➡ Today’s article discusses the importance of understanding surveillance technologies during protests for personal safety. It highlights how governments use tools like cameras, automatic license plate readers, fog data science, and Stingray devices to monitor and identify protesters. The article emphasizes the need to be aware of these technologies and suggests ways to mitigate their impact, such as wearing hats and sunglasses, disabling location permissions on your phone, or removing your SIM card. It also warns that power shifts can lead to surveillance being used against any political side, so it’s crucial to stay informed and protest smartly.
➡ This text discusses how certain technologies can be used to track and identify individuals, particularly during protests. It explains that a ‘Simjacker’ attack can locate phones, and apps used to coordinate protests can be monitored. It also warns that internet traffic can be intercepted, potentially revealing the identities of protesters. The text suggests using an open-source phone and a VPN to avoid these risks, but also warns of potential leaks from phone makers like Apple or Google. It further discusses the threat of Google’s Sensor Vault, which stores location data, and the potential for tracking via Bluetooth Low Energy signals. The text concludes by advising against bringing electronics to protests or, if necessary, storing them in a Faraday bag to prevent tracking.
➡ This text emphasizes the importance of staying safe and maintaining privacy during protests, especially in countries where freedom is not guaranteed. It warns about the dangers of surveillance and suggests ways to avoid detection, such as minimizing electronic use, planning ahead, and staying decentralized. The text also promotes smart protesting with pseudo anonymity and encourages viewers to share their experiences and join a privacy-focused community. Lastly, it introduces various privacy tools and services offered by Braxme, a company dedicated to privacy.

Today we’re talking about something timely and critical. Protests. Whether it’s for social justice or some political change, hitting the streets is a powerful way to make your voice heard and is an expression of freedom. But in our hyper connected world, governments have unprecedented tools to track, monitor and identify participants. This isn’t about paranoia, it’s about being informed so you can protest smarter and safer. Protests are exploding right now in Iran. Citizens are marching on the streets en masse with 2500 confirmed and potentially up to 20,000 killed with live ammo. Look at Minneapolis. ICE operations have turned deadly with two shootings in just a week.

Your political side doesn’t matter here because we all already have proof that government monitoring of protesters is focused on the side opposed to whoever is in power. In the US this switch has occurred in the space of only a year. Thus we must always know how we can be tracked since power shifts back and forth and it can easily turn against your side. Surveillance technologies are constantly being introduced, so you need to know the tools used. This way you find out how to get around them. Today we will tackle both physical surveillance and electronic surveillance. Stay right there.

Cameras. One of the tools certain to be used in protest situations are cameras. These can be surveillance cameras installed by a city like the Flock cameras so common in Los Angeles. I just saw a Flock camera installed on a nearby main street, so they’re flaunting this. But cameras that can surveil you can also come from home security cameras. The most dangerous one being Ring cameras. You see the Ring cameras automatically upload the videos to Amazon aws and these videos are made available to law enforcement. And there was a new partnership announced in 2025 between Ring and Flock.

So law enforcement can now easily see the combined data between these two sources. So without even contacting any local camera owner, law enforcement can just check the Flock and Ring cameras videos in the vicinity. And depending on how close it is to the protest site, it may be able to flag your presence. These videos are then tied directly to facial recognition systems like Clearview AI or even directly to the AWS service called Rekognition. Also, since law enforcement is involved with both the Flak cameras and the Ring camera data, you can expect that this data will automatically be matched to driver’s license and passport photos using Palantir systems.

And that should reveal real names and addresses and a complete record of the individual. You should be able to mitigate some of this with hats and sunglasses as that still reduces the accuracy of these tools. And use of prosthetics can be useful though some jurisdictions may make that illegal with anti mask rules. Consider third party cameras as well. This reminds me of news cameras capturing faces of people doing looting in the Los Angeles area during the Floyd Railroad riots. Again, depends on the party in power at that time. No one was prosecuted for looting stores, even though I clearly saw faces in the news camera feeds.

By the way, later they said there were no riots. Whoever’s in power can control the spin. Okay? Those stores, many of them shut down and will never return. And that exclusive shopping area is now in full decline. Alpr One of the newest technologies and frequently forgotten are automatic license plate readers or ALPRs. Again, this is an area typically dominated by flak cameras, so the cameras not only can see the occupants of cars, but it can read the license plates. This is a very commonly used data in Palantir contracts with law enforcement agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department.

In a well publicized engagement with Palantir many years ago, LAPD used this data together with social media data to track the movements of potential gang members. Then they would send a black and white to intercept individuals and do routine traffic stops to intimidate them. The point to understand is that there is a record of all of your comings and goings using your vehicle license plate and this is tracked by by these alprs. If you’re going to a protest in a certain neighborhood, be aware that this would be a secondary source of data, especially when the ALPR record terminates somewhere near the area of protest.

Here in California there is a dense collection of ALPRs on freeways, but as I said, they also install them on city streets. One particular city here has them in all the major intersections. They are unavoidable and this city gives out tickets using facial recognition and a photo of your license plate and the driver. I’ve seen this in case you think I’m making these up Fog Data Science the newest threat in the location tracking field is fog data science and this is particularly useful for doing what is called geofencing. Geofencing is the act of drawing a shape over a geographic map with a Google Maps like interface and then you set a start and end time.

Then all the contacts within that time frame shows up there as little icons you can click. The key to this geofencing tool is that it is warrantless and it is frequently used to do dragnet searches which include innocent people. I expect most normies to show up in a fog data science database. My followers are usually smarter and will avoid this. But let’s state the actual process of data collection. The location data comes from thousands of common apps. If your device has one of these common apps like the Weather Channel and various free apps that track location like a Waze, for example, then expect that that data is presented at an auction together with an advertising id.

This data is then bought by Fog Data Science. There are other location data aggregators, but specific Fog Data Science is used heavily by law enforcement. While the data doesn’t have an actual identity other than the advertising id, it’s a start. So let’s say that some violence occurred over some specific area of the protest and law enforcement needs to identify who was there. Then it’s a simple matter of identifying the advertising IDs found in that area. Then to identify these specific persons, click on them and just trace the advertising ID and see where they go home to.

Wham gotcha. So the home addresses are matched to advertising IDs and then it should be a simple matter to correlate to cameras and ALPR to verify. Now this kind of threat does not exist if a you disable location permissions on your phone or b if your phone has no advert advertising ID which is true of the Google phones or c if you Disable the advertising ID for an iPhone or d you installed none of the apps that provide this data. Stingray Stingray is just a popular term from what is officially known as an IMSI catcher and the official devices which are made by the Harris Corporation are commonly used by law enforcement with the newer versions having different sea creature names.

While Stingray is typically used to conduct active surveillance of targeted individuals by being a man in the middle of phone traffic, it also has a passive surveillance function which is what would be used in a protest situation. Stingray devices can detect an active SIM card on your phones and the credential broadcast made by your phone reveals the International Mobile Subscriber identity or imsi. The IMSI is the unique identity of your current cell subscription. Since typically these are purchased with KYC or id, then they can be matched to your name. This again would be something I expect to be found in a Palantir system since the cell data would be accessible to law enforcement via the CALEA law.

Permitting such access and then combined with the other identity information would be easy matching. Mobile phones can be tracked pretty easily using cell tower triangulation. The problem is that this kind of location tracking is not precise enough for geofencing. Depending on the distance of the towers it could be 1/2 mile square up to a mile square which is too big of an area to show that someone was at a particular street corner, but this is solved by Stingray. Stingray detects imsis nearby. The range is fairly short, so if the range is 50 meters, that’s being covered and the Stingray is near you, then you’ll be in its database.

That kind of proximity tracking is pretty damning as there’s no way you can say you’re not nearby. And unfortunately Stingrays are portable. In fact, a law enforcement officer in plain clothes could just be walking around with a Stingray on his person and it could record or all the MZs around him to cover a larger area. The Stingray can be carried by a drone to capture the MZs from above. Presumably then helicopters can do the same thing. The defense against this threat is a to remove the SIM card or b to go to settings and disable the SIM card.

That should be possible on many phones. By the way, this threat exists for both normal production phones as well as the Google phone, so the the threat specifically comes from the baseband modem. Also realize that a government could actively surveil each known phone using a simjacker attack, which could send a silent text to all the discovered phones and then phones could self identify themselves and thus get their location by cell tower triangulation. DNS Some protests may be coordinated through the use of particular apps where the leaders of the protests announce where the protest would go to or what will happen next.

It may be possible to detect people using those apps matched with some other general information like cell tower data. The reason this can be done is that while most Internet traffic is based on TLS or are HTTPs encrypted, unfortunately DNS traffic may be intercepted by the carrier and knowing the websites or apps being accessed may be combined with other clues to identify groups like active protesters. So I’ll just call this general threat app profiling. This is in fact based on DNS data, so just be aware of that. Again, it wouldn’t surprise me if this kind of aggregate DNS data is available to a Palantir because it’s all government accessible in this case via Prism, the program revealed by Snowden matching general cell tower triangulation information which may not be precise but used together with app use may reveal the individuals and then confirmed by alpr.

The solution to this is to use an open source phone and a vpn. Let me explain further. The VPN choice should be obvious. If you use a VPN then the DNS should be redirected to to the VPN server and thus will not be captured by the carrier. If you’re using our bytes VPN product, it’s even better. The DNS queries are all aggregated into a single pihole DNS server and the Entire Population of BytesVPN users use cached DNS data. So if the app in question is X for example, then only a single query leaks out to resolve the IP address of X.com and all the other users just use the cached IP address.

This aggregation of data plus filtering of ad domains limits the risk of DNS tracking as you cannot count the DNS queries made of X. Ok, so it’s clear a VPN would resolve part of the DNS issue. The problem is spyware from the phone maker like Apple or Google it is possible to capture traffic pre vpn. It is not unknown for DNS data to leak via IPv6 before it gets to the VPN. So that’s why I point out that I’d rather have some open source the Google OS rather than some production phone where some intentional or non intentional data leak can occur pre vpn.

In case you forgot, Apple connects you to the icloud private relay where they can intercept the DNS traffic like a carrier. Google of course uses DNS over HTTPs where they also capture all the DNS data centrally. Both of these can be turned off so you can use your VPN instead. Google Sensor Vault the Google Censor Vault is a very serious threat because this was used to supply the evidence used in the J6 riots by the Biden administration. These are all in court records. Just to be clear, if you have a production iOS or Google Android then you must assume that your location data is captured and stored in the Google Sensor Vault.

This data cannot be turned off. There is no provision for that since it is baked in and not permission based. While the Google Sensor Vault is likely not a good tool for general surveillance, it is more of a positive proof of geofencing. The reason it is not so easy to use for general surveillance is that law enforcement has to provide requests to Google itself and of course this is not immediate. Also, I believe Google put some limits on doing dragnet type geofencing searches where there’s no specific target. So for geofencing research the government’s best solution would be to start with Cell Data, alpr, Fog, Data Science, Stingray and all the other methods I described earlier.

This would be directly and immediately available even on Palantir systems and there would be no restrictions to access. But when the cases progress further and arrests are made, then evidence collected officially via the Google Sensor Vault becomes more relevant. While many people can evade fog data science through the techniques I mentioned, there is no escaping the Google Sensor Vault unless you have a de Googled phone. So to be specific, de Googled phones like a Brax 3 phone, a pixel running EOD OS, Linux OS, GrapheneOS and so on will not be on the Google Sensor Vault. While I believe that Apple has a database of locations, which should be obvious from Find My Phone, I don’t think Apple makes it easy to make this data available or even makes any claim that this data is accessible.

But it doesn’t matter as the same data is found on Google’s site Contact Tracing Contact Tracing I know the technology exists, but I have no proof that this is being used in the wild. So my point in revealing this to you is just to make you aware of what’s possible. There is a way to detect proximity of a device by tracking signals of BLE or Bluetooth Low Energy I have a video where BLE signals can be used to track it is very hard to track BLE signals manually as I demonstrated in a BLE tracking video recently.

The reason is that the identifier for ble is a Mac address and several OSes will change that Mac address using randomization techniques. While it is visually hard to identify devices, you can actually track them by distance and direction, which can be quite accurate. Just to emphasize this, Apple can track the position of an airtag to within inches. So with an app that has the full features of ble, it should be a piece of cake to record the positions of devices by exact location. Unfortunately, I did not find a common app that used the direction feature BLE as accurately as Apple in an Android version, so I couldn’t test this.

Also, using AI, it should be possible to come up with a pattern that tracks the movement of these devices accurately, which can ignore the the randomized Mac address. Also remember that there is a more severe danger from wireless earbuds and BLE trackers that have fixed Mac addresses. These technologies can be used to keep a record of who went in and out of a building, for example as in the case of looters, and can match them to camera footage. The point is that even if you disable the SIM card, the phone if on will still transmit BLE signals.

Traceable BLE signals The solution here is to turn off the phone and turn off all portable electronics like earbuds. General Electronic Strategy to simplify things, the best solution to handle electronics is just not to bring any or put them in a Faraday bag. A Faraday bag would limit the risk. The problem is that people want to know firsthand what is happening in the excitement of some demonstration, so they’re eager to look at the app where the leaders of a protest are communicating or watch news reports while leaving a cell connection open. Worse yet, it is texting and talking on the phone while in a protest, not being aware that all that data, every call and text, is available to law enforcement by via the CALEA law.

And right now, Case in point, Governor Walz just went on primetime recently and told Minnesotans, help us establish a record of exactly what’s happening in our communities. You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities. So carry your phone with you at all times and if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution. Sounds heroic, right? Sounds like accountability. But this is the ultimate normie trap.

He’s telling everyone to keep their phone on, pull it out, constantly record live stream or upload footage, and build a database, all while standing in the middle of tear gas, federal agents, and portable stingrays that can grab your IMSI from 50 meters away. Your location pings, your BLE signals leak from earbuds, your footage feeds facial recognition systems like Clearview or Recognition, and every bit of metadata gets fused into Palantir. You’re handing them your digital fingerprint on a silver platter while thinking you’re fighting the system. If you want to take photographs, for goodness sakes, bring a separate dedicated camera that’s not connected to the Internet.

I remember seeing a photo of a protest in Hong Kong a long time ago where the protesters were hanging out in a specific area and then all were glued to their phones while their faces were captured by the cameras and protest signs next to them and their entire Internet activity tracked. Incredible how little thought is given to their security. I don’t think there are many protests in Hong Kong anymore. Total CCP crackdown with thousands of protesters put in jail with long prison sentences. That certainly cut off that method of speaking out. I’m sure the lack of preparation or OPSEC didn’t help.

So the biggest threat is actually the normie threat. Everyone wants to behave in a cool way and the crowd effect is to do normal things even in an abnormal situation. I hope the young people in Iran see this video too and maybe take some of the precautions mentioned here so they can protect themselves while freedom as long as it is without violence is guaranteed in the us that is certainly not true of other countries as you already see in Iran. Also, the violence may not be caused by you, but someone near you and you could be implicated just because you wanted to behave like a normie.

Final thoughts? Look folks, right now in Minneapolis, we’re seeing exactly how fast things can spiral. Two shootings in a week, tear gas hitting, kids in cars, feds in right gear, and the President talking about sending in the military. Surveillance isn’t waiting around. It’s already fused cameras feeding into Palantir geofencing from your weather app. Ims grabbed by portable stingrays on drones. They don’t need a warrant for half the stuff. Until the case is built, the normies are glued to their phones, posting live texting mom leaving digital breadcrumbs everywhere. That’s how Hong Kong went from millions in the streets to silence and long prison terms.

Don’t be that guy. In Iran, the regime’s using the same playbook. Kill the signal. Internet blackout. Track the rest and crush dissent. Don’t let that happen here. Bottom line in 2026, knowledge is your shield, but action is your armor. Minimize electronics Faraday Bag everything or leave it home. Use the Google phones like pixels or brax 3 bytes VPN with PI hole aggregation. No sim if you can swing it. Hats, sunglasses, prosthetics where legal? Plan ahead. Travel smart. No personal vehicle if possible and stay decentralized. No single app or leader holding all the comms. This isn’t about fear, it’s about freedom.

The power wants you tracked, identified and deterred. You want to make change without becoming a statistic. Choose wisely, protect yourself and keep pushing back. Smart protest, but with pseudo anonymity. If this video opened your eyes, drop a like. Subscribe for more real talk and privacy and surveillance and share it with anyone heading to the streets. What’s worked for you in staying off the grid? Tell me in the comments. Stay private, stay free out folks. If you’re serious about privacy, come join us at Braxme. It’s a growing community where real privacy people hang out. No censorship, no nonsense.

While you’re there, check out the tools we actually built and use ourselves. Braxmail Unlimited alias no IP leaks, multiple domains Brax virtual phone real anonymous numbers with no KYC bytesvpn no logs, unique PI hole DNS no big unknown corporation de Google phones and more in the store. The Brax 3 phone is on its second batch and is open for pre order right now. @braxtech.net the first batch sold out shortly after release. Big thanks to everyone supporting us on patreon, locals and YouTube memberships. You keep this channel alive. See you next time.
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