8mo ago

Offensive, racist texts now being sent to high-schoolers, Latinos and LGBTQ community, FBI says

www.nbcnews.com

Summary

The FBI is investigating a surge of anonymous racist and offensive text messages targeting Latino, Black, and LGBTQ communities following last week’s election.

Messages have included threats of deportation, re-education camps, or being forced into plantation labor.

While no violence has resulted, the texts, sent via services like TextNow, have prompted collaboration between the FBI, DOJ Civil Rights Division, and local authorities.

Advocacy groups like LULAC and the NAACP condemned the harassment, citing it as a troubling resurgence of hate rhetoric emboldened by recent political developments.

44 comments

Tin foil hat time: What if it's the Russians just trying to spark a civil war over here?
- Yeah this is just regular hat type thinking
- It most likely is a state actor with the scale at play.
  What should be more concerning is that they have these lists of people to target.
  
  Just pay a data broker. I'm sure it's trivial to find demographics tied to phone numbers.
  
  People are terrible at infosec.
- No, that's been their plan the entire time.
- I think there’s a lot of ways to connect those dots. It’s not very “tin foil” in my opinion. There’s no way to “invade” the US. They have to destroy it from within.
  
  There’s no way to “invade” the US
  There will be if Trump gives Putin Alaska. Which he PROBABLY won't, but the fact that it's not a 100% certainty is not ideal..
  
  I'm sure we'll be in a Hunt for Red October situation eventually.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
  I also remember reading how there's evidence that the USSR was funding both sides of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with the hopes that it would tear the country apart.
- Honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic lol. Yeah, autocracies have long maintained that democracy and freedom of speech isn't sustainable because you can always use free speech to manipulate the voters to democratically elect an autocrat who ends the democracy. Russia has been openly trying to demonstrate this since the cold war.
  Source: ex-KGB agent flat-out says it.
FBI on Jan 20 Afternoon: "The racist texts are being sent by democrats and antifa as a false flag operation to blame republicans. Heil Trump! President for life!"
- Trump will tell these people that eggs are $1.00 per dozen and they're repeat it as fact while they buy $7 eggs
  
  Arrested Development won't be nearly as funny when a banana is $10.
Another poster suggested a Russian disinformation campaign, I would suggest a more home-grown hate faction that was grown from the poll-watcher contingent. They culled and sifted lists of people that were most likely to "spoil the vote" and had nothing else to do do but harass people.
- Ya I did, it probably is, thanks for bringing this up. We need to get the word out! Fuck misinformation!
I've been calling this for years. The next holocaust will be more efficient than Hitler could ever imagine beyond his wildest dreams. Big tech knows more than people know about themselves. We're all on lists we don't even know we're on. People will be discriminated for reasons they didn't know they could be.
- IBM programmed the first one you described
- Not too late to install all the tracker blockers, all the metrics blockers, and also start using plug-ins and tools to pollute the data one creates online so it is full of noise. Leave the cloud as much as possible too. Minimize social media use. Minimize use of mobile phones for social media as they are data polluters. Disable and cease using health tracking features in watches and such. Delete (well, "delete") what you can now before data preservation laws change. Companies don't like the cost of saving everyone's data so they often do have retention policies.
  Any of these steps help.
  Longer-term, all medical databases storing patient records should have tons of fake patients inserted to create noise there too, in lieu of better, safer storage policies. This is more of a challenge. People at risk may want to request copies of their medical records now and see if the provider has a deletion policy.
- People will be discriminated for reasons they didn't know they could be.
  camera pans over to r/dogfree where they're hating anybody who has even been near a dog
  
  Dog free??? Even Satan fuck with dogs cause he knows they are loyal and rad as fuck
“Some recipients reported being told they were selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp,” the agency said.
How is anyone supposed to believe this? Oh wait, I remember. Because it was voted for.
- It's exactly that threat that is why we are emigrating. If my daughter were marched into a conversion therapy camp, I would never forgive myself.
- Hey, we get what we voted for. Our only hope is that people stand up to them. But I won’t hold my breath.
Don't worry, Trump will put a stop to this quickly. The investigation I mean.
Just so everyone is absolutely clear, AT&t, Verizon, etc, are 1000%
(If it)* Was not the sale of that information to unscrupulous parties, it was a lack of proper configurations and security measures to prevent that information from leaking.
Edit: a word or two.
- Uh oh, did you accidentally the whole thing?
  
  Yup, he accidentally the whole coke bottle’d.
  
  Username @foggy@lemmy.world checks out
May our collective military boot action find the correct metaphorical set of balls to kick onto the legal concrete. I want those balls to make a nice social media pop noise.
Now, how does the FBI know? Surely they're not reading our texts, are they?
- The FBI has a phone number (actually more than one). People call it. I don't think we need to invent conspiracy theories.
- Nah that's clearly the NSAs job
- You know SMS is not encrypted
  
  You know most messenging apps aren't encrypted either
  
  Just cos they can doesnt mean they should

44 comments