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.
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.