In most cases there isn’t much you can do to fool the government without a lot of prep time such as scouting routes to find cameras, destroying them, or being really good at changing into bloc in the middle of a crowd and not getting caught.

But the important thing is threat modeling. The past dozen or so protests I’ve been at haven’t had the government as a big threat, it has had fascists as the primary threat. While a fascist cop would be a problem, it is much less likely than fascists combing through protest footage to try and doxx people, or a fascist at said action trying to get good photographs. That’s why I masked up.

The last real dicey action that I went to I still masked up, even knowing that the government could still try to track me if needed because I knew it would be time consuming to do so, and that they would only go through the process of doing that if I make it worth their while. Bloc is still effective, but quite hard under this heavily surveillanced police state.

I think it would be funny to normalize wearing bloc in order to retain privacy. It’s why some people might wear accessories they normally don’t wear, such as beanies and sunglasses at protests, even if they aren’t in full bloc, covering hair and eyes (in addition to a surgical mask) can make it really hard to doxx someone.

That’s a fun mistake to make. I had a similar thing happen with Kubuntu uninstalling my GPU drivers. I could never figure out what caused it.

I work in security, and I’ve seen a lot more EDR killers lately. Every incident I’ve seen regarding ransomware or potential ransomware has used EDR killers while compromising DCs, backup servers, file servers, and the odd workstation used for persistence.

It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)