(To check out any of the X threads I reference, click the time stamp at the bottom of the tweet embed)

Welcome to the third issue of Thought Crime Trap House! Please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already, and don't forget to follow me on X or Farcaster. Hit me up in my DMs if you want to speak with me about anything.

If your wondering why it's been like two weeks since I put one of these out, it's because I haven't decided how often I am going to publish yet. I will probably start out publishing every 2-3 weeks, than move to weekly if I get some readers. Thank you to my subscribers I appreciate every one of you!

Well the crypto market's been shit, except privacy coins. Monero and Zcash have outperformed the majority of coins this year. Love to see it. The Monero outperformance is even more notable because it's mostly fueled by organic spot exchange due to there not being very many places to trade Monero perps on leverage.

Crypto is returning to it's roots. Fuck the fartcoins and dogs with hats, I want permissonless, censorship resistant, private, digital cash that will help me opt out of the servile society and resist the oppression of the ruling class.

You don't have to have something to hide for it to be a good idea to stack some value outside of the system, and the best wealth is wealth noone knows about so that you don't get your skull cracked in by a 5 dollar wrench attack. Everybody talks about how Monero protects people using dark net markets, but the truth is, it also protects normal people who just want some security. Transparent blockchains are just plain dangerous, and attacks on crypto holders continue to increase every year. If you use them you need to use bolt on privacy tools and one mistake can link your identity or location to your stack. You can't rely on companies like Coinbase to protect your information either, as they have proven with their lax data security. If you want to store wealth safely, the best way to do it is on a private blockchain.

Criminals are not the only threat privacy can protect you from, in France they have started taxing "unproductive wealth" including crypto holdings! This is straight up theft, I mean capital gains taxes are theft too but at least you have to make a profit before you get taxed instead of getting taxed for simply holding an asset. At any time your Government could decide to start stealing your stack, the time to prepare for this is now and not after they start doing so.

Privacy lost a big battle with the sentencing of Samourai wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez who was given five years in a cage by a 79 year old judge who shouldn't even be assigned any kind of technology case, or any case at all honestly. Your mental acuity is definitely in decline by the time you are 79 fucking years old. She didn't like his clemency letter and gave him the maximum sentence.

If that wasn't bad enough......

One of the most serious threats to our freedom, privacy, and right to travel is the Flock Safety surveillance network consisting of automated license plate readers and surveillance cameras all over the country.

The Supreme Court has ruled that tracking you via cellphone location requires a warrant. No such restriction exists for tracking via automated license plate readers. Law enforcement can get this data from Flock Safety's massive surveillance network, and if you audit these LE requests, the reasons given for needing to track a particular license plate include such important things as "lalala" or "asdf". They don't need an actual legitimate reason, they can put whatever they want on the data request form. The places you drive to can reveal a detailed picture of your life. There have already been instances of cops misusing this data for non law enforcement reasons, and it is incredibly dangerous to allow them to access this kind of information on any citizen at any time for any reason.

This new surveillance network should not be tolerated by the American people. It is nobody's business where you go throughout the day, and I would love to see some kind of anti license plate movement go viral. Imagine if even a third of people just ripped their license plates off or covered them with mud. There isn't enough cops to pull over that many people for driving without a visible license plate number. The people could instantly destroy the power of this Flock Safety surveillance network, but it would only work if enough people were willing to do it.

Would you be willing to obscure your license plate if you knew others would do the same? Do you have the guts to stand up to this mass surveillance? Or should we just roll over and continue to let America grow more dystopian with every passing day? Now is the time to resist, not when it gets even worse and any dissent is immediately crushed by armed drones reading your brain waves (that's not even a joke any more, mind reading tech is gaining more accuracy every day).

You have a right to keep your personal life private, but it's a right you are probably going to have to fight for. We can bitch about this government overreach all day, but unless we are actually willing to do something about it, nothing will get better and it will only get worse.

We all need to opt the fuck out and throw our license plates in the garbage. Make it a Tik Tok challenge or something, make it viral. How do we make people care enough about this to commit a small act of civil disobedience?

*I posted the above on Nostr and someone pointed out the obvious point that I had missed, that even if we all obscure our license plates, these cameras are also recording other things about our vehicles such as the make/model, bumper stickers, presence of tool boxes, bike racks, etc. So obscuring your license plate would only help if you made your car look like every other car of that model with no disctinct features. Then your anonymity set would consist of every other car of that make/model and color that also didn't have any distinct features. In other words, while it would be an improvement over doing nothing at all, it wouldn't be as effective as I intially thought.

When we obscure our license plates, it will get us pulled over (perhaps unless everyone is doing it), but if ICE agents do it so that they can't be identified, it's all good. They expect privacy for themselves but not for anyone else. They don't think you should be able to travel from point A to point B without being tracked and ocassionally forced to identify yourself.

Camouflaging cars and swapping license plates: How agents make immigration arrests

Immigration enforcement officers are sometimes forgoing license plates or otherwise masking their cars while apprehending migrants across the U.S.

https://www.npr.org

There have been more ChatGPT leaks that serve as yet another reminded to be very careful what you say to ChatGPT.

..."it appeared that “ALL ChatGPT prompts” that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past two months. OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to GSC."

This leads me to our privacy tip of this issue:

If you want to use AI in a more private way, there are basically four options that I can think of at the moment:

• Self host an open source LLM: This way you control the model and all prompts are being processed locally on your system instead of being sent to a company which will often use them to further train their model.

• Use Venice's private AI, a product created by crypto OG Erik Vorheez (creator of Satoshi Dice) that offers a ChatGPT-like experience except they actually respect your privacy and aren't logging your chats. I use this personally and I like it a lot. The product has also improved significantly since I first started using it in 2024. (link uses my ref code)

• If you want to access almost any AI model, but want to do so anonymously without being required to create an account, you can pay per prompt using NanoGPT to access them. It's kind of like connecting to these models through a proxy, and instead of having to pay with a credit card linked to a name you can pay with cryptocurrency including Monero. Keep in mind your chats are still being logged and will likely be used as training data, but it just makes it much harder to link those chats to your real world identity if you use this (and pay using Monero).

• Finally, the new kid on the block that I haven't tried yet is Maple AI which offers end to end encrypted chats with their model. I'm assuming this works in a similar way to Venice, but don't quote me on that. I know you can pay using Bitcoin though.

CBDC's are spreading across the globe like a virus, they will infect free markets and turn them into dystopian nightmares.

The EU's coming adoption of a CBDC has been preceded by a ban on cash transactions over 10,000 Euros. People should be rioting in the streets over this nonsense, but most people just ignore it.

After decades of draconian financial surveillance in the United States, they don't even know how many people they have arrested. Was it worth it?

Well it didn't take long for ZEC to follow Bitcoin's path to join the suits on Wall Street......the Winklevoss twins or maybe just Tyler Winklevoss launched a DAT for ZEC. Kinda makes me want to puke a little bit honestly.

The US Government doing it's best to get people out of self custody and into crypto ETPs, now your paper ETH that you don't really own can be staked.

The SEC also clarified that digital collectibles and network tokens are not securities. I wonder if this will have an affect on any potential future efforts to get XMR relisted?

SimpleX, the encrypted chat application, is launching a utility token. The move was controversial in the privacy community, or it least it was controversial on Twitter. Check out the Monerotopia episode in the media section for an interview with SimpleX about this and other issues.

The US military continues to execute suspected drug smugglers without even attempting to arrest and try them first. They aren't even fentanyl smugglers, they are smuggling cocaine, either way if they aren't actively attacking someone you don't have any right to execute them in cold blood. Today they made the murder official and gave it an op name, albeit an op name that they already used not long ago, in January. The US Government has murdered so many people around the world that they ran out op names.

Republicans snuck a paragraph in the spending bill that effectively bans hemp growing in the United States. They say that stores are selling THC derivitatves such as Delta 8 to minors. You can just target the stores that are doing that and punish them instead of outlawing an entire industry and hurting farmers and everyone else this industry provides income to. They say you can still grow hemp as long as it has less than 0.3% of THC, which is not even possible with current hemp varities. So Rand Paul objected to this nonsense and then proceeded to get blaimed for holding up the reopening of the Government, despite his objection having no actual affect on the timing of the bill.

The Epstein saga is getting spicy again with the combination of the release of a massive trove of Epstein emails and the 218th signature from newly elected representative Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.Res-581) that Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) proposed alongside Ro Khanna (D-Calif). The act would force the government to release all Epstein Files, minus redactions of the names of victims, and is likely to pass.

This tweet thread goes over a lot of the emails that mention Trump.

Checkout the latest Politics Channel stream from the Policast team. Policast is a prediction market application within Farcaster.

*I don't endorse cummunism.

The latest episode of Monerotopia was a banger despite lacking the news section which is usually my favorite part. They had a great discussion with the SimpleX guy about why Monero may need it's own advocacy organization to represent interests of Monero users worldwide. Because Monero is entirely decentralized with no leaders or CEOs, there isn't really anyone standing up for us against things like exchange delistings. I mean we all shout really loudly on X about it, but as far as actually doing shit IRL we are kind of unorganized. A little organization isn't a bad thing, it doesn't have to mean the project becomes a centralized entity.

The latest episode of Cloak and Dagger on Paznia Radio's Self Liberation Saturday has arrived.

I'm not a Mert/Zcash fanboy but I thought his interview with Balaji was interesting, although he doesn't get him to talk about crypto and privacy until the very end.

Thanks for reading! Please consider leaving some feedback and let me know what you like and don't like about Thought Crime Trap House.