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Biden Admin to Fact Check Your Text Messages?
From Politico, this is really scary.:
“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages”
The DNC wants to fact-check your private messages. What could possibly go wrong? And people wonder why some are hesitant to trust the vaccine. It is amazing how much of a threat this administration has been to civil liberties. For all of you Republicans who think everything is going to be A-OK when pushback to this leads to a Republican landslide in 2022: You may want to think again. An administration that resorts to these measures won’t let some pesky inconvenience like elections get in their way.
Published in Politics
But no mean Tweets! There are gulags in D.C for political prisoners, but no mean Tweets!
Thank you, Never Trumpers! And to hell with you all.
Heck, we probably won’t even be allowed to talk about the Republican Candidates at all.
We also have Capital Police expanding into a National Police Force but no one seems to care or notice.
The Biden Administration is also gathering information on all the social media influencers that the Jan. 6th political prisoners followed. The goal, I assume, is to pressure social media outlets into banning them.
Conservatives are systematically being silenced by the regime.
But it’s okay, because Alex Jones was a weirdo!
This is merely the logical progression of that twitter chain from Darryl Cooper the other day. All of it is scary. The reaction from conservative inc or GOPe, though, remains bewildering and infuriating. I’m long past caring whether our guys are stupid, weak, or in on it. Either way the practical effect is that they’re enabling it. It’s a shock, actually, that Desantis seems to be the only one who understands how to take up this banner of the disaffected, that he seems to be the only one interested in taking up that banner. We’re in worse shape than I thought.
All three, for what it’s worth.
We should have formed that conservative party back in 2012. We’d be in a great position today to take the whole country. Alas, so many dummies thought we needed to stick with Romney.
On the other hand, it’s a nice reminder that encrypted messaging apps were invented precisely because SMS messages are transmitted as cleartext, just like email. Complaining that phone companies and/or the government can read your SMS messages (or your emails) is sorta kinda like complaining that the Post Office can read what’s written on a postcard.
Use Signal!
I’m vaccinated but this would have had the opposite of the intended effect. This would have made me trust the vaccine so much less.
Sadly, the folk with whom one wishes to communicate must be using the same messaging service as oneself.
In my case, that means I’m limited to Apple Messages (which is relatively secure) unless I can teach the lumbering dinosaurs in my office to switch to something even more secure (our IT department would prefer we use Yammer since we already use Office 365 Enterprise).
They didn’t in 2020, so let’s wait to see what happens in 2022. It almost makes me want to tar and feather never-Trumpers, then run them out of town on a jagged rail.
FYI: Tarring and feathering was an extremely painful ptactice. The tar was hot and burned like crazy, and when the victims cooled down and pulled the feathers off, it was doubly painful as some skin was lost.
Some alleged racist, I never bothered to check him out during the Malkin kerfuffle, was recently banned. Some of Conservative Inc. are still okay with it. After all, he’s a racist. The pushback in the replies is quite strong though. A lot of we told you when Alex Jones was banned, what hill are you willing to die on, someday you will be next, etc.
Your link is broken. Are they looking at Facebook and Twitter? Supposedly the planning took place on Parler and it needed to be taken down, but most reporting I saw said it happened on Facebook.
What’s with the “almost”?
Here we go: https://thelibertydaily.com/radicalized-by-memes-biden-regime-to-release-list-of-conservative-social-media-influencers-followed-by-j6-defendants/
Apropos of nothing: I just learned that one can enable end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger, but for it to work the person with whom you want to communicate first has to also enable it at their end.
I guess this would make me way more hesitant to ever trust anyone with a D after his name. But it wouldn’t necessarily give me pause about the vaccine.
Or listen to your phone calls, which I’m pretty sure is still illegal without a warrant. I would be surprised if SMS messages don’t have the same degree of legal protection as voice calls do.
Interesting question: if a bot reads your messages, and responds by sending you a ‘fact-checking’ message…but doesn’t tell any humans…is it still in violation if it doesn’t have a warrant?
Same here, and I’m sure that’s true of a lot of people. The Democrat approach to ‘marketing’ doesn’t seem to be marketing at all, it is mainly about intimidation.
Right in line with what Stalin’s master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, told Arthur Koestler, back when Koestler was still a Communist:
Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them. Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!
Why does the Democratic National Committee have any power at all to “fact-check” Facebook/etc. etc.??? This is even more creepy than I thought! What part of the Constitution gives them the authority to monitor any one’s speech?? This is really NOT okay.
Well, see, it’s not the Government doing it. The government knows that it can’t legally do such a thing, but they’ll encourage their corporate pals to do it, and all the “conservatives” will just shrug and say “Oh well. Private company. Nothing can be done.”
The difference is that the phone company does not have to record your conversation in order for a phone call to work. In order to deliver an email or an SMS message, the message must be copied onto numerous computers between the sender and the receiver.
This is a good point, but it’s still creepy. I know anyone who sees a postcard can read it, but it would still be really rude for the post office to write a comment on it, something like “Be aware: skepticism of Mr. Venters’ claim that he ‘wishes you were here’ is warranted. Studies have shown that he puts the same message in every postcard he sends. Also, he’s lying about the weather in St. Augustine. The National Weather Service has confirmed that it was raining there on the day this postcard was mailed.”
But seriously, legality aside, this is a terrible idea that will be counterproductive.
This is what I was wondering about. Are they talking about actually filtering individual text messages for misinformation? How is this even technically possible? This would require real time reading of texts by human censors before the text is delivered to its destination, or some kind of AI to do it in place of human censors. And this assumes texts aren’t encrypted, and I think they are.
Not so sure about that….the phone calls will probably be digitized at some point in the network, and the servers it is transmitted between have at a minimum *memory* that the message must be temporarily stored in, if not anything normally more permanent such as disk storage.
Here is my guess – if you share links to Covid-related articles, that trips their censors. If you are sending something from one of the “bad” sites, then that person may receive an automated text along the lines of “we have noticed you are concerned about the effectiveness of the vaccine. Please be aware that much misinformation has been spread, and for your safety, you should only trust official sources. Please visit LINK for more information.”
That, they can realistically do. I do not think it is possible for them to delay text messaging for editorial review. If they went that far, it’s all over.
Telegraphy…initially Morse telegraphy and later based on teleprinters…seems like a pretty good technical precedent for SMS messaging, and it would be worthwhile to look at any legal precedents involving this technology.
Telegraphy was store-and-forward; messages would be received at intermediate locations and their forwarded further toward their destination, either by manual retransmission, paper tape retransmission, or computer-based solutions. So I wonder if there are any cases in which the federal government demanded–without warrants–that the carriers be on the lookout for certain content in messages, from any sender to any recipient or set of recipients….?
Thank you for the laugh – I needed it. That’s a classic Simpson’s-style line that unfortunately isn’t as satirical as it should be nowadays.
SMS is old technology and SMS messages are not encrypted end-to-end. The wireless transmission between the phone and the cell tower may be weakly encrypted (it’s at the provider’s discretion), but the message is unencrypted when travelling through the phone network to the intended recipient. This is precisely why messaging apps are preferable to SMS. Even the least secure messaging apps are still more secure than SMS.
a) Intercepted telegrams routinely landed on Abraham Lincoln’s desk during the Civil War, and in 1920 the US government made a deal with Western Union to gain access to any telegrams it wanted. (Source)
b) Apropos of nothing: The very first public demonstration of wireless telegraphy was hacked.