How Trump Can Kill Protesting Nationwide With One Action: Break the Internet

I think it is safe to say that America's protest movement has one giant, glaring single point of failure (SPOF): The Internet. Think about it -- all these protests are being:

  • Planned on Signal or Discord
  • Managed on Trello boards
  • Coordinated via Audio or Video calls over the Internet
  • Promoted online via Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc

The idea of an SPOF comes out of Internet software development. It is the idea that you should never have an SPOF in your architecture and, if you do, that's where your failures will manifest. And the very nature of an SPOF is that it takes down the entire system.

And protests are a system. Take away the Internet and our entire protest movement crumbles.

How Can Trump Kill the Internet?

Here's a fairly plausible scenario:

  1. The next wave of protests will happen on 4/19.
  2. The numbers should roughly double from 4/5. I say that because Indiana saw its numbers go up 4.4x between 3/8 and 4/5. Now we have 2 weeks less time to plan and promote so doubling seems right.
  3. The 4/5 protests were roughly 5 million in aggregate. If that doubles to 10 million then it isn't hard to imagine something bad happening (example - burning cars like in France; possibly actually done by Trump sponsored state actors, not even done by actual protestors).
  4. Trump declares protestors "terrorists" and invokes the Insurrection Act, troops are deployed to every U.S. City over say 1 million people.
  5. Trump declares that the Internet is being used to facilitate the "terrorism" and executes orders to simply purge the root DNS servers from all entries except for X.com, Tesla.com, Facebook.com (and all related FB properties that aren't messaging) and Amazon.com. He then announces that to bring back Internet properties, an investigation must be done -- records turned over to the government, etc. And domain names are brought back one by one with a tariff being paid to the federal government.

This feels to me an entirely plausible scenario. And with the courts deeming Trump's illegal deportation at least temporarily legal, they clearly have no spine.

What Do We Do In Advance?


Here is my recommendation for 50501 state leaders:

  1. Identify the core leadership people in your team.
  2. Compile a list of the following elements:
  • Name
  • Signal Username
  • Phone Number
  • Email
  • Home Address
  1. Make this nothing more than an ASCII file.
  2. Put it on an encrypted SD card to be distributed to all senior people at the 4/19 protest (or separately if they can't make it).
  3. Distribute the password separately upon completion of the list.
  4. This would sustain our ability to meet and plan should the insurrection act pass.

Ways Around This

There likely are ways around this:

  • Use a VPN and connect through DNS servers located in say Germany (I use this regularly to use archive.ph). Still the bulk of the root DNS servers are U.S. operated and they default automatic syncing via AnyCast could take them down automatically (at least until they are manually restored).
  • Use a privately located MatterMost instance as a Signal / Discord replacement. MatterMost can be run on your own hardware and ip addresses should still work if they are distributed ahead of time.

Operational Steps

This document will be updated with the operational steps that need to be taken to implement a cross platform windows / mac encrypted file. Or if you already know this, please email (fuzzygroup a[t] tutamail.com) or direct message me (if you are on signal)