[Not moderating]
I’m not 100% certain about the technology used, but I’ve seen current students using devices like that (well, much more developed than the old flimsy toy ones) to do scratch work.
With the old toys there’s a security issue.
Yes, they are silent, readily eraseable, and leave no trash that needs secure disposal as e.g. paper post-its would.
But every time you write on one, the stylus leaves a trailing dent in the substrate. As long as you’re certain the used tablet never falls into enemy hands you’re good. But if it does, modern techniques could probably recover a lot of whatever had ever been written on it. Oops.
A standard security measure from USAF was never write on the top sheet of a bound tablet of paper. Instead peel off the top sheet, set it a hard surface like desk or clipboard, then start writing. That way the subsequent sheets don’t contain recoverable copies of whatever you wrote.
I still do that 40 years later even when writing a phone# or “eggs, bread, milk, TP”.
What sort of resistance are we talking about? Organizing civil disobedience and other mass tactics can defeat high tech by holding face to face meetings, though the low tech stool and fink and undercover agent are still a problem. But legal resistance need not worry about that. Illegal activities? I got nothing.
More like always sensationalized. It follows a format of trying to accommodate both the woo-woo paranormal in the first half and skeptics in the second half. As though he tries to “Philadelphia Experiment” his cake and have it too.
As for old tech and resistance movements, bust out your guitar, write “This Machine Kills Fascists” on it, and start singing and writing songs of social significance. Here’s one to start with https://youtu.be/VwcKwGS7OSQ?si=5t7HQVRrgyNSfpKJ
I’m not an expert on privacy, but with high tech if you use VPNs and Tor browser, that should help cover a lot of your tracks.
As far as old tech, just don’t buy any beepers or walkie talkies from Israel.
One thing I read that terrorists did to communicate was they wouldn’t send emails. What they’d do is share an email address. One person would log on, write an email in the draft folder and save it. Then the other terrorist in a different location would log into the account and read the draft email. Supposedly this helped prevent the info from being sent over the internet and provided more security (I have no idea how it works or if it works)
Governments can put up phony cell towers that your phones connect to during a protest or rebellion. They can use that to gain all your personal information. I’m not sure what the solution to that is, but its a big issue in Hong Kong. We will probably have to take cues and advice from how people in Hong Kong are resisting oppression.
National indices
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As part of their Freedom in the World survey series, Freedom House downgraded the United States’s score significantly in their civil rights and political liberties index between 2010 (94) and 2020 (83), citing the need for 3 main reforms: removing barriers to voting, limiting the influence of money in politics, and establishing independent redistricting commissions.[106][107][45]
The Economist Democracy Index started the U.S. at the index’s launch in 2006 at an 8.22/10 (full democracy) though the rating started declining in 2010 and dropped to its lowest rating yet of 7.85 in 2021 (flawed democracy[108]).[109] The Economist cited functioning of government and political culture (both related to polarization) as major reasons for the lower score.[110][111]
The V-Dem Democracy indices show significant declines from 2016 to 2020.[112][113] V-Dem has measures on democracy starting in 1789, providing rare historical data to compare backsliding events, though comparing across centuries has challenges.[114] V-Dem also scores political parties in an annual illiberalism score, and ranked the Republican Party more similar to authoritarian parties than typical center-right governing parties.[115]
International IDEA labeled the US a “backsliding democracy” after evaluating 2020 and 2021 events, including January 6 and a poorly functioning legislature.[116] IDEA’s democracy scores started sliding for the United States in 2016.[117]
Mark Zuckerberg still uses papwr notebooks.
This thread reminds me of an old episode of Leverage where the team’s resident hacker discovers, to his horror, that the computer he’s supposed to extract information from is some piece of junk from the 1980s. His usual bag of tricks is useless.