talk about the specs of tanks in War Thunder.
That being said... I wouldn't be surprised if there's some vestige of the COINTELPRO infiltration/monitoring operations that specifically targeted left-wing political spaces.
...I mean, I also wouldn't be surprised if there isn't, if that makes any sense? We're a generation or two removed from those days, and while ideas like "the end of history" seem laughable to us, it still has traction amongst those insulted by wealth and power.
-?-
Did you know mormons in the CIA are given a carte blanche to break whatever doctrine they deem fit? It's OK because they're doing our Heavenly Father's work on earth, so they get pre-approved into the special top tier of heaven that's usually only reserved only for the really good doctrine-abiding LDS members.
Actually ActivityPub (Mastodon) is in the glossy advertising copy of the private intel firms and they talk specifically about how they catch federated or rarely frequented/obscure platforms. If I were on my other account I would be on PC and would have the photo to show you. This community exists specifically because of the CIA banhammer being thrown at certain Reddit communities. Don't get confused.
I think I'm qualified to talk about this. I work at Langley and it's complicated. Do I get paid to monitor leftists so that I can report posters who post too good so they can get injected with cringe takes and nanobots? Sure. But it's happened just over a dozen times. The reality is that a lot of my peers don't really value my work and will go so far as to demean me and make fun of me.
This is especially hurtful when my work crush, Sam, says things like "If you can do your work in your sweatpants then you're not really a spy like us." It made everybody laugh and I felt my heart drop. I complain to my manager to plead saying "these are the best posters on the left! We need to be devoting more resources to the cause. Please move Sam to the project so I can show them how important the work is." But of course, Sam is busy with the Juan Gauido project still so they gave me a virtual AI assistant instead, Intelligent Ian.
Intelligent Ian is anything but. Our SOP demands that I ask it every day for the top 100 most destabilizing hexbear posts. It'll think of some really, really
stuff. However, it's all hallucination. It's complete fabrication. So now the majority of my day, some 80% of my work, is just going around and verifying everything that II is telling me. The freakin Hexbear admins won't give me a government backdoor API so I have to do it all by hand...All of this to say that the government is "watching." But internally, you can't really be a POI if they're not interested in my reports. Neither my work crush nor my manager really take me seriously. If you want to talk about a POI, you should talk about my rival, Johnathon China
. He's been embraced by this community in ways that I could never. The worst part? One time Sam came over to my cubicle and goes "you're a computer person, right?" I nod and then I go over to their computer. THEY HAD A FUCKING JOHNATHON CHINA POST AS THEIR BACKGROUND! He's singlehandedly infiltrated Langley, Hexbear, and is basically taking over the world while I'm sitting here talking about my crush and how nobody respects my spycraft. It's so fucking rough, comrades...I'm sure this site and everyone on it has a file and the site itself also does. But I also wouldn't worry too much about it because fucking everyone and everything has a file. It's the information age and these are intelligence agencies. So like, yeah, there's for sure a hexbear folder and I'm guessing some guy named Steve has had a look here from time to time for his fed job but probably most data being tagged and stored is done so automatically by whatever algorithm or keyword trackers or whatever. It's there if they ever need it but if I were a fed tracking threat levels I'd put us at nearly harmless, have Steve lurk there once a month or so and have computers do all the rest of the snooping. I'm sure you're a person of above average interest but like...most likely not by enough to matter. If you do becoming a person of interest enough to matter they'll be able to pull up several hundred pages documenting you for sure, but you just kinda gotta accept that's part of living a functional life nowadays and if you do go bigger or if shit gets real bad be ready to operate under the assumption they know everything you do on an electronic device.
Think of it like drug dealers, your mids guy who sells so he can smoke for free can pretty much just openly text message about setting up deals with the bare minimum effort of code talk "hey you good to stop by?' From a bunch of different numbers being your entire text history. The guy he's buying from, honestly is probably still using phones but probably demands much more subtlety, they guy that guy is buying pounds off of is gonna have a more robust system of contact, a meet will be arranged and business will he handled at a known to be safe location. Harder drugs means even more secrecy up and down the line. Same methods just different targets.
Huh, nice visiting us, I guess
First things first. Hexbear makes my life bearable sometimes. I don’t use an account because I don’t like how addicted to social media I get sometimes and I’m afraid of pissing people off, because although I consider myself an ML, I come from a very conservative family where I unknowingly say bad things about idpol.
Okay, I understand trying to not piss off people and getting addicted to social media but specifically what of the idpol?
Anyways. As a very drunk man (bad very bad day first time drinking in months - not an alcoholic), do you think the US government monitors hexbear? Like if I browse it without a VPN do you think I become a POI, serious, if not stupid, question?
Egh, I prolly guess some intern just marked us on a list in Langley, but I don't think they'd carry much attention for it, beyond that
but specifically what of the idpol
lol this guy is here for one post and you still want to get him
Get him, in what sense, understanding or argue with him?
But I isolate BC I don't wanna upset ppl
I feel this, but if you do make anyone upset, if you are genuine and not being a shit head on purpose I think most people can forgive a lot.
Posting on reddit and the greater internet in the past had made me anxious about being misunderstood or offending someone so I didn't post much. But here it seems most people actually try to understand what you are saying and don't instinctively insult or react to something they might not agree with, unless of course it's pro-imperialist or genocide denial or something of that variety.
Even if you have a vpn, you’ll be cooked if they actually take an interest in this place
Yeah most of their work on people who are actually organizing involves a broad range of osint and social engineering shit, not just correlation of IP addresses
I mean forum with 1000 visitors is easily flaggable. On the other hand, unless you do cool stuff, it’s frankly irrelevant. And visited website is irrelevant, cause didn’t fbi flag like 4 million people? It’s whatevs
do you think the US government monitors hexbear? Like if I browse it without a VPN do you think I become a POI
If you're asking, you probably are already POI (IMO). But thankfully we are (presumably) millions even just among the west. They monitor literally everyone (POI or not) and probably will gun for us if and when shit happens, even if we're not remotely involved... or that's my take on it, anyways (could be called paranoid or alternatively optimistic).
Honestly I figure for a whole list of reasons it'd probably be for the best to want to leave the west in time, anyways. The economic spiral sucks, fascism sucks and will only continue getting worse for everyone, etc. Many of the sensible petty bourgeois or those proles who could seize opportunities elsewhere are reading between the lines and getting the hell out of dodge IMO. If we stay here- in the foreseeable future, worst case scenario if shit really goes south we'll wind up facing death squads or concentration camps, best case scenario we're going to see the empire continue to spiral even further but "in peace"- cracking down on "civil liberties," continuing to be the usual fascists, with tent cities ever-increasing, the economy only ever getting worse for the majority, and life becoming ever-more precarious, to describe the outlook for much of the collective west. I don't sound optimistic, but it's going to get worse before it gets better (in the west) IMO.
I'm not a defeatist, but IMO if we can live better lives (or just plain survive), and maybe even contribute to the global south, we can do better- more for humanity and ourselves alike- by leaving. Not to say we shouldn't do things while we're in the west, and personally I might wind up remaining simply because my loved ones are here (if I had the means, and particularly if I had enough of the means to convince them all and move them with me, I'd head to China lol), or because I can't get my life together.
