> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool
on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an
infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS
queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a
commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session
logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s
signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that
had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with
Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson-
Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license
nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address
history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly
registered vehicles.
Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things. Now it seems they just gladly hand it over with a wide smile on their face. Am I the only one to notice this shift?
"Authoritarian capitalism is a system in which corporations ally themselves with repressive or anti-democratic political regimes, benefiting from protection and impunity."
Cloud equals not your computer, folks. Any cloud company can be legally subpoenaed and required to hand over any data they have, and they can also be legally gagged from telling anyone about it. Doesn't matter if they support it or not, they are a corporation subject to the laws of their jurisdiction and disobeying can expose the directors personally to civil or criminal penalties. Every corp will comply with a legal subpoena, and those are often easier to get than warrants.
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here? Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server? Buying hardware and colocating it then getting permanently blacklisted from every datacenter when they get raided?
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house. Your use of someone else's machine doesn't, especially when they voluntarily give up your info.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
>Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here?
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
1) we must get an actual warrant in a lot of different physical jurisdictions across the country all with different judges and then spend the money and availability to send physical meat agents to said locations, often rural and remote, across the country to an unknown physical situation with at least some areas where people might shoot at us, and all equipment needed for that, and will by definition have to disclose everything to our targets
vs
2) an agent can comfortably from their central office chair use a preexisting automated system to a central cloud portal to demand info secretly from companies that will just comply without any question
Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.
And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
It's a realistic goal, for now. There's probably still time, a year or two. If things go really bad, there may be a sudden outflux of refugees or whatever you want to call and it could get really difficult to get a job and a visa abroad.
History suggests this is a short-term solution, not even a medium-term solution.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
"technical and network-activity records from fly.io included:
SSH session logs (CSV format) listing multiple "New SSH session" entries for <redacted> with verified=true between approximately 2026-03-26 and 2026-04-01, timestamped in UTC.
outbound-connection records (CSV format) reflecting numerous TCP port 443 connections originating from internal fly.io addresses <redacted> to external IP addresses attributed to AMAZON-02 (Amazon Web Services) in the US and Cloudflarenet (Cloudflare)".
Yea, I thought the whole Lavabit episode made it clear that privacy oriented solutions based in the US were going to have a hard time. Most Proton’s whole selling point is their location.
However on page 8 the document states that these "session logs" don't record commands, they're just audit logs of when, where, by whom the sessions were initiated.
Of course not, but that's a separate problem that I didn't treat. It was about the ability to make that choice, I don't think that that my choice should be respected is a controversial statement worth debating.
Especially the idea that somehow Fly.io wouldn't keep track of which IP is signing up for service - kind of important, constantly, for CSAM investigations and the like.
If you're doing anything in the freedom fighter vein of activity, why would you be connecting directly to anything from your IP? Why are you not bouncing around through VPNs, TOR exit nodes, and the like? I know not everyone is a skilled freedom fighter, and even skilled freedom fighters make mistakes, but isn't this like step one to not connect directly from your IP?
CSAM investigation is used as the rationale for all sorts of unrelated searches, see the grapheneOS duress password case where they took a protestors phone because they made up that they were investigating CP
All of your comments are coming up as [dead]. I vouched and upvoted your first one shortly after you posted it, I think that's probably why you couldn't edit it anymore.
the most annoying part is that i got no indication that i was suddenly shadowbanned. if someone didn't tell me, it would have probably been a day or two at least of wondering why i had no engagement on my comments.
no notification, no appeal system outside of email and pray. very cool system.
Define letting? The political system has de-criminalized vote buying by re-branding the bribers as 'lobbyists' and protecting it as a 1st Amendment right. Even Guilfoyle's controversy was asking for 100k to her Amex account from a "lobbyist". In most countries it's a jailable offense.
This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."
Even worse the Supreme Court has actively made it quite difficult to pursue bribery cases recently basically requiring the parties to be stupid enough to put in writing "I will pay you X to vote Y on Z" and then "This is the payment for your vote that would not have happened if you had not voted Y on Z".
And the Supreme Court did this because the Republican Justices were caught accepting bribes. It's become just another corrupt Republican institution, the same as the Presidency and Congress.
Don't you get it?! What if a restaurant had a QR code and I had to ask the waiter what to eat? Or what if I had to pay more for a TV? Or WORSE -- not watch TV? I have to be comfortable and and everything must be convenient ALL THE TIME. I love the 4th amendment, but the MOMENT I suffer even the most minor inconvenience I MUST throw the 4th amendment out the window. Don't you see I have no choice?
Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.
That and a nice slight of hand. When they coupled that with a clear removal of corporate ethics, "a business' ONLY responsibility is to its shareholders" and then removed the barriers between the private and public sector (mostly via Citizen's United)... private sector effectively just became the public sector without any accountability.
Now they can just chip away at whatever regulation is left, and create mistrust in oversight bodies and the rigging of the game is complete.
Better than communism, the government hardly even has to pretend to work for the benefit of the people, because the wealth imbalance has a closed circuit of money between private entities and elections. They can bring suitcases of cash, walk in the front door literally holding a chainsaw and prune off every olive branch extended toward the citizens.
These election "investments" are clearly paying off at high multiples now. Why spend your money in a capitalist competition when you can more efficiently spend it in public elections to eliminate competition, divert tax revenue directly into your businesses and eliminate any responsibility you should have? Do a Nazi salute for the whole world to see, and watch the propagandized twist themselves into whatever shape pretzel you ask them to.
How are we gonna get them to do that? We have a choice between two parties each propped up by trillions of dollars in donations that are both cool with selling our data.
This isn’t “both sides” stuff. We, the constituents, seem to have very little input on what values our parties represent anymore. We just get to pick the one we like best. This has gotten worse in my lifetime, esp after Citizen’s United.
I’m voting against the face eating leopard party every time. I’m not voting for someone. I would like very much to be voting for someone instead of against someone.
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
>And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
Trump famously won without having the largest donors. He only had 1 big backer (Robert Mercer) in 2016 before the Republican primaries, he was assumed to be a joke candidate. After he won the primaries, he finally got some recognition from the establishment, but even then, they were tepid on investing in him because he was assumed to lose the election.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
I guess you can pretend Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, dozens of house reps and thousands of Democratic legisltators in statehouses and towns around the country don't exist and just vote for the "party that lowered my taxes" again , right?
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who care in our government, it’s just that the political machines themselves — the political parties — are beholden to big corporate donors until such time that Citizen’s United is struck down.
You aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean that ranking candidates and then choosing the one that is more aligned with your ideas isn't a valid strategy. This system is deeply broken but pointing that out and then putting a period on the end helps ensure it stays that way.
Warren? Come on. She is a TEXTBOOK example of someone who was a real person who arguably had morals who sold her soul to the party for a fancy title. Obama should have made her head of the CFPB since that was her pet project and career specialty. But no, everything "worked out better" for the machine if she just became an unremarkable senator.
There's no "selling" of data. These are just connection logs kept as part of routine auditing/anti-spam/anti-abuse practice by the ISP (something we all agree here is a good thing). And ICE appears to have gotten a warrant for them, which showed them the personal IPs of their targets.
You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.
But why is ICE, specifically, investigating that? The Federal government has multiple criminal divisions - why are ICE now a US Citizen criminal investigatory branch too? Seems far outside of their remit.
Yes - the question has always been whether that is a good reason for a new, big federal organization to expand its surveillance capabilities, budget, and prosecution powers.
As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.
The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.
If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.
The framing applied here in this comment is very odd. People are allowed to organize and assemble.
One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just trigger a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.
DNS, too. I imagine they weren't using their ISP's DNS server, as that could cut out needing a bunch of this data, but then I wonder what data they did get from whatever DNS provider...
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.
Immigration in the US has always been more complicated than "no papers? gotta go." Moving north to do some seasonal work then moving back south is a very old thing, and was enshrined into law by the "Bracero program" in the post ww2 era. In the 60s, however, it was ended abruptly, giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally. ... and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
As others have pointed out in the thread, those who slurp up the surplus value of the labor of these undocumented workers would hate to lose this leverage of "Oh you want the same rights American workers get? Don't want me making a phone call to my buddy over at the police department!"
You have to prove you are actually verifying these things and our government has done a pretty bad job at it. We have at this point hundreds of incidents of legal residents and citizens caught in this fascist net.
We have lots of laws that aren't meant to be followed 100% of the time. We don't ticket everyone who speeds. Even those who get caught are often let go with a verbal warning. Speed cameras that automatically send tickets are illegal in some places. Weed is still illegal at the federal level and in many states, but people aren't always prosecuted for small amounts for personal use, even when they get caught.
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
Because the business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything.
That response article (whether intentional or not, I can't say) horribly misunderstands and misrepresents the POSIWID axiom.
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
Should the consequence of speeding be forfeiture of your car and license?
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
You've connected to very unrelated things unjustifiably - Immigrants and criminals
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
It's a civil infraction, like a speeding ticket or a heavy equipment rebuilder that makes the mistake of painting a bunch of stuff with paint that doesn't meat whatever this years EPA VOC rules are.
A civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
> If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Real life isn’t so neat and tidy. Your comfort with treating your fellow humans with such cruelty if their situations aren’t in alignment with our existing clusterfuck of immigration laws speaks volumes about you. Be better.
The Bracero program was ended, but the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm labor remains active, with no numeric cap and hundreds of thousands of visas issued each year. I don't blame workers for making a living, but is there some reason why these business owners requiring seasonal labor could not obtain the proper visa for it?
> They can pay them less, treat them worse, then if there are any issues, deport them. It's very gross.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
Friction of paperwork. Not saying it's right, but it's a reason.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
Yes, again, I don't personally blame the employees. I think the vast majority of people who unlawfully immigrate to the US mean well. There's actually pretty broad agreement on that, despite the psychopaths running enforcement right now; CBP is still paying bonuses for voluntary departure.
It's actually better in many cases for businesses to hire undocumented workers, since it makes the workers position much more tenuous. They are much less like to unionize, demand higher pay, etc. if the threat of deportation is hanging over their head
I've never met a single person in real life that can't understand why illegal immigration is bad or that you have to be racist to think we shouldn't let the entire world in.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
Laws aren't moral. These laws are bad, and shouldn't be enforced. They should be changed, but we don't have the political will to do so, so "rounding up all the brown people and shipping them to Mexico" is not the second-best option.
Sure, but when 1 party blocks that continually due to racism (and kills programs put in place like DACA that help the situation), then funnels money to "law enforcement" specifically for the thing they helped make illegal, then it's fair to criticize the "law enforcement" as a tool of racist politics (and make no mistake, before anyone comes claiming racism isn't the reason for it, Stephen Miller has plenty of choice quotes stating that's exactly why he is pushing for ICE deportations).
Don't know why you think I don't understand that, I'm just pointing out that a law being a law doesn't shield racist people who support racist laws from being called racist.
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
It's more intellectually convenient to call people racists and push over the strawman than it is to deal with reality. This is American politics today in a nutshell.
I'd encourage you to read the entire last sentence of my comment and not focus on the racism part if it bothers you so much; there is a non-racist argument for deporting all illegal immigrants as well.
> Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
>Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
What are you talking about? Can we avoid the Reddit/twitter style of comment? If you have an argument or a point to make just make it.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
The point is that families didn't just evacuate when it turned into US territory. There are very strong ties to Mexico in the southwest that will never go away.
And what does it have to do with foreigners illegally coming to do these seasonal jobs? People who were here when it became US territory just became citizens.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
That’s an extreme take. What other laws do you think should be ignored? Traffic laws? Building codes? Tax laws?
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
That's a definition you just made up, which has no precedent and is clearly untrue.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
Given the high level of criminality of the current administration, are you a racist, a gullible mark, or an HSI agent handed a keyboard?
To folks reading along at home, please remember there are no serious debates with fascists, fascist adjacent, or fascist apologists. The ideology requires a foundation based on racial stereotypes and scapegoatism. The "real problem" to these people will always be the weakest and most ill equipped to fight back.
There will be fascist vanguards attempting to draw you into circular logic. Just remember, the scapegoats never have the power to direct the path of society. It's all slight of hand. They don't care about criminals, freeloaders, etc as it would require them to look inward at their own communities as well. They do not do that, as they do not actually care.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
Its too much work, we did violent rounding up of brown people to have images to re use for campaigns and now we can use the paramilitary force for chasing political dissidents like any normal democratic goverment would do.
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission, executing people is not.
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
I outright think deporting every person here undocumented now is not ethical, or beneficial to society, given the history of immigration and enforcement in this country.
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
I agree, but that is not for ICE to decide. Democrats should have fixed this a long time ago, USA isn't a one party state so if Democrats wanted to fix this they could have. But they too didn't want undocumented immigrants to gain full rights, it is very useful to have abusable second class citizens around for the upper classes.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
Of the half-dozen or so attempts at immigration reform in the past 25 years, every one of them has been blocked by Republicans.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
It’s also the federal government’s job to go around arresting everybody carrying or smoking weed, as it is still illegal no matter what any state says and every single person consuming it is a lawbreaker.
Every time the police gets to choose whether to apply a law or not you add more power to the police, I don't want the police to be more powerful.
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
The law is assumed to be in line with "protect America", it isn't up for ICE to decide that. If you think current laws are not protecting America then vote to change them.
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
The law dictates who can be deported, generally not who must be deported.
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
> Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
Sure but keep in mind that most of these people pay taxes into a system that they don't actually benefit from (social security for one), so by doing so you're actually causing more economic damage than you think you're fixing.
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
We have evidence now that they execute people without a criminal record.
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately
stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car,
thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists
manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
This should be obvious to anyone that has seen the videos from this incident. In any normal civilised country 10% of adult population would protest something like this next day in every city and town. Then those "agents" would be arrested and they would have a very public court case.
To be fair, this was obvious to many people who study domestic civil rights as early as the bill that originally created the DHS and ICE. For eg, this review from 2002:
>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.
>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.
It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.
While they both fall under DHS, you're confusing CBP with ICE.
CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.
While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.
ICE is rouge agency. They need to be disbanded. Fine if we still have an agency doing ICE work or whatever, but every single person employed by ICE needs to be fired, potentially prosecuted, definitely black listed from federal government work, and their funds returned for the blatant unconstitutional and dangerous use they've been put towards.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
Man, this is chilling. Between this and those "anti-ice" protestors that got a collective 450 years of jail time, it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
They're not hard to find. It's happening; it's not as widespread as it could be if it's allowed to continue. Put this into google: "federal agents intimidating people for posting social media comments".
If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
Sure, it's fine to complain, but calling it a "police state" just discredits you at this stage.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
> If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
"Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore."
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
An important characteristic of autocracy and fascism is there is no bottom: the government is targeting activists but you can still talk about it online; professors in Texas must submit their syllabus to AI censorship software to screen for discussions of sexuality, but they aren't being sent to the gulag; ...; people are free to go about their lives as long as they are "apolitical"; ...; Suharto's death squads have killed half a million "communists" but at least it's not 5 million, and it's mostly in the villages...
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
Add to that the weaponization of the justice department. Former FBI director Comey charged 3 times as retaliation, Senator Mark Kelly and other senators, even lowly aides such as Cassidy Hutchinson, all facing retaliation.
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.
All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )
All of this happening out in the open, no checks, no balances. Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.
Didn't they get 450 years of jail time (spread among nine people IIRC) for attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder?[0] If the start of your pattern of "police state levels of power, corruption and control" is people engaging in organized terrorism, (i.e. using violence for political ends) being convicted of terrorism offenses, then I guess I don't see it. Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
you're excusing a cold blooded murder. what is wrong with you? what has happened to your sense of humanity? they executed him while he was no danger to them. that's murder, not law enforcement. there is no legitimate excuse for it.
say it with me:
In the USA, government agents are not allowed to kill people for protesting. they're not allowed to kill people for being a mouthy lesbian. they're not allowed to kill people for provoking them, insulting them, or making them mad.
The way you frame the event is very misleading after reading the article.
I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.
I think in another universe where they just stood outside and shouted while holding signs and shooting up fireworks, then peaceably surrendered when when the cops came, they would get slaps on the wrist, maybe.
But instead a few of them had guns, and one of them decided to get into a shoot-off with the police.
You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people doing shit like that on federal property.
(the bodycams and security footage for this event are on youtube)
Small nitpick, but I believe this all happened on private, not federal, property. The ICE facility they were protesting at was a private company ICE was contracting with, not an actual federal building.
IIRC, people involved in this case made extremely telling comments about the political alignment of the protestors. They despise them either way, the guns are just used as pretext to elevate it to the next level, especially since the people among them who didn't have guns or do anything violent didn't escape the wrath. They almost certainly would not have gotten slaps on the wrist, those are reserved for 'our good boys'. They would have still gotten their lives ruined, just not in quite the same dramatic fashion with showy century-long sentences, but just the routine 'you're going away for a long time' treatment.
People are killed and maimed every year from Fourth of July fireworks. You're proving my point that these were LARPing revolutionaries who nevertheless engaged in real violence.
And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.
No, the fact that people occasionally get hurt by accident with fireworks does not make the violent subtext in "attacking a government building with explosives" a correct description of the situation.
So you admit that fireworks are known to cause death and severe bodily harm. What sort of prison sentence would be appropriate for attacking people with such devices?
And people who use water intentionally to cause death or serious harm should face harsh legal consequences.
In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?
Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.
His point, which you pretend to not understand, is that the bar needs to be higher. Both water and fireworks are fairly innocuous items, even though both can be used to inflict harm and even though fireworks can be more easily weaponized than water.
> Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
Unless of course your guy ends up in power again and offers you pardons and reparations.
Attacking a government building with explosives is a stretch. They had fireworks on July 4th to stage a noise protest outside of the detention facility which got out of hand. The issue is that the government's case for 'material support for terror' mostly hinged on them wearing black and all being members of a signal chat [1] and handed down extraordinarily harsh sentences.
The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].
The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.
In terms of absolute number of incarcerated persons, though, the US is ahead of everyone else by a country mile. Depending on which inmate pools you include or exclude, the US holds 20-25% of all incarcerated persons in the world.
Just remember that there is a child somewhere who saw their mum for the last time happily dropping them for school only to be shot by an ICE agent seconds after he called her a fucking bitch - and the agent faced no consequences for this. Every time I think about that kid my heart breaks. Every time I think about the cruelty of the system unwilling to at least put this one wrong right and prosecute the agent properly my heart breaks. What a unbelievably cruel world we live in.
Those 450 collective years of jail time was due to all of the firearms they brought, running away from the scene, shooting at the facility, and lying to law enforcement. I'm all for protesting, but this is not the hill you want to die on as your "chilling" moment.
Firearms are legal in Texas. One person committed violence. Others got 50 years for being at the same protest. Another got 30 years for picking up his own box of zines.
The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.
The 2nd amendment is an absolute and utter bullshit against tyranny. In fact it is a method to make ordinary people not engage in peaceful protest when it is needed most.
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).
It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).
It's more a self reinforcing side-effect of a withering democracy than the cause. The rhetoric from the far right keeps implying that we're much closer to a single party state than the current election cycle suggests and they have proven themselves to be weak predictors of outcomes they don't directly control so I'm sure more shenanigans will be revealed shortly.
State resources and armed officers are all part of a political stance. If you don't recognise it it's because they are on your side. But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
It’s so cute that some people imagine the armed forces and police were on the other side or are on their side. If you’re average Joe, the police in a tyrannical state are never on your “side”.
The police never but historically the military is less predictable. Militaries have their own cultures & norms, separate ideas of and sources of prestige & reward, commitment to the military as a valuable institution in its own right etc. Officers are also educated and high ranking ones are powerful political actors within their own domain in way almost no police are. This can really change their relationship and susceptibility to power and political influence.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.
Well, no, but you could have the very rude awakening that the in-group that you thought you were part of is suddenly now more narrowly defined than you had deluded yourself into believing. “I’m one of the good ones” quickly receives the response “there are no good ones” once the dominoes start to fall. The curse of reactionary politics is that it always crumbles under its own weight of an ever-narrowing definition of the in-group.
It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."
Entities like the courts and law enforcement optimize for the retention of people who do what they're told and the turnover of those who have their own principals. And this is before you account for the fact that most people will do what they're told before they threaten their paycheck.
Our armed officers first and foremost protect capital. The constitution is what limits their conduct in that pursuit. I don’t believe that in a capitalist society any alternative is possible.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.
They've never done what they're "supposed" to do, though. While maybe not so egregious in the past, these eager violations from the police apparatus are a large part of why I'm an abolitionist.
Why is this being voted down? This is fundamentally how states and governance work. The state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, and can, at any moment, make that a problem for its citizenry.
Both-sides-ism is probably the single worst stance to take here. You're tacitly siding with whoever actually holds and wields the power. Not caring which one wins isn't helping anyone at all, even you.
That's not actually true, though. In some sense all governments are posessed of "weapons" like this, the cost of use being only the violation of some norm. Or even law. The "rule of law" is a gentelemen's agreement at its core. Yet the world is filled with basically good governments who broadly follow that code!
So the way you treat that is by calling out and resisting the attempts to weaponize the government in new ways, not just throwing up your hands because it was "eventually" going to be used anyway. No, it's bad. You should say that it's bad and take action to oppose it.
If you're not American, then you should consider before commenting that you may be missing important context. The allegiance of US federal law enforcement agencies does not switch on a moment's notice or even follow electoral control of the government; one example of this you can easily verify is that the director of the FBI is always a Republican.
Both sides argument are springing up like weeds all over the various forums in the last couple weeks before a predicted major shift in Congress.
If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.
When, in the history of the U.S., have police forces ever been on the left?
Heck, historically the cops have even broken up peaceful union protests, despite being in unions themselves, throwing away all class solidarity in favor of their right wing leanings.
And the police unions have uniquely been extremely right wing, other than during rare highly localized conditions (often involving the democratic candidate being center right at least).
How are the actions of the feds at Waco and Ruby Ridge "left"? Authoritarian, yes, but supporting collectivism, shared ownership, etc? Nothing at all left wing about their actions.
I keep seeing that subreddit mentioned in a context that appears trying to push those against this to violent solutions. Almost as if it is an attempt at driving some sort of stochastic action.
Go join your local Pink Pistols/Brown Berets/SRA/whatever chapter.
The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.
The people who would normally argue "but muh 2A!" are either applying to be on ICE, are on ICE, or just support what they're doing, completely oblivious to the obvious.
The #1 reason sighted by 2nd amendment loyalists for needing such liberal gun rights is to protect us all from government overreach. I assume that's what he means.
turns out, they’re into it. they were in favor of it in the 60’s and still are.
the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.
The same political groups that support hate speech laws are now looking for support from the freedom of speech groups? That sounds like a temporary alliance at best. They aren't going to support you long term because they know leftists are authoritarians of a different color. AKA your rhetoric isn't going to work because you have no principles and they do.
I see you brought up the freedom of speech group, but didn't address the potential implications of other similarly important groups such as fursuit afficianados and PETA and, most egregiously, the Taylor Swift fandom.
Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.
Previously, they claimed they stand with nazi solely for free speech of everyone purposes, not because they would share the oppressive authoritarian ideology of nazi.
If that was true, that is why.
Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.
Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.
I read the article and the facts don't match up with the title. The thesis is actually
The Minnesota 15 case is the clearest example yet of DHS pursuing the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on what have long been upheld as First Amendment–protected activities
But did the Minnesota 15 commit actual crimes? There's lots of hyperbole "15 terabytes of data" but in the end it centers on investigations into the Minnesota 15 and doesn't answer this question. The Minnesota 15 are not accused of ordinary protest. The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes it just went on and on about investigative capabilities of HSI.
Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is opposed to democracy.
For me it wasn't so much that he was the only one to vote against it, as it was that when he did vote against it the people of his state promptly replaced him with a more Law and Order senator.
In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
Let's put aside whether or not surveillance is necessary.
The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.
The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.
ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.
No, the surveillance is at the core here. People love making pro-surveillance arguments in this same vein by just asserting that there can exist a world where everyone is surveilled but the usage of surveillance is checked and will never cross any line.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
I am not making a pro-surveillance argument, though. I am merely stating there are malicious concerns that if left unaddressed will continue to be malicious irrespective of any technology.
I understand, this is why I said that the same line of reasoning is used in pro-surveilance arguments, not that yours was necessarily one of them. I agree that the concerns outside surveillance are also very real, I'm just saying that surveillance itself isn't an ideology-agnostic tool that's at the whims of its users, the technology itself inherently will always motivate all those other malicious actors and should not exist.
I agree with your second paragraph, but disagree with the first.
Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.
The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.
Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.
So, what are the harms? This is the very first question that comes up in any form of judicial review. If there exists vast increases of surveillance and law enforcement is forbidden from using it is there still a harm? There absolutely could be, but that is what must be addressed to provide the proper regulation.
The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.
Great. So when the dems get back in power they can go after all the far right militant movements that are armed to the teeth and breaking countless laws?
Ya this is the big lie 2Aers are bought into, turns out being able to organize is as important or more than just having a bunch of guns and a ooh-rah attitude. And as you can see from article the government will be there if you start acting in a way the admin disapprove of
You have the power to stop them. There are plenty of technical opportunities out there and every internal security memo with your hn handle on it is another piece of grear they can't use and time they've wasted ratcheting their own paranoia.
I change countries a lot and my default assumption for any new country is that overstaying your visa will be treated seriously, resulting in something like immediate detention (in a very lousy environment), probably a fine, and near-immediate deportation (at your expense), and probably some sort of quite serious ban (probably greater than merely months). And that's if the individual has a clean record; I'd expect it to significantly less benign otherwise.
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
Even ignoring the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that behaves thuggishly and routinely lies to judges, the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws. Suddenly enforcing them as written would fundamentally not work. It would be cruel, since the people you've effectively let live here for decades are now parents of American citizens who have the right to live here. It would also be self-destructive, because large parts of the country function because of the labor of those individuals. Despite the fact that Trump's administration is full of people who advocate remigration (ethnic cleansing), the pro-business parts of his administration have made a lot of concessions to avoid deporting so many people that they'll disrupt farming (though there's been a lot more than 0 disruption).
This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).
Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
Got it. So distain is more for ICE's thuggish approach than the laws/consequences themselves.
To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.
But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had many).
I lived in Australia for a year during COVID. It's surrounded by water and doesn't have thousand-mile long borders to any country. Controlling entry is not the same logistical problem as controlling entry to the US.
That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.
The majority of my concern has to do with tactics, yes.
The other issue is intent.
I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.
Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.
I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.
> They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.
It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.
And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.
There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.
First off, there is a difference between “I come from a decent country and therefor have no real reason to take the risk of illegally immigrating somewhere” and "My country is very, very bad (possibly in not small part due to country X), and moving to country X illegally is less risky for my life and family than staying here". We tend to have at least some empathy for people in the second scenario.
But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.
Helping refugees makes sense, but should existing laws be changed or broken? (there's a big difference). It feels like many smart people are advocating the latter, which appears at odds with their behaviour and attitudes in most other domains (i.e. law abiding). Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
The first world is not a foster home for unwanted people from other nations. We can and should be selective of who we let in. We don't need to bleed ourselves dry because some other countries are shitty.
Also on America being built by immigrants, who cares? Honestly, that really doesn't matter. Just because America was founded by immigrants then doesn't mean we need to let in unlimited immigrants now.
The 15 people charged in the case this story is about were not overstaying their visa; they were protesting ICE after ICE killed a US citizen in Minnesota.
ChatGPT can you take the sentiment “Why haven’t immigrants just tried not being poor? Are they stupid?” and dress it up as intellectual so I can get upvotes on Hacker News? Make it personal and anecdotal. Thanks.
Snideness aside, your argument is that laws ought not apply to someone who is poor.
That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If a law can only possibly impact the poor, then that law is effectively written to impact the poor - the purpose of a law is what it does.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
Because seemingly only in the U.S. the legislature hasn’t meaningfully passed significant new legislation, making the immigration law out of date. A lot of intelligent people voted for Obama, and Obama created DACA, which says overstaying your visa as a child is fine and results in “deferred” deportation. Hence a lot of leftists think visa rules in the U.S. are so outdated that violating them is fine. IMO Obama made a careful calculation to degrade the sanctity of immigration laws to avoid hardship on a million people; it was a good idea on humanitarian grounds but it did open a large can of worms.
As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.
For decades the US has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration because of how much profits agribusiness and construction makes from it. It wasn't an Obama thing, but spanned several presidents and both parties.
That's what the H-2a program is. Many employers have avoided using it because it gives labor actual rights, requires an above-minimum wage, and includes free housing. All of those provisions are currently being gutted though.
Because some people have to have their opinions on things be reaffirmed by how it maps to coordinates on the cultural battle map.
Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.
Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.
ICE is not enforcing the law, they are in fact regularly breaking the law. Judges said so, repeatedly. And ICE threw middle finger. Breaking the law is the literal intentional strategy of ICE. They also mistreat people who are in the country legally, who are citizens and committed no crimes.
Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.
You won't get much traction with the "shouldn't people follow the law" angle. The far left is running rampant with the idea that laws only apply to them if they agree with them.
You should look up the two guys who viciously attacked armed police officers in Manchester Airport in the UK, all on video. Incredibly they were out almost immediately, police officers were up for firing and the trial dragged out for months ending in a pretty lenient sentence. In that case the new UK "two tier" justice kicked in where thanks to crazy far-left thinking, there is now consideration of race in whether something was illegal and what the punishment should be.
Without a doubt this direction will be the downfall of the west. Which is probably the idea from those financing all this "grass roots" protesting and law breaking.
I am from the US and the headline is accurate. Not “the largest,” but “one of the largest.” We’ve been here before. The question is does it get kneecapped or does it spin out of control?
> Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
Not really the bent of the article, but it's also worth pointing out that this shows some really terrible opsec practice by the activists in question. Like, no, you don't just spin up a cloud server to coordinate your protest activity and then ssh into it from your home IP. Dude...
I'm having flashbacks to when I was in high school in the 1970's while Nixon was at the height of his powers.
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
It is eerily similar to the 1930s era in central Europe.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should
never be confused with having an agenda other than
fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or
Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power
to their cronies.
What gets me is how much of this stuff is just bought, not built. Agencies can purchase location and social media data from brokers and skip the warrant step entirely, so I'd honestly put more energy into closing that loophole than into fighting any one agency.
anti-left sure, but more like "anti everyone who isn't part of a small set of VERY far right movements by general western standards, many affected people just don't know about it yet or are willful ignorant about it"
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
I remember as a 14 year old (2004) thinking about how I'd make sites like TPB or 4chan without getting it shut down, a place that anyone could speak freely. Then Kim Dotcom happened, and even Lavabit, and I'm sure many others.
It's a thankless thing, but we need more people who are willing to just do it. Now I know some of you will point out that Kim Dotcom was hosting movies, shows, music, etc. That's not my point, look at HOW they took him down, and WHEN. They were trying to pass SOPA, claiming it would help them take down people like Kim Dotcom "because they couldn't" so what they did to Kim Dotcom was questionable from a legal perspective...
Sigh. I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones) it was much nicer.
The evidence will remain in ssh logs and such. That is part of why it got posted here. This political struggle has gone technical and we're all involved.
"How dare they monitor my violent terrorist actions. We only shot 3 people at an immigration facility. We only organized a massive law enforcement interference campaign. How DARE THEY".. Leftists will always use your principles against you. They don't care about the second amendment. They want you to care about it so they can bully you into allowing them to be violent and gain political power. Give me the down votes I don't care. Leftists are insane and nuance is lost on their utopian beliefs.
You will fail to achieve anything if you mentally approach these things from a partisan view (like all the comments, general public).
ICE should not be running surveillance Ops on Left activists or immigrants and the FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters.
The tools violate all of our rights full stop. Please don't support this garbage again when Dems sweep into power, trying to debank ppl for X tweets etc.
> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson- Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly registered vehicles.
Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!
The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.
Seems like it was fly.io, since they got the user IP from there and it would make sense they would have the session logs.
tptacek oddly silent here...
He doesn't work there anymore I'm told.
Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things. Now it seems they just gladly hand it over with a wide smile on their face. Am I the only one to notice this shift?
"Authoritarian capitalism is a system in which corporations ally themselves with repressive or anti-democratic political regimes, benefiting from protection and impunity."
Cloud equals not your computer, folks. Any cloud company can be legally subpoenaed and required to hand over any data they have, and they can also be legally gagged from telling anyone about it. Doesn't matter if they support it or not, they are a corporation subject to the laws of their jurisdiction and disobeying can expose the directors personally to civil or criminal penalties. Every corp will comply with a legal subpoena, and those are often easier to get than warrants.
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here? Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server? Buying hardware and colocating it then getting permanently blacklisted from every datacenter when they get raided?
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house. Your use of someone else's machine doesn't, especially when they voluntarily give up your info.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
>Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here?
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
vs Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
Fix your country.
I'm not saying it's easy, but the straightforward solution is to move
To a country without brownshirts you mean?
Yes, exactly.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
It's a realistic goal, for now. There's probably still time, a year or two. If things go really bad, there may be a sudden outflux of refugees or whatever you want to call and it could get really difficult to get a job and a visa abroad.
History suggests this is a short-term solution, not even a medium-term solution.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
probably use tor and nothing tied to your identity
Even safer to say nothing, wear your MAGA cap and watch Fox.
Same goes for most ISPs, which are needed to connect to the Internet.
indeed, the actual case report (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28831278-govuscourts...) states:
"technical and network-activity records from fly.io included:
SSH session logs (CSV format) listing multiple "New SSH session" entries for <redacted> with verified=true between approximately 2026-03-26 and 2026-04-01, timestamped in UTC.
outbound-connection records (CSV format) reflecting numerous TCP port 443 connections originating from internal fly.io addresses <redacted> to external IP addresses attributed to AMAZON-02 (Amazon Web Services) in the US and Cloudflarenet (Cloudflare)".
Yea, I thought the whole Lavabit episode made it clear that privacy oriented solutions based in the US were going to have a hard time. Most Proton’s whole selling point is their location.
And that they'll let you register even when connected to tor.
However on page 8 the document states that these "session logs" don't record commands, they're just audit logs of when, where, by whom the sessions were initiated.
Darned if you do, darned if you don't.
If there's a hack, HN will say, "How could Fly.io not be keeping logs? Malpractice!"
If there's a warrant, HN will say, "How could Fly.io be keeping logs? Malpractice!"
Choose whether you want logs when creating your instance? Good practice.
Okay, then the service running on Fly gets hacked, and gets the same blame.
"They don't know who hacked them? Malpractice. What if it was the government?"
You dont seriously believe if you check a box that says "keep no logs!" they will.. not keep any logs?
Of course not, but that's a separate problem that I didn't treat. It was about the ability to make that choice, I don't think that that my choice should be respected is a controversial statement worth debating.
Especially the idea that somehow Fly.io wouldn't keep track of which IP is signing up for service - kind of important, constantly, for CSAM investigations and the like.
If you're doing anything in the freedom fighter vein of activity, why would you be connecting directly to anything from your IP? Why are you not bouncing around through VPNs, TOR exit nodes, and the like? I know not everyone is a skilled freedom fighter, and even skilled freedom fighters make mistakes, but isn't this like step one to not connect directly from your IP?
Yes, to a freedom fighter software developer. Good news for law enforcement agencies, only 0.5% of the population is a software developer.
CSAM investigation is used as the rationale for all sorts of unrelated searches, see the grapheneOS duress password case where they took a protestors phone because they made up that they were investigating CP
What about "it's not Fly.io and it's more about how the Fourth Amendment is effectively neutered in our dystopian, socially regressive era."
for some reason, the above comment wont let me edit it (despite it being a minute old). but i was going to add:
"i wonder if fly.io bothers to vet/challenge records requests or if they just hand data over".
(this one can be edited, though. very strange)
All of your comments are coming up as [dead]. I vouched and upvoted your first one shortly after you posted it, I think that's probably why you couldn't edit it anymore.
huh... shadowban of some sort because they aren't appearing as [dead] on my side. not sure what rule i broke, but okay.
thanks dang/tomhow.
fwiw I'm seeing these comments.
yeah, they were vouched for. but, for example, others were not and are still hidden (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273618). and apparently this one, too.
the most annoying part is that i got no indication that i was suddenly shadowbanned. if someone didn't tell me, it would have probably been a day or two at least of wondering why i had no engagement on my comments.
no notification, no appeal system outside of email and pray. very cool system.
America is crazy, why are you letting people sell your data like this?
Define letting? The political system has de-criminalized vote buying by re-branding the bribers as 'lobbyists' and protecting it as a 1st Amendment right. Even Guilfoyle's controversy was asking for 100k to her Amex account from a "lobbyist". In most countries it's a jailable offense.
This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."
Does this answer your question sufficiently?
Even worse the Supreme Court has actively made it quite difficult to pursue bribery cases recently basically requiring the parties to be stupid enough to put in writing "I will pay you X to vote Y on Z" and then "This is the payment for your vote that would not have happened if you had not voted Y on Z".
And the Supreme Court did this because the Republican Justices were caught accepting bribes. It's become just another corrupt Republican institution, the same as the Presidency and Congress.
I don't know what this has to do with the topic, but buying votes is more transparent now. They offered $5,000 for every adult if they win.
Don't you get it?! What if a restaurant had a QR code and I had to ask the waiter what to eat? Or what if I had to pay more for a TV? Or WORSE -- not watch TV? I have to be comfortable and and everything must be convenient ALL THE TIME. I love the 4th amendment, but the MOMENT I suffer even the most minor inconvenience I MUST throw the 4th amendment out the window. Don't you see I have no choice?
Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.
That and a nice slight of hand. When they coupled that with a clear removal of corporate ethics, "a business' ONLY responsibility is to its shareholders" and then removed the barriers between the private and public sector (mostly via Citizen's United)... private sector effectively just became the public sector without any accountability.
Now they can just chip away at whatever regulation is left, and create mistrust in oversight bodies and the rigging of the game is complete.
Better than communism, the government hardly even has to pretend to work for the benefit of the people, because the wealth imbalance has a closed circuit of money between private entities and elections. They can bring suitcases of cash, walk in the front door literally holding a chainsaw and prune off every olive branch extended toward the citizens.
These election "investments" are clearly paying off at high multiples now. Why spend your money in a capitalist competition when you can more efficiently spend it in public elections to eliminate competition, divert tax revenue directly into your businesses and eliminate any responsibility you should have? Do a Nazi salute for the whole world to see, and watch the propagandized twist themselves into whatever shape pretzel you ask them to.
How are we gonna get them to do that? We have a choice between two parties each propped up by trillions of dollars in donations that are both cool with selling our data.
We need to fight back against this type of both-sidesism and other demoralization propaganda on HN.
This isn’t “both sides” stuff. We, the constituents, seem to have very little input on what values our parties represent anymore. We just get to pick the one we like best. This has gotten worse in my lifetime, esp after Citizen’s United.
I’m voting against the face eating leopard party every time. I’m not voting for someone. I would like very much to be voting for someone instead of against someone.
It’s pretty pervasive and there’s plenty of tacit and overt support for Republicans here.
Are both parties not driven by their largest donors?
Yes and no
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
>And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
Trump famously won without having the largest donors. He only had 1 big backer (Robert Mercer) in 2016 before the Republican primaries, he was assumed to be a joke candidate. After he won the primaries, he finally got some recognition from the establishment, but even then, they were tepid on investing in him because he was assumed to lose the election.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
Sure, there are third parties. It just that people associate that with wasted votes.
There's a secret third political option, but it's usually frowned upon.
Labor organizing?
> both cool with selling our data.
I guess you can pretend Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, dozens of house reps and thousands of Democratic legisltators in statehouses and towns around the country don't exist and just vote for the "party that lowered my taxes" again , right?
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who care in our government, it’s just that the political machines themselves — the political parties — are beholden to big corporate donors until such time that Citizen’s United is struck down.
You aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean that ranking candidates and then choosing the one that is more aligned with your ideas isn't a valid strategy. This system is deeply broken but pointing that out and then putting a period on the end helps ensure it stays that way.
Warren? Come on. She is a TEXTBOOK example of someone who was a real person who arguably had morals who sold her soul to the party for a fancy title. Obama should have made her head of the CFPB since that was her pet project and career specialty. But no, everything "worked out better" for the machine if she just became an unremarkable senator.
There's no "selling" of data. These are just connection logs kept as part of routine auditing/anti-spam/anti-abuse practice by the ISP (something we all agree here is a good thing). And ICE appears to have gotten a warrant for them, which showed them the personal IPs of their targets.
You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.
America is a backwards country where unless something is explicitly illegal, apparently it's totally okay to engage in said thing.
In 2026 illegal just means it’s negotiable if you have access to the trump admin
I keep pushing the big "make it illegal to sell US citizens' data and arrest anyone who breaks that law" button on my wall here but nothing happens
> America is crazy, why are you letting people sell your data like this?
Because of FUD spread about data protection laws… such as the GDPR?
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t this in response to a massive organized anti-ICE operation?
Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
But why is ICE, specifically, investigating that? The Federal government has multiple criminal divisions - why are ICE now a US Citizen criminal investigatory branch too? Seems far outside of their remit.
Yes - the question has always been whether that is a good reason for a new, big federal organization to expand its surveillance capabilities, budget, and prosecution powers.
As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.
Regardless of the current administration there is no world where the government has shown restraint in surveillance creep.
People protesting in the United States?!?!? Unthinkable
This makes it better why?
I have no idea, but why would that change anything?
The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.
If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.
The framing applied here in this comment is very odd. People are allowed to organize and assemble.
One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just trigger a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.
They never tell the full story…
DNS, too. I imagine they weren't using their ISP's DNS server, as that could cut out needing a bunch of this data, but then I wonder what data they did get from whatever DNS provider...
They might mean SSH TCP traffic logs, maybe?
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.
Could they not deport the ones without a criminal record as well?
Immigration in the US has always been more complicated than "no papers? gotta go." Moving north to do some seasonal work then moving back south is a very old thing, and was enshrined into law by the "Bracero program" in the post ww2 era. In the 60s, however, it was ended abruptly, giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally. ... and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
As others have pointed out in the thread, those who slurp up the surplus value of the labor of these undocumented workers would hate to lose this leverage of "Oh you want the same rights American workers get? Don't want me making a phone call to my buddy over at the police department!"
The purpose of a system is what it does.
You have to prove you are actually verifying these things and our government has done a pretty bad job at it. We have at this point hundreds of incidents of legal residents and citizens caught in this fascist net.
There are visas for seasonal work and farm work though? J1/j2 afaik?
What is the point of having laws if you’re just going to let criminals break them and then stay?
We have lots of laws that aren't meant to be followed 100% of the time. We don't ticket everyone who speeds. Even those who get caught are often let go with a verbal warning. Speed cameras that automatically send tickets are illegal in some places. Weed is still illegal at the federal level and in many states, but people aren't always prosecuted for small amounts for personal use, even when they get caught.
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
Because the business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
That response article (whether intentional or not, I can't say) horribly misunderstands and misrepresents the POSIWID axiom.
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
That's a good point. The USA has many counterproductive restrictions on immigration which should be repealed.
Why have speed limits if everyone is going to speed. There are systems where selective enforcement works for more parties than is immediately obvious.
Should the consequence of speeding be forfeiture of your car and license?
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
You've connected to very unrelated things unjustifiably - Immigrants and criminals
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
>It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
If it is not a crime, then what is it?
It's a civil infraction, like a speeding ticket or a heavy equipment rebuilder that makes the mistake of painting a bunch of stuff with paint that doesn't meat whatever this years EPA VOC rules are.
A civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
Of course immigrants should follow the legal process and illegal immigrants are called that rightfully so.
If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
> If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Real life isn’t so neat and tidy. Your comfort with treating your fellow humans with such cruelty if their situations aren’t in alignment with our existing clusterfuck of immigration laws speaks volumes about you. Be better.
The Bracero program was ended, but the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm labor remains active, with no numeric cap and hundreds of thousands of visas issued each year. I don't blame workers for making a living, but is there some reason why these business owners requiring seasonal labor could not obtain the proper visa for it?
They can pay them less, treat them worse, then if there are any issues, deport them. It's very gross.
> They can pay them less, treat them worse, then if there are any issues, deport them. It's very gross.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
Friction of paperwork. Not saying it's right, but it's a reason.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
Yes, again, I don't personally blame the employees. I think the vast majority of people who unlawfully immigrate to the US mean well. There's actually pretty broad agreement on that, despite the psychopaths running enforcement right now; CBP is still paying bonuses for voluntary departure.
It's actually better in many cases for businesses to hire undocumented workers, since it makes the workers position much more tenuous. They are much less like to unionize, demand higher pay, etc. if the threat of deportation is hanging over their head
I've never met a single person in real life that can't understand why illegal immigration is bad or that you have to be racist to think we shouldn't let the entire world in.
That doesn't explain why ICE were notorious for rounding up people attending immigration hearings.
Th policy has just been struck down, but we'll see whether that makes a practical difference.
IME ICE are simply a death squad. Immigration is a pretext.
The goal is political terror against regime opponents, not a rational and proportional response to people without paperwork.
> giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally
Are you serious? The choice for them was to go back to their home countries.
> and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
Um?
> The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
It only becomes a crime once you're formally deported
Laws aren't moral. These laws are bad, and shouldn't be enforced. They should be changed, but we don't have the political will to do so, so "rounding up all the brown people and shipping them to Mexico" is not the second-best option.
Change the laws.
Sure, but when 1 party blocks that continually due to racism (and kills programs put in place like DACA that help the situation), then funnels money to "law enforcement" specifically for the thing they helped make illegal, then it's fair to criticize the "law enforcement" as a tool of racist politics (and make no mistake, before anyone comes claiming racism isn't the reason for it, Stephen Miller has plenty of choice quotes stating that's exactly why he is pushing for ICE deportations).
Welcome to democracy.
Don't know why you think I don't understand that, I'm just pointing out that a law being a law doesn't shield racist people who support racist laws from being called racist.
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
It's more intellectually convenient to call people racists and push over the strawman than it is to deal with reality. This is American politics today in a nutshell.
I'd encourage you to read the entire last sentence of my comment and not focus on the racism part if it bothers you so much; there is a non-racist argument for deporting all illegal immigrants as well.
It's worse to call out racism than it is be racist. This is American politics today in a nutshell. Your turn.
> it was ended abruptly, giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally
Or they could have "moved back south" like you said, and stayed there.
Since this "program" was ended it sounds like it should be as simple as "no papers? gotta go".
Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
> Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
>Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
"for that wage."
This is wage suppresion you're supporting.
it's always funny the mental and grammatical gymnastic people will go through just to not say "but who will pick the cotton??!!"
It's almost as if the entire southwest used to be Mexico.
Ukraine used to be the USSR too.
What are you talking about? Can we avoid the Reddit/twitter style of comment? If you have an argument or a point to make just make it.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
The point is that families didn't just evacuate when it turned into US territory. There are very strong ties to Mexico in the southwest that will never go away.
And what does it have to do with foreigners illegally coming to do these seasonal jobs? People who were here when it became US territory just became citizens.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
That’s an extreme take. What other laws do you think should be ignored? Traffic laws? Building codes? Tax laws?
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
>A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders.
A state*
A nation is a people with common identity, culture, language, history, etc (see first nations, stateless nations, etc)
That's a definition you just made up, which has no precedent and is clearly untrue.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
> What other laws do you think should be ignored?
Given the high level of criminality of the current administration, are you a racist, a gullible mark, or an HSI agent handed a keyboard?
To folks reading along at home, please remember there are no serious debates with fascists, fascist adjacent, or fascist apologists. The ideology requires a foundation based on racial stereotypes and scapegoatism. The "real problem" to these people will always be the weakest and most ill equipped to fight back.
There will be fascist vanguards attempting to draw you into circular logic. Just remember, the scapegoats never have the power to direct the path of society. It's all slight of hand. They don't care about criminals, freeloaders, etc as it would require them to look inward at their own communities as well. They do not do that, as they do not actually care.
> That’s an extreme take.
Big words considering the rest of your comment.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
Its too much work, we did violent rounding up of brown people to have images to re use for campaigns and now we can use the paramilitary force for chasing political dissidents like any normal democratic goverment would do.
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
They are. https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/
Sure, along with the occasional public execution, for optics.
Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission, executing people is not.
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
> Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission
This is not in fact the stated mission of the agency.
Enforcing immigration law is their mission which includes deporting those who aren't allowed to be in the country. So yes it is their mission.
I outright think deporting every person here undocumented now is not ethical, or beneficial to society, given the history of immigration and enforcement in this country.
https://wannabewonk.com/how-are-they-different/
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
I agree, but that is not for ICE to decide. Democrats should have fixed this a long time ago, USA isn't a one party state so if Democrats wanted to fix this they could have. But they too didn't want undocumented immigrants to gain full rights, it is very useful to have abusable second class citizens around for the upper classes.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
Of the half-dozen or so attempts at immigration reform in the past 25 years, every one of them has been blocked by Republicans.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
It’s also the federal government’s job to go around arresting everybody carrying or smoking weed, as it is still illegal no matter what any state says and every single person consuming it is a lawbreaker.
Should they go around and do that too?
Every time the police gets to choose whether to apply a law or not you add more power to the police, I don't want the police to be more powerful.
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
"Protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety."
Deporting people is "enforcing immigration law".
Sure but you don’t have to be an asshole about it and deprive people of civil and moral rights.
But deporting families and nonviolent people who have been here, tolerated for decades and contributing to society, is not "Protecting America".
The law is assumed to be in line with "protect America", it isn't up for ICE to decide that. If you think current laws are not protecting America then vote to change them.
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
The law dictates who can be deported, generally not who must be deported.
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
> Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
> where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
Isn’t it so cool that none of the theoretical /s
Sure but keep in mind that most of these people pay taxes into a system that they don't actually benefit from (social security for one), so by doing so you're actually causing more economic damage than you think you're fixing.
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
That would be mean.
We have evidence now that they execute people without a criminal record.
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car, thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
This should be obvious to anyone that has seen the videos from this incident. In any normal civilised country 10% of adult population would protest something like this next day in every city and town. Then those "agents" would be arrested and they would have a very public court case.
But in US human life is not worth much.
To be fair, this was obvious to many people who study domestic civil rights as early as the bill that originally created the DHS and ICE. For eg, this review from 2002:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...
>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.
>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.
It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.
Ice is a part of a parallel state, a strategy to facilitate a smooth transition of power when replacing the existing state infrastructure
You do understand that ICE also does customs enforcement like stopping drugs and trafficking as well, right? Not everything in ICE is immigration.
While they both fall under DHS, you're confusing CBP with ICE.
CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.
While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.
I'm pretty sure these days it's 95+% immigration, though.
ICE is rouge agency. They need to be disbanded. Fine if we still have an agency doing ICE work or whatever, but every single person employed by ICE needs to be fired, potentially prosecuted, definitely black listed from federal government work, and their funds returned for the blatant unconstitutional and dangerous use they've been put towards.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
They are doing exactly what they are being asked to do. There's nothing rogue about what they are doing. They are following orders.
Spying on political enemies and arresting citizens? That's completely outside of their statutory powers.
But they aren’t following the constitution or the rule of law, hence rogue.
Man, this is chilling. Between this and those "anti-ice" protestors that got a collective 450 years of jail time, it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
I think we can stop pretending it's "pretty close" and just call it what it is.
Well it can definitely get worse. You're not yet scared of being picked up tonight for posting this comment.
There have been people recently that have had law enforcement show up to their homes for posting comments.
Are they British?
Sources for that kind of claim please.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5667213/free-speech-law...
They're not hard to find. It's happening; it's not as widespread as it could be if it's allowed to continue. Put this into google: "federal agents intimidating people for posting social media comments".
I feel they weren't being genuine in their request, but just in case, a couple quick finds.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/nx-s1-5961220/dhs-ice-observe...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
How do you know they are not. I mean, the moment they posted it here it's now part of the forever record in some data center.
If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
>Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore
I fireproof my house before it catches on fire.
Sure, it's fine to complain, but calling it a "police state" just discredits you at this stage.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
> If you live in North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference. You don't protest, you don't express your opinion, even in private because who knows who the government spies are or who will snitch on you for slightly better living conditions in the system.
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
>Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore.
By then it's too late
>North Korea or pre-unified East Germany, you know the difference
Most of the East side of the Wall was like that, it's just less known.
"Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore."
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
An important characteristic of autocracy and fascism is there is no bottom: the government is targeting activists but you can still talk about it online; professors in Texas must submit their syllabus to AI censorship software to screen for discussions of sexuality, but they aren't being sent to the gulag; ...; people are free to go about their lives as long as they are "apolitical"; ...; Suharto's death squads have killed half a million "communists" but at least it's not 5 million, and it's mostly in the villages...
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
hey guys, we can talk about it with no discernible change even with that capability so we’re so unique and different
classic American cope
and this round, everyone without birth naturalization is being investigated for removal based on their speech, when it doesn’t match the state opinion
The "pretty close" is a hedge in case if the gun ever ends up pointing at them.
Hedging won't help, so we might as well be blunt.
Sparkling fascism?.
Add to that the weaponization of the justice department. Former FBI director Comey charged 3 times as retaliation, Senator Mark Kelly and other senators, even lowly aides such as Cassidy Hutchinson, all facing retaliation.
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.
All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )
All of this happening out in the open, no checks, no balances. Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.
Prosecution of political opponents does not a "police state" make. Remember Trump got prosecuted when he was out of office as well.
Abuse of power? Sure. But I'm sick of the hyperbole.
Didn't they get 450 years of jail time (spread among nine people IIRC) for attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder?[0] If the start of your pattern of "police state levels of power, corruption and control" is people engaging in organized terrorism, (i.e. using violence for political ends) being convicted of terrorism offenses, then I guess I don't see it. Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
Shot in the neck and lived. 420 years. Pretti filming peacefully and shot in the back. 0 years.
> Pretti filming peacefully and shot in the back.
Pretti attempted to "de-arrest" a woman while armed with a 9mm Sig Sauer P320.
From https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15494997/alex-jeffrey..., which also has the videos of Pretti not filming peacefully:
> A woman started screaming as an agent appeared to grab ahold of her coat and drag her across the frozen ground.
>
> The woman being dragged was able to get away as agent swooped in on Pretti, who appeared to try and help the woman.
>
> An agent appeared to pepper spray on Pretti as he shielded the woman.
>
> Agents dragged Pretti to the ground as he tried to fight them off. Multiple agents worked to detain him.
> Agents dragged Pretti to the ground as he tried to fight them off. Multiple agents worked to detain him.
... and then shot him dead. I recommend an alternative source than the Daily Mail, it's a sensationalist rag.
"shot him dead" doesn't even begin to describe it. ICE put 10 bullets into the back of a restrained citizen.
you're excusing a cold blooded murder. what is wrong with you? what has happened to your sense of humanity? they executed him while he was no danger to them. that's murder, not law enforcement. there is no legitimate excuse for it.
say it with me:
In the USA, government agents are not allowed to kill people for protesting. they're not allowed to kill people for being a mouthy lesbian. they're not allowed to kill people for provoking them, insulting them, or making them mad.
The way you frame the event is very misleading after reading the article.
I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.
The “explosives” being Fourth of July fireworks.
I think in another universe where they just stood outside and shouted while holding signs and shooting up fireworks, then peaceably surrendered when when the cops came, they would get slaps on the wrist, maybe.
But instead a few of them had guns, and one of them decided to get into a shoot-off with the police.
You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people doing shit like that on federal property.
(the bodycams and security footage for this event are on youtube)
Small nitpick, but I believe this all happened on private, not federal, property. The ICE facility they were protesting at was a private company ICE was contracting with, not an actual federal building.
It doesn't look like the judge cared much
IIRC, people involved in this case made extremely telling comments about the political alignment of the protestors. They despise them either way, the guns are just used as pretext to elevate it to the next level, especially since the people among them who didn't have guns or do anything violent didn't escape the wrath. They almost certainly would not have gotten slaps on the wrist, those are reserved for 'our good boys'. They would have still gotten their lives ruined, just not in quite the same dramatic fashion with showy century-long sentences, but just the routine 'you're going away for a long time' treatment.
People are killed and maimed every year from Fourth of July fireworks. You're proving my point that these were LARPing revolutionaries who nevertheless engaged in real violence.
And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.
Gunpowder is gunpowder.
This is like the "Palestinian children throwing rocks". You can do as much damage with fireworks as you can with a head-sized piece of concrete.
Those aren't "explosives", they are explosives. Google death/maiming by fireworks for examples.
No, the fact that people occasionally get hurt by accident with fireworks does not make the violent subtext in "attacking a government building with explosives" a correct description of the situation.
So you admit that fireworks are known to cause death and severe bodily harm. What sort of prison sentence would be appropriate for attacking people with such devices?
So you admit that you were making a nonsense argument. Thanks for your honesty!
Nope, fireworks are still explosives and they can cause death and severe bodily harm. Where’s the nonsense?
Water is known to cause death and serious harm.
And people who use water intentionally to cause death or serious harm should face harsh legal consequences.
In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?
Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.
So if you throw water at me I can throw a lit firework back at you? Same thing?
His point, which you pretend to not understand, is that the bar needs to be higher. Both water and fireworks are fairly innocuous items, even though both can be used to inflict harm and even though fireworks can be more easily weaponized than water.
That's why drowning somebody or attempting to drown somebody is a crime. Just like using fireworks as a weapon against somebody.
> Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.
Unless of course your guy ends up in power again and offers you pardons and reparations.
Tolerance? Jan 6.
Listen to the NYT Daily episode about this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/podcasts/the-daily/antifa...
tldr, the govt (not the court) decides whether it is terrorism or not, which elevates misdemeanor into decades long felony conviction.
The J6 crowd was not charged with terrorism.
Attacking a government building with explosives is a stretch. They had fireworks on July 4th to stage a noise protest outside of the detention facility which got out of hand. The issue is that the government's case for 'material support for terror' mostly hinged on them wearing black and all being members of a signal chat [1] and handed down extraordinarily harsh sentences.
The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].
The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.
[1]https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr... [2]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
While the Jan. 6th convicts all get pardons.
That was a riot by morons rather than organized interference with law enforcement by vigilante-morons.
There are court records.
Except for all the Proud Boys who were there and later pardoned.
And then during the debate, when asked about another fascist, racist, far right, or white supremist group, the usual response was given, "Who dat?"
But then were told to "stand back, and stand by."
> it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?
El Salvador?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
In terms of absolute number of incarcerated persons, though, the US is ahead of everyone else by a country mile. Depending on which inmate pools you include or exclude, the US holds 20-25% of all incarcerated persons in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Not an argument.
> [El Salvador (16.5/Mln), Cuba (8/Mln), Rwanda (6/Mln), Turkmenistan (5.5/Mln), United States (5.5/Mln)]
Cats always have claws, not just when they're showing.
Just remember that there is a child somewhere who saw their mum for the last time happily dropping them for school only to be shot by an ICE agent seconds after he called her a fucking bitch - and the agent faced no consequences for this. Every time I think about that kid my heart breaks. Every time I think about the cruelty of the system unwilling to at least put this one wrong right and prosecute the agent properly my heart breaks. What a unbelievably cruel world we live in.
You think a prison sentence for shooting a federal law enforcement officer in the neck is chilling?
Those 450 collective years of jail time was due to all of the firearms they brought, running away from the scene, shooting at the facility, and lying to law enforcement. I'm all for protesting, but this is not the hill you want to die on as your "chilling" moment.
Firearms are legal in Texas. One person committed violence. Others got 50 years for being at the same protest. Another got 30 years for picking up his own box of zines.
The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.
This is how we know "The 2nd Amendment is to protect against government tyranny" is complete, absolute bullshit.
The 2nd amendment is an absolute and utter bullshit against tyranny. In fact it is a method to make ordinary people not engage in peaceful protest when it is needed most.
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
Is it bullshit?
If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).
It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).
Both sides are playing a very concerning game.
Current regime targeting their enemies.
Potential next regime (democrats) threatening their enemies (like Musk).
Both need their hands slapped by the highest courts that any retaliation against constitutional rights is a violation of them.
State resources and armed officers taking a political stance like this is how democracy withers
It's more a self reinforcing side-effect of a withering democracy than the cause. The rhetoric from the far right keeps implying that we're much closer to a single party state than the current election cycle suggests and they have proven themselves to be weak predictors of outcomes they don't directly control so I'm sure more shenanigans will be revealed shortly.
State resources and armed officers are all part of a political stance. If you don't recognise it it's because they are on your side. But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
It’s so cute that some people imagine the armed forces and police were on the other side or are on their side. If you’re average Joe, the police in a tyrannical state are never on your “side”.
The police never but historically the military is less predictable. Militaries have their own cultures & norms, separate ideas of and sources of prestige & reward, commitment to the military as a valuable institution in its own right etc. Officers are also educated and high ranking ones are powerful political actors within their own domain in way almost no police are. This can really change their relationship and susceptibility to power and political influence.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.
Well, no, but you could have the very rude awakening that the in-group that you thought you were part of is suddenly now more narrowly defined than you had deluded yourself into believing. “I’m one of the good ones” quickly receives the response “there are no good ones” once the dominoes start to fall. The curse of reactionary politics is that it always crumbles under its own weight of an ever-narrowing definition of the in-group.
It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."
Entities like the courts and law enforcement optimize for the retention of people who do what they're told and the turnover of those who have their own principals. And this is before you account for the fact that most people will do what they're told before they threaten their paycheck.
Our armed officers are supposed to be upholding a constitution, not party preferences.
Our armed officers first and foremost protect capital. The constitution is what limits their conduct in that pursuit. I don’t believe that in a capitalist society any alternative is possible.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.
And definitely not religious preferences.
They've never done what they're "supposed" to do, though. While maybe not so egregious in the past, these eager violations from the police apparatus are a large part of why I'm an abolitionist.
Why is this being voted down? This is fundamentally how states and governance work. The state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, and can, at any moment, make that a problem for its citizenry.
I'll take unfalsifiable statements for $300, Alex.
Both-sides-ism is probably the single worst stance to take here. You're tacitly siding with whoever actually holds and wields the power. Not caring which one wins isn't helping anyone at all, even you.
> You're tacitly siding with whoever actually holds and wields the power.
No, I’m not doing that. I’m not even American. But I know that giving someone a weapon means they can eventually try to use it against you.
That's not actually true, though. In some sense all governments are posessed of "weapons" like this, the cost of use being only the violation of some norm. Or even law. The "rule of law" is a gentelemen's agreement at its core. Yet the world is filled with basically good governments who broadly follow that code!
So the way you treat that is by calling out and resisting the attempts to weaponize the government in new ways, not just throwing up your hands because it was "eventually" going to be used anyway. No, it's bad. You should say that it's bad and take action to oppose it.
If you're not American, then you should consider before commenting that you may be missing important context. The allegiance of US federal law enforcement agencies does not switch on a moment's notice or even follow electoral control of the government; one example of this you can easily verify is that the director of the FBI is always a Republican.
Both sides argument are springing up like weeds all over the various forums in the last couple weeks before a predicted major shift in Congress.
If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.
When, in the history of the U.S., have police forces ever been on the left?
Heck, historically the cops have even broken up peaceful union protests, despite being in unions themselves, throwing away all class solidarity in favor of their right wing leanings.
And the police unions have uniquely been extremely right wing, other than during rare highly localized conditions (often involving the democratic candidate being center right at least).
FBI in the 90's (maybe later). WACO, Ruby Ridge come to mind.
How are the actions of the feds at Waco and Ruby Ridge "left"? Authoritarian, yes, but supporting collectivism, shared ownership, etc? Nothing at all left wing about their actions.
>But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
Or, more appropriately, on an election's notice.
A plurality of voters preferred to have leaders of a certain political persuasion.
Now, we can complain about the fine print in the platform of those leaders, but..
I mean..
democracy is a team sport. We voted them in.
It's like football:
Yes.
That's an awesome DB. Guy got 2 interceptions and 4 TFLs in that game. I'd love to get that safety for my team.
All that said, his offense didn't score. So guess what? He gets to take an "L" too. That's just how it works.
That depends entirely on the degree to which those in power will respect the results of an election.
Not a peep from the second amendment types. Curious.
They're not all quiet: https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/
I keep seeing that subreddit mentioned in a context that appears trying to push those against this to violent solutions. Almost as if it is an attempt at driving some sort of stochastic action.
Go join your local Pink Pistols/Brown Berets/SRA/whatever chapter.
The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6182901
Why is the paper not available?
What do you mean by this? This article seems to be mostly about govt surveillance and not gun rights.
A stated core purpose of the second amendment is for ordinary people to be able to keep a government in check by force or threat of force.
Some people view the actions of ICE, like in this article, to be crossing a line that would normally provoke a response from second amendment types.
The people who would normally argue "but muh 2A!" are either applying to be on ICE, are on ICE, or just support what they're doing, completely oblivious to the obvious.
Those people are the people who want gun control and therefore don’t have any guns.
The #1 reason sighted by 2nd amendment loyalists for needing such liberal gun rights is to protect us all from government overreach. I assume that's what he means.
Agreed. I'm pro-second amendment, what is the there to comment on here about guns? seriously asking.
turns out, they’re into it. they were in favor of it in the 60’s and still are.
the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.
The same political groups that support hate speech laws are now looking for support from the freedom of speech groups? That sounds like a temporary alliance at best. They aren't going to support you long term because they know leftists are authoritarians of a different color. AKA your rhetoric isn't going to work because you have no principles and they do.
I see you brought up the freedom of speech group, but didn't address the potential implications of other similarly important groups such as fursuit afficianados and PETA and, most egregiously, the Taylor Swift fandom.
Are "principles" how this administration justifies its less than principled behavior or how you justify rewarding that behavior?
It's not "looking for support", it's pointing out the abject hypocrisy. But what's new. Have a great day.
Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.
The OPs point stands; why would anti-tyranny types want to stand with people who are (in their example) linguistic tyrants and thought police?
Previously, they claimed they stand with nazi solely for free speech of everyone purposes, not because they would share the oppressive authoritarian ideology of nazi.
If that was true, that is why.
Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.
no one poopoos the golem when its on their side
it might listen, and turn...
Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.
Q: “Who won the 2020 election?” A: “I’m not a biologist”
There have been multiple instances of people doing things with weapons. It's not good, but it has been done.
Deny defend depose I suppose
I read the article and the facts don't match up with the title. The thesis is actually
But did the Minnesota 15 commit actual crimes? There's lots of hyperbole "15 terabytes of data" but in the end it centers on investigations into the Minnesota 15 and doesn't answer this question. The Minnesota 15 are not accused of ordinary protest. The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes it just went on and on about investigative capabilities of HSI.Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is opposed to democracy.
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/ice-is-running-one-of-the-largest-anti...
Not clear how central the patriot act was to this operation, but it does pop up here.
Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.
For me it wasn't so much that he was the only one to vote against it, as it was that when he did vote against it the people of his state promptly replaced him with a more Law and Order senator.
In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.
Feingold served another 10 years following his vote on the Patriot Act.
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
Fun-fact™ Wednesday:
One person has appointed every single judge to the current US FISA Courts (whose jurisdiction includes domestic surveillance rubberstamping).
You can thank the concessions of Bush v. Gore (2000) for giving this executive-level privilege to the hoNoRAblE Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
Let's put aside whether or not surveillance is necessary.
The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.
The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.
ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.
No, the surveillance is at the core here. People love making pro-surveillance arguments in this same vein by just asserting that there can exist a world where everyone is surveilled but the usage of surveillance is checked and will never cross any line.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
I am not making a pro-surveillance argument, though. I am merely stating there are malicious concerns that if left unaddressed will continue to be malicious irrespective of any technology.
I understand, this is why I said that the same line of reasoning is used in pro-surveilance arguments, not that yours was necessarily one of them. I agree that the concerns outside surveillance are also very real, I'm just saying that surveillance itself isn't an ideology-agnostic tool that's at the whims of its users, the technology itself inherently will always motivate all those other malicious actors and should not exist.
I agree with your second paragraph, but disagree with the first.
Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.
The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.
Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.
So, what are the harms? This is the very first question that comes up in any form of judicial review. If there exists vast increases of surveillance and law enforcement is forbidden from using it is there still a harm? There absolutely could be, but that is what must be addressed to provide the proper regulation.
The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.
Brought to you by the people who have complained bitterly for decades about federal overreach and excessive government spending. Oh, the irony.
https://archive.is/2026.10.28-130224/https://www.wired.com/s...
Great. So when the dems get back in power they can go after all the far right militant movements that are armed to the teeth and breaking countless laws?
Horseshoe theory in action.
Stop voting for these assholes.
Where are all the Don't Tread on Me people who prepped for decades for precisely such cases?
Ya this is the big lie 2Aers are bought into, turns out being able to organize is as important or more than just having a bunch of guns and a ooh-rah attitude. And as you can see from article the government will be there if you start acting in a way the admin disapprove of
They're the ones treading on other people.
They're too busy re-enacting the "Clown Applying Makeup" meme, to achieve a proper mar-a-lago face.
Apparently the full expression is "Don't Tread On Me, But Feel Free To Tread On Those With Whom I Disagree"
They don't seem to be doing a very good job. It's a dog and pony show highlighting low hanging fruit getting reaped.
Ahhh, the SuperMax in El Salvador will soon be overflowing ...
You have the power to stop them. There are plenty of technical opportunities out there and every internal security memo with your hn handle on it is another piece of grear they can't use and time they've wasted ratcheting their own paranoia.
I change countries a lot and my default assumption for any new country is that overstaying your visa will be treated seriously, resulting in something like immediate detention (in a very lousy environment), probably a fine, and near-immediate deportation (at your expense), and probably some sort of quite serious ban (probably greater than merely months). And that's if the individual has a clean record; I'd expect it to significantly less benign otherwise.
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
Even ignoring the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that behaves thuggishly and routinely lies to judges, the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws. Suddenly enforcing them as written would fundamentally not work. It would be cruel, since the people you've effectively let live here for decades are now parents of American citizens who have the right to live here. It would also be self-destructive, because large parts of the country function because of the labor of those individuals. Despite the fact that Trump's administration is full of people who advocate remigration (ethnic cleansing), the pro-business parts of his administration have made a lot of concessions to avoid deporting so many people that they'll disrupt farming (though there's been a lot more than 0 disruption).
This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).
Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
ICE under the current administration has been “enforcing the law” using excessive force and intimidation tactics.
People have died in our detention centers due to unsanitary conditions.
They arrested a five year old and sent him to one of these detention centers without his parents.
They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
I favor responsible immigration enforcement. This is not that.
Got it. So distain is more for ICE's thuggish approach than the laws/consequences themselves.
To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.
But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had many).
I lived in Australia for a year during COVID. It's surrounded by water and doesn't have thousand-mile long borders to any country. Controlling entry is not the same logistical problem as controlling entry to the US.
That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.
The majority of my concern has to do with tactics, yes.
The other issue is intent.
I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.
Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.
I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.
> They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.
It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.
And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.
There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.
First off, there is a difference between “I come from a decent country and therefor have no real reason to take the risk of illegally immigrating somewhere” and "My country is very, very bad (possibly in not small part due to country X), and moving to country X illegally is less risky for my life and family than staying here". We tend to have at least some empathy for people in the second scenario.
But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.
Helping refugees makes sense, but should existing laws be changed or broken? (there's a big difference). It feels like many smart people are advocating the latter, which appears at odds with their behaviour and attitudes in most other domains (i.e. law abiding). Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
The first world is not a foster home for unwanted people from other nations. We can and should be selective of who we let in. We don't need to bleed ourselves dry because some other countries are shitty.
Also on America being built by immigrants, who cares? Honestly, that really doesn't matter. Just because America was founded by immigrants then doesn't mean we need to let in unlimited immigrants now.
The 15 people charged in the case this story is about were not overstaying their visa; they were protesting ICE after ICE killed a US citizen in Minnesota.
Would you expect to be detained and deported from those other countries while trying to attend a court hearing to resolve your immigration status?
ChatGPT can you take the sentiment “Why haven’t immigrants just tried not being poor? Are they stupid?” and dress it up as intellectual so I can get upvotes on Hacker News? Make it personal and anecdotal. Thanks.
Snideness aside, your argument is that laws ought not apply to someone who is poor.
That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If a law can only possibly impact the poor, then that law is effectively written to impact the poor - the purpose of a law is what it does.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
Ah, the just following orders person, always at least one in a discussion.
Just following the law, you mean, in the countries he is visiting.
But you didn't actually answer the quesion.
Do you expect to be murdered? Repeatedly tortured and gang raped in custody while it's filmed? Disappeared to some other country?
Also, any of this can happen to you even if you're a lawful citizen.
The situation in the USA is dire and it's going to get, much, much worse.
Hum... It can be your assumption, but most countries do not fulfill it.
Detention in particular is a violation of human rights, with an exception to strictly for the time it takes for the next flight to take off.
Because seemingly only in the U.S. the legislature hasn’t meaningfully passed significant new legislation, making the immigration law out of date. A lot of intelligent people voted for Obama, and Obama created DACA, which says overstaying your visa as a child is fine and results in “deferred” deportation. Hence a lot of leftists think visa rules in the U.S. are so outdated that violating them is fine. IMO Obama made a careful calculation to degrade the sanctity of immigration laws to avoid hardship on a million people; it was a good idea on humanitarian grounds but it did open a large can of worms.
As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.
For decades the US has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration because of how much profits agribusiness and construction makes from it. It wasn't an Obama thing, but spanned several presidents and both parties.
Correct. Now the question is, why hasn’t Congress made laws so agriculture and construction can benefit from cheap foreign labor in a legal way?
That's what the H-2a program is. Many employers have avoided using it because it gives labor actual rights, requires an above-minimum wage, and includes free housing. All of those provisions are currently being gutted though.
This seems like an obvious and workable solution. Could it be being blocked by something - perhaps unions representing local workers? (only guessing)
The Wired article is not about people who violated travel visa. Not at all.
It is not so simple. Here is some information: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...
Because some people have to have their opinions on things be reaffirmed by how it maps to coordinates on the cultural battle map.
Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.
Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.
ICE is not enforcing the law, they are in fact regularly breaking the law. Judges said so, repeatedly. And ICE threw middle finger. Breaking the law is the literal intentional strategy of ICE. They also mistreat people who are in the country legally, who are citizens and committed no crimes.
Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.
You won't get much traction with the "shouldn't people follow the law" angle. The far left is running rampant with the idea that laws only apply to them if they agree with them.
You should look up the two guys who viciously attacked armed police officers in Manchester Airport in the UK, all on video. Incredibly they were out almost immediately, police officers were up for firing and the trial dragged out for months ending in a pretty lenient sentence. In that case the new UK "two tier" justice kicked in where thanks to crazy far-left thinking, there is now consideration of race in whether something was illegal and what the punishment should be.
Without a doubt this direction will be the downfall of the west. Which is probably the idea from those financing all this "grass roots" protesting and law breaking.
I'm tired of these guys trying to one up McCarthy.
Why do they call it 'Anti-Left'?
Because the justification for running these operations is NSPM-7, which explicitly designates leftist groups and beliefs as terrorism.
Because it's Pro-Fascist.
Ok. And I'm supposed to do what with this information, exactly?
This is fascism.
not a us citizen but this seems reasonable from historical US perspective
I am from the US and the headline is accurate. Not “the largest,” but “one of the largest.” We’ve been here before. The question is does it get kneecapped or does it spin out of control?
> Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
Not really the bent of the article, but it's also worth pointing out that this shows some really terrible opsec practice by the activists in question. Like, no, you don't just spin up a cloud server to coordinate your protest activity and then ssh into it from your home IP. Dude...
Tech fascism alright.
Read The Nerd Reich.
I'm having flashbacks to when I was in high school in the 1970's while Nixon was at the height of his powers.
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
I think the history of the FBI suggests this will continue long after Trump himself leaves office, effectively becoming a state run gang.
don't worry. Global warming will kill us all within the next 100 years anyways.
Alas, it will not. It will instead dramatically increase suffering in the world while leaving most humans alive.
seems like they're trying to make it come faster with fossil fuels.
the pendulum will eventually swing back and most of these fucks will be thrown in prison.
It is eerily similar to the 1930s era in central Europe.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should never be confused with having an agenda other than fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power to their cronies.
What gets me is how much of this stuff is just bought, not built. Agencies can purchase location and social media data from brokers and skip the warrant step entirely, so I'd honestly put more energy into closing that loophole than into fighting any one agency.
That's what happens when you have mass privatization of productive capacity. The power to procure surveillance pools in fewer and fewer hands.
anti-left sure, but more like "anti everyone who isn't part of a small set of VERY far right movements by general western standards, many affected people just don't know about it yet or are willful ignorant about it"
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
/s
This is going to be moderated off the front page.
I remember the early days of the internet when hating surveillance was non-political.
Back when it was just nerds on the internet, and powerfull people with agenda's had not infiltrated everything
Half the people here are working to help them, intentionally or unwittingly.
I remember as a 14 year old (2004) thinking about how I'd make sites like TPB or 4chan without getting it shut down, a place that anyone could speak freely. Then Kim Dotcom happened, and even Lavabit, and I'm sure many others.
It's a thankless thing, but we need more people who are willing to just do it. Now I know some of you will point out that Kim Dotcom was hosting movies, shows, music, etc. That's not my point, look at HOW they took him down, and WHEN. They were trying to pass SOPA, claiming it would help them take down people like Kim Dotcom "because they couldn't" so what they did to Kim Dotcom was questionable from a legal perspective...
Sigh. I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones) it was much nicer.
> It's a thankless thing
<https://www.little-gamers.com/2001/12/13/372>
Even back then, it was partly various three-letter agencies manufacturing their own criminals to justify the budget.
Everything is political. Just people on the early internet tended to have a particular personality type that shared certain political views.
The evidence will remain in ssh logs and such. That is part of why it got posted here. This political struggle has gone technical and we're all involved.
good
Now many people might understand what the Right was going through during the Biden administration, when they were censored, spied on, and arrested.
Will this stop? or will we see the same thing again when a Democrat becomes president (with no articles about it and nobody mentioning it)?
"How dare they monitor my violent terrorist actions. We only shot 3 people at an immigration facility. We only organized a massive law enforcement interference campaign. How DARE THEY".. Leftists will always use your principles against you. They don't care about the second amendment. They want you to care about it so they can bully you into allowing them to be violent and gain political power. Give me the down votes I don't care. Leftists are insane and nuance is lost on their utopian beliefs.
If current so called left wasn’t so radical, crazy and obviously corrupt at times - i would have been very dissapointed by this.
You will fail to achieve anything if you mentally approach these things from a partisan view (like all the comments, general public).
ICE should not be running surveillance Ops on Left activists or immigrants and the FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters.
The tools violate all of our rights full stop. Please don't support this garbage again when Dems sweep into power, trying to debank ppl for X tweets etc.