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FBI: Burning Man Testing Ground For Free Speech, Drugs ... and New Spy Gear
v3rgEz writes: The 29th annual Burning Man festival kicks off this week in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Among those paying close attention to the festivities will be the FBI's Special Events Management unit, who have kept files on "burners" since at least 2010. One of the more interesting things in those, files, however, is a lengthy, heavily redacted paragraph detailing that the FBI's Special Events Management Unit gave Las Vegas Police Department some specialized equipment for monitoring the week-long event, as long as LVPD provided follow up reports.
Has free-thinkers and weirdos ever caused an actual revolution? Changed the course of government that they were able to rid it of corruption and incompetence?
So why put all this effort in monitoring them?
It can't make them feel better. It seems to only make those in authority more paranoid than before. It makes them jump at their own shadow to think that someone, somewhere that might be different from them is plotting against some abstract institution.
Why exercise this kind of authority over people that aren't doing anything disruptive of their lives?
They're out in the desert not hurting anyone and trying to feel normal for a few minutes. The best thing you could do is ignore them and concentrate on troubles you can do something about. Like poverty or something.
But that's the point. Poverty and other societal issues present as difficult things to solve. Those problems involve changing some base portions of how our society functions. So here we see the real reason for this sort of harassment. To make it look like something is being done about the ever present other.
Sounds like if you are going to burning man, you need a burner phone for the event. I am guessing they are setting up a Stingray device and capturing communications at the event. Simple paid for cash burner phone, and you defeat a lot of that. Or better yet, just don't turn your phone on and avoid the whole mess.
Freedom of speech applies only to the government. You can say any crazy, racist, xenophobic stuff you want to "speak your mind," but a private company like NBC is not obligated to transmit your message.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Any counterculture gathering that doesn't attract FBI watchers just isn't trying hard enough. I used to think it was insidious. Now, I think the feds just want a cushy week or two watching the scantily clad.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The laws they're breaking are themselves morally bankrupt, and therefore moral to break.
Whao there, isn't NBC one of the companies entrusted with a section of the public airwaves? The same airwaves that the poster you are responding to is prohibited from broadcasting on, such that they may have the privilege of doing so, for commercial benefit, but also to benefit us all, as they are our shared resource?
Seems a government subsidized company would be a valid target for some criticizm for the messages they choose to carry or not on our medium.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'll bet a lot of people love the fact that all this "free speech" will be taking place hundreds of miles out in the desert...
You don't know people very well then. As Lord Macaulay observed in his The History of England from the Accession of James the Second,
You see it is not enough for prigs and busybodies that they're not involved in any way in the things you do that give you pleasure; their problem is with you enjoying something they don't enjoy, or perhaps understand.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.