> 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.
Adding `fly.io` to my permanent "never use" list. If they're not going to lawyer up when it comes to the 4th amendment, I will never use this service.
It's so reassuring to know that all a cloud provider needs to compromise its users trust is an official looking letterhead.
Definitely 0% chance they could ever be phished by a foreign (or domestic) power with enough email (or letter) know-how.
At least other big tech companies were forced to kneel with secret (unconstitutional) FISA orders. Both Apple and Google at least try to show that they're pushing back.
EG: google shifted location data to local device only to combat Geo fencing warrants
If you read the DHS document it sounds like Fly.io and Stripe are complacent. They provided data without fighting the subpoenas. Warrants should be required for this data.
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?
Indian government is banning 1000s of posts and accounts everyday on Insta/FB/Reddit/X in India. They used to notify the user and let them know that this is a government requested tack down. Now, they just say, their automated system flagged the content.
> Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things.
Two things are true
1) Tech has become more financial people and "techbros" than principled nerds.
2) The powers of the USG have become a lot stronger and far reaching- quite literally to the level where talking about complying with an order is itself a crime.
I want to reunite with my 'principled nerds' so badly. Things weren't perfect, not by a long shot, back then, but there was a sense of hope and excitement about using technology to make the world a better place.
Agreed. One of the reasons I'm seeing myself becoming more of a luddite looking forward to retiring offline with minimal technology is precisley because online discourse is largely comprised of unserious people confidently incorrect and technology companies have largely stopped trying to make peoples' lives better and are more focused on quarterly earnings.
Hackerspaces still exist - and seem to be booming again since the tech layoffs. Dropped by Noisebridge while I was visiting SF and as the kids say, the vibes were immaculate.
Do you participate in a hackerspace though, or do you just visit? I've realised I've become far too passive as a result of consuming mass internet media.
They used to operate in a legally consistent Western Democracy. They no longer do. OpSec for most involved in basic social activism needs to now be at the level of 'Journalist in a Dictatorship' or stricter.
At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.
Are you talking about the individuals or the companies? Companies can lie a lot of the time and just say they don't have the requested information, and the government has no way to know, unless they usually comply with similar requests. The government can seize servers, but can't compel disk encryption keys yet.
"Authoritarian capitalism is a system in which corporations ally themselves with repressive or anti-democratic political regimes, benefiting from protection and impunity."
There's a shorter phrase for corporations and other large organizations colluding with or controlling an authoritarian government for the organizations' own ends at the expense of at least some subset of the people. It's actually only one word, and there are three options. Mussolini had corporatism on the mind. You probably know the other two, and one is a proper noun.
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.
> your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
Again : “HEY MY DUDES WHERES YOUR WARRANT AND YOU CAN ONLY SEARCH FOR STUFF IN IT” going to be hard to yell when you have a trooper’s boot smashing your neck against the ground and they’re ransacking your home after having blown the door off its hinges.
If you want to ignore legality, then you need to keep a rifle for every man, woman, and child in your home strong enough to shoulder one, and enough black-tips to ensure the cops bring a chaplain along for the raid.
Fifteen years ago, yes, maybe your movie ingestion would have given you unrealistic expectations.
However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.
Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.
What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?
In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.
Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.
[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.
[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.
>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.
Yeah these are pretty good points I can't really dispute.
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
Thanks for the reply, and I'm definitely all in favor of assessing things in light of threat model! That said:
>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read
I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.
In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.
If that is your worry, people who do a lot more dangerous things than web hosting have written and talked about how to act during a raid so that you don't get murdered. Mainly just let them do what they want, don't immediately push back with violence against infringements of your rights, push back in court later.
This happens sometimes, but rarely, and if it does happen, chances are you'll be fine, apart from downtime and having to buy a new server, as long as your disks are encrypted.
You're treating this as if the worst thing that can happen will happen, when it's more of a numbers game. They do these raids occasionally on one or two people in order to scare tens of thousands of other people away from participating.
DCs also get bullshit raids sometimes and have processes that don't involve an immediate permanent blacklist.
You have to realise it's a move of desperation by the attackers. If they are seizing a server, it means they don't have anything and they're hoping beyond hope they can get something, anything, from that server.
For those with the resources to do so, perhaps. But those well-resourced people fleeing the country are then leaving those who are not well-resourced to fend for themselves, and letting it further devolve.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
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 not an option for everyone, and just being American will result in difficulties in getting bank accounts and access financial rails overseas thanks to FACTA. Countries that do not have a history of compliance/cooperation are generally countries you don't want to go to and also, likely can't actually stay in. For the past 100 years or so there's no terra nullis one can simply escape to and be allowed to live with any degree of comfort and acceptance. Realistically though, even the places that offered the illusion of safety are not really safe now. Not to mention that the fact that any part of the pipes is even visible is in a meta sense part of the safeguards actually working. If you go to Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, etc., they've simply had time to learn how to run authoritarianism as normal. The reaction to such a scheme indicates that in the US this is still aberrant. Elsewhere this is quotidian and assumed to exist even when it doesn't really because of the inability for any individual person not in a privileged position to even begin to understand what state capacity actually exists, or doesn't exist.
There is at least still the ability to recognize tyranny when it arrives that exists in the culture here. People have the option of playing jurisdictional arbitrage with their data. ICE isn't part of the actual judiciary and even the DOJ loses cases - routinely, now, under this admin, a mindblowing change from the gears that exercised discretion to keep its reputation under all circumstances.
The case that revealed all this abuse of authority is a relatively minor and poorly chosen set of facts that the government has a real possibility of taking to trial and lose on. What ICE is doing is authoritarian drag compared to pretty much everywhere else that has the capacity to have such agencies in the first place. ICE is genuinely incompetent because all this is new to them, because it's both unlawful and culturally unacceptable, and running a surveillance state is not reflexively easy to most people. They don't know how to prioritize, how to cover things up whether the authority exists or not, and how to even properly police themselves. They don't know how to passively let information reach them and instead everything is loud and noisy and leaves paper trails and frequently ineffectual. What's important is maintaining that reflex about how all this is fundamentally unacceptable in every sense.
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.
Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.
The important data being handed over was the IP address of the admin. If you self-host the server, that skips the first step to discover who is running the server, your own IP address is in the web site's DNS entry.
On the other hand if it's on a hosted server that you have control over, they know whose server it is but they don't know what it's doing, and without a wiretap they don't even know who's connecting, and they can't see any encryption keys or content if encryption is used well.
Imagine a world where we all use Gmail, and one where we all host email on our own servers the host can't get into. In the latter world, a wiretap can identify who's sending mail to who, but not read the email, nor identify the IP address that downloaded any individual email. That's a severe handicap for them over just being able to read your mail. If you have 10 people on each server, they get even less info (but the server owner gets more).
Fair, but he’s the most prominent person here who’s been on both sides of this so I’d genuinely like his take.
Two concrete questions. Did Fly challenge this request, or just comply? And does he still think server-side trust is a non-issue when the identity in this case was built entirely from provider-side records (signup IP, SSH audit logs, a Stripe fingerprint)?
When I said in 2023 that the infrastructure around E2EE matters, he called it misinformation (rather aggressively).
This case looks a lot like the infrastructure mattering.
"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.
I think they have a daily rate limit for free Tor accounts. You can make a paid account through Tor with Bitcoin, which of course you obtained by some anonymous method.
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.
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.
edit: i just ran all of my recent comments through pangram and they came back 100% human (which i knew, of course, considering i wrote them), so i am really not clear on how you want me to write my comments. apparently using my own words isn't enough for you or your bot.
OK, well there seem to have been a couple of false positives and perhaps a glitch in one case, which we'll look into. Sorry about that. In the case of the quote from the HSI document, perhaps that text you copied/pasted was LLM-enhanced (the comment was classified as genai according to all the methods we use, but of course no approach is 100% accurate).
False positives are going to happen, no matter how much we try to make our systems infallible, and you're welcome to email us if any comments of yours get killed and aren't quickly vouched by other users.
I can still confirm that your comments weren't being killed via any deliberate moderator intervention.
Thanks for understanding. I should have read the comments more closely and normally do, but I was on the defensive after the comment seemed to accuse us of killing comments, or at least make assumptions that we did or would do that.
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.
Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
It's nice that this place maintains an email endpoint that's actually staffed by humans who can intervene if needed. That's more than can be said about most places these days.
>Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
shadow bans here have no purpose. i would have found out in a couple days even if no one told me. so yes, it might as well just be a regular ban, correct. at least that way i would know what rule i broke.
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.
I mean the Chief Justice was asked by Congress - "It seems that every other part of the federal court system has ethics guidelines and processes, but not the Supreme Court. It seems reasonable that the highest Court in our land should have those." And he replied, almost verbatim, "We're not going to do that and we're offended that you feel the need to ask."
If it truly went to everybody to me it is just government paying dividends to the people. Which I think is far preferable and useful compared to corporate bailouts and tax cuts and most other allocations. We gave money to people during covid and it wasn't catastrophic.
Free healthcare, I think you mean single payer healthcare or a public option for healthcare, exists in most countries in the world. How is it different? How about how is it the same?
Healthcare is a comprehensive quality of life improvement that indivuduals can't waste in fast fashion and such, which reduces the wealth gap, which will remain after election campaign, which is a cornerstone of societies of many developed countries.
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?
At some point, foregoing everything that is similar to what you just mentioned moves out of inconvenience territory and into social self-exclusion territory. To remain ideologically consistent with your argument, one must fully self-exclude.
Consider all of the sources of the available tracking data on a person in the United States. If you don't have a cell phone, don't drive a car, don't walk around outdoor networked cameras, don't patronize businesses that have networked cameras, don't use a credit card, how exactly are you interacting with this society?
Except for the flock cameras, we opted into this system with open arms. If you're coming of age right now it must suck, but there has been a steady march towards a demolition of privacy for more than 20 years.
This is maybe half correct (or fully correct for some people). It's not that simple though. We're talking about a web service the fascists didn't like. How do you host that anonymously other than Tor (which no one will use)? As someone who doesn't partake in any sort of MSM in the US and actively tries to avoid fascism, I would genuinely like to know what the solution is here.
Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.
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.
I’m getting unsolicited texts all the time about how the “billionaire tax” in California is the worst thing ever. No matter if you think the tax is misguided, it’ll probably work at preventing the billionaire tax from passing, but it’s a good firsthand demonstration at how power accumulating to billionaires tends to accumulate even further. Only billionaires have the resources to fight back so aggressively against any encroachment on their power.
That gets into an idea I've been pretty adamant about. People say that capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, but its actual property is that it's inevitable. Money (power) can be used to gain more power. If even a few people choose to do so, if not countered intentionally by some outside force, wealth and power will accumulate.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
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.
Trump was a billionaire, able to fund his own campaign, that hardly proves the power of the common man. Now, back to 2026, the richest person in the world has spent almost $500 million on helping Republicans in the midterms. Clearly him and Trump don't believe too much in the power of the common man's vote.
>Trump has spent much of the race so far breaking the mould of a traditional campaign, defeating a crowded field of primary opponents who vastly outspent him in ads and staff.
>During the Republican primary race, he often told his supporters not to contribute money and ridiculed opponents for accepting cash from special interest groups and wealthy contributors.
>He has so far showed little interest in calling donors to ask for money for his general election battle. He only began holding in-person fundraisers in late May.
What I meant was the 2016 Repub primaries are evidence that the common man votes for who they want, not who the large donors want. The Repub party leadership and previous decision makers were usurped, and hence the idea of MAGA supplanting the Republican Party. More evidence is Dick Cheney and the Bush family becoming quickly irrelevant.
not at all. wow people need to do some basic research on this. the Republicans are driven by a tiny handful of billionaires and with Musk, trillionaires. Democratic candidates OTOH rely to a vastly larger extent on millions of individual donors sending $100 or less - there are still large donors but their contribution to Democrats is close to an order of magnitude less than what GOP megadonors provide.
Of course, both of these funding models should be banned which would mean dismantling the Citizens United decision spearheaded by the now-known-to-be-fully-corrupt Roberts court, which might require a constitutional amendment.
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.
The court rulings are based on telephone directories and the conflicts between their disparate companies (including Ma Bell). The phone company tried to claim that they owned the phone numbers (and any derivative intellectual property rights). The companies that published competing phone books successfully argued that the only property rights exist in the compilation of data - not in the data itself. The result of this pile of history is that whosoever owns the computer owns the data on that computer.
The GDPR comes from the opposite direction - you own the data about yourself.
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.
Almost all the cabinet level departments has their own Inspector General office since the 70s and 80s.
Homeland Security got one in 2003 with the combination of previous agencies.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 also let those offices start having their own statutory powers and carry firearms without needing to be deputized by the US Marshals Service.
(1) protest is protected by the first amendment
(2) American law enforcement isn't supposed to have access to this kind of information about citizens absent a warrant
The Constitution and its amendments binds the government, not private entities such as corporations.
The Fourth Amendment gives you zero protections from corporations willingly handing your data over to the government upon a simple warrantless request. A corporation can choose to tell the government to pound sand without a warrant, but they're not in any legal way obligated to do so.
EDIT: Actually, I may be wrong here. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 may give you some protections against data intended to be private, such as Friends-only social media posts, private messages, etc.
>Charges Include Conspiracy to Impede or Injure a Federal Officer, Interstate Stalking, Interstate Threats, Solicitation to Commit a Crime of Violence, and Assaults on Federal Officers
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.
What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.
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.
UPS could do this, yes, but ICE isn’t allowed to. All of what you described is, by itself, perfectly legal for US citizens, and ICE has even more restrictions about targeting US citizens than the government as a whole. So why is it okay for ICE to do 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.
I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians? On top of that there are companies like Flock who monitor civilians when ICE isn’t there.
I don’t get why you love ICE so much and want to protect them like they’re doing you some big service and not going around instilling fear in others. Have you been living under a rock?
It’s a leap to claim anyone loves a federal agency.
I followed a lot of the news about them regarding this thing. If I own a business or even simply act as a manager and I know of a constant threat to my staff I would take any action I was legally allowed to protect them. Doesn’t matter if it’s ICE, the postal service, a gas station, theme park, etc.
It’s basic self defense.
ICE agents didn’t start covering their faces just because, they did it because people were doxxing them and going after their families.
People are going to protect themselves and their staff. It’s basic human nature.
Do you want to be targeted? Then don't look Latino, black or foreign, work blue collar or service jobs or speak a language that is not English. There are plenty of examples of law abiding citizens getting illegally arrested or killed by ICE.
ICE is facing backlash because they are breaking the law and discriminating. Flock is facing backlash because they are enabling ICE and the general oppression of opposition to the current administration. Crimes should be investigated, but this falls outside of an immigration agency's responsibilities.
Well it's fully legal to use widespread AI cameras for mass surveillance, as exemplified by Flock. That has nothing to do with the government - it's just plain legal to do. If the government wants it to be illegal it should make a law that says it's illegal, and then both Flock and other groups will have to shut down their camera networks.
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 start 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.
Votes that lose by a large margin have no information. They’re commitment free actions taken purely for political gain. Narrow wins are the only ones where you can really learn something.
If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.
I think that effect still exists on small margin votes too. You know pretty much how it’s goona go down on every vote. 99-1 feels a little different to me. That no one else even wanted to claim that lane.
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.
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?
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).
They stopped reporting on individual boat arrivals, a media blackout was imposed and enforced.
For quite a while is was illegal for news to report on conditions. Doctors, nurses, security guards, other staff could be punished for reporting conditions there.
Australia spent over $9m per asylum seeker held on Nauru in 2025–2026. Some people there couldn’t afford food or clean water (it wasn’t supplied).
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.
It is, ironically, a situation where the best solution might very well be a lighter touch.
US immigration policy used to be simply... Less. You could pretty much come and go as you please along the southern border. So people did, and therefore there were simply fewer issues because folks didn't feel the need to "sneak in," not when getting in and out of the country was as easy as a day-pass. People would live in Mexico and work a job in a border city.
The tightening of the rules began in (if I recall correctly) the '80s, and with it the actual crisis; if you could come and go as you please, it was no issue to live in Mexico, but people, when forced to choose, stayed where the economic productivity was.
Obama deported at least as many people as trump, but did it in far more competent way.
If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.
Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.
The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.
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.
American media, such as CBS has been purchased by Larry Ellison and directed not to.
Read the exit comments of journalists who worked there.
> “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me,” Pelley said. “And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
It's also known that ICE on the street right now differs from ICE in 2024.
To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.
Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.
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.
Smart people know that "the law" has little to do with morality, and vastly more to do with power. When evil people are in power, they make evil laws, and when you have evil laws, it is immoral to follow them. Following the law is never moral in it's own right; Legality, even in the best of times, only strives to shadow morality.
I've never met someone who wouldn't prefer to change the law rather than be forced to violate them. But only cowards and the intellectually incapable think that supporting the enforcement of an unjust law while campaigning for it's fix is someone a morally superior stance.
And to answer why America? Because if we can't do it, nobody can. What kind of yellow-bellied, unpatriotic attitude can you have to think "oh, let's just let some better country solve the problems we've created in the world through prolonged geopolitical control over the 20th century". Fuck that. If America is great enough to conquer the world, it should be great enough to solve the side effects that come with it.
Some people DO advocate for better laws. It doesn't mean that it will pass. At then end of the day, you have to convince enough people to vote for people who want to make it a law, or make enough noise and be an enough electoral power that politician wants to do it. But, while a lot of people care about immigration and such, at the end of the day, some other issues (the typical example is the cost of living), might take precedences.
> 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.
I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.
Economic migrants are by far the majority in the US. In fact, economic migrants abusing “asylum” have basically made it impossible for the immigration authorities to have a sane asylum policy.
Agreed completely, I’d never illegally migrate to Japan and expect them to do anything besides arrest and deport me. It’s only western countries that get this weird illogical hate for not opening the borders to literally anyone and actually enforcing immigration law.
> 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).
Overstaying a visa in the us isn't necessarily illegal. It can mean that the next time you leave, you'll have to get a new one before being allowed to re-enter which can take months even if it's the same one.
I'm not saying this is universally true for all visas. But if the underlying reason you're eligible for the visa is still there then overstaying it is not a problem.
So I get your assumption, and being pessimistic on that front is probably a good idea. However, immigration isn't straightforward and things that sound bad could be completely legal.
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.
Yes, if the biggest political issue in that country at the time was would-be immigrants taking advantage of the slow legal process in order to stretch out their illegal stay in the country longer.
Why not speed up the process legally, instead of just kidnapping people who are going to court hearings, in contempt of court?
Why not let the judge say "you shall be immediately deported" and then immediately deport them? Right now they're not even letting the judge issue a decision.
Some people are indeed upset about the way ICE is enforcing immigration law, but that's not remotely what this article is about. The article is about the government co-opting ICE (and other resources) to crack down on ideological dissent by US citizens.
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.
> the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws
This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.
I think missing from your context is the racial and religious motivations of people that back ICE's current actions. They don't care about the law or reasonable expectations on visa policies.
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.
One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.
The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).
(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"
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.
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. But I should say Obama was being very public about the program whereas previously it had been more of an under-the-table thing. 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.
To me gutting these benefits is the less bad alternative compared to just bringing in people illegally. And also H-2A doesn’t cover construction workers.
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.
You mean being voted into regional parliaments in the former GDR states?
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
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 watch the TV network that tells them every single day that huge numbers of illegal immigrants (or other scary brown-skinned people) are the reason for all their troubles & fears. They always hype the false story that there is a huge caravan of migrants approaching US borders but only during lead-up to elections.
Trump is persecuting the same "others" that the "don't tread on me" group also hate. They only wave their weapons when Democrats are sitting in the White House.
Always amusing to see this saying on _license plates_ of all places. Idk if a snake can look pathetic, but I always read them with a "please, mister," in front of them.
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.
Constitutional rights extend everywhere the Constitution covers regardless of immigration status. If ICE is conducting business in opposition to rights conveyed by the Constitution then you have found a far more grave concern to address.
For sure, my point is that there's no way you can slice this as being justifiable. Even if you are pro surveillance and anti-leftist. ICE shouldn't be doing this, it's the job of the FBI.
HSI has long been criminal enforcement within ICE, but I agree that they are the wrong agency to investigate this. They're doing it because they're unquestioningly loyal to Trump and because it's likely the administration has ordered certain outcomes.
I would also argue that there are no potential benefits that would make this sort of surveillance acceptable, let alone necessary.
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.
It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.
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.
We might be talking past each other. You're talking purely legal interpretation, I'm talking society and philosophy.
My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.
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?
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!"
That happens occasionally. But it mostly doesn't happen. Mostly, the people who end up with criminal charges are the illegal immigrants. If you dig into the numbers it tells the story of a vanishingly small number of companies (like hundreds per year out of millions) getting scrutiny. The industries which get the scrutiny are the ones where people could end up dead or injured (construction, meat packing, etc.). (According to Gemini - grain of salt)
A few years ago there was a huge set of raids at Tyson facilities - 900+ undocumented immigrants working there.
Awkwardly, it was made known to the media that Tyson knew all about it, to the point where they had provided those workers written instructions and tips on how to stay under the radar with respect to taxes, financials, immigration, etc.
When a journalist asked about this at the press conference where DHS was crowing over the success of the raid? "That's not something that is being investigated as part of this operation." Well, what about separately? "We are not investigating the company."
A lot of the theory was that like some other food production firms (Hormel dealing with people getting sick from y'know, inhaling aerosolized pig brain), that it was very much a "won't someone rid us of these meddlesome immigrants" (the ones advocating about child labor, wage theft, OSHA violations). Come round these ones up, you get a press conference and we solve a labor issue.
Couldn't you just better fund the court system so the court date isn't years away? Or improve the citizenship process? Maybe some of that $100 billion we gave to ICE could have gone to the courts for faster processing of these specific cases. That would seem like the more civilized way to do it.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
Well, as it happens these immigration court judges were appointed by previous administrations, and they were intentionally slow walking every case. The Trump admin fired a bunch of those judges earlier this year, was sued, won, and now the cases are actually getting processed.
The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).
People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
> The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
> we could use state police to deport people
So much for states rights.
> both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
In what ways? I don't see a lot of police unions supporting left-leaning or Democratic candidates. Democrats have voted against things like the Patriot Act in much larger numbers than Republicans. Democrats have introduced bills like "Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2026" which have basically no Republican support. The biggest private advocates for an increased police state (Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Palmer Luckey, etc.) are huge Republican supporters and donors.
> Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
It sounds like you’re saying we should all just accept that our visas mean nothing, and that in practice literally anyone should be able to just show up, claim asylum, never show up to court for their hearing, and what we should do is absolutely nothing. In “blue” states they are strongly encouraged to sign up for driver’s licenses and welfare programs, and state agencies are forbidden from even asking their legal status. State and local police in those states are often banned from spilling the beans even when they commit crimes.
So, overstaying legal status can’t be addressed by states because Dems think it’s too mean to send them home, and it can’t be actively done by federal agencies because to do so, they have to come into states and investigate people to determine if they’re legally here or not and we don’t like the possibility that they might ever get it wrong.
This is why Democrats lost all respect from moderates like me who used to proudly be part of that party a decade ago. They’re not serious anymore. They appear to want a system that pretends to work but which everyone ignores because everyone knows it’s never enforced. Like driving 70 on the freeway in a 65 zone - everyone does it.
Or, given the fact that normal folks come here and live normal lives contributing to their communities, the US could just make easier paths to citizenship.
We already have paths to citizenship, people just need to wait their turn. People with skills we need can already get in under programs that exist for that purpose.
We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.
It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.
Hah, what? I have skills we need. I came here legally.
It would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper for me to come here on a visa waiver, marry a USC against the terms of that waiver, and ask for forgiveness (i.e. "adjust status") than it was to do so the "proper way".
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.
Undocumented immigrants are a useful scapegoat politically, because it allows those in power to point the finger at them for all the country's problems, but those immigrants have no political power themselves since they can't vote.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
>> 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
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
Yup, and 50 million “Democrats” assisting them, people who’ve been convinced that maximizing the number of foreign citizens living here without valid visas is the enlightened and cool policy to aim for, or at least that if the other party won’t let them automatically naturalize everyone as they sprint across the border, that this is the next best thing.
At the risk of a committing a "No True Scotsman" here... it isn't a properly left wing position. Or at least it hasn't been for most of the history of the left.
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?
I strongly believe all people are equal, and we should not apply different ethics based on national borders, race, sex, etc. They should be able to come work any jobs, and be treated the same as citizens.
> 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.
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
Tyson Chicken was shown to have provided written instructions for undocumented workers on staying under the radar. And yet when DHS arrested 900 workers at their facilities, they also announced there was no plans to investigate the company itself (strange - knowingly assisting an undocumented immigrant with such is a felony).
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.
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.
The term combines two concepts:
Nation: A group of people who identify as belonging to a shared community.
State: A political entity with a defined territory, a government, and sovereignty over its internal and external affairs.
I would argue this requires at least some sovereign control over borders.
The EU defines their borders as a bloc. States are not nations - and that’s one of the reasons why.
Border control is an important expression of state sovereignty. If you have zero controls the state would experience net migration until conditions declined below the global average and nobody wants to move there anymore. That’s pretty self evident, it’s how economics works and how systems maintain an equilibrium.
Both legal and undocumented immigrants in the US show lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans in major studies; the picture in Europe is different, with clear overrepresentation for non-Western and asylum-related groups. Fiscal impacts depend heavily on skill/education level rather than legal status alone, with low-skilled migrants (legal or not) more often a net cost over their lifetimes.
So control over borders is important, and having standards is a good thing.
There is no magic soil. A nation is the people who make it up. Bring in the violent, stupid, and culturally incompatible people from the shithole countries they are trying to escape and things will trend downwards to some average between those terrible places and our desirable countries. That’s not racist our xenophobic, it’s acknowledging the facts.
People are not equal. Countries are not equal. Education and culture and religions are not equal. There are better and worse versions of all of them. Again just facts. To ignore that is to live in fantasy land that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I have traveled to nearly 50 countries. I have lived in the developing world. My ancestors have had to flee countries and been refugees. I know what I’m talking about. You sound very idealistic and naive.
America itself brought in the <undesirable> people from the <bad> countries in Europe throughout the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s - Irish peasants, Jews, poor and uneducated Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Norwegians.
It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.
A nation-state, technically. A state is an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. There have been historical states (eg. European kingdoms of the high middle ages) that meet the definition of a state while still having very fuzzy borders.
> 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.
Could they not just have fruit picking farms in the south and export it here? I think that will be a win win for everyone. The big losers will be the US farms I guess.
You could imagine a sane policy regime to unwind the "look the other way" approach to illegal immigration and the under-the-table low wage labor market that it created.
Instead we get... well, whatever the fuck this gestapo shit is.
I guess regulatory reform doesn't really play with the kind of people who will gleefully vote for mass deportation on the grounds that they just want immigrants gone.
> 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.)
> 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.
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.
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?
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
When it was irish, they were white. And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
You are mistaken: the Irish may be white now, but they weren't then! Whiteness evolved over time, it used to be exclusive for WASPs, and excludes the Irish, Italians, Jews, slavs, and other groups widely accepted as white today. Race is a sociological construct.
The 19th Century was full of anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. There was even a political party devoted to getting rid of Catholics who became known as "the know nothings".
The other immigrants from Catholic countries were also perceived as being "not white", which is why there was a lot of anti-Italian and anti-Spanish sentiment along with the anti-Irish folks. Along with the "they are not real Christians" sentiment (still held by many Evangelicals), they were perceived as "taking orders from Rome" much like (during the Cold War) communists were perceived as "taking orders from Moscow".
Yes, this isnt true. It's from a 1995 book and just invents a history.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.
The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.
Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word
EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:
Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.
See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,
> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.
This is patently wrong. And just look at images from the time. There are many Italians, especially from the south which was the main immigration areas - Sicily, Sardegna, Lecce - who are less white than many Latinos.
What's wrong? I don't think i've made any non-empirical claims.
The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.
The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?
You think the 18th race-"realists" (urgh), "who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one", would stop there and not begin to divide white people between "good" white sub-races and "vile" white sub-races? You really think that those racists thought that once you're white, you're all good?
"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw in Ireland. .. to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much"
Benjamin Disraeli, 1836:
"[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood."
_The Spectator_ News magazine in 1882:
"The Tragedy at Maamtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians."
H. P. Lovecraft (yes, the famous author), in 1921 (!):
"If the Irish had the 'right' to independence they would possess it. If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does ... It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme. Why have not the Irish conquered and colonized the earth if they be so deserving of regard? They are brainless canaille."
You are deeply uneducated on the topic. I would suggest you stop commenting on a subject you know nothing about and learn a thing or two before interacting again.
Right, so you agree that the Irish were classified as white. And that presumably, 'white' entails nor means as such 'white superiority' and presumably that 'white' all along was in reference to a european lineage and the american 'white' diasopara is a european one from the start.
Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.
The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.
If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.
The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.
With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true. It is only true of absolute numbers, *not* rates of change. Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.
Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.
You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.
Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.
> The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true
To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum
> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
citation needed
> The type and character of the immigration matters
No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter
> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK
What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.
SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.
Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country
> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own
Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.
But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...
Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?
> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.
That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.
South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.
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.
Only if they have a deportation order. There are scenarios where people are in an in between state or have the ability to challenge a deportation order
It is extremely important to distinguish between people who are here illegally and people who are subject to a deportation order. ICE's mission is to deport people with deportation orders, and get people suspected of breaking the law in front of a court. The way you've worded it makes it sound like their mission is to go straight from "here illegally" to "deport" which it very much is not.
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.
---
edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
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.
You're mixing up cause and effect. The police in America aren't more dangerous and powerful because they have choices, they have choices because they are dangerous and powerful.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
I do actually think that we shouldn’t have laws we aren’t willing to enforce, so we agree more than you think. I’ve been against states unilaterally legalizing it for years because I worried what happens when states buck laws that I do agree with, such as voting rights or basic protections for all people.
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
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.
When you have trouble meeting the daily quota set by the administration, I guess you wouldn't have time to ponder if the 73-year-old grandma who has been here 30 years is a threat to America.
And civil rights are merely a speed bump on the way to the detention center.
Then why is the administration revoking immigration status, and we have evidence that a significant portion of those detained have zero criminal background? Worse, why are you acting as an apologist for fascist and xenophobic policies?
But they aren't prioritizing dangers. That is false. They have quotas set by a white supremacist. And I think talking about the Trump administration's direction of ICE and ICE itself is a distinction without a difference.
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
That wasn't the campaign promise and isn't worth spending money on. Also they are deporting and detaining people who are here legally and even killing American citizens. Even if it isn't a official mission it's the inevitable side effect of funding a domestic law enforcement agency like a military and making them explicitly beholden to a political agenda.
First a judge would have to order them to leave, and then they would have to disobey that order for a certain time, and only after that can they be deported forcefully. That process takes too long for the people who want them gone right now.
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.
Even if that were true, so what? ICE's violence and overreach are unacceptable and its culture is rotten to the core. The agency needs to be abolished. If there are functions they're performing that we actually need, move those functions elsewhere, but as an agency ICE is irredeemable.
ICE is rogue* 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.
As history has already shown during the Nuremberg Trials, "Following orders" doesn't absolve the individual responsibility of the people under command.
The point of bring all this up isn't to expect the trump admin to do anything, it's an expectation of a (hopefully) future democrat admin to change forces and stop framing the ICE problem as a training or lack of body cams issue.
A core principle of a free democratic society is that everyone has obligations to more than the whims of a wannabe fascist dictator. ICE agents who do things like violently assault peaceful citizens are in the wrong, both morally and legally. The fact that the current president wants to destroy the pillars of our society means there won't be immediate consequences for that kind of behavior, but that doesn't make it any less despicable or immunize them against future consequences.
Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.
>Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.
That's one of the reasons I don't even look at the front page any more. Rather I look at the "Active"[0] and, less often, the "New"[1] pages.
> Among the records revealed during the discovery process in these cases are intercepted Signal chats, ...
I asked claude how ICE was able to intercept signal chats and it seems like it wasn't a failing of signal's encryption, but rather there were some semipublic signal chats that agents were able to join.
And once they joined these signal chats, they launched a privilege escalation attack - in claude's words:
> In one case, an activist posted a license-plate lookup tool, hosted on Fly.io, to an infiltrated chat. Agents then got the service’s DNS queries, Stripe data, SSH logs, and the signup IP, and matched them with DMV records and Thomson Reuters CLEAR data to find a driver’s license number and other personal records. This was reportedly done by buying data from a commercial broker rather than getting a warrant.
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.
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.
No, it's Leftist rhetoric to use their principles against them. Leftists are trying to weaponize principles even though they don't share the same ones. They don't actually care about "hypocrisy" of their political opponents, it's a guilt tactic for political leverage.
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.
>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.
False premise. The Trump administration is doing exactly what he was democratically voted in to do by the "vociferously pro-gun people": close the border and deport illegal immigrants.
By repeatedly ignoring the laws of the nation, because of the edicts of its leader, i.e. literally the definition of tyranny, "a ruler who governs without restriction".
DHS has been dragged into court hundreds of times now and literally stood in front of federal judges and said "we're ignoring your court order, what are you going to do about it?"
This is an illegitimate argument in the context of Second Amendment. The "second amendment people" are pretty vocal proponents of strict adherence to the US constitution - hence the name of the group.
Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.
Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.
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.
I meant nazi. Yes I know what it means. Yes they exist and even on the rise.
And they were go to example of important free speech for years. The gauge was always defending nazi free speech, never defending communist free speech, radical feminists free speech or whoever else free speech.
Your question supposed to determine authoritanianism shows the same fallacy - nazi and other fascists wont count as an authoritarian. If I think all women should be locked at home and be under control of husbands, you wont count me as authoritarian either.
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 Mulford Act is a 1967 California statute which prohibits public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the law was initially crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party, which was conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.[5][6]
Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.
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.
Since most people aren't gonna have context on this part of the literature.
This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.
The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on.
None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.
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.
It wasn’t self defense, it wasn’t for recreational fun, it is to provide a physical check on government overreach. Therefore it’s sensible to discuss it during times of government overreach.
But I don't bring up the second amendment when complaining about income taxes either. Again, what part of what ICE is doing infringes on the second ammendment?
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.
Common misunderstanding. The reason is to protect themselves from government overreach (and other threats), not you or anyone else. You were supposed to get your own gun to protect yourself, that's why the right needs to extend to everyone.
(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining their logic)
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.
As part of an imminent, concerted, collective effort with peers during civil unrest? Sure. Most people aren't ready to Luigi themselves to jail for life as a statement.
Abolish ICE, abolish DHS. Put every single ERO officer and person involved in efforts like this on trial and/or bar them from any public service of any kind going forward.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like they shouldn't put this behind a pay wall or should make it easy to pay for just this article. I'm not subscribing, even with a free trial, to read it.
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.
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.
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".
The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview. I asked for facts - which HN is generally a fact based environment instead of broad hand wavy fear based statements.
As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.
> The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview.
Like I've stated, there are an unusual amount of authoritarian sympathizers in this forum - though it's possible they are bots. When I first heard of the forum and signed up, it was noticeable and I almost did not stick around, but ultimately decided it was better to know what is going on around the world and the posts here are far better quality than somewhere like reddit. Nothing to do with my worldview, just an observation from being around here for 10+ years. It's nothing personal against you.
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.
This account (GP) often comes to these stories to make comments like this. Flag them and move on, avoid giving them the attention they crave like King Trump
> 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.
By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
Seems like you are constructing a very specific situation that should mark some sort of regime change to dictatorship. The reality is, complex things have their own momentum and US society is a big thing.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
"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.
For Dudley Dursley it's the worst getting only 36 presents for his birthday. It's good to maintain a sense of proportionality. If you call everything hell, the word hell looses meaning and it's also an insult to people actually living in hell.
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.
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.
Highlighting the hypocrisy? Even if we assumed both things are equally bad (an opinion I will never understand), it doesn't change the fact of the different treatment whatsoever.
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 mean, everything is an "emergency" if you squint and have no regard for the humans you harm.
I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.
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.
I'm having trouble believing this comment chain is happening/neccesary. I feel completely disconnected from the thought process of a large portion of society.
Suppose I am setting off some fireworks in my street to celebrate the 4th. Do you believe that my neighbors should fear for their lives? This was a noise protest. They weren't shooting roman candles at people.
> 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.
Go watch the body cam footage of the peaceful protest. Looks a lot like people with guns hid in the woods and shot a cop who responded to what looked like a terrorist attack.
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.
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 anti-democratic.
> 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.
Actually, the way the criminal justice system works here in America is that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It's not the job of the newspaper to exonerate the victims of government overreach.
You're right, it's not but that wasn't what I was asking. If they are going to claim that ICE is targeting left wing movements and then use the Minnesota 15 as an example, I would want to hear about this case. If the Minnesota 15 performed only constitutionally protected speech then this investigation might be concerning but the article didn't really describe that. Could ICE have collected evidence illegally? Yes, that can be decided in a court. I am just a layman but if it turns out that the Minnesota 15 were doing things like blocking law enforcement vehicles or throwing ice blocks, that doesn't seem like constitutionally protected speech anymore. Apparently some of them were charged with such offenses. So that might weigh on whether I thought ICE was "cracking down on left-wing social movements".
> 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.
The indictment itself makes no specific mention of violence as far as I know because there was no actual violence committed. It's staggering that people are getting set multi-million-dollar bonds for what is essentially civil disobedience.
"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."
A few things to unpack with this statement. 10 million people never entered illegally, that number is derived from DHS reporting of 10 million encounters which includes people who are arrested, denied entry or removed.
Also, that doesn't cover the fact that this was a recognized issue by Democrats hence why the party had the bipartisan border bill that was killed by Trump because he wanted the border as a political issue for the upcoming election.
The ~10 million were not substantially deported, they entered illegally and then were given Notices to Appear which is completely a lawyerly way to cover for it all.
The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day. Some people don't want that. It wasn't even proposed until 2024. By then people might not have trusted the admin.
Interesting in the same sentence you directly foot gunned yourself.
First of all, the bipartisan bill would have de-facto ended catch and release due to significantly ended "Catch and release" or Notice to Appear since there was now sufficient capacity to adjudicate.
You are correct 10 million were not substantially deported because a majority of them never entered at all that 10 million figure is just a downright lie. Based on the data from Title 42 expulsions around half of that 10 million were people sent back.
"The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day."
Funny because if we take your (lies) about 10 million the legislation would have cut that down by 80% on just the caps alone. Increase in adjudication and the end of catch and release (if we assume all of the 2 million getaways are entirely dishonest) then it would be less than 10% of that figure.
Perfect is the enemy of good or something like that.
How many encounters are there now? DHS says it's a historical low with a 95% reduction. How many people are paroled or given NTA releases now? Sources suggest 0 in the first year. What's the asylum grant rate now? Sources suggest it's about 7% now as opposed to 65% or higher previously.
The bipartisan bill was full of loopholes and it only triggered when border crossings exceeded certain rather high thresholds. Do you realize that? It wasn't comprehensive at all. Here is an example of a loophole: "While the president’s parole authority would be narrowed, he or she would retain the power to parole entire classes of migrants and would have greater authority to do so at airports." (https://digital-release.thehill.com/?p=4447957). So this assumes Biden and Mayorkas were genuinely trying to fix the problem all of a sudden in 2024 as they were facing an election. Why would we want to codify allowing in a certain high number of people along with loopholes when we could just replace Mayorkas and Biden?
The thing is that Mayorkas WANTED the border to be open. This wasn't a mistake. It's an unofficial policy that you're dancing around. I am not interested in stupid Trump vs Democrats or GOP vs Democrats bullshit. There's a substantial nnumber of people who want large scale immigration and a substantial number who don't so all this legalistic bickering is just window dressing for this issue but don't try to pretend that it's universally the moral or democratic norm to have open borders.
> The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes
Are we now doing “guilty until proven innocent?”
> there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders?
Where is that figure sourced from? Are the borders still open?
You’re ignoring the bipartisan bill that would have increased border security in 2024, but Republican politicians shot down for political purposes to help Trump in the election. What did that bi-partisan solution get wrong that you would have done differently?
I get the sense this writer believes Immigration Enforcement Officers deporting and tracking legal American citizens is anti-democratic.
What's new? Gov been doing this to every dissident group for decades now. Funny that "left" now care about it since it's pointed at them. Making this a left vs right debate is so tiresome.
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.
yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.
They're standing, but he's weakened them. He's also laid down a pattern of how to attack them.
Either the institutional protections are strengthened after 2028 (presuming the Democrats win the presidency) and before 2030 (presuming the Democrats lose a bunch of seats in Congress in the midterms), or the next try (whenever it comes) is likely to break the institutional protections and result in authoritarian rule over the US.
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...
> 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.
A few hours ago I posted about the fact that left-wing governments spy on right-wing governments with a very recently discovered example of such while right-wing governments spy on left-wing ones as this article claims. That post was flagged for some inexplicable reason. Here's the link, no idea whether the post itself is visible to others:
Are the denizens of this site so intolerant of different views that they need to flag them out of sight? Whatever happened to the hackers in HN? They'd vociferously defend their own standpoint, pointing out all the errors in my post. The would not hide behind appeals to authority by pressing flag links. What gives, other than that you - meaning those who flagged this innocuous post - just can't stand anything dissenting with your desired narrative to remain on this site? If so, please hand in your hacker card at the exit and find your way to the closest subreddit where such behaviour seems to be cherished. Otherwise discuss, let us know what you think so we can respond or agree or maybe just shake our heads in disbelief but still consider your opinion yours enough that you are willing to post it.
No, this is not the first time I write something like this. I can not help but notice that I've had to write more and more such replies these last years though, things are not looking up here.
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"
For 40 years left wingers have in no particular order:
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion and ethnic background up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as they say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
Be more aware of your online privacy. Try to arrange things so the government can get less information about you. It doesn't matter who they're targeting now - anyone could be next, or could be misidentified as belonging to the current target.
You are supposed to get real angry, scream "Those MAGA b*stards", throw things around your office, jump up and down, call all your friends, post ugliness online; you know, the usual things like every other HN/reddit thread.
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.
ICE should absolutely be running surveillance ops on immigrants that is their job. That is necessary to do in order to find and deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been going out of their way to evade deportation for decades.
> FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters
I think an important distinction here ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so they have no reason to be spying on US citizens unless we're harboring illegal immigrants.
The FBI's *is* the domestic intelligence and security service. So an angry armed mob smashing the Capitol building, threatening to hang the vice president, interfering with the lawful transfer of power, and attempting to gouge the eyes out of a police officer are absolutely something the FBI should be investigating and surveilling. If I merely posted online that I *wanted* to do any of those things, I would expect to be surveilled by the FBI. Actually doing those things is a guarantee.
Neither agency should be doing it for political affiliation reasons, but J6 was a lot more than people just "being conservatives".
Mine was as well, there seems to be an aggressive flag brigade watching this thread. I only pointed out that left spies on right while right spies on left which was too much for the trigger-happy flaggers. It doesn't bode well for the future of this site, there's plenty of censor-happy sites and services out there for those who can not abide to see anything outside of their desired narrative so it is sad to see how these narrow-minded hacks have invaded the hacker news.
IMO the moderators here are biased leftwingers/anti-rightists. Your opinion is sensible but naive - politics is subject to darwinian pressure and if you want to win then it is an absolute war. Both parties should go to the extreme in increasing their power. Technologists should be aware of the hard nature of politics.
Moderators don't flag these comments, nor do they comb through flagged comments to vouch for them. This website is funded by Y Combinator, so if anything the ownership is steered by centrist/pro-right rules and decisionmaking.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like your comments were flagged for Holocaust denial, white supremacist sentiments and uncouth conduct in general. The parent comment was flagged for being low-effort and factually incorrect. If HN didn't flag these comments, the website would be indistinct from /pol/.
I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of and it is actually hard to know what it actually takes to be accused of white supremacist sentiments [1] nowadays since that term has been bandied around by the usual suspects so much. The problem I see is that this site has started to look like /pol/ more or less since Trump 1 when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk. Either bring the ban hammer down on all posts political or keep it only for those few occasions where someone really goes over the line. The mentioned holocaust denial would be one as far as I'm concerned, same for the denial or glorification of other atrocities like the Holodomor/killing fields/Chinese cultural revolution/etc. Political dissent should never be a reason for flagging but unfortunately I've seen this too many times. The Athenians used to debate politics (among other things) on the 'agora' or 'meeting place'. They generally did not do this by kicking anyone who dissented off the square, they debated them. Sites like HN are the modern versions of that meeting place and kicking people off them because they happen to voice dissent does not do anyone any good.
> I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of
It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.
> when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk.
That "seemingly" is doing all your heavy lifting, there. Read my last comment again; users are the ones who enforce flags on those posts, in the vast majority of cases.
It can lead to scenarios where apolitical submissions are flagged, or where flamebait slips through. There is almost never a moderator with their finger on the button waiting to flag something on /new, much less in the comment section. The only exception is banned users and banned domains, both of which prevent repeat offenders and disingenuous content from reaching the front page.
Just about every social media site is privately-owned, and protected by Section 230 from most political blowback. If you want to discuss white supremacy and Holocaust denial, you'll have to do it on federal honeypot sites like /pol/, not here. The OP thread is on-topic, intellectually gratifying, high-quality and relevant to HN as it mentions a YC 2020 batch company (Fly.io).
For years the social contract was that neither side did it to the other because once that rubicon was crossed, both sides would do it.
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
I'm honestly curious. What line do you think the left crossed first? There is nothing in my mind that comes even close to the lines that have been crossed by this administration.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
This response is rich in vibes, low in fact, but my guess is OP is generally referring to things like the FBI's storming of Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the infiltration and surveillance of organizations, basically right and far right, in response to the OKC bombing, in the name of preventing domestic terrorism.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
If you aren’t going to include a shred of justification to back up why you think the left started it, you’re just deluding yourself that you are a centrist.
The radical left celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. And long before that, they were doing all kinds of harassment on college campuses. And don’t forget about the BLM riots.
Under the first amendment, Americans have the right to celebrate the death of anyone they please. It might not be tasteful or respectful, it might be inflammatory, but that's an American freedom enshrined in constitutional law; freedom of speech is integral and fundamental to the US national identity.
As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.
We can very easily count the murders that happen in the US every year. With the exception of COVID, which was largely due to unemployment and school closures, homicide has dropped precipitously since the invention of “calling people Nazis online”
Where are all these murders caused by calling out racism and fascism?
> 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.
Adding `fly.io` to my permanent "never use" list. If they're not going to lawyer up when it comes to the 4th amendment, I will never use this service.
It's so reassuring to know that all a cloud provider needs to compromise its users trust is an official looking letterhead.
Definitely 0% chance they could ever be phished by a foreign (or domestic) power with enough email (or letter) know-how.
At least other big tech companies were forced to kneel with secret (unconstitutional) FISA orders. Both Apple and Google at least try to show that they're pushing back.
EG: google shifted location data to local device only to combat Geo fencing warrants
EG: Apple [requiring warrants](https://apnews.com/article/apple-push-notification-data-cour...) to read push notifications
(why aren't push notifications E2E encrypted in the year-of-our-lord 202X?)
If you read the DHS document it sounds like Fly.io and Stripe are complacent. They provided data without fighting the subpoenas. Warrants should be required for this data.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28831278-govuscourts...
> complacent
Complicit?
both, really.
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.
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?
Indian government is banning 1000s of posts and accounts everyday on Insta/FB/Reddit/X in India. They used to notify the user and let them know that this is a government requested tack down. Now, they just say, their automated system flagged the content.
> Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things.
Two things are true
1) Tech has become more financial people and "techbros" than principled nerds.
2) The powers of the USG have become a lot stronger and far reaching- quite literally to the level where talking about complying with an order is itself a crime.
I want to reunite with my 'principled nerds' so badly. Things weren't perfect, not by a long shot, back then, but there was a sense of hope and excitement about using technology to make the world a better place.
Agreed. One of the reasons I'm seeing myself becoming more of a luddite looking forward to retiring offline with minimal technology is precisley because online discourse is largely comprised of unserious people confidently incorrect and technology companies have largely stopped trying to make peoples' lives better and are more focused on quarterly earnings.
Hackerspaces still exist - and seem to be booming again since the tech layoffs. Dropped by Noisebridge while I was visiting SF and as the kids say, the vibes were immaculate.
Do you participate in a hackerspace though, or do you just visit? I've realised I've become far too passive as a result of consuming mass internet media.
You and I both. :/
Both of these are serious, but decades-old problems.
They used to operate in a legally consistent Western Democracy. They no longer do. OpSec for most involved in basic social activism needs to now be at the level of 'Journalist in a Dictatorship' or stricter.
At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.
That was before doing so would almost certainly result in immediate retaliation from the executive branch.
Are you talking about the individuals or the companies? Companies can lie a lot of the time and just say they don't have the requested information, and the government has no way to know, unless they usually comply with similar requests. The government can seize servers, but can't compel disk encryption keys yet.
Your mistake is assuming that the company is anti-ICE.
People care more about money than morals and ethics and just being a decent human being and citizen.
"Authoritarian capitalism is a system in which corporations ally themselves with repressive or anti-democratic political regimes, benefiting from protection and impunity."
There's a shorter phrase for corporations and other large organizations colluding with or controlling an authoritarian government for the organizations' own ends at the expense of at least some subset of the people. It's actually only one word, and there are three options. Mussolini had corporatism on the mind. You probably know the other two, and one is a proper noun.
You should call the nazis out imho
Fair enough. The two other words are fascism and Nazism.
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.
> your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
I do watch too many movies.
If they have a warrant, they can search for stuff in that warrant.
If they don't, they can still do that, but anything they find will likely not be usable in court and you'll have a straightforward civil rights case.
Again : “HEY MY DUDES WHERES YOUR WARRANT AND YOU CAN ONLY SEARCH FOR STUFF IN IT” going to be hard to yell when you have a trooper’s boot smashing your neck against the ground and they’re ransacking your home after having blown the door off its hinges.
I agree. And you don't have to yell it.
And... Them stomping on you during an illegal search doesn't make it a legal one and doesn't shield them from liability.
Even in a legal search, I'm guessing they can't decide to curb stomp you just because without the risk of legal/other liability.
If you want to ignore legality, then you need to keep a rifle for every man, woman, and child in your home strong enough to shoulder one, and enough black-tips to ensure the cops bring a chaplain along for the raid.
I have no idea what you just wrote. What?
Fifteen years ago, yes, maybe your movie ingestion would have given you unrealistic expectations.
However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.
Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.
What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?
In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.
Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.
[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.
[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.
> Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections
no such thing called constitutional protections in 2026 USA.
There are, although you still have to find a lawyer to litigate them. Maybe less so than in other years, but in other cases, maybe more so.
>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.
Yeah these are pretty good points I can't really dispute.
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
Thanks for the reply, and I'm definitely all in favor of assessing things in light of threat model! That said:
>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read
I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.
In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.
If that is your worry, people who do a lot more dangerous things than web hosting have written and talked about how to act during a raid so that you don't get murdered. Mainly just let them do what they want, don't immediately push back with violence against infringements of your rights, push back in court later.
> provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback
Where's the furious pushback for the people they've murdered already?
Fix your country.
Oh, gee, none of us thought of that. Thanks.
This happens sometimes, but rarely, and if it does happen, chances are you'll be fine, apart from downtime and having to buy a new server, as long as your disks are encrypted.
You're treating this as if the worst thing that can happen will happen, when it's more of a numbers game. They do these raids occasionally on one or two people in order to scare tens of thousands of other people away from participating.
DCs also get bullshit raids sometimes and have processes that don't involve an immediate permanent blacklist.
You have to realise it's a move of desperation by the attackers. If they are seizing a server, it means they don't have anything and they're hoping beyond hope they can get something, anything, from that server.
probably use tor and nothing tied to your identity
Even safer to say nothing, wear your MAGA cap and watch Fox.
I'm not saying it's easy, but the straightforward solution is to move
For those with the resources to do so, perhaps. But those well-resourced people fleeing the country are then leaving those who are not well-resourced to fend for themselves, and letting it further devolve.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
Unlike the USA (yes, even now), most countries are not eager to accept foreigners.
Which countries aren't dangerous like this? Norway perhaps?
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 not an option for everyone, and just being American will result in difficulties in getting bank accounts and access financial rails overseas thanks to FACTA. Countries that do not have a history of compliance/cooperation are generally countries you don't want to go to and also, likely can't actually stay in. For the past 100 years or so there's no terra nullis one can simply escape to and be allowed to live with any degree of comfort and acceptance. Realistically though, even the places that offered the illusion of safety are not really safe now. Not to mention that the fact that any part of the pipes is even visible is in a meta sense part of the safeguards actually working. If you go to Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, etc., they've simply had time to learn how to run authoritarianism as normal. The reaction to such a scheme indicates that in the US this is still aberrant. Elsewhere this is quotidian and assumed to exist even when it doesn't really because of the inability for any individual person not in a privileged position to even begin to understand what state capacity actually exists, or doesn't exist.
There is at least still the ability to recognize tyranny when it arrives that exists in the culture here. People have the option of playing jurisdictional arbitrage with their data. ICE isn't part of the actual judiciary and even the DOJ loses cases - routinely, now, under this admin, a mindblowing change from the gears that exercised discretion to keep its reputation under all circumstances.
The case that revealed all this abuse of authority is a relatively minor and poorly chosen set of facts that the government has a real possibility of taking to trial and lose on. What ICE is doing is authoritarian drag compared to pretty much everywhere else that has the capacity to have such agencies in the first place. ICE is genuinely incompetent because all this is new to them, because it's both unlawful and culturally unacceptable, and running a surveillance state is not reflexively easy to most people. They don't know how to prioritize, how to cover things up whether the authority exists or not, and how to even properly police themselves. They don't know how to passively let information reach them and instead everything is loud and noisy and leaves paper trails and frequently ineffectual. What's important is maintaining that reflex about how all this is fundamentally unacceptable in every sense.
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.
Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.
They can't even take Iran by force.
Iran is far away and has been preparing for this war for decades though.
Or Afghanistan, or Vietnam.
Same goes for most ISPs, which are needed to connect to the Internet.
The important data being handed over was the IP address of the admin. If you self-host the server, that skips the first step to discover who is running the server, your own IP address is in the web site's DNS entry.
On the other hand if it's on a hosted server that you have control over, they know whose server it is but they don't know what it's doing, and without a wiretap they don't even know who's connecting, and they can't see any encryption keys or content if encryption is used well.
Imagine a world where we all use Gmail, and one where we all host email on our own servers the host can't get into. In the latter world, a wiretap can identify who's sending mail to who, but not read the email, nor identify the IP address that downloaded any individual email. That's a severe handicap for them over just being able to read your mail. If you have 10 people on each server, they get even less info (but the server owner gets more).
[flagged]
He doesn't work there anymore I'm told.
Fair, but he’s the most prominent person here who’s been on both sides of this so I’d genuinely like his take.
Two concrete questions. Did Fly challenge this request, or just comply? And does he still think server-side trust is a non-issue when the identity in this case was built entirely from provider-side records (signup IP, SSH audit logs, a Stripe fingerprint)?
When I said in 2023 that the infrastructure around E2EE matters, he called it misinformation (rather aggressively).
This case looks a lot like the infrastructure mattering.
You're on some powerful hallucinogens if you believe for a second that he would comment on a previous employer in such a way.
As much as you'd like his take to, I don't think he's out to burn bridges or open himself up to a lawsuit.
This is an unreasonable request.
Requesting people to behave ethically might be unrealistic, but it is never unreasonable.
It takes balls to be a whistleblower. I'm not holding my breath that it'll happen.
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.
I tried and failed to get working account.
Huh, I though they did. But maybe I was wrong or they changed that.
I think they have a daily rate limit for free Tor accounts. You can make a paid account through Tor with Bitcoin, which of course you obtained by some anonymous method.
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.
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.
Some of your comments were killed because our software classified the text as genai. That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
none of my text is genai. ever. and i dont appreciate your insinuation that it is.
the comment that started this was quoting directly from the HSI document.
this comment was one that was killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273618 can you please tell me how i can write it so your bot doesn't think i am a bot?
same for this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273525 or this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274615. i'll take advice on how to rewrite the original one too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272749) because im at a loss for words how it was classified as genai.
edit: i just ran all of my recent comments through pangram and they came back 100% human (which i knew, of course, considering i wrote them), so i am really not clear on how you want me to write my comments. apparently using my own words isn't enough for you or your bot.
OK, well there seem to have been a couple of false positives and perhaps a glitch in one case, which we'll look into. Sorry about that. In the case of the quote from the HSI document, perhaps that text you copied/pasted was LLM-enhanced (the comment was classified as genai according to all the methods we use, but of course no approach is 100% accurate).
False positives are going to happen, no matter how much we try to make our systems infallible, and you're welcome to email us if any comments of yours get killed and aren't quickly vouched by other users.
I can still confirm that your comments weren't being killed via any deliberate moderator intervention.
alright, that's fine, and thanks for saying it. false positives are expected, but your initial reply was not.
Thanks for understanding. I should have read the comments more closely and normally do, but I was on the defensive after the comment seemed to accuse us of killing comments, or at least make assumptions that we did or would do that.
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.
Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
It's nice that this place maintains an email endpoint that's actually staffed by humans who can intervene if needed. That's more than can be said about most places these days.
>Informing the subject they are shadowbanned would kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban. Might as well just issue a regular ban then.
shadow bans here have no purpose. i would have found out in a couple days even if no one told me. so yes, it might as well just be a regular ban, correct. at least that way i would know what rule i broke.
Definitely some weirdness going on in this whole thread in general. It went from front page to 5th page in an instant.
Fly.io really needs to explain what happened here.
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 mean the Chief Justice was asked by Congress - "It seems that every other part of the federal court system has ethics guidelines and processes, but not the Supreme Court. It seems reasonable that the highest Court in our land should have those." And he replied, almost verbatim, "We're not going to do that and we're offended that you feel the need to ask."
I do hope a congress soon has the spine to fix the courts and some of their recent missteps, the list is getting very very long though.
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.
If it truly went to everybody to me it is just government paying dividends to the people. Which I think is far preferable and useful compared to corporate bailouts and tax cuts and most other allocations. We gave money to people during covid and it wasn't catastrophic.
How is that different than democrat socialists offering free healthcare and universal income?
Free healthcare, I think you mean single payer healthcare or a public option for healthcare, exists in most countries in the world. How is it different? How about how is it the same?
Healthcare is a comprehensive quality of life improvement that indivuduals can't waste in fast fashion and such, which reduces the wealth gap, which will remain after election campaign, which is a cornerstone of societies of many developed countries.
If you can’t tell the difference you’re stupid or you support trump style fascism.
One is a bribe the other is a health insurance program.
I can’t speak to UBI but it’s not a common platform anyways.
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?
At some point, foregoing everything that is similar to what you just mentioned moves out of inconvenience territory and into social self-exclusion territory. To remain ideologically consistent with your argument, one must fully self-exclude.
Consider all of the sources of the available tracking data on a person in the United States. If you don't have a cell phone, don't drive a car, don't walk around outdoor networked cameras, don't patronize businesses that have networked cameras, don't use a credit card, how exactly are you interacting with this society?
Except for the flock cameras, we opted into this system with open arms. If you're coming of age right now it must suck, but there has been a steady march towards a demolition of privacy for more than 20 years.
This is maybe half correct (or fully correct for some people). It's not that simple though. We're talking about a web service the fascists didn't like. How do you host that anonymously other than Tor (which no one will use)? As someone who doesn't partake in any sort of MSM in the US and actively tries to avoid fascism, I would genuinely like to know what the solution is here.
Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.
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.
I’m getting unsolicited texts all the time about how the “billionaire tax” in California is the worst thing ever. No matter if you think the tax is misguided, it’ll probably work at preventing the billionaire tax from passing, but it’s a good firsthand demonstration at how power accumulating to billionaires tends to accumulate even further. Only billionaires have the resources to fight back so aggressively against any encroachment on their power.
That gets into an idea I've been pretty adamant about. People say that capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, but its actual property is that it's inevitable. Money (power) can be used to gain more power. If even a few people choose to do so, if not countered intentionally by some outside force, wealth and power will accumulate.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
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.
With how successful the Republicans have been recently it would be very strange if that were not the case.
Sure, there are third parties. It just that people associate that with wasted votes.
That's because the two reigning parties designed the system such that votes for other parties are in fact mostly wasted.
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.
Trump was a billionaire, able to fund his own campaign, that hardly proves the power of the common man. Now, back to 2026, the richest person in the world has spent almost $500 million on helping Republicans in the midterms. Clearly him and Trump don't believe too much in the power of the common man's vote.
>Trump was a billionaire, able to fund his own campaign, that hardly proves the power of the common man.
He still spent the least and publicly eschewed donations. His skill was being able to connect with the voters that matter (unfortunately).
As far as I can tell, donations after he was elected in 2016 are simply bribes.
When did he publicly eschew donations? He raised plenty of money, albeit bit as much as his competitors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-shrugs-off-campa...
>Trump has spent much of the race so far breaking the mould of a traditional campaign, defeating a crowded field of primary opponents who vastly outspent him in ads and staff.
>During the Republican primary race, he often told his supporters not to contribute money and ridiculed opponents for accepting cash from special interest groups and wealthy contributors.
>He has so far showed little interest in calling donors to ask for money for his general election battle. He only began holding in-person fundraisers in late May.
He gave over $60 million to his own campaign and used his existing celebrity to get media coverage 24/7.
>that hardly proves the power of the common man.
What I meant was the 2016 Repub primaries are evidence that the common man votes for who they want, not who the large donors want. The Repub party leadership and previous decision makers were usurped, and hence the idea of MAGA supplanting the Republican Party. More evidence is Dick Cheney and the Bush family becoming quickly irrelevant.
not at all. wow people need to do some basic research on this. the Republicans are driven by a tiny handful of billionaires and with Musk, trillionaires. Democratic candidates OTOH rely to a vastly larger extent on millions of individual donors sending $100 or less - there are still large donors but their contribution to Democrats is close to an order of magnitude less than what GOP megadonors provide.
Of course, both of these funding models should be banned which would mean dismantling the Citizens United decision spearheaded by the now-known-to-be-fully-corrupt Roberts court, which might require a constitutional amendment.
As always Trump is worse but the Democrats hands are by no means clean.
There's a secret third political option, but it's usually frowned upon.
Labor organizing?
That's pretty normal. I think bro is pointing at either a general strike or regicide, both of which are highly frowned upon.
I guess I view a general strike as the inevitable precipitation of labor organizing critical mass.
And I also think of it as pretty esoteric to the mainstream, TBH.
> 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.
You have to string more than 1 of them together to get any results besides “they voted for it and it still lost”.
Liz Warren is a fascist who would use every police state tactic you hate on her opposition.
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.
dont look at soundbites, look at legislation proposed. that's how Senators actually do their work
Except for the part where they often propose legislation they know won't pass and then don't propose it later when it will pass.
Sometimes they miscalculate. Mitch McConnell once had to filibuster his own bill because he didn't mean for it to pass.
We keep voting for people promising they won’t do things like this, who then proceed to do things like this.
The court rulings are based on telephone directories and the conflicts between their disparate companies (including Ma Bell). The phone company tried to claim that they owned the phone numbers (and any derivative intellectual property rights). The companies that published competing phone books successfully argued that the only property rights exist in the compilation of data - not in the data itself. The result of this pile of history is that whosoever owns the computer owns the data on that computer.
The GDPR comes from the opposite direction - you own the data about yourself.
Because then daddy can make the scary people go away.
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?
GDPR has a giant gaping loophole for government pressure. They're also writing a new one to allow AI training that would otherwise be illegal.
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.
Almost all the cabinet level departments has their own Inspector General office since the 70s and 80s.
Homeland Security got one in 2003 with the combination of previous agencies.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 also let those offices start having their own statutory powers and carry firearms without needing to be deputized by the US Marshals Service.
> Homeland Security finally got one in 2003.
This was heavily affected by them being founded in 2002.
The departments they were built from didn't have those either.
"finally"? The Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2003.
And the departments they were created from lacked IGs...
(1) protest is protected by the first amendment (2) American law enforcement isn't supposed to have access to this kind of information about citizens absent a warrant
The Constitution and its amendments binds the government, not private entities such as corporations.
The Fourth Amendment gives you zero protections from corporations willingly handing your data over to the government upon a simple warrantless request. A corporation can choose to tell the government to pound sand without a warrant, but they're not in any legal way obligated to do so.
EDIT: Actually, I may be wrong here. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 may give you some protections against data intended to be private, such as Friends-only social media posts, private messages, etc.
>(1) protest is protected by the first amendment
I'm guessing those 15 people are these 15 people:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/15-members-direct-action-...
>Charges Include Conspiracy to Impede or Injure a Federal Officer, Interstate Stalking, Interstate Threats, Solicitation to Commit a Crime of Violence, and Assaults on Federal Officers
They don’t, a private entity has it, and shared it with law enforcement.
We’re very grateful to these corporate servants of the community.
Man, you Americans are really playing with fire
By not paying a bit of attention what happens in government, especially when our “team” is in power?
Yes, it’s been a long-time coming.
Pendulum has to hit something eventually.
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
> a massive organized anti-ICE operation?
What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.
This makes it better why?
You mean protesting? The thing the Constitution protects? You’ve been corrected.
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.
UPS could do this, yes, but ICE isn’t allowed to. All of what you described is, by itself, perfectly legal for US citizens, and ICE has even more restrictions about targeting US citizens than the government as a whole. So why is it okay for ICE to do 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.
I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians? On top of that there are companies like Flock who monitor civilians when ICE isn’t there.
I don’t get why you love ICE so much and want to protect them like they’re doing you some big service and not going around instilling fear in others. Have you been living under a rock?
>I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians?
You are asking why a civilian can't do the same things that a federal agent can?
It’s a leap to claim anyone loves a federal agency.
I followed a lot of the news about them regarding this thing. If I own a business or even simply act as a manager and I know of a constant threat to my staff I would take any action I was legally allowed to protect them. Doesn’t matter if it’s ICE, the postal service, a gas station, theme park, etc.
It’s basic self defense.
ICE agents didn’t start covering their faces just because, they did it because people were doxxing them and going after their families.
People are going to protect themselves and their staff. It’s basic human nature.
Do want to be targeted? Then don’t commit constitutional violations and murders
Do you want to be targeted? Then don't look Latino, black or foreign, work blue collar or service jobs or speak a language that is not English. There are plenty of examples of law abiding citizens getting illegally arrested or killed by ICE.
ICE is facing backlash because they are breaking the law and discriminating. Flock is facing backlash because they are enabling ICE and the general oppression of opposition to the current administration. Crimes should be investigated, but this falls outside of an immigration agency's responsibilities.
All this coming from a non-american by the way.
Well it's fully legal to use widespread AI cameras for mass surveillance, as exemplified by Flock. That has nothing to do with the government - it's just plain legal to do. If the government wants it to be illegal it should make a law that says it's illegal, and then both Flock and other groups will have to shut down their camera networks.
ICE agents are undeserving of peace so your argument kind of falls apart a bit.
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 start 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.
Fly.io signup IP, huh ?
A proper warrant must be respected and adhered to …
… but was it a proper warrant or just a bluff and, further, was the customer notified?
I insist on knowing the answer to this question and if you are a customer of fly.io (I am not) you should too.
if fly.io has servers based in the U.S by all means the gvt has access to those logs legally and illegally.
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.
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 [SCOTUS Chief] Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
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.
Votes that lose by a large margin have no information. They’re commitment free actions taken purely for political gain. Narrow wins are the only ones where you can really learn something.
If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.
I think that effect still exists on small margin votes too. You know pretty much how it’s goona go down on every vote. 99-1 feels a little different to me. That no one else even wanted to claim that lane.
Yeah, I think narrow wins are the only ones you can count on. Those require participation. Otherwise it’s all local constituency branding.
Hardly true. Have you never tried to be the lone dissenter in a crowd? Make that crowd a nation.
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.
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?
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).
Adding this for context for those who don’t know:
They stopped reporting on individual boat arrivals, a media blackout was imposed and enforced.
For quite a while is was illegal for news to report on conditions. Doctors, nurses, security guards, other staff could be punished for reporting conditions there.
Australia spent over $9m per asylum seeker held on Nauru in 2025–2026. Some people there couldn’t afford food or clean water (it wasn’t supplied).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/20/nauru-asylum-s...
https://rsf.org/en/australia-suppresses-coverage-refugees-na...
We outsourced it, at huge expense to the taxpayer and unfathomable suffering to many refugees.
It would’ve been cheaper and faster to house, feed, and educate them.
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.
It is, ironically, a situation where the best solution might very well be a lighter touch.
US immigration policy used to be simply... Less. You could pretty much come and go as you please along the southern border. So people did, and therefore there were simply fewer issues because folks didn't feel the need to "sneak in," not when getting in and out of the country was as easy as a day-pass. People would live in Mexico and work a job in a border city.
The tightening of the rules began in (if I recall correctly) the '80s, and with it the actual crisis; if you could come and go as you please, it was no issue to live in Mexico, but people, when forced to choose, stayed where the economic productivity was.
Obama deported at least as many people as trump, but did it in far more competent way.
If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.
Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.
The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.
Depends on the political framework of the person you are speaking to. I think the laws are thuggish, as are the goons executing them.
Something, something, Borders do not exist as anything other than an abstract concept.
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.
American media, such as CBS has been purchased by Larry Ellison and directed not to.
Read the exit comments of journalists who worked there.
> “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me,” Pelley said. “And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scott-pelley-cbs-new-yo...
This is the state of media, and it's looking like the media of certain other countries.
It's also known that ICE on the street right now differs from ICE in 2024.
To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.
Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.
Wasn't this a hoax? A parent abandoned thir child and ICE took care of the kid.
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.
Smart people know that "the law" has little to do with morality, and vastly more to do with power. When evil people are in power, they make evil laws, and when you have evil laws, it is immoral to follow them. Following the law is never moral in it's own right; Legality, even in the best of times, only strives to shadow morality.
I've never met someone who wouldn't prefer to change the law rather than be forced to violate them. But only cowards and the intellectually incapable think that supporting the enforcement of an unjust law while campaigning for it's fix is someone a morally superior stance.
And to answer why America? Because if we can't do it, nobody can. What kind of yellow-bellied, unpatriotic attitude can you have to think "oh, let's just let some better country solve the problems we've created in the world through prolonged geopolitical control over the 20th century". Fuck that. If America is great enough to conquer the world, it should be great enough to solve the side effects that come with it.
Some people DO advocate for better laws. It doesn't mean that it will pass. At then end of the day, you have to convince enough people to vote for people who want to make it a law, or make enough noise and be an enough electoral power that politician wants to do it. But, while a lot of people care about immigration and such, at the end of the day, some other issues (the typical example is the cost of living), might take precedences.
> 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.
I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.
Economic migrants are by far the majority in the US. In fact, economic migrants abusing “asylum” have basically made it impossible for the immigration authorities to have a sane asylum policy.
Agreed completely, I’d never illegally migrate to Japan and expect them to do anything besides arrest and deport me. It’s only western countries that get this weird illogical hate for not opening the borders to literally anyone and actually enforcing immigration law.
> 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).
Overstaying a visa in the us isn't necessarily illegal. It can mean that the next time you leave, you'll have to get a new one before being allowed to re-enter which can take months even if it's the same one.
I'm not saying this is universally true for all visas. But if the underlying reason you're eligible for the visa is still there then overstaying it is not a problem.
So I get your assumption, and being pessimistic on that front is probably a good idea. However, immigration isn't straightforward and things that sound bad could be completely legal.
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?
Yes, if the biggest political issue in that country at the time was would-be immigrants taking advantage of the slow legal process in order to stretch out their illegal stay in the country longer.
Why not speed up the process legally, instead of just kidnapping people who are going to court hearings, in contempt of court?
Why not let the judge say "you shall be immediately deported" and then immediately deport them? Right now they're not even letting the judge issue a decision.
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.
Everyone in society should just ignore all laws they don’t feel are just. That will surely work great
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.
Some people are indeed upset about the way ICE is enforcing immigration law, but that's not remotely what this article is about. The article is about the government co-opting ICE (and other resources) to crack down on ideological dissent by US citizens.
"ideological dissent", in the form of interfering with lawful arrests.
ICE has yet to roust a Philly DSA meeting, in contrast.
Multiple judges have issued orders because arrests have not been lawful, and ICE has flagrantly violated the orders.
https://www.aol.com/articles/nashville-judge-orders-release-...
https://www.aclu-co.org/press-releases/federal-judge-rules-i...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/nyregion/ice-judge-condem...
https://alabamareflector.com/2026/09/22/federal-judge-orders...
...and exactly none of these rulings grants anyone a priori the right to interfere with an arrest.
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.
> the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws
This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.
It is not so simple. Here is some information: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...
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.
I think missing from your context is the racial and religious motivations of people that back ICE's current actions. They don't care about the law or reasonable expectations on visa policies.
The left-wing activists who attack ICE that this article is about absolutely have racial and religious motivations for what they do.
I guess preserving the freedoms under the Constitution against ICE is a racial or religious motivation
The Wired article is not about people who violated travel visa. Not at all.
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.
For a couple of reasons.
One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.
The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).
(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"
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.
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. But I should say Obama was being very public about the program whereas previously it had been more of an under-the-table thing. 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.
To me gutting these benefits is the less bad alternative compared to just bringing in people illegally. And also H-2A doesn’t cover construction workers.
This seems like an obvious and workable solution. Could it be being blocked by something - perhaps unions representing local workers? (only guessing)
https://archive.is/2026.10.28-130224/https://www.wired.com/s...
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.
You mean being voted into regional parliaments in the former GDR states?
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
Basically true but is it any more important than that retired cops moved to Idaho for the neonazi vibe?
They're talking about the period of time that followed reunification. Going from there to where Germany is today isn't inevitable.
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
Apparently the full expression is "Don't Tread On Me, But Feel Free To Tread On Those With Whom I Disagree"
They're the ones treading on other people.
They watch the TV network that tells them every single day that huge numbers of illegal immigrants (or other scary brown-skinned people) are the reason for all their troubles & fears. They always hype the false story that there is a huge caravan of migrants approaching US borders but only during lead-up to elections.
Trump is persecuting the same "others" that the "don't tread on me" group also hate. They only wave their weapons when Democrats are sitting in the White House.
They're too busy re-enacting the "Clown Applying Makeup" meme, to achieve a proper mar-a-lago face.
They don't want to be trod upon, they want to tread on everyone else.
Always amusing to see this saying on _license plates_ of all places. Idk if a snake can look pathetic, but I always read them with a "please, mister," in front of them.
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.
Constitutional rights extend everywhere the Constitution covers regardless of immigration status. If ICE is conducting business in opposition to rights conveyed by the Constitution then you have found a far more grave concern to address.
For sure, my point is that there's no way you can slice this as being justifiable. Even if you are pro surveillance and anti-leftist. ICE shouldn't be doing this, it's the job of the FBI.
HSI has long been criminal enforcement within ICE, but I agree that they are the wrong agency to investigate this. They're doing it because they're unquestioningly loyal to Trump and because it's likely the administration has ordered certain outcomes.
I would also argue that there are no potential benefits that would make this sort of surveillance acceptable, let alone necessary.
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.
> for political reasons
It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.
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.
We might be talking past each other. You're talking purely legal interpretation, I'm talking society and philosophy.
My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.
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?
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.
Yeah if they actually wanted to solve this "problem", they would go after the business owners who incentive them coming here via pay.
That happens occasionally. But it mostly doesn't happen. Mostly, the people who end up with criminal charges are the illegal immigrants. If you dig into the numbers it tells the story of a vanishingly small number of companies (like hundreds per year out of millions) getting scrutiny. The industries which get the scrutiny are the ones where people could end up dead or injured (construction, meat packing, etc.). (According to Gemini - grain of salt)
A few years ago there was a huge set of raids at Tyson facilities - 900+ undocumented immigrants working there.
Awkwardly, it was made known to the media that Tyson knew all about it, to the point where they had provided those workers written instructions and tips on how to stay under the radar with respect to taxes, financials, immigration, etc.
When a journalist asked about this at the press conference where DHS was crowing over the success of the raid? "That's not something that is being investigated as part of this operation." Well, what about separately? "We are not investigating the company."
A lot of the theory was that like some other food production firms (Hormel dealing with people getting sick from y'know, inhaling aerosolized pig brain), that it was very much a "won't someone rid us of these meddlesome immigrants" (the ones advocating about child labor, wage theft, OSHA violations). Come round these ones up, you get a press conference and we solve a labor issue.
Oh yes. I mean ICE could raid some of those big meat packing factories tomorrow, but obviously that would cut down on donations.
Sorry is this an argument for or against stronger immigration enforcement?
The issue is that past administrations of given them quasi-legal status. You hop the border, claim 'asylum', then you get a court date years away.
So the first step is revoking the fraudulent claims, and processing the cases so they can be deported legally.
Couldn't you just better fund the court system so the court date isn't years away? Or improve the citizenship process? Maybe some of that $100 billion we gave to ICE could have gone to the courts for faster processing of these specific cases. That would seem like the more civilized way to do it.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
Well, as it happens these immigration court judges were appointed by previous administrations, and they were intentionally slow walking every case. The Trump admin fired a bunch of those judges earlier this year, was sued, won, and now the cases are actually getting processed.
The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).
People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
> The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
> we could use state police to deport people
So much for states rights.
> both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
In what ways? I don't see a lot of police unions supporting left-leaning or Democratic candidates. Democrats have voted against things like the Patriot Act in much larger numbers than Republicans. Democrats have introduced bills like "Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2026" which have basically no Republican support. The biggest private advocates for an increased police state (Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Palmer Luckey, etc.) are huge Republican supporters and donors.
> Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
It sounds like you’re saying we should all just accept that our visas mean nothing, and that in practice literally anyone should be able to just show up, claim asylum, never show up to court for their hearing, and what we should do is absolutely nothing. In “blue” states they are strongly encouraged to sign up for driver’s licenses and welfare programs, and state agencies are forbidden from even asking their legal status. State and local police in those states are often banned from spilling the beans even when they commit crimes.
So, overstaying legal status can’t be addressed by states because Dems think it’s too mean to send them home, and it can’t be actively done by federal agencies because to do so, they have to come into states and investigate people to determine if they’re legally here or not and we don’t like the possibility that they might ever get it wrong.
This is why Democrats lost all respect from moderates like me who used to proudly be part of that party a decade ago. They’re not serious anymore. They appear to want a system that pretends to work but which everyone ignores because everyone knows it’s never enforced. Like driving 70 on the freeway in a 65 zone - everyone does it.
This is not how we should run immigration.
you're not a moderate, you put words in others mouths to justify your own extremist beliefs. own it.
Or, given the fact that normal folks come here and live normal lives contributing to their communities, the US could just make easier paths to citizenship.
We already have paths to citizenship, people just need to wait their turn. People with skills we need can already get in under programs that exist for that purpose.
We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.
It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.
Folks have been crossing that border since before there was a border. The border is the created problem, not folks moving around.
Hah, what? I have skills we need. I came here legally.
It would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper for me to come here on a visa waiver, marry a USC against the terms of that waiver, and ask for forgiveness (i.e. "adjust status") than it was to do so the "proper way".
Much of your comment just sounds xenophobic.
We don't need your skills, your country 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.
Undocumented immigrants are a useful scapegoat politically, because it allows those in power to point the finger at them for all the country's problems, but those immigrants have no political power themselves since they can't vote.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
>> 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
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
There exists a subset of business owners who would prefer hiring workers without standard protections or rights.
Yup, and 50 million “Democrats” assisting them, people who’ve been convinced that maximizing the number of foreign citizens living here without valid visas is the enlightened and cool policy to aim for, or at least that if the other party won’t let them automatically naturalize everyone as they sprint across the border, that this is the next best thing.
Yes, which baffles me why being pro-immigration is a left wing position, given that it harms workers so much.
Bernie used to be anti immigration for exactly this reason.
At the risk of a committing a "No True Scotsman" here... it isn't a properly left wing position. Or at least it hasn't been for most of the history of the left.
Well "A policy of parties that currently identify as left of centre" - UK Labour, US Democrats etc
yes yes as everyone knows there are exactly 112,530,874 jobs in the US, and will never be any more or less, so the labor market is exactly zero-sum
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.
So you are arguing for not allowing immigrants to come and work those jobs?
I strongly believe all people are equal, and we should not apply different ethics based on national borders, race, sex, etc. They should be able to come work any jobs, and be treated the same as citizens.
> 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.
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
Tyson Chicken was shown to have provided written instructions for undocumented workers on staying under the radar. And yet when DHS arrested 900 workers at their facilities, they also announced there was no plans to investigate the company itself (strange - knowingly assisting an undocumented immigrant with such is a felony).
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.
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.
The term combines two concepts: Nation: A group of people who identify as belonging to a shared community. State: A political entity with a defined territory, a government, and sovereignty over its internal and external affairs.
I would argue this requires at least some sovereign control over borders.
The EU defines their borders as a bloc. States are not nations - and that’s one of the reasons why.
Border control is an important expression of state sovereignty. If you have zero controls the state would experience net migration until conditions declined below the global average and nobody wants to move there anymore. That’s pretty self evident, it’s how economics works and how systems maintain an equilibrium.
Both legal and undocumented immigrants in the US show lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans in major studies; the picture in Europe is different, with clear overrepresentation for non-Western and asylum-related groups. Fiscal impacts depend heavily on skill/education level rather than legal status alone, with low-skilled migrants (legal or not) more often a net cost over their lifetimes.
So control over borders is important, and having standards is a good thing.
There is no magic soil. A nation is the people who make it up. Bring in the violent, stupid, and culturally incompatible people from the shithole countries they are trying to escape and things will trend downwards to some average between those terrible places and our desirable countries. That’s not racist our xenophobic, it’s acknowledging the facts.
People are not equal. Countries are not equal. Education and culture and religions are not equal. There are better and worse versions of all of them. Again just facts. To ignore that is to live in fantasy land that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I have traveled to nearly 50 countries. I have lived in the developing world. My ancestors have had to flee countries and been refugees. I know what I’m talking about. You sound very idealistic and naive.
America itself brought in the <undesirable> people from the <bad> countries in Europe throughout the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s - Irish peasants, Jews, poor and uneducated Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Norwegians.
It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.
Something for you to consider.
>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)
A nation-state, technically. A state is an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. There have been historical states (eg. European kingdoms of the high middle ages) that meet the definition of a state while still having very fuzzy borders.
> 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.
There are visas for seasonal work and farm work though? J1/j2 afaik?
Could they not just have fruit picking farms in the south and export it here? I think that will be a win win for everyone. The big losers will be the US farms I guess.
Just so I understand you:
Advocating for any restrictions on immigration means you are racist?
If not I honestly don’t understand what point you’re making.
You could imagine a sane policy regime to unwind the "look the other way" approach to illegal immigration and the under-the-table low wage labor market that it created.
Instead we get... well, whatever the fuck this gestapo shit is.
I guess regulatory reform doesn't really play with the kind of people who will gleefully vote for mass deportation on the grounds that they just want immigrants gone.
> and business owners no choice but to keep hiring them.
Um?
> giving migratory workers no choice but to stay illegally
Are you serious? The choice for them was to go back to their home countries.
> 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 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.
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
it's always funny the mental and grammatical gymnastic people will go through just to not say "but who will pick the cotton??!!"
We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.
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.
The descendants of those people have always been American citizens.
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?
Family. Imagine if the state next to yours was no longer the US.
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
When it was irish, they were white. And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
> When it was irish, they were white
You are mistaken: the Irish may be white now, but they weren't then! Whiteness evolved over time, it used to be exclusive for WASPs, and excludes the Irish, Italians, Jews, slavs, and other groups widely accepted as white today. Race is a sociological construct.
The 19th Century was full of anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. There was even a political party devoted to getting rid of Catholics who became known as "the know nothings".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
The other immigrants from Catholic countries were also perceived as being "not white", which is why there was a lot of anti-Italian and anti-Spanish sentiment along with the anti-Irish folks. Along with the "they are not real Christians" sentiment (still held by many Evangelicals), they were perceived as "taking orders from Rome" much like (during the Cold War) communists were perceived as "taking orders from Moscow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United...
Do you have any evidence that contemporaries of irish catholics thought that they irish werent white?
If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization
Yes, this isnt true. It's from a 1995 book and just invents a history.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.
The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.
Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word
EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:
Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.
See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,
> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.
This is patently wrong. And just look at images from the time. There are many Italians, especially from the south which was the main immigration areas - Sicily, Sardegna, Lecce - who are less white than many Latinos.
What's wrong? I don't think i've made any non-empirical claims.
The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.
The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?
Oooof
You think the 18th race-"realists" (urgh), "who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one", would stop there and not begin to divide white people between "good" white sub-races and "vile" white sub-races? You really think that those racists thought that once you're white, you're all good?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment#/media/Fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment#/media/Fi...
An English priest in 1860:
"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw in Ireland. .. to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much"
Benjamin Disraeli, 1836:
"[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood."
_The Spectator_ News magazine in 1882:
"The Tragedy at Maamtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians."
H. P. Lovecraft (yes, the famous author), in 1921 (!):
"If the Irish had the 'right' to independence they would possess it. If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does ... It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme. Why have not the Irish conquered and colonized the earth if they be so deserving of regard? They are brainless canaille."
You are deeply uneducated on the topic. I would suggest you stop commenting on a subject you know nothing about and learn a thing or two before interacting again.
Right, so you agree that the Irish were classified as white. And that presumably, 'white' entails nor means as such 'white superiority' and presumably that 'white' all along was in reference to a european lineage and the american 'white' diasopara is a european one from the start.
Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.
The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.
If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.
The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.
With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"
as all of your quotes show
> Right, so you agree that the Irish were classified as white
It should go without saying that a white sub-human (according to the bigots of yore) is not a white person.
> When it was irish, they were white.
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true. It is only true of absolute numbers, *not* rates of change. Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.
Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.
You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.
Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.
> The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true
To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum
> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
citation needed
> The type and character of the immigration matters
No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter
> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK
What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.
SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.
Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country
> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own
Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.
But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...
Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?
> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.
That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.
South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.
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.
Only if they have a deportation order. There are scenarios where people are in an in between state or have the ability to challenge a deportation order
That would put them in the criminal record column, unless you mean "without legal review", ie anyone they feel like?
It is extremely important to distinguish between people who are here illegally and people who are subject to a deportation order. ICE's mission is to deport people with deportation orders, and get people suspected of breaking the law in front of a court. The way you've worded it makes it sound like their mission is to go straight from "here illegally" to "deport" which it very much is not.
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.
---
edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
> A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens
Why follow the rules then? If it happens once, it can happen again, it would have the opposite effect.
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.
You're mixing up cause and effect. The police in America aren't more dangerous and powerful because they have choices, they have choices because they are dangerous and powerful.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/tennessee-man-jailed-charlie-kirk-po...
I do actually think that we shouldn’t have laws we aren’t willing to enforce, so we agree more than you think. I’ve been against states unilaterally legalizing it for years because I worried what happens when states buck laws that I do agree with, such as voting rights or basic protections for all people.
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
"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.
When you have trouble meeting the daily quota set by the administration, I guess you wouldn't have time to ponder if the 73-year-old grandma who has been here 30 years is a threat to America.
And civil rights are merely a speed bump on the way to the detention center.
> they prioritize those who are bigger dangers
Then why is the administration revoking immigration status, and we have evidence that a significant portion of those detained have zero criminal background? Worse, why are you acting as an apologist for fascist and xenophobic policies?
But they aren't prioritizing dangers. That is false. They have quotas set by a white supremacist. And I think talking about the Trump administration's direction of ICE and ICE itself is a distinction without a difference.
What is telling a federal judge who has placed a hold on someone's detention that "No, we're ignoring that and have put him on a plane anyway"?
Or "No, we won't be turning that plane around."
I think you mean selectively enforcing some immigration law.
And what do you call targeting people based on their skin color?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/10/immi...
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.
Just legalize murder and you will have no more criminal murderers.
The current administration seems to be doing a trial run of this policy, limited to agents in ICE/USBP
> 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
That wasn't the campaign promise and isn't worth spending money on. Also they are deporting and detaining people who are here legally and even killing American citizens. Even if it isn't a official mission it's the inevitable side effect of funding a domestic law enforcement agency like a military and making them explicitly beholden to a political agenda.
Isn’t it so cool that none of the theoretical /s
They are. https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/
First a judge would have to order them to leave, and then they would have to disobey that order for a certain time, and only after that can they be deported forcefully. That process takes too long for the people who want them gone right now.
They already are. A majority of ICE detainees have no criminal record and that has been true for most of this administration.
You'd think, wouldn't you?
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.
Ice is a part of a parallel state, a strategy to facilitate a smooth transition of power when replacing the existing state infrastructure
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.
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.
Even if that were true, so what? ICE's violence and overreach are unacceptable and its culture is rotten to the core. The agency needs to be abolished. If there are functions they're performing that we actually need, move those functions elsewhere, but as an agency ICE is irredeemable.
I'm pretty sure these days it's 95+% immigration, though.
They were doing that before the 10x budget, yeah?
ICE is rogue* 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.
* Misspelled initially
They aren't rogue, they're what you call "kings guard". They're there to protect the President, not serve the country.
They're doing exactly what you expect of such a 'secret police' based on the history of basically all other secret polices.
They are doing exactly what they are being asked to do. There's nothing rogue about what they are doing. They are following orders.
As history has already shown during the Nuremberg Trials, "Following orders" doesn't absolve the individual responsibility of the people under command.
Words have meaning.
Rogue would imply they are doing something at odds with the President’s wishes. The reality is worse.
Pardon powers, OTOH...
The Republican way:
There are those the law protects but does not bind.
And then there's us.
I think we're deep into a post-law environment at this point, though. People who weren't bound by the law will not be protected by it either.
Spying on political enemies and arresting citizens? That's completely outside of their statutory powers.
The whole point is that powers don't matter. Orders do.
If only those who are intended to oversee the proper use of those powers could take offense at this misuse ...
But they aren’t following the constitution or the rule of law, hence rogue.
brother it is the executive branch that isn't following the constitution. if your house is on fire you don't say "oh no! curtains are burning!"
Ice is under the executive branch. They are one and the same thing
The point of bring all this up isn't to expect the trump admin to do anything, it's an expectation of a (hopefully) future democrat admin to change forces and stop framing the ICE problem as a training or lack of body cams issue.
A core principle of a free democratic society is that everyone has obligations to more than the whims of a wannabe fascist dictator. ICE agents who do things like violently assault peaceful citizens are in the wrong, both morally and legally. The fact that the current president wants to destroy the pillars of our society means there won't be immediate consequences for that kind of behavior, but that doesn't make it any less despicable or immunize them against future consequences.
Dude you mean rogue? Or red (rouge means red in French)?
At least you know I'm not using AI for my comments :)
Stop voting for these assholes.
Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.
>Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.
That's one of the reasons I don't even look at the front page any more. Rather I look at the "Active"[0] and, less often, the "New"[1] pages.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/active
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
> Among the records revealed during the discovery process in these cases are intercepted Signal chats, ...
I asked claude how ICE was able to intercept signal chats and it seems like it wasn't a failing of signal's encryption, but rather there were some semipublic signal chats that agents were able to join.
And once they joined these signal chats, they launched a privilege escalation attack - in claude's words:
> In one case, an activist posted a license-plate lookup tool, hosted on Fly.io, to an infiltrated chat. Agents then got the service’s DNS queries, Stripe data, SSH logs, and the signup IP, and matched them with DMV records and Thomson Reuters CLEAR data to find a driver’s license number and other personal records. This was reportedly done by buying data from a commercial broker rather than getting a warrant.
You don't need to share your tokens here
> Operation Puppet Master
They're not even trying to pretend to not be evil.
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/ice-is-running-one-of-the-largest-anti...
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.
I wouldn’t care if it was
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.
No, it's Leftist rhetoric to use their principles against them. Leftists are trying to weaponize principles even though they don't share the same ones. They don't actually care about "hypocrisy" of their political opponents, it's a guilt tactic for political leverage.
I note that you do acknowledge the hypocrisy.
That's enough for me.
Double downing on it I see. Nice, makes my point.
You literally have no idea what you're talking about.
But I'm pleased you live up to your profile name.
All best,
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.
>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.
False premise. The Trump administration is doing exactly what he was democratically voted in to do by the "vociferously pro-gun people": close the border and deport illegal immigrants.
By repeatedly ignoring the laws of the nation, because of the edicts of its leader, i.e. literally the definition of tyranny, "a ruler who governs without restriction".
DHS has been dragged into court hundreds of times now and literally stood in front of federal judges and said "we're ignoring your court order, what are you going to do about it?"
This is an illegitimate argument in the context of Second Amendment. The "second amendment people" are pretty vocal proponents of strict adherence to the US constitution - hence the name of the group.
Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.
Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.
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.
You keep using the term Nazi but I don't think you actually know what it means.
I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?
>I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?
You keep using the term authoritarian but I don't think you actually know what it means.
I meant nazi. Yes I know what it means. Yes they exist and even on the rise.
And they were go to example of important free speech for years. The gauge was always defending nazi free speech, never defending communist free speech, radical feminists free speech or whoever else free speech.
Your question supposed to determine authoritanianism shows the same fallacy - nazi and other fascists wont count as an authoritarian. If I think all women should be locked at home and be under control of husbands, you wont count me as authoritarian either.
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 Mulford Act is a 1967 California statute which prohibits public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the law was initially crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party, which was conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.
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
Since most people aren't gonna have context on this part of the literature.
This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.
The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on.
None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.
Idk about the paper but I know a lot of trans women and I don't think any of them haven't been stabbed/assaulted for being trans at least once.
Why is the paper not available?
Someone who thinks ICE is lawfully investigating people who obstruct enforcement or attacked a facility has no reason to take issue with this.
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.
Certainly some
Those people are the people who want gun control and therefore don’t have any guns.
Agreed. I'm pro-second amendment, what is the there to comment on here about guns? seriously asking.
Hmm what was the reason for the second amendment?
It wasn’t self defense, it wasn’t for recreational fun, it is to provide a physical check on government overreach. Therefore it’s sensible to discuss it during times of government overreach.
But I don't bring up the second amendment when complaining about income taxes either. Again, what part of what ICE is doing infringes on the second ammendment?
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.
Common misunderstanding. The reason is to protect themselves from government overreach (and other threats), not you or anyone else. You were supposed to get your own gun to protect yourself, that's why the right needs to extend to everyone.
(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining their logic)
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”
As part of an imminent, concerted, collective effort with peers during civil unrest? Sure. Most people aren't ready to Luigi themselves to jail for life as a statement.
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
Careful, if you say that phrase three times you'll summon a gang of evil clowns.
Abolish ICE, abolish DHS. Put every single ERO officer and person involved in efforts like this on trial and/or bar them from any public service of any kind going forward.
You have my vote
Why was the title changed from the article? The original title is "ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History".
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Our armed officers are supposed to be upholding a constitution, not party preferences.
And definitely not religious 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”.
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.
>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.
> Or, more appropriately, on an election's notice.
That depends entirely on the degree to which those in power will respect the results of an election.
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.
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.
Seems like they shouldn't put this behind a pay wall or should make it easy to pay for just this article. I'm not subscribing, even with a free trial, to read it.
We’re going to find out ICE was investigating a group that was harboring illegal immigrants.
Shocking
Ahhh, the SuperMax in El Salvador will soon be overflowing ...
The logical conclusion for republicans is to import their own illegals (east germans, venezualians, etc) and play the same game.
Anyone mind explaining to me why an Immigration enforcement agency is being used to spy on the political behaviour of citizens?
I'm tired of these guys trying to one up McCarthy.
They don't seem to be doing a very good job. It's a dog and pony show highlighting low hanging fruit getting reaped.
Brought to you by the people who have complained bitterly for decades about federal overreach and excessive government spending. Oh, the irony.
>>Brought to you by the people who have complained bitterly for decades about federal overreach and excessive government spending.
>"When the President of the United State of America does it – it isn't illegal!"
>–Nixon, probably
Literally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_immunity_in_the_U...
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.
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.
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
> I feel they weren't being genuine in their request
Likely not. I've always been surprised by the amount of authoritarian sympathizers here.
The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview. I asked for facts - which HN is generally a fact based environment instead of broad hand wavy fear based statements.
As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.
> The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview.
Like I've stated, there are an unusual amount of authoritarian sympathizers in this forum - though it's possible they are bots. When I first heard of the forum and signed up, it was noticeable and I almost did not stick around, but ultimately decided it was better to know what is going on around the world and the posts here are far better quality than somewhere like reddit. Nothing to do with my worldview, just an observation from being around here for 10+ years. It's nothing personal against you.
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.
This is silly.
"If you ignore everything that's happening the problem will just go away. So easy, I don't have to do anything at all".
>By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable
If I just close my eyes the fire will magically go out by myself.
Have you ever stopped to think that the opposite of what you're thinking may actually be closer to the truth.
I didn't say to ignore everything. I said "it's fine to complain". Describe it accurately.
This account (GP) often comes to these stories to make comments like this. Flag them and move on, avoid giving them the attention they crave like King Trump
Arguing for an unpopular position is not a violation of the HN guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please stop flagging comments simply because they go against your ideology.
There is serious irony in you advocating for this type of knee-jerk censorship of views you oppose, in a thread about authoritarianism.
"The current government is an evil, oppressive police state. Anyone who suggests otherwise must be silenced!!"
>Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore.
By then it's too late
> 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.
>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.
By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
Seems like you are constructing a very specific situation that should mark some sort of regime change to dictatorship. The reality is, complex things have their own momentum and US society is a big thing.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
"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.
The fact that it can always get worse means that it's tautological to say "it can get worse".
For Dudley Dursley it's the worst getting only 36 presents for his birthday. It's good to maintain a sense of proportionality. If you call everything hell, the word hell looses meaning and it's also an insult to people actually living in hell.
I mean, yeah.
Though you're the one comparing getting a 50-year sentence for being a member of a signal chat to "only 36 presents for his birthday".
I am sure you have a reply but "it can only get worse".
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?.
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.
What's the point of this comment? Both things can be bad.
Highlighting the hypocrisy? Even if we assumed both things are equally bad (an opinion I will never understand), it doesn't change the fact of the different treatment whatsoever.
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 mean, everything is an "emergency" if you squint and have no regard for the humans you harm.
I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.
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)
> But instead a few of them had guns
One of them had a gun, which the US decided was ok for someone to carry in public.
> You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people
Guilt by association is it?
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.
Not just people involved, but the judge. Kacsmaryk is basically a psycho and his statements during the sentencing are outrageous.
Exactly one of them had a gun on them.
Did they discharge the gun? If so, was it towards anyone? If so, who was it towards and what was the intent? Was anyone harmed during that discharge?
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?
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.
I mean yeah. Maybe I’m a bit older than you but that’s not a wild thing to do.
That's why drowning somebody or attempting to drown somebody is a crime. Just like using fireworks as a weapon against somebody.
I'm having trouble believing this comment chain is happening/neccesary. I feel completely disconnected from the thought process of a large portion of society.
If only you were normal.
You can’t drown someone with fireworks.
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?
Suppose I am setting off some fireworks in my street to celebrate the 4th. Do you believe that my neighbors should fear for their lives? This was a noise protest. They weren't shooting roman candles at people.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi...
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.
Tolerance? Jan 6.
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...
"Explosives" in this case are "ordinary fireworks you can buy at a stand on the side of the road meant to be loud and annoying."
While the Jan. 6th convicts all get pardons.
> 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...
> In terms of absolute number of incarcerated persons, though
They weren't asking about absolute numbers, though
>which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?
Not an argument.
> [El Salvador (16.5/Mln), Cuba (8/Mln), Rwanda (6/Mln), Turkmenistan (5.5/Mln), United States (5.5/Mln)]
Go watch the body cam footage of the peaceful protest. Looks a lot like people with guns hid in the woods and shot a cop who responded to what looked like a terrorist attack.
You think a prison sentence for shooting a federal law enforcement officer in the neck is chilling?
Well 100 years seems disproportionately harsh compared to other sentences for the same crime.
And the other protesters had huge, unjust sentences applied to them for protesting.
No, the 30 year one for not even being at the protest is.
Or the lack of one for a bunch of feds pinning a man to the ground and executing him. And then scattering like fucking roaches after they do so.
But you know all this. Why are you carrying water for it?
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.
Cats always have claws, not just when they're showing.
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 anti-democratic.
> 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.
Actually, the way the criminal justice system works here in America is that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It's not the job of the newspaper to exonerate the victims of government overreach.
You're right, it's not but that wasn't what I was asking. If they are going to claim that ICE is targeting left wing movements and then use the Minnesota 15 as an example, I would want to hear about this case. If the Minnesota 15 performed only constitutionally protected speech then this investigation might be concerning but the article didn't really describe that. Could ICE have collected evidence illegally? Yes, that can be decided in a court. I am just a layman but if it turns out that the Minnesota 15 were doing things like blocking law enforcement vehicles or throwing ice blocks, that doesn't seem like constitutionally protected speech anymore. Apparently some of them were charged with such offenses. So that might weigh on whether I thought ICE was "cracking down on left-wing social movements".
Generally the evidence seems vastly more narrow.
> 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.
The indictment itself makes no specific mention of violence as far as I know because there was no actual violence committed. It's staggering that people are getting set multi-million-dollar bonds for what is essentially civil disobedience.
"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."
A few things to unpack with this statement. 10 million people never entered illegally, that number is derived from DHS reporting of 10 million encounters which includes people who are arrested, denied entry or removed. Also, that doesn't cover the fact that this was a recognized issue by Democrats hence why the party had the bipartisan border bill that was killed by Trump because he wanted the border as a political issue for the upcoming election.
The ~10 million were not substantially deported, they entered illegally and then were given Notices to Appear which is completely a lawyerly way to cover for it all.
The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day. Some people don't want that. It wasn't even proposed until 2024. By then people might not have trusted the admin.
Interesting in the same sentence you directly foot gunned yourself.
First of all, the bipartisan bill would have de-facto ended catch and release due to significantly ended "Catch and release" or Notice to Appear since there was now sufficient capacity to adjudicate.
You are correct 10 million were not substantially deported because a majority of them never entered at all that 10 million figure is just a downright lie. Based on the data from Title 42 expulsions around half of that 10 million were people sent back.
"The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day."
Funny because if we take your (lies) about 10 million the legislation would have cut that down by 80% on just the caps alone. Increase in adjudication and the end of catch and release (if we assume all of the 2 million getaways are entirely dishonest) then it would be less than 10% of that figure.
Perfect is the enemy of good or something like that.
How many encounters are there now? DHS says it's a historical low with a 95% reduction. How many people are paroled or given NTA releases now? Sources suggest 0 in the first year. What's the asylum grant rate now? Sources suggest it's about 7% now as opposed to 65% or higher previously.
The bipartisan bill was full of loopholes and it only triggered when border crossings exceeded certain rather high thresholds. Do you realize that? It wasn't comprehensive at all. Here is an example of a loophole: "While the president’s parole authority would be narrowed, he or she would retain the power to parole entire classes of migrants and would have greater authority to do so at airports." (https://digital-release.thehill.com/?p=4447957). So this assumes Biden and Mayorkas were genuinely trying to fix the problem all of a sudden in 2024 as they were facing an election. Why would we want to codify allowing in a certain high number of people along with loopholes when we could just replace Mayorkas and Biden?
The thing is that Mayorkas WANTED the border to be open. This wasn't a mistake. It's an unofficial policy that you're dancing around. I am not interested in stupid Trump vs Democrats or GOP vs Democrats bullshit. There's a substantial nnumber of people who want large scale immigration and a substantial number who don't so all this legalistic bickering is just window dressing for this issue but don't try to pretend that it's universally the moral or democratic norm to have open borders.
> The article gave no evidence that these people hadn't committed any crimes
Are we now doing “guilty until proven innocent?”
> there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders?
Where is that figure sourced from? Are the borders still open?
You’re ignoring the bipartisan bill that would have increased border security in 2024, but Republican politicians shot down for political purposes to help Trump in the election. What did that bi-partisan solution get wrong that you would have done differently?
I get the sense this writer believes Immigration Enforcement Officers deporting and tracking legal American citizens is anti-democratic.
There's actually a ton of evidence that they have committed crimes but the article doesn't mention that.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/15-members-direct-action-minn...
Another highly upvoted article shadow-banned off HN’s front page. Ridiculous!
Ah, the ICE Nazguls at work.
What's new? Gov been doing this to every dissident group for decades now. Funny that "left" now care about it since it's pointed at them. Making this a left vs right debate is so tiresome.
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.
he's a wannabe dictator.
yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.
They're standing, but he's weakened them. He's also laid down a pattern of how to attack them.
Either the institutional protections are strengthened after 2028 (presuming the Democrats win the presidency) and before 2030 (presuming the Democrats lose a bunch of seats in Congress in the midterms), or the next try (whenever it comes) is likely to break the institutional protections and result in authoritarian rule over the US.
According to my MAGA friends/family, Antifa is the biggest threat to the US.
Tech fascism alright.
Read The Nerd Reich.
This is fascism.
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.
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...
You might if it should be legally protected actions
> 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.
A few hours ago I posted about the fact that left-wing governments spy on right-wing governments with a very recently discovered example of such while right-wing governments spy on left-wing ones as this article claims. That post was flagged for some inexplicable reason. Here's the link, no idea whether the post itself is visible to others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280200
Are the denizens of this site so intolerant of different views that they need to flag them out of sight? Whatever happened to the hackers in HN? They'd vociferously defend their own standpoint, pointing out all the errors in my post. The would not hide behind appeals to authority by pressing flag links. What gives, other than that you - meaning those who flagged this innocuous post - just can't stand anything dissenting with your desired narrative to remain on this site? If so, please hand in your hacker card at the exit and find your way to the closest subreddit where such behaviour seems to be cherished. Otherwise discuss, let us know what you think so we can respond or agree or maybe just shake our heads in disbelief but still consider your opinion yours enough that you are willing to post it.
No, this is not the first time I write something like this. I can not help but notice that I've had to write more and more such replies these last years though, things are not looking up here.
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.
the pendulum will eventually swing back and most of these fucks will be thrown in prison.
Yeah, just like the J6 rioters. Oh wait. Shit.
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
For 40 years left wingers have in no particular order:
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion and ethnic background up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as they say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
Ok. And I'm supposed to do what with this information, exactly?
Be more aware of your online privacy. Try to arrange things so the government can get less information about you. It doesn't matter who they're targeting now - anyone could be next, or could be misidentified as belonging to the current target.
You are supposed to get real angry, scream "Those MAGA b*stards", throw things around your office, jump up and down, call all your friends, post ugliness online; you know, the usual things like every other HN/reddit thread.
My comment should not have been flagged.
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.
ICE should absolutely be running surveillance ops on immigrants that is their job. That is necessary to do in order to find and deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been going out of their way to evade deportation for decades.
> FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters
I think an important distinction here ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so they have no reason to be spying on US citizens unless we're harboring illegal immigrants.
The FBI's *is* the domestic intelligence and security service. So an angry armed mob smashing the Capitol building, threatening to hang the vice president, interfering with the lawful transfer of power, and attempting to gouge the eyes out of a police officer are absolutely something the FBI should be investigating and surveilling. If I merely posted online that I *wanted* to do any of those things, I would expect to be surveilled by the FBI. Actually doing those things is a guarantee.
Neither agency should be doing it for political affiliation reasons, but J6 was a lot more than people just "being conservatives".
Mine was as well, there seems to be an aggressive flag brigade watching this thread. I only pointed out that left spies on right while right spies on left which was too much for the trigger-happy flaggers. It doesn't bode well for the future of this site, there's plenty of censor-happy sites and services out there for those who can not abide to see anything outside of their desired narrative so it is sad to see how these narrow-minded hacks have invaded the hacker news.
IMO the moderators here are biased leftwingers/anti-rightists. Your opinion is sensible but naive - politics is subject to darwinian pressure and if you want to win then it is an absolute war. Both parties should go to the extreme in increasing their power. Technologists should be aware of the hard nature of politics.
Moderators don't flag these comments, nor do they comb through flagged comments to vouch for them. This website is funded by Y Combinator, so if anything the ownership is steered by centrist/pro-right rules and decisionmaking.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like your comments were flagged for Holocaust denial, white supremacist sentiments and uncouth conduct in general. The parent comment was flagged for being low-effort and factually incorrect. If HN didn't flag these comments, the website would be indistinct from /pol/.
I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of and it is actually hard to know what it actually takes to be accused of white supremacist sentiments [1] nowadays since that term has been bandied around by the usual suspects so much. The problem I see is that this site has started to look like /pol/ more or less since Trump 1 when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk. Either bring the ban hammer down on all posts political or keep it only for those few occasions where someone really goes over the line. The mentioned holocaust denial would be one as far as I'm concerned, same for the denial or glorification of other atrocities like the Holodomor/killing fields/Chinese cultural revolution/etc. Political dissent should never be a reason for flagging but unfortunately I've seen this too many times. The Athenians used to debate politics (among other things) on the 'agora' or 'meeting place'. They generally did not do this by kicking anyone who dissented off the square, they debated them. Sites like HN are the modern versions of that meeting place and kicking people off them because they happen to voice dissent does not do anyone any good.
[1] Here's a nice read-up on the subject: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-white-supremacy/ ... and please don't tell me that James Lindsay is a white supremacist to avoid ending up in an endless loop. He isn't, not even when he says something you don't agree with, see https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...
> I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of
It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.
> when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk.
That "seemingly" is doing all your heavy lifting, there. Read my last comment again; users are the ones who enforce flags on those posts, in the vast majority of cases.
It can lead to scenarios where apolitical submissions are flagged, or where flamebait slips through. There is almost never a moderator with their finger on the button waiting to flag something on /new, much less in the comment section. The only exception is banned users and banned domains, both of which prevent repeat offenders and disingenuous content from reaching the front page.
Just about every social media site is privately-owned, and protected by Section 230 from most political blowback. If you want to discuss white supremacy and Holocaust denial, you'll have to do it on federal honeypot sites like /pol/, not here. The OP thread is on-topic, intellectually gratifying, high-quality and relevant to HN as it mentions a YC 2020 batch company (Fly.io).
For years the social contract was that neither side did it to the other because once that rubicon was crossed, both sides would do it.
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
I'm honestly curious. What line do you think the left crossed first? There is nothing in my mind that comes even close to the lines that have been crossed by this administration.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
This response is rich in vibes, low in fact, but my guess is OP is generally referring to things like the FBI's storming of Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the infiltration and surveillance of organizations, basically right and far right, in response to the OKC bombing, in the name of preventing domestic terrorism.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
If you aren’t going to include a shred of justification to back up why you think the left started it, you’re just deluding yourself that you are a centrist.
Huh? In what way did the left cross it first?
The radical left celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. And long before that, they were doing all kinds of harassment on college campuses. And don’t forget about the BLM riots.
Under the first amendment, Americans have the right to celebrate the death of anyone they please. It might not be tasteful or respectful, it might be inflammatory, but that's an American freedom enshrined in constitutional law; freedom of speech is integral and fundamental to the US national identity.
As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.
They called really racist people Nazi’s as fascists and it went from there.
Not saying I agree but if I had to guess…
Calling people Nazis online ... and a state sponsored billion dollar surveillance program ... Are what you're choosing to equivocate?
"Calling people Nazis online" has resulted in countless murders, violent riots. Do not downplay it like that.
> countless murders
We can very easily count the murders that happen in the US every year. With the exception of COVID, which was largely due to unemployment and school closures, homicide has dropped precipitously since the invention of “calling people Nazis online”
Where are all these murders caused by calling out racism and fascism?