Trans Protection Party

Third Person Perspective #2

Third Person Perspective is a monthly physical publication that is available at many of TPP’s events free of charge. All of the articles and poetry in our zine are also available free of charge in textual form on our online newsletter.

Third Person Perspective Issue 2 Cover

TRANS PROTECTION PARTY FOOD DISTO PROGRAM Contact trans_protection_party@proton.me For free grocery delivery on Wednesdays for trans, two-spirit, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks of Kansas City! Welcome to the second issue of Third Person Perspective -- a Trans Protection Party publication. We seek to protect Trans People by any means necessary while acting in solidarity with the liberation movements across occupied Turtle Island. This paper is an apparatus of education and inspiration -- to help those outside to understand our sentiments -- and to give hope to those engaged in our struggle. Some calendar updates include the TPP Defense Program on the 16th at Goofball Sk8boards -- the event starts at 6 PM. Come train with us to use our bodies for defense. The TPP Food Program runs every Wednesday between 2:30 and 6:30 PM -- we deliver free groceries to Trans People, NB's, and various gender non-conforming identities. April 8th is the day that we have the opportunity to vote NO on the Public Safety Sales Tax Renewal, which will supply funding for a super jail in Kansas City off 40 Highway. We cannot consent to a new jail in our town because jails put Trans People and all above mentioned folks in grave danger, especially in this charged political climate aimed and weaponized against us as a people. VOTE NO APRIL 8TH! We hope you enjoy these columns from our community. We have perspectives that are valuable for intersectional liberation everywhere. Beneath the above text there is a halftone picture of a screaming coyote wearing a beret. On Governor Kelly, Or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Veto by Therese Allow me to propose a hypothetical, dear reader---one I think may perplex the staunchest radicals among us (amogus), that being; “What, if any, role does the “true” liberal, ““sensible”” progressive, left “““moderate”””, or milquetoast ““““democrat”””” have in the revolution? And what of circumstances where their involvement benefits the revolution greatly?” Laura Kelly is the Governor of Kansas and has been since 2018. By all accounts she is a standard democrat---like, an actual democrat, too, not the bootlicking neolibs we got today, but like, an honest to god, slightly progressive, standard blue democrat person (who is still a capitalist and benefits from certain status quo arrangements)---like the kind of democrat from before the turn of the century, from some mythical past where we get the vague sense that at some point the democrats stood for something slightly kind of positive. She's *that* kind of democrat. She mostly runs on campaigns of Education (she thinks it's good), “Good Government and Economy,” and Infrastructure (then why are there so many potholes in downtown KCK?). She's codified laws promising protections to Trans and Queer Kansans. Which is cool, I guess. For an establishment figure she could be way worse. But.... Well, she's not exactly the spokesperson of the revolution, either. Well, why are we talking about Ms. Governor Kelly? And entertaining the idea that democrats or any parallels they may have in any two-party system globally is as anything more than an extension of the interests of colonizers and bourgeoisie capitalists? The two-party system is a shadow on the cave wall. Democrat? A farce---her role is one of the status quo, of the false promise of change through voting, the idea that America was ever a “democracy.” Why talk about this middle-of-the-road progressive? Well, let's go back to that hypothetical---what do we do in a system filled to the brim with reactionaries, with someone almost acceptable in how normal she is? What do we do, when actually applied liberal policies, are what end up making life.... Not quite bearable for trans lives in Kansas, to be sure, but certainly better than if she wasn't there. What am I referring to? Well, Governor Miss Madam Kelly is exceptional in one area! She has vetoed 60+ bills, many of them explicitly anti-trans legislation. Since the inauguration of the orange demon she's halted bans on gender related healthcare for minors as well as broad name change ban that wouldn't even work (*but the whole point is that none of this works and it's literally just---“hey let's lynch all these trannies” but in the slowest most insane and inane way imaginable while still somehow causing maximum suffering---holy shit I hate it here and I think maybe we should start putting down white men at the age of 35 (the average life expectancy of the modern transsexual, by the by, recently learned that) but I digress, gotta give the thoughts their five minutes or they'll start taking years, fuck*)---but yes, the house republicans have tried to push a lot past the Kansas Governor, but one thing she's remained consistent on is that she will not give in to right wing pressure to throw trans and queer people under the bus, even as the actual “““democratic party””” slides further and further towards fascism. Yes, these bills attacking transsexuals in this country are scary, and yes, in our relative pockets of the melting pot the fire is getting turned up every day, we are all frogs slowly boiling. Or maybe we're crabs and the boiling pot is also a bucket? Mixed metaphor but you see the vision, if you don't, I can't help you---they only give me so many words for this thing. Keep up. The bottom line is this---we have allies in this fight in all different forms, some are staunch cis and/or het people, who maybe have skin in the game through trans people they know---and then there are the more challenging allies, milquetoast democrats with enough spine to... maybe not break rank with more fascistic democrat tendencies, but certainly bend the party line as opposed to towing it---these allies, who are still allies, like Laura Kelly, may, in some instances---be all that stands between trans lives and ruin. We may not notice it as much closer to the cities, and the allure of the global village, but these vetoes do affect trans lives in Kansas, and they are perhaps noticed most by rural Trans Kansas (Transans?), our siblings often the most silenced in these conversations. In some cases, the centrist, the unaligned, the milquetoast---those perhaps you wouldn't think of when the conversation of “radicalism” comes into focus---are in truly revolutionary positions. Though I would never imply this woman is our bulwark tranny supporting fag hag Rosa Luxembourg or some such shit---it is a radical act to protect trans lives. Her vetoes keep us safe. The more I think about it in these spirals, the more I notice it for how particular, how interesting, how beautiful, and perhaps, how tragic that is. Oh! I met her a week or so ago. She was nice enough. Big smile. She shook my hand, asked my name---at least pretended to listen when she asked where I was from, and I stumbled over telling a condensed version of how I came to Kansas like a tumbleweed trash bag on fire, and emerged as a beautiful shemale butterfly partially because of the serenity and centering the Midwest, this flat and square state, ancient ocean bed, offered to me. I noticed two things about her---they kind of cascaded off each other, these twin realizations; 1) She was a lot smaller in person than I had imagined she would be. Like, I knew she was an old lady, and I know my ethereal, stomping transsexual height keeps me for from the 5' foot heavenly heights of the bouncy bio-girls, but still, she was small. 4' foot something small. Like, you got some pixie dust there for me, tiny? Lmao. Anyway. 2) The second thing, was that amidst the realization that what I thought would be an interview, and quickly realized was more of a photo op---I did begin to ponder, in the mind of someone so milquetoast, so politically unremarkably democrat that the two first name having governor could be next to the dictionary definition of “standard liberal politician,” I wondered why, she would want a photo op with a bunch of trannies, while signing a mostly symbolic proclamation (it was for Kansas Trans Day of Visibility? So not exactly the “Let's feed, house, and secure the safety, freedom, and happiness of Transsexuals” act). Teams of people helping prop this woman into place, symbolic active steps, faux revolutionary actual vetoes---they help us, (until 2027 when she's out of office), but they're stagnant help. We're boiling in the melting pot, and Ms. Madam Empress Queen Governor, instead of turning off the heat, has opted to drop a few ice cubes in the water. Thanks Miss---we appreciate you, but we'll keep trying to put out the fire over here. At the foot of the article is a picture of a highly stylized coyote. Come Out Ye Anti-trans by Comrade Jane The British occupation of Ireland is arguably the longest running colonial project in human history. As the British Empire's first colony, Ireland was used as laboratory for developing methods of colonial domination. Apartheid laws used against Black South Africans and residential schools used in Canada and the United States against indigenous people were pioneered in Ireland. Later, as Ireland struggled for independence, the expertise Britain had gained in colonial violence returned to be used in crushing revolts not in India or the Middle East, but in the British Isles themselves. This experience with, both in history and living memory, is one reason why the Irish people have so often been supporters other revolutionary or anti colonial struggles. When Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin visited New York in 1969 and was given a key to the city by the mayor, she promptly gave the key to the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party. More recently, CNN called Ireland "the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe". One does not need to look far to find Keffiyehs in the Irish green and orange, honoring the shared history of struggle against ethno-religious settler-colonial oppression. One classic expression of this solidarity comes in the form of a song written by Irish republican socialist Dominic Behan in the 1960s and covered repeatedly in the decades since. *Come Out Ye Black and Tans* tells of Behan's memories of his father calling to the former agents of the British occupation and challenging them to fight. The song explicitly ties the Irish struggle for independence to the struggles of African and Arab peoples against British colonial violence, and carries a powerful message about how cops, though bold while wielding heavy weapons, are quickly revealed to be cowards when denied monopoly over the technologies of state violence. The Black and Tans were a British auxiliary police force of British Army veterans made infamous by their reprisal killings of civilians in response to their inability to defeat the Irish Republican Army. If the concise definition of fascism as "the methods of colonialism turned inwards against the imperial core," is taken as true, then brutality of these soldiers turned cops is one fascism's earliest and most shining examples. Soldiers in the British Army served as enforcers of Britain's global empire, wielding superior technology and an eagerness to commit ultra violence against resisting populations. As so often happens with young men returning home from war with no marketable skills except the ability to do violence, they found employment in the one profession where that skillset is most prized: policing. At the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in 1919, the Empire had an abundant supply of such young men, and haphazardly pressed them into service against the Irish people. Faced with tenacious Irish republican resistance, these Black and Tan police resorted to the exact same methods they had employed against resistance in South Africa, Sudan, Iraq, and China. When the IRA would carry out a successful operation, the Black and Tans would respond by randomly executing civilians or burning nearby homes as collective punishment. During the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1920, after the IRA killed several British Army Officers, Black and Tan auxiliary police opened fire on a stadium during a football match, killing 14 and wounding 60. (The police claimed that the civilians had fired first, a claim that British authorities accepted without investigation.) Other methods employed by the Black and Tans that will be familiar to readers in fascist America today included requiring auxiliaries to live away from the neighborhoods they patrolled, carrying rifles and machine guns, wearing darkly colored military-style uniforms, and drilling in military tactics and maneuvers. These parallels with modern-day Amerika are not coincidental, or even a result of shared culture with Britain. This illuminates a core aspect of how fascism works. Police violence and colonial violence work hand-in glove. As war on the Iraqi people waned, discarded military equipment flowed from Iraq to the streets of Baltimore, Detroit, and Kansas City. This equipment was not limited to the guns or armored vehicles that they used to beat protesters or the homeless or the victims of the pharma industry's opioid epidemic. The discarded soldiers too were sent home as so much military surplus. Often injured or poisoned, but always traumatized, soldiers whose only working experience was kicking in doors or handcuffing kids in Baghdad or Kabul often went home to become police, or police consultants who trained the next generation of police. In this way even the police without military experience---the bullies, the cowards, the sadists---were indoctrinated by wraparound sunglass-wearing crew cut-sporting tacticool "operators" who taught police academy cadets to see everyone as an enemy, carrying the mindset of counterinsurgency to the streets of our cities. The difference between Amerika and Britain though is that Amerika's first colony is not an island apart from us, it is woven into the very fabric of the country, in the prisons, the reservations, the slums, and the rusted out mining towns. When the Amerikan empire shrinks, like the British before it, and the colonial tactics are brought back to the place where they were born, there won't be a neat line between north and south, the line will run through our streets and cities. Within a generation of Irish independence, the British Empire was no more. It would take several decades and another world war, but there was no mistaking that an empire that couldn't even maintain dominion over its own island chain could continue to rule the world. Likewise, the United States finds itself at a high-water mark and receding. Those of us here at home will increasingly be treated like colonized people as capitalism and empire fails, which is why solidarity with colonized people is vital. Those who fought for their own freedoms at home without also resisting imperialism abroad were not striking at fascism where it grows, but only biding time until it returned home. Beneath this article is a TPP coyote logo. This page contains the lyrics of the song "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" I was born in a Dublin street, Where the Royal drums did beat, The loving English feet, they walked all over us, And every single night, When me da' would come home tight, He'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus: Come out ye' black and tans! Come out and fight me like a man! Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders! Tell her how the IRA, made you run like hell away, from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra! Come let us hear you tell, How you slandered Great Parnell, When you thought him well and truly persecuted! Where are those sneers and jeers, That you loudly let us hear, When our leaders of '16 were executed! Come out ye' black and tans! Come out and fight me like a man! Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders! Tell her how the IRA, made you run like hell away, from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra! Come tell us how ye slew, Them poor Arabs two by two, Like the Zulu they had spears and bow and arrows! How bravely you faced one, With yer sixteen-pounder gun! And you frightened all the natives to the marrow! Come out ye' black and tans! Come out and fight me like a man! Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders! Tell her how the IRA, made you run like hell away, from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra! The time is coming fast, And I think the day is here, To kill each yeoman that comes before us! And if there be a need, Where our kids will say "Godspeed!" With a verse or two of singing this fine chorus: Come out ye' black and tans! Come out and fight me like a man! Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders! Tell her how the IRA, made you run like hell away, from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra! An article entitled "The synthesized story of an anonymous woman" I am a transsexual transgender woman -- and last year I went to Jail. For the first time in my adult life, I was incarcerated. What had happened was that I got into a scrap with someone who shouldn't have been in my home. It would've been a misdemeanor, but I am a Trans Woman of Color -- so it was a felony. When I was in Jail I was not allowed a phone call for ten days, I was not allowed clothes or a bed for twenty. I was denied warmth. I was denied reprieve from twenty-four hour bright lights that drove me crazy in my cell. I was in observation- but I gave no indicator that I should have been, and I remained there for almost a month before I was moved to the disciplinary F-POD. Disciplinary, as in more solitary lockdown and a somehow dimished status. I was placed there because I am trans. While I was inside I lost everything. My animals died because I could not tell anyone that I had been jailed, my house was evicted, my belonging ransacked. I lost my career, they replaced me. I lost my medical insurance that I needed so badly. I lost my place in my community -- and I owed them reparations of over a thousand dollars for the privilege. On top of all of this, I was detransitioned against my will despite the best efforts of KU Medical Center's gender clinic staff. I was not allowed my hormone therapy, and it hurt me. My medical status as a trans woman only impacted me negatively in jail. I was isolated, ridiculed, humiliated, and barbarized. And it did not make me a better person. The corrections officers tortured me. My story is only one story, only one voice, and even if it shakes coming out of me I have to speak it because there are well over a million voices that are not allowed to speak their stories to you today. I stand in solidarity with all incarcerated peoples, because o one is free until we are all free. I stand in solidarity with Decarcerate KC and Trans Protection Party because this sentiment is their North Star. Through abolitionist feminist efforts we can shift our culture of justice to one that can meet our potential and honor the individual potential of every human being. We cannot call ourselves free until incarceration is abolished and left behind us as an unfortunate historical fact. Through preventative social welfare and mutual aid we can rehabilitate "criminal" lives and honor those living through them as human beings. We can do better, and people like me don't intend to rest until we do. VOTE NO APRIL 8TH on the public safety sales tax renewal -- jails kill trans folk Beneath the article is a red silhouette of handcuffs. Maoist Brainrot/Applied Prison Abolition (FKA: On Despair and Solutions) by Therese Mao begins On Contradiction by saying this; "The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics." He then quotes Lenin in the very next sentence, as I am also doing, "Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in *the very essence of objects.*" Which is wild because it's basically the same as the first sentence, but Mao wanted to glaze Lenin, and they're both just glazing Marx, who glazed Hegel, I think? Who cares, this isn't a Krispy Kreme (unfortunately I could go for donuts, honestly, yes, I'm leaving it in) lets leave the glaze for the low effort simps, real gooners of this theory bullshit.... (*Listen, I wish it was a praxis column too but unfortunately this armchair is just so comfy, I never want to leave. You know what I will say? The cameras are all shitty, don't have mics, and probably don't have someone looking at the other end. The prison has ghost wardens---break free, comrades. No face no case. Also shoplift from large and small businesses at every opportunity you can find. Anyway*), ....as I was saying, real theory gooners know true constructive material analysis comes from constant and concentrated criticism of that which we love, hate, believe and reject. All the time. I'm going to be calling Mao a little bitch (whine about it, MLMs) in this column, while using a bastardized, approximation of his take on contradictions within dialectical materialist worldviews to make some point we all basically already believe---Prisons are colonial bullshit and should all be torn down. They're stupid. If you aren't a total prison abolitionist, I think you're stupid. Like period, full stop. You can show this to your non-prison abolitionist friends (why are they your friends, girl) and if it helps them see how stupid it is to say it's okay for a bunch of rich, old, bitch ass, faggot ass, smelly white men to rape every continent and then get away with throwing the indigenous, oppressed, and often (always, literally every single time) Black and Brown people in cages because they wrote some rules on a sheet of paper, then great! I'm happy for people to see that being a bootlicker cuck is dumb---but that isn't my point with this column. As a journalist, I believe my job is to tell the truth. So. Let's get honest in this bitch. First. A small aside. You may have noticed that there is a small streak of brainrot strung through my word. Skibidi. I'm not doing this to appeal to the children, inshallah, far from it. I'm on some post-modern bullshit with it, elevating brainrot to an academic and published level creates a literal contradiction of speech within the text, that can then be mirrored again with the contradictions and themes of contradiction in the literal text, and honestly (journo, truth. Whatever), I'm mostly doing it because I think that's really cool. Or Chile---You know, sis? The tea is so gagged, boots the house down. Do you get it? You don't need to understand my method or my madness. But yeah, that's what that is---don't worry too much about it, hunnies. On truth. On prison. There is no fundamental split between left and right under the everpresent guise of bourgeoisie panopticon imperialist colonization. The left is anemic and well meaning, the right is more individualistic---please shut uuuuup. This is a first graders' understanding of any political dichotomy. The only meaningful split in any social problem we face in America, is whether one believes Eurocentric, "Western," Patriarchal, Bitchless, "Global Northern," Air Frierless, Bad smelling, White Supremacist Colonialization is at the core of the continued atrocities committed against us, or if it's somewhere else--- (If you believe it's somewhere else, then I don't know, go suck off a Nazi, congratulations your vibes suck and Luffy, Naruto, and Goku would hate you. Get your eyes off my words, fuck). The main issue, or as Mao would put it, the Principal Contradiction within any given social problem, was the true root of the problem, making true cohesion between the dichotomy contained within a contradiction at all, the resolution of this contradiction is how Hegelians would achieve what they called synthesis in basic dialectical materialist worldview. Synthesis from the thesis/antithesis resolution, thesis/antithesis from the dichotomy of the contradiction (think of it like... Thesis = Proletariat, Antithesis = Bourgeoisie, the synthesis-- once the Principal Contradiction would be resolved would be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Mao needed like 50,000 words to explain that. What a little bitch, bro, I'm saying. Like dweeb head ass, on some Poindexter timing fr. So, what is the Principal Contradiction? Mao believed there was only one that all other contradictions cascaded off of. I don't remember what he specifically thought the big Principal Contradiction was to save the world. I'm not going to look it up either. He was wrong. I'll tell you the Principal Contradiction right now, the problem at the root of every problem. Colonization. Decolonization is at the core of the patriarchy, queerphobia and transphobia, capitalism, and racism-- any social ill one can name, from poverty to our spiritual constipation-- all relate back to colonization and the ongoing global settler colonial project. For the duration of this, I'd like you to remember that at the root of this, of every Black and Brown person in prison, for every Trans Person incarcerated, for every Neurodivergent, Disabled, Poor, Desperate, Colonized person held in a cell against their will---there is an enforcer of colonization who wants them there, who is willing to shed blood or pay someone else to to keep people trapped. Literally colonized. They want all of there, where the businesses and puppet governments of this world can extract every red penny from our crushed and withered bodies. They're trying to pass a new sales tax in Kansas City to build a new jail. We have established jail is stupid. Jail is dumb, bitchless concept and supporting it is supporting some colonizers right to extract wealth from a body you hope isn't yours---which is evil. If you support building a new jail, you're going to hell :^). The vote to pass that is less than a month away, happening on Apr. 8th ---the day before that Leavenworth is voting to build a new ICE facility. Do you see what they're doing? Ramping up to put more of us in underfunded cages. More Black and Brown and Trans and Queer bodies, piled up---we have a responsibility to each other to fight these battles and prevent these facilities from opening by any means necessary. They do not care about us. They are actively colonizing the world, and we are being squeezed from the imperial core. "**Trans woman detained in Aurora ICE facility for 2 years struggles to get court date,**" **"Harassment, pervasive fear, and transphobic abuse,**" "**Death of trans woman in ICE detention highlights need for action,**" the headlines are heartbreaking, and the articles that follow tell tales of a disturbing truth. *"For the trannies that we don't kill on the outside, or drive to killing themselves, this is what waits for you."* I can hear the sneering voice of some wrinkled old Colonel Sanders looking dinosaur say, the embodiment of the American project, an evil old white man who wants to make a buck. **"People make money off of keeping people detained, and that's so problematic. You cannot be making money off of people wanting to seek a better life." (*Andrea Loya,*** ***executive director of Casa de Paz)*** **"Then my door rolled open one night. One inmate after another assaulted me. Fourteen different individuals. An officer stood there and watched the whole thing, chanting, "*Yeah! Do it!*" I couldn't fight them. I was tired. So I just lay there. Let them finish.** **I went to the infirmary. They basically said, "*You're alright. You'll heal*." They gave me some triple antibiotic ointment, and that was it. No paperwork, no nothing. They just like covered it up, like *Get him off the unit*. That's how I ended up here. I've been in nine or 10 prison units in the system, in 27 years." (*Willow Eva Williams, Poet, Former Prisoner)*** **"At a time when we are grieving the murders of transgender women of color, and the murder of 20 year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzalez by Border Patrol at the Texas-Mexico border, it is unconscionable that a transgender woman would die in the hands of ICE at the Cibola trans pod in immigration detention. The community, now more than ever, needs to organize to protect our most vulnerable, in particular transgender immigrant women who are surrounded by violence on a daily basis," *(Anandrea Molina, President of Organización Latina de Trans en Texas)*** **"In here, we do not exist anymore*,*" *(Anonymous Trans Woman)*** Take these words with you, and remember at the root of this, is the colonial project seeking to ultimately eat and consume us all. We must move radically differently. Not just for the sake of ourselves, our future, or even the world---Our spirits demand it. More than destroying the cop in your mind, in order to truly reach a point where we can free ourselves from this system, we must break the chains the settler has implanted in our mind. The pilgrim. The settler. The fucking motionless, bitch ass, cuck pilled, slave necessitating colonizer. He has no place in the world we're trying to build.

References

Smart Defense Against Smart Devices by Ninel Gribskaya It is the year 2025, and we live in a society that is overrun by digital devices under a capitalist state that is becoming increasingly invasive and tyrannical. As the corporations and the iron fist of the dictatorship of capital metastasize, we can never be too careful with how much data is gathered about us. There are many ways that one can protect one's digital privacy and a big one to consider are the various devices we use, especially these so-called "smart" devices that are becoming a bigger part of our lives. So what is a smart device anyway? A smart device is a device that has three main features: context awareness, autonomous computing, and connectivity (Urwin, 2023). What this means is that these devices collect information and perform computational tasks on their own and connect to the internet to upload the data to some server somewhere (Urwin, 2023). These devices include many things such as smart watches, TVs, cars, cameras, homes, and many more things (Urwin, 2023). One immediate concern that comes to mind is that once these devices collect data on you, it can be used for a number of purposes. Corporations generally use this data to advertise to you, especially if you use a device that has Amazon Echo on it; a device that is always listening to you talk even when you are not directly talking to it (Komando, 2019). That innocent little device that listens to your voice commands is in fact as creepy as you imagine it to be; it was discovered that Amazon employees are actually listening to you use Echo enabled devices and making transcriptions (Komando, 2019). Voice driven devices are potential wiretaps, and if you don't want your voice to be heard and stored on the cloud, it is best not to have one around. There is one other privacy concern with smart devices, and that is they are generally very insecure (Puzder, 2022). Smart devices can be compromised and used for botnets as seen with the Mirai worm that brought down various websites including Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, Github, and Netflix in 2016 (Puzder, 2022). Smart devices can also be hacked to demand ransom as seen with the hacker who took control of internet-connected chastity cages and told their victims, "Your cock is mine now," and demanded payment in Bitcoin to release them (Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2021). If random hackers can breach these devices, just imagine what a malicious government entity can do with them. Given all of these security and privacy concerns, how does one protect themselves from these devices? The easiest solution is generally to not use a smart version of some device if it can be avoided (Puzder, 2022). Some products however no longer offer a non-smart version; it is generally impossible to buy a new TV nowadays that does not have smart functionality built in (Somers, 2023). In the case of smart TVs, one can avoid generally the security and privacy concerns by simply not connecting it to the network and using it as a dumb TV (Somers, 2023). There are plenty of ways to connect to streaming services with an external box such as a Roku or better yet, a real computer (Somers, 2023; Jacobsson Purewal, 2024). There may of course be some smart devices that you do intend to use with their smart functionality. If you plan to use a smart device there are some steps you can take to limit what it can do on your network and decrease the possibility of them being hacked; some of these will take some technical know-how and specialized networking equipment (UMA Technology, 2024). Some of these steps can be done on your home router such as encrypting your wifi with WPA2 or WPA3 and changing the default wifi password (UMA Technology, 2024). You can also configure your router's firewall to limit what traffic goes in and out of your network (UMA Technology, 2024). Be sure to disable Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) on your router as well; UPnP would allow smart devices to automatically configure connections on your network and is also generally insecure (Kost, 2025; UMA Technology, 2024). Always keep your devices up to date as much as possible; while you probably can't count on the manufacturer to give you more privacy, you can at least get their fixes to security vulnerabilities (UMA Technology, 2024). If you are curious as to what your devices are doing, you could monitor your network traffic with a program like Wireshark (UMA Technology, 2024; Henry & Long, 2019). Finally, if you have networking equipment that supports this, you could also segment your network and keep your smart devices on their own VLAN (UMA Technology, 2024). The key of course to using any smart device, whether you intend to use its smart functionality or intend to use it as a dumb device, is to do some research ahead of time before you buy it. It is likely impossible to completely avoid being spied on given how much we interact with internet connected technology in our daily lives but with some effort we can at least limit how much espionage is conducted upon us by the devices we use.

References

Franceschi-Bicchierai, L. (2021, Jan 11) ‘Your Cock Is Mine Now:’ Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom. Vice⇲

Henry, A & Long, E. (2019, Oct 28) How to Tap Your Network and See Everything That Happens On It. Lifehacker⇲

Jacobsson Purewal, S. (2024, Apr 16) Use your TV as a computer monitor: Everything you need to know. PCWorld⇲

Pudzer, D. (2022, Sept 29) Smart Gadgets Are Mostly Insecure. Washington University in St. Louis Office of Information Security⇲

Komando, K. (2019, June 20) When smart devices watch you, what do they do with the data? USA Today⇲

Kost, E (2025, Jan 2) What is UPnP? Yes, It's Still Dangerous in 2025. UpGuard⇲

Somers, J. (2023, Apr 13) How to Make Your Smart TV ‘Dumber’ (and Why You Should) Lifehacker⇲

Urwin, M. (2023, Dec 19) What is a Smart Device? Built In⇲

UMA Technology (2024, Dec 30) 10 Ways to Limit Smart Devices’ Access to Your Home Network. UMA⇲

A QR code to donate to the Third Person Perspective Zine A crossword puzzle entitled "Culture Cross KC" with the following clues: - An eight-letter word with the clue: "A community approach to support each other's needs" - An eleven-letter word with the clue: "Where is the proposed site of ICE detention center near Kansas City" - A fourteen-letter word with the clue: "The name for where Kansas City in the Osage Language" - A six-letter word with the clue: "What business builds jails in Kansas City?" - A ten-letter word with the clue: "What revolutionary cadre won back sovereign land in Mexico for indigenous peoples in 1994?" - A ten-letter word with the clue: "A tool used to stop arterial bleeding in an emergency?" - A four-letter word with the clue: "What organization receives the biggest portion of the Kansas City budget?" - A seven-letter word with the clue: "One of the indigenous nations who helped to facilitate the underground railroad in Kansas City" - An eleven-letter word with the clue: "What is the alleged name of the most infamous black female anarchist of early 20th-century Chicago?" - An eight-letter word with the clue: "The day we get to vote on the public safety sales tax renewal in KC - A ten-letter word with the clue: "The act of setting someone or yourself free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression"