If you’re not familiar with the LEGO scandal, the tl;dw is that this YouTuber Reckless Ben (Ben Schneider) has been investigating a stolen set of LEGO worth ~$100-200k (depending on who you ask) and the local police dept and criminal justice system has been colluding with the criminals (all members of the local Mormon church) to get him to STFU. The long version is, very long. You can check his channel for more.
Previously the local police dept managed to get a warrant to raid Ben’s rental home with guns drawn and arrest him, based on what is clearly fabricated evidence. Here they appear to have done it again to get access to his Google account.
The linked video is mirrored on Peertube and timestamped to the relevant section.
Ben does also provide a copy of the subpoena in the video but I cannot vouch for its’ validity, and he has used placeholder evidence before, but that’s neither here nor there.
Anyway, the part that was relevant to this community was that in the course of their investigation they subpoenaed Google, and Google handed over basically his entire life to them. I’m sure this was very useful in their investigation.
I don’t necessarily blame Google here for complying with a subpoena, but the moral of the story is to stop giving Google your data, because everything you say and do can and will be used against you in a court of law, with or without legitimate justification, and the more stuff you give them, the more ammunition you’re providing the prosecutor.
This is also not exclusive to Google. Anything not local, self-hosted or encrypted a la Proton can be subpoenaed and the provider will have to comply. It just so happens that Google probably has more information about literally everyone in the world than any other particular entity.
It’s good to have reminders of what is and isn’t private.
Google accounts aren’t “free”.
Yea I watched the video today and it was a good wake up for me to continue my process to move from google. I have started some time ago already but have been doing it in increments. I still have an android phone and moving away from it will be a pain.
GrapheneOS is a dream, if you have a Pixel.
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Aside from 1. Buying second hand, or 2. Waiting until Motorola releases their GrapheneOS phone, then yes. Unfortunately.
Ironically, Pixel is the best hardware to degoogle.
There is the Fairphone with /e/os its great and easily repairable.
fairphones can also run LineageOS if you want to go a step further and remove gapps. for the really bold, you can run postmarketOS on fairphone 4 or 5 to remove android entirely. there are sacrifices in android functionality, but with serious gains by way of Linux desktop to counter those.
It is pretty easy to pick up a second hand phone on eBay
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Sounds like a phobia
Yeah never made sense to me either, its the only device they support. Other options are /e/os and lineage is from my knowledge on other limited device options.
CalyxOS is back too and also supports older hardware than Graphene.
I’m not seeing much of a difference between the two, it’s basically the same list.
Graphene doesn’t support Pixels older than the 6.
Yeah, but updates only until the end of 2026, so no really a good option.
Plus, it’s still mostly a list of Pixel phones.
It looks like onnos comments haven’t been populated in the modlog yet so I might be way off on the context but here’s some possibly useful information: the reason graphene is pixel only is because the hardware was originally intended as a reference implementation of an Android handset. It’s incredibly well documented by design and intention with none of the abstracted away components, functions and interfaces that almost everything else is filled with.
Pixels also have relockable bootloaders, which most people don’t care about because for their purposes (installing some custom rom) it only needs to be unlockable, and that means you can generally rely on their security if someone else gets their hands on your phone because the bootloader is locked after installing graphene.
Graphene is a security and privacy focused project.
If all you want is not to have the google apps then graphene isn’t really pointed at you. If you feel it’s more important to have not paid money to a company you don’t trust than it is to be private and secure, graphene isn’t pointed at you. That’s not a judgement, just the reality.
My exact reasoning to avoid GrapheneOS.
To my understanding you can have a functional phone with LineageOS+ Motorola and a few other brands.
Lots of other brands, Lineage supports hundreds of models.
But not hundreds of mobile modems
What do you mean by that? I assume you don’t mean radio firmware.
Oh, yes, it’s radio, sorry for the brain fart
I’ve been following this and he keeps making so many mistakes. Stop talking to the police, bro. Stop trying to get the shop owner on camera.
File lawsuits against the company (I know he tried and the cop refused to issue the summons illegally, so you do it again after filing a complaint against the police), and file every lawsuit possible outside of that district.
But that’s not good views for YouTube. He just keeps giving them more ammunition to go after him.
Lawsuits do no good when they are invisible. He’s exposed insane police and judge corruption that would be swept under the rug becuase of no exposure. If utah decides they dont like you or me, we would be fucked, in jail for made up lies, becuase we dont have millions of people watching.
Yes he has also done some dumb shit for sure.
After he got forcibly muted by court I believe he finally spoke to lawyers and then he won pretty quick.
I suspect he was playing 4D chess, and decided to show what your chances are in the system if you play it by the book and alone, which most people who can’t afford a lawyer would do, and what also the thieves relied on. They told the victim directly try to sue us and you’ll end up paying more in lawyer costs.
i guess he lives up to the name Reckless Ben huh lol
How did we not see this!?
In the above video, his decision to attend a protest wearing a beard is beyond dubious. I sure hope he had several independent lawyers weigh in on exactly what he could say and do that won’t violate the court order, because on the surface that seems like begging the judge to throw him in jail. Even if he technically followed the order, the appearance of it is probably enough for the judge to go nuclear.
Most everything leading up to that I could write off as a combination of telling a good story, boundary testing, and shining a light on how absurdly corrupt our criminal Justice System is in operation, but that beard scene has me concerned that Ben just lost whatever ground he had to stand on.
Given the US is currently rotting from the top down and the bottom up I wonder if this guy will get lucky and find some help from the middle that isn’t yet so corrupt.
He has a civil rights lawyer with a youtube channel helping him on the criminal charges and has hired some other lawyer to help with the civil charges (hence the move for those to federal court). So he’s getting there.
The lesson here is not to trust Google or other non-encrypted storage with your stuff. There are email providers that are more protective of your stuff, but more than that: don’t store everything in one place. That way if one account is compromised, not everything is exposed. And American companies are more likely to share your data than European ones.
Yes I did say that but thank you for reiterating.
it would seem their whole legal system is as corrupt as their government
I live here, and yes, it’s corrupt.
It has been for at least 50 years, now most of all. It’s not as blatant as some countries re open bribery, but our “news” sources have been owned by the bourgeoisie since at least the 90s, every year they bought up more and more smaller, local news sources; now only a few remain, all firmly under control.
Abuses of power are rampant, just not reported often. So we have more room for Kanye coverage, two-page spread
Don’t sell America so short, it’s been corrupt for a lot longer than 50 years. It’s just that more than 50 years ago the victims of corruption didn’t include white families.
wouldn’t you like to become Canada’s 4th territory?
Don’tbe evilYeah, again, even if they are evil in general, I can’t necessarily blame them here. They were complying with the law.
And who makes the law in the empire?
Exactly. And if the law doesn’t suit their needs, change it until it does.
Story is interesting, the video is a chaotic abomination of bad storytelling.
LOL yeah it is.
Seems he wants to appeal to gen z and alpha iPad baby brain.
the local police dept and criminal justice system has been colluding with the criminals (all members of the local Mormon church)
Sounds about on par for the corrupt, death cult religionists. Quick! Someone steal their magic underwear and ransom it back to them for the LEGOs!
Thank goodness we’re finally safe, everyone! I feel so incredibly safe I can barely sleep at night — partly from relief, partly from the faint red glow of the dashboard camera evaluating my facial expressions for signs of independent thought. Remember when driving was about getting somewhere? Now the car watches you, the road watches you, the toll booth photographs you, and somewhere an algorithm decides whether your blinker-to-lane-change ratio indicates sufficient loyalty to remain a licensed citizen. And those anti-distraction cameras! You’re no longer trusted to glance at a road sign without the system assuming you’re filming a TikTok. The camera knows. The camera always knows. And the camera, unlike you, never had a stressful Tuesday.
I also adore the financial supervision. Every coffee I buy with my card is lovingly noted and stored in case someone - anyone - someday needs to review my caffeine patterns for national security purposes. Two espressos before 9 AM? Possible instability. Four beers Saturday? Risk factor. Thirteen emergency Toblerones during tax season? Irrefutable character assessment.
My phone tracks my location so faithfully I couldn’t match its dedication if I tried. It knows I went to the pharmacy Thursday. It knows I took the scenic route Friday. It probably knows I stood outside the bakery six minutes deciding whether to treat myself and walked away empty-handed - proving to whichever algorithm monitors such things that I possess both self-discipline and poor decision-making skills simultaneously.
Facial recognition cameras mean I no longer suffer the indignity of walking through a city anonymously like some 2003 peasant. I’m identified, timestamped, and filed - because a free citizen moving through public space unnoticed is clearly a missed opportunity for database enrichment.
But here’s my absolute favorite part. All this magnificent safety infrastructure - every camera, every log, every database, every tracking system - it’s all in the hands of whoever happens to be in government this season. And governments change. Today’s well-meaning bureaucrat administering your data with careful oversight is tomorrow’s populist demagogue who noticed you donated to the wrong cause, attended the wrong protest, and Googled the wrong thing on a Tuesday afternoon. Maybe you were researching a school project. Maybe you were just curious. Doesn’t matter — the search history doesn’t care about context, and neither will they.
And the beauty of the pitch? Nobody ever said “we’d like to watch everything you do forever.” They said “safety”. One word, carrying all the weight, answering all questions, and conveniently foreclosing further discussion. Safety from what? Don’t worry about it. Who controls it? Interesting. Can you influence it? Adorable that you’d ask. The safest person alive is someone in a padded cell under constant supervision. Magnificent safety record. Very low satisfaction. But completely safe - until the warden changes.
This comment is straight up literature. Bravo. Putting it all so succinctly. I hope this gets posted elsewhere too! 👏
Some jack off corrupt podunk cop shop can clearly ubpoena your entire life if you piss off the wrong person, then fabricate charges or create circumstances to fuck your life. This is here, now. Reclaim your digital sovereignty from big tech…
For a series of incidents that have gathered international attention, it interesting to see the police and legal system double down on corruption. It like internationally advertising how crooked the cops are and how corrupt the legal system is to everyone. Do you want tourists to never visit? Because that is how you get tourists to not visit.
most people are sadly not paying attention
Most people are still ‘nothing to hide nothing to fear’ and I know some people close to me that insist that ICE and Trump are only going after the worst of the worst.
the people who understand what’s going on have figured out that what the regime means is “brown people are, as a group, the worst of the worst.” the people who don’t understand that are more vulnerable to believe that the face value is the truth
Except some of the people who told me that and still hang onto it are brown themselves. That is what makes their naivety more frightening.
Even seeing some people who could very well be undocumented immigrants themselves joining ICE such as the agent in a clip I saw of an ICE agent with a thick Mexican accent acting like he spotted a foreigner and was going to detain him based on his accent… when the guy makes Speedy Gonzalez sound mild, only makes this worse.
The Epstein oligarchy’s propaganda game has become so pervasive and self-reinforcing that it makes many brown people believe that the anglosphere’s unspoken understanding about brown people doesn’t apply to them and it makes them genuinely believe that they are part of the dominant group.
Worse yet: the Epsteins understand optics better than the liberals and it’s made those brown people the most powerful tool in their toolbox in all western liberal democracies – especially so for the white passing ones.
At this stage, It’s gotten so bad that it’s become safe to assume that white passing brown people are maga.
“First they came for everybody who wasn’t me, but they weren’t me, so I didn’t care and even helped them do it…then they came for me.”
It’s the way it has always been. They just don’t fear repercussions anymore.
So is the youtuber the one who got his lego stolen? Or is he just a journalist reporting on this story?
Ben is a YouTube entertainer that found out about this situation. He’s more activist than journalist. I think the original owner sold the collection to Ben.
The original owner didn’t sell it to anyone. It was on consignment with Bricks n Minifigs. Hence the whole issue to begin with.
There was some «sale» as a part of the process. But yeah.
Clarifying for the curious because it’s been a whole saga: Original owner (Brian) of the legos did consignment deal with BAM, and it was going well til new owners took over, but when it went sour with new owners Ben got involved.
During one of their many creative attempts to resolve the matter, they decided to have Brian “sell” the legos to Ben and some of his friends (I think it was 10k worth of legos each because that was the threshold for small claims court.)
So yea, there was a “sale” as part of the trying to recover them process, and yea, the original consignment deal with BAM is what started the whole ordeal.
At one point they did a thing to sell them to Ben so the owner could duck out.
He’s reporting on it and trying to help the victim get restitution.
Call Batman
We could only afford Benman
Ed Mansell consigned a massive LEGO Star Wars collection to the Salem Bricks & Minifigs store in 2023; payments later stopped and inventory allegedly vanished.
The franchise collapsed in 2024, new owners took over, and both sides disputed whether the LEGO sets were still in the store.
Bryan Mansell sought help, leading YouTuber Reckless Ben to investigate, confront BAM Corporate, and release viral videos in 2026.
Chaos followed: arrests, leaked police footage, conspiracy theories, and over $500k raised for Bryan.
The Gormans sued BAM Corporate; BAM Corporate filed a TRO, gag order, and a federal RICO lawsuit against Reckless Ben and others. That legal action against Ben was an egregious overreach. Couldn’t post anything, talk about anything to go huge distances from any BAM store in existence. RICO lawsuit is like what you charge mobsters with.
The case moved to federal court in June 2026, with multiple civil and criminal proceedings still ongoing.
Apart from what everyone else here has said LegalEagle did some videos on this, and the big takeaway was that everybody needed to get a lawyer ASAP instead of trying to plead their case in the court of public opinion via podcast/youtube videos/whatever. Reckless Ben got the audio from his court case and used it to make a youtube video (he was representing himself). This whole thing went from ordinary mess to Great Big Mess with no signs of anyone trying to dial it down.
It think this is the one depending on how far the rabbit hole you want to go down:
(he was representing himself)
Nooo
It think this is the one depending on how far the rabbit hole you want to go down:
NOOOOO! lol that does sound like a mess.
I do appreciate that Ben prioritizes publicizing the blatant and thorough corruption. That is a public service.
The rules seem to be so loose and open to interpretation around privacy etc. What makes self hosted data different? Surely that’s not a major barrier to big tech, the government, the lawmakers etc.?
If they really wanted to, I’m sure they could just decide, “as of today we can take your self hosted data, so we will swing by at 4pm to collect it”. 4pm comes, they are at your door, what are you gonna do? They come and take your data, you know it’s wrong, what are you gonna do?
I just worry that even the holy grail of privacy, i.e. self hosted data, is going to be of little consequence to them. If people want your data bad enough, they will do wherever is needed to get it. Change laws? No problem. Reduce rights? Yep we’re in it. And so on.
It seems like the only truly safe way to store your data is by not putting it anywhere other than in your head.
What makes self hosted data different?
You can’t be compelled to testify against yourself.
4pm comes, they are at your door, what are you gonna do?
If they have a warrant, they can have it. It’s encrypted anyway. If they don’t have a warrant and try to take it by force, it’s not admissible in court anyway. Let em have it.
I just worry that even the holy grail of privacy, i.e. self hosted data, is going to be of little consequence to them.
It’s outside of their control. Nothing they can do. Encryption is legal.
E: edited for clarity.
Nothing they can do. Encryption is legal.
Until the change laws so that you have to hand over keys, passwords etc.
Passwords are protected under the 5th Amendment, as it’s something “from your mind” that would fall under self-incriminating. Hence why people say if you’re at a protest with your phone put it into lockdown mode so you have to input a code/password to open it as they can legally force you to use your thumb/face to unlock it.
We’re pretty fucked up as a nation right now, but in order to repeal or nullify a previous amendment you’d have to get a fuckton of states or representatives to agree and we literally can’t agree on shit, so it’ll never happen (Hell, Prohibition is literally the only amendment we’ve ever repealed in 250 years).
No law can revoke that and you’d have an easy case if someone did force you to give passwords.
Passwords are protected under the 5th Amendment, as it’s something “from your mind” that would fall under self-incriminating
That argument falls apart quickly if you use a password manager and have it generate your passwords though.
Edit: and it assumes due process in the justice system, something that seems to be eroding.
Still need the password for the manager
Wouldn’t you technically just need the encryption backdoor the governments want in place?
What does a password manager have to do with anything?
because then the passwords generated by the password manager (which, let’s be honest, is how most people use them) are no longer a “thing from your mind”
Do you have legal precedent for that?
Sure, I’ll give you that. But I would assume a person wouldn’t put their phone/laptop password in a password manager as you use it every day. And if you were really planning crazy shit you should keep it on your local device and not posted to your Twitter account imo.
Edit: Even better? Keep your passwords saved locally. Still have to crack the phone to even ask you to open your manager app.
This is hilariously wrong. The reality is they can use biometrics to open it without a warrant. They can and will force you to unlock it with a warrant.
Any lawyers reading this post are either cackling or bashing their head into a brick wall.
Motherfucker I said that biometric ISN’T protected and that you SHOULD go password only for that exact reason. ANd I wasn’t talking about warrants and subpoena, that falls under the 4th Amendment. 5th is self incrimination.
Thanks, appreciate the clarity.
I hope its as simple as that.
It’s not. This reply is incredibly naive. They can compel you to give the password to your phone, why wouldn’t they be able to compel you to give the password to your encryption? There’s a reason so many cases are solved via phone contents even though that’s “testifying against yourself”. If they have a warrant and you refuse you’ll definitely be charged with obstruction. Also in court there’s a concept where if you refuse to provide evidence the court/jury is instructed to assume that it’s as bad as it can possibly be, making sure you’re going to lose.
This reply is incredibly wrong. They cannot compel you to give your password. This is super basic 5th amendment stuff. Start reading.
Sort of. If law enforcement already knows the information that would be unlocked by the password they can compel you to unlock it through the “foregone conclusion” exception. They can also compel you to unlock a fingerprint scanner.
Just say you don’t remember it.
That’s what I thought, hence the “I hope…”. I wasn’t hopeful with the “I hope…” 😁.
I just don’t trust nowadays that there are enough or sufficient safeguards for people, regardless of what way their data is stored. OK you might hold out and not give them your encryption key from your head, and on that singular point you technically win, but at what cost with the litany of other things you will be nailed for, as you have outlined. You can think about that win from your prison cell I guess?
Loss is almost predetermined in situations like this.
Most of this seems to relate mainly to the US, and I dont live there, but this shit is still frightening.
I would guess this is the case everywhere. If there was, “I don’t want to give you evidence” loophole so many people would walk away no problem. I mean, this literally how Alex Jones lost. They refused to comply with discovery so the judge said you lose, let’s go to the judgement phase. There was no trial.
If they don’t have a warrant, it’s not admissible in court anyway. Let em have it.
Oh it’s definitely admissible in court if you willingly hand it over. If they have no warrant, they have no legal right to enter your home, and you don’t need to talk with them. But that doesn’t apply if you invite them in and let them start developing probable cause of a crime.
That’s true. I misspoke. I mean if they try to take it without a warrant. You can decline but you can’t stop them.
You have rights, kinda. You can refuse to hand over data if they have no warrant.
If you are compelled to hand over data, it can be fully encrypted. You cannot be compelled to give them the key as long as the only place it’s stored is in your head.
Thanks.
If I found myself in a situation where I had a key in my head and it was what they were looking for, I’d worry about what other ways they might screw me if I didnt give it up. They would find a way.
It’s all really bleak at the moment. First time in my 46 years of life that I’ve genuinely worried about how the world is evolving.
It is bleak, but if you’re at the stage if being tortured for an encryption key, you’re already fucked.
It’s a good idea to keep data local. It’s an even better idea to encrypt it. But it’s not going to completely protect you from a fascist government.
What was the value of the Lego collection in this scandal? 200k? It’s wild just how far people are willing to go over what’s ultimately not even enough money to retire off of, and only a couple of years’ living expenses in some cities
Sounds like they’ve been successfully getting away with this sort of thing for a long time. So in the long run, probably way more money.
