(Audio Available)

One of my most salient memories is of scurrying through the streets of DTLA past curfew, evading patrols and blockades of armed soldiers and officers.

I remember dropping into the middle of the city in the dead of night, having to worry about every hint of movement I sensed on the streets, trying to evade confrontation, my path lit only by the harsh white streetlights above, trying to make it to a warm bed waiting for me at my group’s staging area for the next day’s demonstration. I remember the musty, lingering smells of smoke, the streets I traversed having been scenes of intense bloodshed, beatings, arrests, and tears only a few hours prior.

Hey there. I’m still alive. I’ve been really busy moving cities, changing career trajectories, going through major life changes, and a whole lot more.

This blog isn’t dead and neither am I. I’ve been getting back in touch with my activism, art, and writing again. I’m based out of Portland, Oregon now, and I’ve been working on establishing my foothold in this new city.

More updates to come. And this blog is about to get really radical, because right now is the phase of my life where I am completely, fully me, without restraints.

I’m building a portable radio scanner to listen in on communications by police forces, both trunked and untrunked, but unencrypted. My primary motivation for building my own is to develop a formula for hacktivists who could scrounge up spare hardware to create a police scanner at a fraction of the cost of a commercially-available scanner such as the SDS100.

In case you haven’t heard yet, this Saturday is the next national “No Kings” demonstration.

Our American democracy is under attack from within. We are at a crossroads in our nation’s history – a pivotal and crucial time for the survival of a free peoples – and I urge anyone reading this to get out there and help send a clear message:

No kings. No dictators. No tyrants.

Our nation’s founding fathers fought to free this country from the rule of a tyrannical king. Our predecessors fought to abolish the sin of slavery. Our predecessors fought to rid the world of fascism once already – and now we are at a time where we must do it again.

Let’s fight for an America that’s for all of us: the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Find a protest near you.

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared.”
- Anne Frank

The increasingly divided United States of America has been witnessing the rapid collapse of democracy before our very eyes. The free America our people have fought and died for is already gone; fascism is here. Our checks and balances have failed, and the structures we rely on to reinforce the integrity of our free country are rife with corruption, openly collaborating with one another to seize power and push our country deeper towards authoritarian rule under the almighty fist of a single party.

Our American people have bought into the lie of the mythic past, readily willing to accept lies as truth, readily willing to divide each other and blame out-groups for our problems, increasingly enthusiastic to hand over supreme, executive power to a single party that can brutalize perceived enemies to restore our country to a believed – however false – “great” past.

Truth is under attack. Democracy is under attack. America is under attack.

If you’re a political activist around the Central Valley, Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, or San Francisco Bay Area who could benefit from having a Rayhunter, please get in contact with me.

At all the hotels I’ve ever stayed at, I’ve never once encountered one with an access system I trust to protect me, my party, or our belongings. It’s always been trivial to clone NFC access tags or magnetic stripes, the former being the subject of this blog post. It’s for this reason that I’ve always carried such access tags in a shielded wallet or sleeve in order to lower the odds of an opportunistic adversary burgling my belongings, though obviously a truly dedicated adversary has plenty of other avenues to achieve physical access.

I’m currently out traveling and for a variety of reasons, a self-contained mobile travel router setup is desirable for me. This was pretty simple to set up with an off-the-shelf GL.iNet, TracFone, and power bank–with a few gotchas to look out for: while piecing together this setup, I discovered that GL.iNet travel routers were actually incompatible with my TracFone (and I assume a number of other common phones); SSH’ing into the underlying router OS and making some quick configuration changes is all that’s necessary to unblock a blocked phone.