How likely is the US government going to identify and arrest every online user who have disagreed with the current administration?

It's completely unrealistic in the short term, more so in the long term. This would require arresting millions of people - there simply isn't enough jail space. They would have to execute people on sight, and that's also not realistic because low level soldiers would refuse (there's a reason the nazis needed to build a system instead of just executing jews on sight). Obviously if this were attempted it would result in extremely violent resistence which would destroy any economic, political, or other incentives for such an action.

Instead we can see what happened in Russia for a more realistic example - there was a slow elimination of dissent. Even today there are some Russians who vocally oppose Putin and don't get arrested so long as they stay small enough. And that's in a place where the society never had a culture of freedom to begin with, so here it will probably be much harder and obviously MAGA is much dumber than the Russians too. But regardless that's why it's very important to be vocal now and oppose any silencing of dissent, like the removal of pro-Palestine activists here on green cards or even the pardoning of pro-Trump people, as this combined with harsh punishments for others is effectively silencing of speech. It may not affect you now, but if they keep at it for a decade or two it'll get to you eventually.

Hi, this is really important and has a real and practical solution: ANONYMITY / OPSEC!

for Lemmy this means registering an account over tor, with email made over Tor (like onionmail.org) and only ever use it over tor. Note that some instances like Lemmy.world won't allow this. Dbzer0 or lem.ee are good bets

It requires learning how this stuff works but it is so worth it. Do not let them intimidate you into censoring yourself, learn to use technology to your benefit so you don't have to second guess yourself or be afraid to resist.

I recommend using Tor Browser if you want a quick and easy solution or Whonix if you're technically inclined/willing to learn/want a full anonymous OS instead of just a browser

I'm considering making a detailed guide for Lemmy resistors but these are great resources to get you started

https://anonymousplanet.org/guide/

http://blog.nowherejezfoltodf4jiyl6r56jnzintap5vyjlia7fkirfsnfizflqd.onion/opsec/index.html

^ can only be accessed over tor

If anyone needs help please don't hesitate to reach out to me

Right now I think its basically zero chance, BUT we are absolutely hurtling face-first into that exact reality.

It's our extremely unfortunate job right now to fight these fascist Cunts and do our best to prevent this reality from coming to be. I get that that is downright terrifying, but if we give in to that fear and bury our heads in the sand, doesn't kinda mean they win?

Give it 4 years when we have martial law and elections are suspended because we're in "wartime" or some kinda shit and the opposite democratic leader is arrested

no. well, not accurately.

which doesn't mean you're safe. it means compliance will not protect you-you could do everything right, and get nabbed anyway. shit's gonna get messy..

the more imaginable scenario is that they always go for the edgiest fuckers, at a certain pace. that's within their bounds to easily identify without wasting resources they need to fight other state level actors on it, and as long as you're just a little less than the edgiest fuckers currently posting (oops) you're probably fine. it will just be a slow ratcheting hand around your neck, that strangles you by millimeters, but you can just think of it as a really really high stakes version of reddit, if you need a familiar frame of reference.

don't worry though; they'll also be messy about this, and get a TON of the wrong people.

Listen at some point its time to realize you dont give a fuck about their threats, accept death as a possibility, and keep to your principles.

Like that man who stood in front of the tank during Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Im pretty sure were headed into such an event locally.

All? Unlikely. But some? A lot harder to say. You're asking for an opinion-based prediction at this point. I think they'll probably eventually try to get the most outspoken critics, but I also think that's a good time to not go silent. You get organized.

Same reason the people on 9/11 stayed in their seats - they thought they’d be fine if they waited it out.

I think it's not feasible to search for anti -trump content and then track down the person, but is much more likely that once they have you they will check your phone to see if you are a dissenter. So any interaction with federal or local authorities will be risky from now on. I just saw a headline of a French scientist being denied entry after immigration searched her phone and found anti Trump messages. If anyone has advice on how to quickly wipe or lockdown a phone, PC, etc. please share. OpSec

AI is a big help here. Including at current tech level. But why bother the expense or judicially-complaining process of arresting them, if you can arrange their next Amazon electronics order to explode?

It's more about setting up a system that rewards your neighbour for snitching on you. If that system is practical online, only time will tell. It worked well irl for other fascists.

Please watch this video about dictatorships and what to look out for.

Extremely unlikely. Not for another 20 years or so, worst case scenario, and by then they probably won't care about now.

First off, there's way too many people who criticize the government to arrest everyone, secondly it's completely unnecessary. Complaining about the government doesn't really do anything other than allowing people to vent their frustrations and feel more content. It's the same way Trump obviously isn't going to "end elections forever" like people say, virtually every country in the world has elections, regardless of how actually democratic they are, because they're a nice little ritual that lets you feel free and in control. It would be like saying that Trump is going to knock down the Statue of Liberty - he doesn't have to.

Now, there are reasons to establish more secure lines of communication, like if you're involved in actual organizing or if you're either helping people do illegal things or planning to help people do things that could potentially become illegal - for example, shipping Plan B or trans hormones to people in red states. Laws in some red states about "pushing transgenderism on minors" could theoretically be interpreted so broadly that if you post information or supportive messages on a public forum and a minor in a red state happens to see it, they could try to come after you for it - but that would probably be found unconstitutional.

Using secure lines of communication for routine, everyday stuff helps keep those lines secure by generating more chaff they'd have to sort through, as well as familiarizing yourself with it and getting more people on board. However, you shouldn't scatter to the wind preemptively and self-censor, beyond just not fed-posting.

I have the RIGHT to freedom of speech and expression and I will not waive it for Trump or anyone else. Without it, there is no United States.

Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the oligarchy. Fuck authoritarianism. Fuck this fear, and fuck advance compliance.

I serve no fucking king.

In the long run, shutting up won’t save you from fascism. Every inch you give is a foot they take, and they will take and take and take if you let them.

If you’ve never wondered whether people living under dictatorships regret not exercising their rights more when they still had them, now’s the time to start pondering.

The worst they can do is kill you. Your gonna die eventually anyway, might as well do it for a good cause.

Many people commenting of the difficulties in prosecuting people for anti Trump settlements. More likely they will "release" this information for the wider public(maga linch mob)

very unlikely.

If they do it'll end up being like less than 5% to make an example out of them.

if that does happen start using and supporting services like i2p and monero.

I don’t see them coming for all of us. It’s just not practical to arrest everyone who complains.

It all comes down to other characteristics:

• are you someone influential or high profile they can make an example of, to promote fear?
• do you have any connection to another country, no matter how tenuous, where they can use this as an excuse to deport?
• are you part of another demographic bias they want to persecute, such as lgbt, where they can use this as an excuse to legally persecute?

Dissenting is the only thing that will actually do anything to make things better.

Rolling over and stopping is giving up before the fight has even started.

Further, pretty sure the entire contents of the internet have been sucked down into that NSA Utah Datacenter since it opened in May 2014.

Not to mention the corporate surveillance systems of Meta, Reddit, Twitter, and so on. If you ever had an account, just because you deleted it doesn't mean the data got deleted. Even Reddit has been seen restoring comments after they were changed and deleted. Facebook has been known to have "shadow profiles" on people for like fifteen years now.

Also Room 641A implies that the phone companies will happily divulge the history of your text messages to the administration as well. There is and hasn't been privacy in a long time in any real way in the USA and they're definitely gonna leverage that.

If Trump is ignoring the law, he'll ignore any laws that prevent the government from using that data against American citizens. I think it's healthier to accept it than to try to pretend all that data isn't already out there for the taking.

If you've ever been critical of Trump or Republicans in the last 11 years, just get used to the idea that it's probably a foregone conclusion and get prepared to be involved.

I don't mean buy a gun. I mean get involved in community gardens, community support networks and other types of Mutual Aid. We'll need to support one another and hiding from what is happening and hiding our opinions because we're scared isn't going to help.

Do you have respect for the journalism outfits that have already turned tail and given up on seriously criticizing Trump? Do you have respect for every judge who pussed out on holding Trump accountable before the election? Because I doubt you do. Well, history will look at you the same way, if anyone even remembers your name.

Nobody remembers Germans in 1941 as anything but Nazis. The only ones who are remembered for not being Nazis took risks and didn't lay down and die. It's different now, the surveillance network is massive, there's no hiding from it, so it's pointless to hide from it instead of embrace it and prepare.

Less likely if we are gun owners

The fact that you are even worried about this says so much.

Love, A european

why don't you take a look at my comment history to find out how I feel about it.

this is my 231st comment. I run a script to scrub anything usually older than 24 hours.

I'm not going to travel to the US just in case they triangulate my ID. Haven't said anything terribly bad about USA but still, why risk it.

Extremely unlikely and possibly physically impossible

First of all, they won't arrest everyone. Even extreme governments on the tail end of their horrible leadership don't arrest everyone. They need some citizens to be there working jobs. Rather, they would aim to arrest enough people to scare everyone else and then some other people randomly just for the hell of it.

But if you think staying under the radar is going to make your life better, maybe you should read some history books. Who do you think is coming to save you? Who do you think is coming to make your community better? When do you think they're going to arrive? Outside forces will not fix contemporary US political problems. It doesn't work that way, not when everyone has armies and nuclear weapons.

Sadly, quite possibly things could get far worse before they get better, so if you want to plan for some unfortunate eventualities, that might be a reasonable decision. But don't think for a second you can run from them. And even if you could, what kind of human would that make you? What kind of person do you want to be?

it's pretty stupid and delusional to think you're going to jail for posting things on social media. in countries where this actually happens (mine for example) you need to be stirring up some viral controversy which directly effects an interest of the government. it wouldn't be useful to put every rambling stepdad in jail and they wouldn't have the resources to do it anyway

You know what they called Germans during WWII who just went along with the nazis because why fight, you’ll just lose?

Nazis.

Well, if I know my lore, the fediverse, Lemmy included, was created by self avowed communists.

And if the Luigi shenanigans, that is to say the censorship brought to bear on any discussion of the man or his alleged crime, have shown us anything; it's that the powers that be very much fear a class war. Besides wich commies have long been a favorite windmill to tilt at.

I think it's safe to assume anything posted on here gets logged and analyzed.

That having been said, eat the rich, free Palestine, and healthcare for all!!

I hate to be all doom and gloom but if the government decided tomorrow that disagreeing with trump was a crime then it's probably already too late for you.

The amount of information about people online is pretty shocking and no amount of cleaning up after yourself could save you at this point.

On the other hand, it probably won't devolve that fast so you're probably ok?

Not likely. There wouldn’t be enough working hours in the 4 years available.

Every single person who disagrees with the administration on the internet? Incredibly unlikely. That'd be literally 10s of millions of people, if not over 100 million. The US prison system currently has a capacity of ~2 million. It's estimated that globally there are ~11.5 million people in prisons. So you're talking about locking up several times more people than are currently locked up. It's just not possible.

The scale of what you're suggesting is just unimaginable. How much manpower would be needed to lock up tens of millions of people? Nearly the entire non-incarcerated population of the US would need to be employed in building and staffing prisons and doing the police work to track down and arrest people.

And what would that do to the US (and global) economy to remove tens of millions of people from the workforce and force the rest of the population into servicing those prisons?

Even in the strictest countries with the most draconian censorship, they don't lock up people who are just disagreeing with the dictator/administration. They lock up people who make a name for themselves and get recognition/go viral. If you have an account that gets a HUGE following and you don't just disagree, but attack and criticize, then you might end up with some problems.

To avoid this, just don't let yourself get a big following with an account that's super critical. If you notice you start to get a following, just delete that account and start a new one.

Well, I think that it would be if not impossible, then extremely difficult to do that, as the amount of people they'd have to catch would be gigantic.

But I think it's best to be prepared for a lot of social media bans and restrictions. (Think China or Saudi Arabia)

And if you happen to partake in protests, do NOT confess to it online. This is especially important if you're doing anything illegal, but looking at what the situation is over there, I'd say that it applies to peaceful protesting as well. Take care.

The entire country would collapse if they did that. There would nothing to be president of.

Not to mention Jon Stewart, Jon Oliver, and the many other celebrities that shit on Trump. Plus all of MSNBC, CNN, and the other "left" news companies. I don't imagine they have resources to do all that.

This is why I use a vpn. But he'd have to prosecute half the people or scare half the people. I hope we'll fight back if that ever happens

@IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol I don't think you need to delete the account.
Just create another account and only log in to it via VPN, i2p or TOR. It's Fediverse, you can have multiple accounts with different content. And don't write anything private on the second (3,4,5...) account that can help in your identification.

And in general, showing the middle finger to surveillance systems it's simply rule of good tone on the modern internet. 😀

Be careful what you say - don't call for violence, definitely don't make threats of violence against specific figures, especially ones in office, and as a general rule don't spread personally identifying information

Past that? Let's say there's a crackdown. They're going after low hanging fruit to instill fear. By nature, the fediverse is hard to tie back to individuals... But if they're looking for you individually, they can find you

I wouldn't worry too much. Dissatisfaction is insanely high... They're more likely to do a great firewall and kill the fediverse long before they bother looking into lemmy accounts

I don't think this is something we have to worry about in the near future and I don't think it will happen under Trump. What concerns me is the way the "system" is being set up so that alternative points of view or other parties just won't have a chance to win an election or survive a lawsuit.

The groundwork is being laid so that people way more extreme than what we are seeing now can come into power and then stay in power without any way of removing them.

The current administration is setting things up where in order to "count" you have to be 1) loyal to Trump and 2) loyal to the republican party (don't want any RINOs!). Heck, you can subscribe to typically republican principals (lower taxes, lower spending, right to bear arms, strong military, etc...) but you aren't a "real" republican unless you un-waveringly support Trump.

But a true patriot is loyal to the Constitution. But now, you can't be a republican and be loyal to the constitution, you have to be loyal to Trump. And that is setting things up to go very badly.

https://generalstrikeus.com/

yeah, I've been wondering how much I should be sharing about my political opinions now... and a little concerned about my 15+ years of social media history.

If they come for you, they come for me, and many many more. Don't pay personal information, you shouldn't do that anyways

My solution is to VPN everything out of country. Not a single packet exits without going through a double hop VPN, with both hops being outside the Fourteen Eyes.

On top of that I run an ad/tracking blocking DNS server that’s updated pretty frequently.

Honestly Lemmy is way too small to be monitored and acted upon.

So even though the question is interesting I think deleting Lemmy because of the current administration is an over reaction.

On the contrary you probably have the opportunity to freely dissent here when others on mainstream socials networks can't.

But I'm European so it's easy for me to say that this is probably safe here. You have to evaluate the risk yourself but I think no administration gives a single sh** about Lemmy.

Maybe start using tor or i2p. You can use Lemmy over tor, for sure.

Very unlikely. They don't have the prison cells to lock up half the population nor the manpower to identify them with how many people DOGE is firing. You're more likely to just lose your job rather than get arrested.

Why arrest when it is enough to disable credit cards?

Would be fun to see the US turn into full dictatorship, but we wont see that. They have too much to lose to be openly hostile to citizens speaking their mind, specially online where it doesnt even matter.

If a big public figure starts saying uncomfortable truths to the media and they have a big following, then maybe Trump will try and contain that somehow, but you and me online? We dont matter.

(As a German living here) I doubt it. It's bad but it's still not China-level bad - and even in China they don't arrest literally everyone. If you're a foreign national living in the US however, you should be a bit more careful.

There is so much content going online, and so much traffic, plus heightened security measures, that make it very hard to identify dissidents on a large scale, at least with the tech we have, without using searches and seizure of one’s devices or other methods unrelated to the Internet itself.

In other words, very hard to impossible.

Wasn't aware that US citizens knew of the existence of other counties, maybe excepting that they are all in Europe; Africa being another, possibly different, country.

Jokes aside. It's not much better here in the UK.

Zero percent chance of that happening. C'moon now..

It's not illegal to have an opinion dude. Calm down.