Want to participate in a protest? You may want to do this with your tech before you go

I have covered more than 100 protests in my tenure as a general assignment news reporter, before turning my focus to tech. Most were peaceful, but I've been caught in the midst of the melee, too – pelted with rocks, tear-gassed, and attacked by extremists co-opting nonviolent marches to create chaos nonrelated to the cause. What I learned early on, long before the days of smartphones and social media, is that keeping track of what's going on – even along the same city block – can be next to impossible. Just gathering information, law enforcement would often tell me one thing, the protest organizers another, and dozens more leaders, marchers, and watchdog groups would say something totally different. Each new hour was often a tangled mess of conflicting information and I felt like – at the end of the day – the only truth I knew for certain, was what I had seen with my own two eyes.