With all the deepest respect toward the US citizens I know, have talked to, and those that don't support the current administration ...

Theres's now _zero_ respect for the US.

Yours sincerely, long time five eyes allies.

Tens of thousands of people are protesting and some getting arrested, anyone with a voice is doing what they can to sway public opinion.

Our higher courts are compromised (and feckless at times even when used correctly), and the police help ICE. And a large number of Americans do, in fact, want this. Others don’t care until it hits them personally.

So what specifically are people to do, like myself, who live in an unaffected area and who’s politicians are in fact speaking out against this?

IMO Trump has exposed fatal flaw in democracy that everyone kinda knew about but nobody wanted to admit because it's never been exploited in a well-established, highly-functioning, independent democracy before - turns out, majority of voters are dumb fucks. Once you accept this as truth, lots of pieces fall into place.

Assuming that most people DO support Trump and his politics, in a democratic system the judges have no basis to be the adults in the room and actually tell voters what they're allowed to do and what they aren't.

https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/index.html

https://www.sony.eu/presscentre/sony-launches-camera-verify-...

Ideally it'd become an open standard supported by all manufacturers. Which is what they're trying to do:

https://c2pa.org/

You will need camera DRM with a hardware security module down all the way to the image sensor, where the hardware is in the hands of the attacker. Even when that chain is unbroken, you'll need to detect all kinds of tricks where the incoming photons themselves are altered. In the simplest case: a photo of a photo.

If HDCP has taught anything, it's that vendors of consumer products cannot implement such a secure chain at all, with ridiculous security vulnerabilities for years. HDCP has been given up and has become mostly irrelevant, perhaps except for the criminal liability it places on 'breaking' it. Vendors are also pushed to rely on security by obscurity, which will make such vulnerabilities harder to find for researchers than for attackers.

If you have half of such a 'signed photos' system in place, it will become easier to dismiss photos of actual events on the basis that they're unsigned. If a camera model or security chip shared by many models turns out to be broken, or a new photo-of-a-photo trick becomes known, a huge amount of photos produced before that, become immediately suspect. If you gatekeep (the proper implementations) of these features only to professional or expensive models, citizen journalism will be disincentivized.

But even more importantly: if you choose to rely on technical measures that are poorly understood by the general public (and that are likely to blow up in your face), you erode a social system of trust that already is in place, which is journalism. Although the rise of social media, illiteracy and fascism tends to suggest otherwise, journalistic chain of custody of photographic records mainly works fine. But only if we keep maintaining and teaching that system.