Let’s say Dear Leader decides to have the houses of anyone who speaks ill of him (or capitalism) burned down in the night, or their dogs killed, or nefarious files uploaded to their network etc. How easy would that be?
US, of course. I’m actually concerned about this.
What for?
There’s nothing on lemmy to monitor. You guys see the vanilla users of reddit and thought r/pics was too spicy.
Sitting around waiting to repost a no kings comment isn’t a concern for anyone.
Lemmy is created to post about beans and moths. That’s what federation is about. If anyone even thought about rocking the bot with a post that wasn’t related to beans or moths then you could stand up another instance and get back to our bean moth funny good time.
Lemmy is the digital left without an unseen well funded invisible hand guiding us. At least not yet. You’d think this is the opportunity to find strategy to build digital spaces to fight back against the rich sizing digital assets. Build communities and discussions to reject corporate influence and push back against the growth of fascism. But no. This is not what federation was ever about. It’s about recreating the SFW vanilla reddit front page but worse with less people. Hahaha haha bean moths so fucking cute. Imagine whose beans are these, I don’t know. Did you see the post where they photo shopped a moth on a guy eating beans. Fucking wild.
There’s nothing to monitor here.
Given a tiny bit of knowledge on big data systems ……
- assume everything accessible is being copied, encrypted or not, kept forever
- there are continuous processes making links to people places times, and connecting the internet to real world data
- when someone wants to search for something, like uses the term “mango Mussolini “, it pretty quickly finds the set of all communications
- then you can further refine it “and lives in the dc area”, and end up with a list of people
- then you have ready links to clever where they’ve posted, everything they’ve said, every person they’ve connected with online or in real life
- and if you have encrypted data, can choose to brute force it (some will have to wait for technology)
It really no longer makes sense to wonder if they’re watching Lemmy. There’s no reason to pick specific places to watch when they can just collect everything, store it, then take their time searching for connections
it is safest to assume that any and every communication you have on the open internet that is not end to end encrypted has been ingested, identified, catalogued, and stored in an NSA data center and can be called up at any time for future reference – and even the encrypted communications may not be secure for much longer, if quantum computing keeps progressing the way it is. Conduct yourself accordingly.
Conspiracy time: Quantum computing may have already been solved and the US gov is keeping it secret so they can harvest encrypted data. Consider this blog post from Scott Aaronson (quantum computing expert / theoretical computer scientist / Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin):
I’m going to close this post with a warning. When Frisch and Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed.
Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway. (emphais my own)
Link for those interested. I’m not bringing this up because I’m trying to say that the US gov for sure has cracked quantum computers, but there’s no denying that Scott’s statements there do come off as a bit of a wink wink nudge nudge.
e2ee is not enough you also need to know what these ends are
Generally it is safe to assume that the NSA is ingesting the entire internet at close to realtime.
Is anyone actually looking here? Do they include this as a social media platform in their toolz? Do their tools know how to parse it as a social media platform?
Hard to say. All we can say is that if you are afraid of posting something on facebook because the NSA might see it, you should feel the same about lemmy.
You have to assume someone there learned how to grep
I will agree with people who suggested that Palantir is scraping anything and everything online that’s public looking for anything actionable. Every time I see some .ml user write an actionable threat on here, it puts all of us on the line. But they’re also probably scraping things like prepper forums and whatever. They’re using AI systems for this, not humans, so until you ping hot for something actionable, they’re just building a profile on you to tie accounts to you as a real person.
Why Palantir and not the NSA? Palantir don’t need no warrant. Even a FISA warrant takes a paper trail. That’s why contractors are contracted - to use third party doctrine to violate the 4th Amendment.
That being said, I strongly recommend:
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Don’t fucking doxx yourself. If you live in the US, don’t say what state or city unless it’s an account tied to you IRL.
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Don’t name, or even gender if you can avoid it, spouses, partners, or family members.
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Always connect with a VPN.
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Any account used through an app on a phone should be considered tied to you IRL.
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Don’t say anything on the internet you don’t want a prosecutor reading back to you in a monotone voice.
Now I want a text2speech option for my lemmy app with the voice of a bored and mildly annoyed lawyer.
Call the voice “Can you please read back the Transcript?”
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There’s no way of knowing. But it would be dumb to assume they aren’t. Fun fact: your subscriptions and up/downvotes aren’t private on lemmy either, due to the nature of how federation works!
More correct to say that Fediverse upvote/downvotes are public.
Whereas on corporate platforms, they are private only to you, the platform, its thousands of ad affiliates, and the government.Perfectly said, thank you.
Piefed does allow users the option to not federate their votes. So harvesting that data would mean needing local access to the infrastructure or snooping on traffic to/from your local instance.
Shouldn’t be an option. All things should be open and be able to scrape. If every lemmy gets big it would be a good way to identify users manipulating votes or posts.
I have zero doubt the fediverse is ingested by intelligence and law enforcement. But I would say it is more automated then actual eyes on posts.
Same thought. They probably run a system that scans for trigger words and maybe a real person reviews reports. Other than that, unlikely.
It is hilarious to think that there is an agent whose whole purpose is to surf lemmy instances all day. Dream job for some mods
ICE/DHS was contracting people to do that at one point, and there are fusion centers full of people doing that
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/new-orleans-immigration-online-criticism-tracking
If there is they mod for .world
Tbe feds can watch deez nuts
I’m taking this as the most educated answer.
You saw how they handled the Eptsein redactions, right? They’ve drained the federal government. I wouldn’t assume any level of competence at all.
I’m sure they outsourced it to musky and palantir
you’re worried about Elon Musk? the scam artist whose employees literally hide their work from him so they can get anything done and who does nothing but bankrupt companies he buys?
They’re heeeere.
The 3-letter agencies are definitely on here, but it’s unlikely they will do anything. It’s more useful to keep watch
NWA has no business reading my posts
Do I think that some desk nerd is planting himself in /c/trumpisafucktard trying to catfish the members into a meetup so they can kidnap him, waterboard him and then deport him to Lithuania? Of course not. Do I think that they have at some point had human eyeballs on something written on the fediverse that got flagged by AI? You can bet your trump-hating ass they have.
I imagine the feds(of all the letter varieties) have had the capability to scrape the entirety of the open internet and look for certain phrases or particular user data that meets their search criteria. If you think about it, Google has been doing it for years.
Why don’t we waste their time I want to kill the president
In minecraft. I would also laugh if someone else did it
I just use multiple VPN tunnels with the first two hops still in the US (so it doesn’t look like I’m going offshore) with random delays along the way (to avoid timing attacks) to a Lemmy instance in a privacy-friendly country.
They could probably still figure out who I am if they tried hard enough though.
there’s a few mental health communities on lemmy as well btw
Probably not that much yet, but they’ll be coming after us sooner or later as lemmy usership grows.
It took them almost 20 years before they seriously came after Reddit users (not that it hasn’t happened before, but not like this), but the government was always watching. And they’re certainly watching us here now.
And it’s every government, and plenty of corporations, too. Not just the United States government.
Threads proved that we aren’t unnoticed. Even truth dot social is only a mastodon instance
An unfederated instance, and highly tweaked to do its own thing
