Mastodawn

Russian Telegram videos now show how ordinary citizens are stopped and having their phones searched.

During these searches, the police writes down their phones' unique International Mobile Equipment Identity number to log their real identity and this number in a database. So every time a citizen turns on his phone, the dictatorship then knows which citizen it is, where he is, what he is doing online, and who he is talking to.

This is not a country. This is the largest prison on earth.

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fuzzyfuzzyfungus

@randahl I'm morbidly curious if this actually means that there are results that data wonks with access to telco-provided data aren't getting them(since there's basically no difference between 'using a cellphone' and 'bleeding metadata to the carrier' and carriers tend to be pretty cooperative in handing over reports); or if the high-touch IMEI gathering is more or less entirely about informing non-nerds that they are indeed being watched.