Any time I see people say "I don't see why I should care about my privacy, I've got nothing to hide" I think about how badly things can go if the wrong people end up in positions of power.
The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
FWIW, people here illegally are already not eligible for Medicaid, [0] so it's hard to see why ICE having access to a roster of Medicaid enrollees would help them with their stated mission of enforcing removal orders.
Then again, we have ICE shooting American citizens in the streets, so I guess the law is whatever they decide it is, not least because our legislative branch is uninterested in laws.
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1191...
What about finding them through the records of their citizen children?
Edit: cael450 has already offered a specific example of this threat vector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758387
> FWIW, people here illegally are already not eligible for Medicaid, [0] so it's hard to see why ICE having access to a roster of Medicaid enrollees would help them with their stated mission of enforcing removal orders.
Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to. Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
ICE isn’t auditing Medicaid FFS. And no, there’s absolutely no evidence they’re getting access to Medicaid.
They’re single mindedly looking for undocumented immigrants to deport.
No evidence because there has been no investigation. The massive Somali fraud had no evidence until a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors, now lots of new evidence has been found.
That is false. There has been lots of prosecution of fraud in Minnesota including by Somalis. When a random YouTuber started accusing places without much evidence this blew up but didn't do anything to help actual investigations of corruptions. It did help Trump push his racist agenda and claim we need to deport Somalis because of actions of a handful of individuals. Which is nonsense not only when one compares it to the massive corruption from the Trump administration but when one realizes most Somalis Americans already have citizenship and a good deal are born in the US
The FBI was investigating the daycare fraud in February 2025. Unfortunately, some of the investigators got moved off this investigation to do anti-immigration work instead, reported by NYT last week.
DOGE would have found everything.
Are you not aware that that story you just repeated was propaganda from the start, and completely debunked by the facts?
Look it up. And take the red pill.
Not true. NYTimes had reported on it
> The massive Somali fraud had no evidence
It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ...
> a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors
"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."
Oh no, that doesn't sound like a "massive Somali fraud", does it?
(Also he's not "a random YouTuber" - he's a former prankster turned full MAGA right-wing agitator[1] and that should tell you all you need to know about his credentials and honesty.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Shirley ("he repeated a false claim", "has falsely implied", "also amplified Trump's false claim", etc.)
Are you being sincere with this comment? I’m in disbelief you could post this with good faith, but this forum requires me to respond to you with the assumption that you’re posting in good faith.
First of all, the investigation for the fraud had already wrapped up years ago, with many charged. You’re falling for the propaganda that this was ongoing and swept under the rug, as pretense that apparently an occupying force is necessary because Somalians are fraudulent criminals (racist AF), despite the incredible amount of fraud (including Medicare fraud!) within the ruling party at the moment.
Second of all, the ringleader was a white woman who was convicted for this fraud, presumably preying on desperate immigrants, maybe even convincing them that “fraud was the American way”, I mean look at the president - how could fraud not be the American way?
Third of all, that YouTuber has a less than room temperature IQ, and was going around to closed daycares to prove that… they weren’t open? The rightwing grift is so powerful and so lucrative that this absolute imbecile can make it big by giving other imbeciles a justification for their deep-seated racism. Honestly, go listen to interviews with this guy. It’s astounding that anyone trusts any content he puts out, because that’s just what it is - content, not investigative journalism.
Anyway, I guess since some Somalians were involved in fraud we get to occupy cities, tearing anyone brown with an accent away from their family, maybe allowing them to prove citizenship (maybe not), and begin shooting anyone who adds friction to that process (civil disobedience)? That’s the implication of your comment.
Tell me when we can start prosecuting fraud when it’s attached to an (R), by the way.
> Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to
Why are you presuming this? There is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion.
> Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
If it is being honest about it's intention, yes. I think we have seen an absolute mountain of evidence that this administration does "audits" as massive data collection waves to suit any and every purpose they want, though.
If this was about fixing things being done incorrectly, DHHS should be doing the audit, not DHS. Perhaps the latter doesn't understand the difference between the two, though, not noticing they're missing an H in their abbreviation.
If you are going to engage in fighting LEA in the US and expect not to get shot, what is wrong with you?
They're also not eligible to be living in the US, yet here we are.
The key issue wilfully ignored by the mob.
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Glad to see this post didn't get flagged like the one that was posted yesterday on a similar topic about ICE data mining and user tracking.
It likely will. There’s major impact on literally everyone in tech, there’s huge data privacy concerns, and it has less coverage or discussion than a new version of jQuery. The US gov could fall but that would count as politics here so clearly irrelevant.
> less coverage or discussion than a new version of jQuery
Pretty sure this is a feature not a bug. Most people aren’t here for political topics.
In a corrupt and authoritarian country, it is common to have officials busted on "corruption" or "embezzlement" charges. And yet most people know they are actually not jailed for the crimes they got charged for, because there are more than enough people to fill all the prisons for breaking the exact same laws they are accused of breaking. They knew the only reason these people got jailed is because they lost some kind of power struggle within the administration, and corruption is just a convenient lie those who prevailed tell you to keep you comfortable.
You never see the "no politics please thk u" crowd when it is about protests in Iran, Chinese oppression in Hong Kong, Russian aggression on Europe or hell, when people were literally running a political campaign the EU to stop killing games. You only see people flagging political submissions when it is a particular kind of politics - just like you only see corrupt officials jailed when they are a certain kind of officials.
Connect the dots, make your own conclusions.
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> Most people aren’t here for political topics.
Looking at the vote numbers on these posts before they get flagged would suggest otherwise.
Ok, I'm not "here for political topics" but I'm here to discuss things with my peers in tech. Mostly that's tech news, yes, but not always.
There is always going to be an intersection between tech and politics. This convo is no different than talking about Section 230, H1B visas or using vision models to sexualize people or distort the truth.
> Most people aren’t here for political topics.
Or rather, most people aren’t here to have their preconceived notions challenged by reality.
Politics is a nebulous term for topics that affect a large number of the population. Tech intersects with politics all the time and deserves good faith discussion.
“Politics” = things that don’t directly affect the (usually highly privileged) speaker.
They should be aware of how tech is being used in political games though...
This.
The government doing bad things is a political topic.
How the government is using technology to do bad things is both a political and technology topic.
Most people aren’t here to be faced with anything that challenges the status quo, you mean. They don’t want to read anything uncomfortable.
> Most people aren’t here for political topics.
There was a time when SV and technology eschewed politics, but that time is long gone. You only have to look at how often all the big tech CEO's end up at random Whitehouse events to see how they are intimately intertwined now.
There has always been politics in SV, this is a weird rewriting of history.
Presumably there’s so much pushback now because people are quite uncomfortable having to confront the fact that they may be the bad guys (even though they were probably the bad guys years ago as well).
Preserving the status quo is a political position.
Comments like this remind me of those guys who wouldn't stop working, in the twin towers. Just didn't want to get out of their zone.
When the computer code many of us are working on is directly shaping that politics I think that we should talk about it and stop hiding behind the bush.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You're choosing to comment. You're not being censored nor is your speech compelled.
This forum is for hacker news. Some people believe tech news related to politics qualifies, some don't.
Your perspective is equally arbitrary. You have no reasoning, no justification. So stop pretending you do.
I don't comment on GitHub issues.
I think that forums like this one should discuss politics as affected by computer code seeing as HN is one of the main (for lack of a better word) computer programmers' forums based/located in/with a focus on SV, it's not some random computer forum which specializes in some random computer programming issue.
Hacker News is not lambda-the-ultimate.org, seeing them as similar is part of that hiding behind the bush, people commenting on here actually work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet, Meta and the like, companies whose recent involvement in politics affects us all, at a worldwide level. Also see this recent FT article [1] in connection with how the leaders of those companies have gotten a lot reacher since Trump ascended to power for a second time.
> Tech titans lined up for Trump’s second inauguration. Now they’re even richer
> Silicon Valley bosses who lined up behind the US president for his inauguration have fared well under his administration
[1] https://archive.ph/https://www.ft.com/content/674b700e-765d-...
>Most people aren’t here for political topics.
Still, I was down voted a lot when I said there's too much politics here.
It gets down to the definition of political which is basically anything that might have a human cost, including to the people here. I have many coworkers having to upend their lives, some can’t currently leave the country. This is not worthy of discussion, but an esoteric library update is. Paul Graham posts are not political topics for some reason, but H1B people is.
Technology, technology leaders, and technology companies are literally driving politics, buying elections, driving the whole US economy.
Saying what “political” topics are IS political - and it’s decidedly a right wing position. Only those with the powers protecting them get to avoid politics.
There is a fun German word capturing this: “Deutungshohheit”
Well said. Even people with a lot in common can and should disagree often. In non-authoritarian systems, politics is supposed to be about managing this disagreement in civil ways. Politics seems unsavory to some, often because they find a lot of political manifestations to be vile or insipid. [1] I get that, but in a way this revulsion is backwards. The alternatives to the sausage-making of politics is usually worse: pretending there is no disagreement, coercion, violence, gaslighting. So when someone says "I don't like politics" I like to say "disagreement is to be expected".
[1] When representatives spend something like 4+ hours a day fundraising, people have good reason to say "this is f-ed up." https://gai.georgetown.edu/an-inside-look-at-congressional-f...
You're past the time of saying that and not being seen as an enabler my friend. This isn't normal politics anymore. They are killing people in the streets. If you don't think that your tech toys have a lot to do with that, then you should grow up. This pathetic point does not apply anymore.
German pastor Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Yep. They’re here to bury their head in the sand and keep up to date with the latest tech trends like the good little worker bees they are.
The "hide" link is right next to the "flag" link. Using flag instead of hide puts more strain on the mods, and is not the right thing to do for "this topic doesn't apply to my interests."
There is no apolitical topics. There's just politics you agree with and politics you don't agree with.
Food is political - Veganism, Carnivore diet, halal, kosher, animal welfare, etc etc.
Weather is political - Climate change, fossil fuel policy etc etc.
I rest my case.
Tons of political posts are on the front page of Hacker News all the time. The ones I actually see get flagged are generally bad articles. Sure, there's real stuff that gets flagged down too, but Hacker News is far from a place where politics is always flagged.
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No the problem is bootlickers with less self-preservation skills than animals who bend over backwards to reject actual reality because they think they're in the billionaire pedophilic ruling class in-group when they're not.
It is really disheartening and sad to see this community burying its head in the sand and ignoring what’s happening to our country
What I see today on HN mirrors the processes I've witnessed in Russian speaking parts of the net during the 2010s. Despite the escalation of totalitarianism in Russia, the growing internet censorship and military operations in nearby countries, which left the posters on the same websites on the different sides of military conflicts, some sites have stuck to their "no politics" rule. Both to avoid upsetting people in power and out of their owners' naïve beliefs.
Reading them was like living in an alternate reality where nothing more notable happens than a release of new version X of a framework Y. Large portions of the tech community had exactly the same attitude that could be seen here and now - refusal to consider the societal implications of their daily work, adherence to technical solutions over the real world ones ("I'll just work remotely and use a VPN, who cares") and just simple willful ignorance.
It was around that time that I started to frequent English speaking discussions, which were much more vibrant and open. It saddens me to see the same kind of process repeat itself here.
As a non-American, I like the way HN is moderated. This isn’t an American politics and domestic issues forum.
As a fellow non-american who also hates politics (us, home or other), pretending this doesn't affect you or the tech world is hopelessly naive.
I hate seeing these posts on HN. I hate not seeing them / getting flagged more.
Exactly. I'm watching this from the Netherlands. Until last year I always ignored political posts here but now it's become an existential necessity to be involved.
If it was only that... What I really take issue with are all the mentally ill trolls jumping in to defend ICE, lying through their teeth about the content of videos we all saw. But actually supporting murder isn't enough to get you banned in here.
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Armed goons terrorizing cities, dragging people out to brutalize and murder them is not "something very normal".
It's what the brown shirts did.
"Come right in, the water is fine" said the frog in the pot.
Maybe you should change the channel from Fox News, NewsMax and "apolitical" forums. It is happening everywhere dumpty and his goon squad decides to make it happen. Do you not realize these ICE agents are Federal agents? Sure, completely incompetent, racists that choose to join so they can go after immigrants (legal or otherwise) with cover, but officially sanctioned Federal agents nonetheless. Your ignorance and acceptance is sad.
Anyone who believes ICE is legitimately trying to rectify illegal immigration is either too stupid to function or a liar.
Because I give the benefit of the doubt, I will assume most people are not that stupid. So, the only option left is they don't actually believe it, and it's just virtue signalling to their fascist overloads. Personally, I think that's a bit pathetic, not to mention naive. Nobody has any reason to think they will be spared, citizen or not.
Damn near everything on HN gets flagged eventually. Either get everyone to drop their biases as Silicon Valley tech VCs or make it so that flags can ONLY be used to remove clear abuse. Sick of it
Give it a few minutes
Yes just wait until the topic changes from databases to the political side where the root of the problem lies.
The title is already political. There's no other way to cut it.
Aaaand… it’s gone
I actually think it’s best that HN flags and removes them because we are quickly entering a stage in this country where you will be flagged by the government monitoring the internet. I would caution people to start using VPN and continuously flush your IPs. I would even go as far as to recommend removing face ID from your devices which basically offers zero protection once you’re detained (or have a quick way to disable it).
You want us to hide in our own country?
It's becoming worse on a daily basis.
People are starting to get angry and if enough people are angry, this will lead to either government change or repression.
If it's repression, you're not ready for what's coming.
Okay
Or get in the streets to peacefully protest before you have to.
Way ahead of you
Why would Medicaid have the data of anyone who is at risk of immigration enforcement? The reported connection seems tenuous:
> The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources.
So, they have a tool that sucks up data from a bunch of different sources, including Medicaid. But there's no actual nexus between Medicaid and illegal immigrants in this reporting.
Edit: In the link to their earlier filings, EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/eff-court-protect-our-...
My wife works in autism services in a predominantly Latino city. Those kids all have Medicaid, which includes info about their parents. It would be pretty trivial to cross reference with other data points to identify kids with undocumented parents and then you have their home address. Many of these kids go to a clinic everyday, so now you know when someone (likely a parent) is dropping them off too. She’s had patients with parents who have been picked up by ICE. I wouldn’t be surprised if that data came from Medicaid. It’s basically the same as the IRS data they’ve been using.
And it is next to impossible for average people to get adequate care for their kids with autism without Medicaid and early intervention can make the difference between someone who can live relatively independently with supports and someone who will spend their adult life chemically restrained in an institution. So they are in between a rock and a hard place.
Using the medical need of someone's child in order to track them down and deport them, separating them from their family ?
I wish I believed in god, because this shit is beyond evil.
What ICE is doing is naked incompetent fascism and the entity needs to be disbanded with hostility.
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.
I didn't talk about deportation itself. I talked about using a sick child as a vector to identify who to deport.
I am not for unrestrained immigration either. But I would not look for whose child is sick so I can kick them out and leave the sick child alone.
Pam Bondi is now demanding voter rolls. It's clearly about suppressing liberal voters in liberal areas through a show of force. They're using this data to optimize who to harass.
If citizenship is required to vote then how would accessing voter rolls suppress liberal voters? Honest question; I'm not concern trolling. I had to Google who's allowed to vote.
I found this article[1] by the Brennan Center. It alleges this is an attempted federal takeover of elections but it doesn't suggest or allude to voter suppression. I'm not convinced by the article that having access to voter rolls can be considered a federal takeover of election administration (but I'm not in the know and would need things explained more verbosely).
If you have more information about the attempted centralization of election administration and its impacts on voter suppression I would be interested to know more.
1. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...
Honestly my real fear is ICE agents at polling places on Election Day harassing would-be voters with citizenship checks and aggressive behavior, slowing things down and maybe causing some people to leave.
Regarding voter data though, if it becomes known that registering to vote as a minority will get you extra scrutiny from ICE, and perhaps a visit to your home, that would probably cause some citizens avoid voting altogether, especially if they are associated with people who are not her legally.
Either way, the federal government really has no right to that data or legitimate use for it, so hopefully they don't manage to get their hands on it.
Thanks. I understand now.
I don't understand your question. What does citizenship got to do with this?
They'll claim they're doing that but intimidate citizens instead.
No.
There are not non-citizens on voter rolls. They want the rolls to get data on voters.
When you ask yourself why the ultra-politicized DOJ (which isn't even the DHS...) from an administration that has explicitly called liberals the enemy is asking for voter rolls, it becomes pretty understandable why people might come to the conclusion that it is to suppress the people that have already explicitly been identified as targets.
How does that work? As a US citizen, no amount of "harassment" is going to stop me from voting.
Voter registration gets names cross referenced to facebook gets you face recognition (Palantir can do this). Ice claims that facial recognition on their app is probable cause (Ice already claim this).
Ice goes down the lines at voting stations to "protect from undocumented aliens voting illegally". The government endorsed news stories will be about how many illegals were trying to vote. Meanwhile a bunch of US citizens were taken for processing due to false positives and unfortunately with such large numbers to process they aren't all released until polling stations are closed. (If only someone hadn't botched the facial recognition database update and contaminated it with a bunch of Dem voters).
If rioting against these actions occurs at a station, it's closed for safety and people in area are detained while it's sorted (the stations targeted had a tendency to vote D anyway as per voter roles).
Strange how that 'harassment' did stop US citizens from voting.
Results come in while the case for voter suppression goes to the Supreme court. Supreme court rules that while voter suppression did occur there is no legal option of redress within its permit and the peaceful transfer of power is more important than any one election A la Bush V Gore.
Seeing as the harassment has escalated to murder of citizens, I'm not so sure how you can say that.
Less sensationally, they'll just crank up ID requirements and wait times to suppress your vote.
Nonetheless, it was successfully implemented for about 100 years in the US.
Are you a citizen, can you prove it at the polling station? I am doubtful you are, and your documents if you have them don't seem legit enough, so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!
Well that's insane. I hadn't heard that.
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Isn’t the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act going to stop married women who have changes their last name from what was on their birth certificate from voting?
Look up Jim Crow. It's not hypothetical.
Wrong https://www.americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/ameri...
There has been many ways to stop you from voting, contesting your vote, calling your registration into account, imitating tests that are impossible to validate if you are intelligent enough to vote, etc
Spend some time educating yourself on how voting suppression has worked historically and you wont sound so ignorant.
While a required literacy test may be a form of voter suppression, it is not "harassment", which is what we are discussing.
you should read up on efforts to suppress the vote of certain US citizens, especially those who are poor and/or of color
Medicaid-receiving immigrants could have their immigration status change, legal violations, emergency medicaid use, sometimes there's state funded coverage that immigrants are offered, etc. There's lots of reasons where Medicaid will have information on immigrants.
That doesnt mean they are illegal right off the bat - there is no reasonable way to filter out the "illegal" members of the roles and essentially making it so the DOJ has a list of people who they can cross reference with expiring status and the moment the clock strikes midnight and their status changes they can get picked up. They should not have all those records for fishing expedititions.
Medicaid holds previous addresses, household details, previous diagnoses, ethnicity, etc.
It is quite trivial to infer if someone is likely to have emigrated to the US due to obvious gaps in records or in their relatives' ones.
This is what Palantir does, essentially. Simple inference and information fusion from different sources.
> EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid
Actually they don't. They say "Some states, using their own funds, allow enrollment by non-citizens" - but they never say if it's legal residents or illegal immigrants. I am not sure whether it's part of the ongoing attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants, or all the states that allow that genuinely do not distinguish between legal residents and illegal immigrants, but we can not assume it by default.
But I am not sure if the states use their own money for this - why would they send this information to HHS?
ICE has been harassing and following legal observers to their houses. They've shot and executed at least two people who were exercising their legal right to record their activity.
The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.
Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.
It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.
When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of interfering and changing things, this is what you eventually get. Crossing fingers and praying given person isn't a complete psycho or worse is not going to cut it forever, is it. Especially when >50% of population welcomes such person with open arms, knowing well who is coming.
Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did.
Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.
I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king.
So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.
Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. How I categorize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism - that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of a single demented career criminal.
> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
If the Democrats didn't allow SCOTUS to become corrupted by the fascist right-wing, we wouldn't be in this situation.
RBG refused to retire and died while Trump was president. That gave them one seat. Obama could have
McConnel refused to let Obama replace Scalia after he died. I'm not sure that had to happen the way it went down.
No. It was before that. She should have retired in 2009 or 2010 when Obama was in the white house and democrats controlled the senate.
People do realize that Republicans have agency right? It’s more fun to blame democrats but it’s fairly striking to blame them while hand waving away that the right wing fascist project has been ongoing since at least 2010. They could have also stopped the fascist corruption.
Excuse me discussing the fact that Jack booted fascist brown shirt thugs murdering people is a political statement and needs to be censored here
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Renee Good blocked half the [small, suburban, low traffic, no lane markings] road and told the officers they were free to drive around her. I don't know what the blockage was about the but she seemingly wasn't trying to get in anyone's way.
Last time I checked, traffic violations aren't punishable by summary execution.
Blocking any road is no excuse for execution at arm's range. Completely unacceptable.
They hold both that people whose citizenship depends on birthright citizenship are not in fact citizens and that naturalized citizens can be denaturalized either for disloyalty or based on some sham pretext. They also see people getting benefits as leaches worthy of targeting.
Also naturalized and birthright citizens are far more likely than others to associate or live with others of less legal status.
Naturalized and birthright citizens quality for benefits and they and their families are at risk.
If they are allowed to detain and deport without any due process as they have asserted anyone not white is at risk.
The DHS official social media presence shared a picture of an island paradise with the caption America after 100 million deportations.
This is the number of non-whites not the number of immigrants in even the most ridiculous estimates.
Do you actually think ICE cares about your legal citizenship status?
Yes. That's very relevant to their aims.
That will change. Soon.
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Do explain
“If it was up to Stephen [Miller], there would only be 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like him.”
To accomplish things like that, a lot of us are going to be removed. I don't think these are jokes, it's a pattern of statements to condition and normalize. A thing he has done over and over.
Trump, ~6 months ago
... a Temu Fredo Corleone with a Nazi haricut ...
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Once upon a time this was such a shocking accusation that people just believed it, as who would lie about it?
But when people say this for ten years at the drop of a hat, you have to forgive everyone else for not just automatically believing it any more.
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Palantir is interesting. Founded by a closeted German, run by an Israeli operative, and a 3rd arm of the federal gov. I wish we could prosecute it in my lifetime for the numerous violations of privacy it undertakes, but the world does not work that way. The rich enjoy private jets subsidized by our hard-earned taxes, while violating ideals held by our Founding fathers (for what would Thiel or the current CEO know about our morals, when they have none and are American by name only.. their loyalties lie elsewhere)
"violating ideals held by our Founding fathers"
There are a whole raft of "ideals" the Founding fathers held that we've obviated, beginning with who got the franchise. I can confidently say that government being the payor for ~50% of all healthcare, and operating the databases necessary to monitor all the money and behavior, was certainly not among their "ideals" either.
This was predicted by many, long ago. The predictions were ignored because they were inconvenient to desires and ambitions. Yet here we are. One wonders if it were known at the time, before we constructed these schemes, that one day there would be fabulous machines that would wade through all the (predicted) streams of data, hunting people, if perhaps those predictions might have been heard.
The cynic in me says "no." At some point, as the streams of politics oscillate, they occasionally converge very strongly, and all doubts are overcome, and the ratchet makes another click.
But it's not all bad news. In the natural course of events there is a high probability that one day, you'll have such folk as you prefer back at the helm, and they'll have these tools at the ready. If you make the most of it, you'll never have to suffer the current crowd ever again!
Palantir will never be prosecuted because they don't actually engage in any violations of privacy themselves or take possession of any data. They just sell software that enables it. And their main customer is the people who do the prosecuting. For the government prosecuting Palantir would be an admission of guilt, so it will never happen.
They most likely do engage. And they are not going to be prosecuted just because they are useful for government - and until this status quo persists, palantir can do whatever they like.
For the same reasons banks rarely get any sensible fines/lawsuits.
At least the billionaires also act indignant when you suggest that they weren't singularly responsible for literally every good thing that has ever happened.
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It is ironic that so many of the American billionaires decrying the erosion of American culture were not even born in America.
Thiel, Musk and Murdoch (owner of Fox News) were not born here, and were not even brought up in households of American influence. America is undermined by an enemy within, because no enemy outside our nation can do us damage to the extent these charlatans have done so far
Wishful thinking but it would be real great if a future leader destroyed this infrastructure.
I'm sure they'll run on not using it but when systems like this exist they tend to find applications
Wishful thinking but it would be real great if an engineer poisoned these datasets with bait entries
It’s not gonna happen. The people who work at Palantir, if they’re not just there for the money, think they’re doing the right thing, they see themselves as keeping the country safe and improving government efficiency (and who could be against that?)
Nobody thinks that. They are there for money.
This is exactly right and why it is so dangerous. The bad guys dont think they are bad. The opposite is true.
There is the expression the road to hell is led on good intentions line with the heads of bishops.
You would be surprised how pilled some people are. It’s unfortunate.
Money, or these IT folks derive pride from the technical challenge of building the tool, whatever its purpose. Or both.
Especially Peter Thiel. Now we are not saying he doesn't internally agree with many things that are happening (I don't mean this specific topic but rather overall direction of US society), we know he does.
Yes. These are the same people that will cry about chat control while pushing heinous privacy violations for their right wing overlords.
The “opposition” has never not funded ICE. Throwing out national level republicans is not enough, almost all national level democrats have to be thrown out too.
These tools are there to make sure no such leader ever gets to power, and to ensure the death of the free state. Luckily there's a constitutional amendment (and therefore a constitutional duty upon true Patriots) that has a patch for such regressions.
Reality is that once the next group is in power they keep all the same infra in place so they themselves can use it oft expanding it further. Then when they are kicked out, the next one comes in and does the same.
I dont like any of it but patriot act, covid vaccine tracking, flock, etc are all arms of the same hydra. This is just one more expanding arm of power and control in a long history of gov attempts to control populations.
Destroying Medicaid would in fact solve the problem, that's true.
I'm afraid of the day strongmen come into power in my country and start targeting people on their social media history. I'm sure to end on _some sort_ of naughty list. You kind of get how people become depoliticized and apathetic when resistance has no apparent effect and speaking up only gets you in trouble. That's how civic societies atrophy and die.
Medicaide data is pretty much covered by HIPPA. So Evil. Also it seems like it is too late, even if a court says do not do it, they will anyway and get away with it since the supreme court rules the president is allowed to break the law.
HELP I AM SOOOO F**NG ANGRY. Sorry I just don't have anywhere to safely put this rage.
HIPAA has mechanisms that allow government access (even if it were not Medicaid).
This current administration and their policies have definitely influenced my opinion on the 2018 debate around citizenship questions on the US census.
(For more context: https://www.tbf.org/blog/2018/march/understanding-the-census...)
pretty awesome that the new yc website touts gary tan's work at palantir as a positive
"he was an early designer and engineering manager at Palantir (NYSE:PLTR), where he designed the company logo"
We’re talking inside the death star
Bro idk about you I'm on Endor
The fourth amendment is basically gone at this point. Private companies can harvest location data from phones or facial recognition cameras/license plate readers in public spaces and sell that to entities like Palantir that aggregate it for government use (or for other commercial use). No warrants required, very little oversight (especially in this admin).
One favorable ruling could cause all of that corporate fuckery to come crashing down, but it doesn't seem imminent.
Wake up Americans, your country is becoming a shitshow.
Tangent: Palentir should absolutely not be granted NHS contracts.
Don't you at least need to legally migrate to be in medicaid? I thought I had to be a citizen? Are they full in a full on SS mode now?
People keep forgetting that it's possible to legally migrate, work for awhile, and so on, and then "become illegal" due to deadlines or administration issues.
An example every tech worker should understand is H1-B, where as an added bonus your employer can make you illegal.
Why did you put a quote around become illegal? It's illegal indeed, not illegal.
You may like immigration laws or not, there is a very clear definition on legal aliens.
They're not just going after the so-called "illegal aliens", something made clear after the numerous extrajudicial killings by ICE officers recently, such as the one that occured yesterday.
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Lol no, guns don't just magically go off when in a holster. Yes mechanical failures do happen, but it requires very specific types of impact in very specific ways that cannot happen when in a holster and are so rare as to happen on decade timescales with tens of thousands of the gun. Also I saw zero evidence of that guys gun going off in the video, the first shot heard is the shot coming out of the ICE goon's gun that he is pointing at that guy, who then also mag dumps him while he is on the ground.
"the firearm may discharge when it is dropped and the back of the slide hits the ground at a 33-degree angle"
That is pretty hard to accomplish while its in a holster unless the guy was suplexed and his entire spine turned to jello giving the gun a multi-foot uncushioned drop.
"misfire was due to "a partial depression of the trigger by a foreign object combined with simultaneous movement of the slide"
Which is irrelevant when in a shielded holster like this guy has.
On top of all this, even had the gun went off, which I have found zero evidence to support, how would that guy know who's gun went off to start with? Guns don't light up with a bunch of LEDs to show you it has been fired. If you aren't staring directly at the gun, which isn't really possible in the scenario that played out, you wouldn't know whos gun went off. And even if someone was staring at the gun and saw it go off, how does a holstered gun that nobody is holding represent any sort of threat? You think the guy is controlling his gun with his mind powers?
I don't even know why im bother argueing with you because this entire thing is ludicrous. I find it hard to believe you have watched any of the video of the incident at all and came to this conclusion.
Well, that's an interesting take. Even if a holstered weapon did discharge (no idea how likely this is for the specific weapon in question), why would someone suspect they are being fired at by a person with a holstered weapon? Poor/no training is the most charitable explanation.
I suppose enough people will grasp at this take.
Incredulity, like sarcasm, does not convey well in text.
The only person suggesting the gun went off while holstered was the sibling comment by ‘AngryData’. After ICE discoverers the gun and yells “gun! Gun!” the Sig discharges into the ground (visible in some of the videos) before he is shot 3 times.
Has there been an investigation?
You saw the videos, the guy only had a phone in hand, he got tear gased, pinned to the ground, and then they unloaded their guns on him. Stop lying about what you saw, or we'll start to believe you're actually pro-murder.
They are targeting undocumented parents of children who are on medicaid, using the medicaid data to build that list.
One way to use this data is to increase the success rate of random stops.
1) Take the medicaid data.
2) Join that with rental/income data.
3) Look for neighborhoods with cheap rents/low income and low medicaid rates.
Dragnet those neighborhoods.
Much easier just to ask a local cop "what neighborhoods do the illegals mostly live in?"
How could a non citizen who came illegally be on Medicaid?
They cannot receive from federally funded Medicaid but some states have programs or state-funded Medicaid programs that allow non-citizens to benefit. CA and NY do for some categories. See this example for WI: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/medicaid/noncitizens.htm
It’s likely citizen children on Medicaid with potentially undocumented parents that they are targeting, which is pretty sad to think about.
The US Attorney General also just said they’ll withdraw ICE from Minnesota if they hand over voter registration files.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/pam-bondi-ice-minnesota-shooting-ti...
They’re not even hiding the fact this has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with compiling lists of people to target later.
How would they target people using voter rolls? Is the concern that it includes party affiliation? Couldn't they just provide the rolls without party affiliation?
Honestly it seems crazy even state governments know party affiliation. I know it's so they know who can vote in primaries etc, but it seems like you should just be able to register to vote with your party directly.
Yes, they’re going to go after anyone that voted for the other party. Trump already said they would, I guess this is how
There's no reason to believe that ICE, DHS or any other agencies will use this data carefully, judiciously or in good faith. Instead, it's quite clear at this point that all they will do is abuse the power they do have, execute and antagonize anyone they disagree with and then lie despite ample evidence to the contrary.
I'd say Palantir should be ashamed for facilitating this, but their entire business model is built around helping the government build an ever more invasive police state.
"ICE Budget Now Bigger Than Most of the World’s Militaries" - https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456
Yes, all you had to do is find transport companies that dont hand in gas bills in the tax season and they just pop up aus fraudulent.
... but I'm sure they'd never target "undesirably unhealthy" citizens with this data to harass.....
If you work on this kind of tech, please, quit your job.
Soft quit so they can continue to bleed money and delay further talent acquisition.
And blow up all backups.
So it appears Medicaid recipients data is target rich for illegals, who would have guessed that?
Right now, in Belarus, amateur radio operators are being considered "enemies of the state".
Naturally they all are registered with the govt, and thus easy to pick up, jail, or murder.
This is the type of danger where last year amateur radio was legal, and now it gets you jailed. Thats the danger of this sort of data.
If you have, you should post articles in English about that. People would be interested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46703694 (5 days ago, 7 comments) Belarus begins a death penalty purge of radio amateurs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708996 (4 days ago, 1 comment) HAM Radio Operators in Belarus Arrested, Face the Death Penalty
The people working for Palantir are collaborators.
Undocumented immigrants/illegal immigrants are not generally eligible for federally funded Medicaid coverage in the United States, as federal law restricts such benefits to U.S. citizens and certain qualified immigrants with lawful status.
They are eligible for Emergency Medicaid, which covers emergency medical needs like labor and delivery or life-threatening conditions; hospitals that accept federal dollars for medicare/medicaid are required under federal law (EMTALA) to provide stabilizing emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay.
Federal law also restricts illegal aliens from entering the US without authorization.
Imagine what they could do with mental health data if they ever decide to start deporting people with mental "problems", just like the Nazis did in their time. The same goes for people with physical disabilities.
Or religious affiliation oops wait that one already happened.
Palantir missed out on JSON as ticker symbol.
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How about this: no masks, no weapons (if they feel they are in danger they can call the cops who already have more weapons than they possibly need). Every time a citizen is detained in jail, detaining agent and their manager lose their paycheck for that period. Family with kids jailed and separated? No paycheck. You know, do it in the Christian compassionate way, not in the shooting single moms way.
We would have to pass a more general law that said children cannot be separated from their parents based on any crime the parents have committed, as there's no reason to special-case illegal immigration.
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You are saying cops should ignore constitutional law in support of ICE? That is absolutely bonkers. This is the United STATES, not the Supreme Authority of the Federal Government.
With all due respect, actually look at the replies to your comment here. You are arguing in bad faith.
> How about local law enforcement just comply with ICE? Sanctuary cities and non-compliance brought this on these blue cities.
No, they "brought this on" by ignoring due process. There is no world in which your stance justifies the extrajudicial execution of a detained US citizen.
If you live in the US, this is relevant to you.
They sold us on a lie about the extent of the illegal immigrant "problem". It's numerically impossible to make the promises they made and not deport people who it's hard to argue should be deported.
Immigrants also commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people and crime is at all time lows. Yet they sold us for years on a crime moral panic and phantom "migrant crime".
So you said, propose a solution that also involves deporting people, and I will say NO. You are wanting to target a mostly fake problem.
It is fairly well established that social economic status is the largest predictor for crime than any other predictor. In order for immigrants to commit crimes at a lower rate than US born people we would have to make the claim that immigrants has an average higher social economical status than US born people.
The statistics you are looking for is that the sum of all crimes is lower for immigrants than US born people. 13.8% of the US population are immigrant residents, so in order for the sum of immigration crime to be higher than US born people the rate would need to be close to 1000% larger, which it is not.
Aside from the confusing conflation of sums and rates mentioned in other replies, your argument assumes that correlations are transitive and exhaustive—i.e., that because socioeconomic status correlates with crime, any group with lower crime must have higher socioeconomic status. Which of course is invalid because correlations do not compose across variables, and crime is multi-causal
You can look at studies like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1331677X.2022.20... if you want to look at those multi-causal aspects. In general however, demographics with higher socioeconomic status has lower crime rate and the concept is well established (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7820585/).
A missing aspect with immigration when it comes to statistics is time spent in the country. The likelihood that a person has ever committed a crime in a specific country is generally lower the less time they spend in that country, especially as that number reach zero. The apple to apple comparison would be to look at the average person of average age, in any specific demographic, and ask if they have ever committed a crime, which is not the same as committed a crime in a specific country. That would be the crime rate. An other way would be to ask the question regarding a given year, what is the probability of an individual to commit a crime. The rate of the average person lifetime will not align with the rate of any given year.
The relation between crime and socioeconomic has been thoroughly debated and research when it comes to race, with the finding that race is not related to violent crime, but only once socioeconomic factors (and other related aspects) has been controlled for. If you disregard socioeconomic factors, then race has a distinct relation with violent crime. It is only because researchers control for related factors that we get the findings that we get.
People can disagree with studies should be valid and which doesn't, or look at different meta studies and say which ones is more valid than the others, but I would recommend that one engage with the discussion rather than throw around assumptions about assumptions.
No, the way any serious person would look at crime data is per capita. You take the number of crimes committed by an immigrant and divide by the number of immigrants. That gives you a rate. The rate is lower than for people born in the US.
This may be the first time you are exposed to this idea, because you have been lied to repeatedly that crime is high and it's immigrants doing it, but it's well studied.
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Speaking of propaganda, do you have a link to the data behind those claims? It feels like “complete destruction” should make the news.
> Let’s see your immigrant crime stats.
https://www.google.com/search?q=immigrants+less+likely+to+co...
> Crime is at an all time low because liberal DAs
If you take out the outlier years of 2020-2022 caused by the pandemic, crime has been declining for more than 30 years. I don't know what kind of conspiracy theories about "liberal DAs" you're on about, this only became a talking point a few years ago, and wouldn't explain why crime dropped for multiple decades starting in the mid 1990s. The trend is also not restricted to areas with "liberal DAs".
I think you forgot to plug your tinfoil hat in.
The US cannot afford, demographically, to curtail immigration, illegal or otherwise. Simple fact is the US needs more people because we’re under the replacement rate.
But why are we under the replacement rate? Seems relevant
It all comes back to women being treated as full people. Having a child is dangerous, expensive, and a major time commitment which mean that women who have other options are going to have fewer children later in life when they have the resources to support them. We also have much less demand for unskilled workers so even women who really want children are getting educated and establishing careers first rather than getting married at 18.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2026/is-the-us-birth-rate-decli...
That leaves really only two choices: pull a Ceaușescu and try to remove the choice, or improve all of the things which make people feel now is not the right time to have kids. Since the former choice is both immoral and self-defeating, that really flips the discussion to why the people who claim to want more children oppose universal healthcare, childcare, making housing more affordable, banning negative career impacts for mothers, addressing climate change, etc. There are many things which factor into an expensive multi-decade bet and you have to improve all of them to substantially shift the outcome.
I meant that they get to choose whether and when they have children, and can have full careers. Think about it in terms of opportunity cost: much over a century ago, women were expected to marry and be wives with a handful of exceptions like religious service. They did not have many opportunities for education and there were limited opportunities for independent employment with entire professions off-limits. When those were your choices, even women who didn’t really want kids that much went down that path because only a few people had the drive and social clout not to, and without modern birth control that almost inevitably lead to more kids (necessary, because mortality was shockingly high in pre-vaccine times).
Now, however, there are tons of other opportunities available. Instead of kids just happening, couples can plan them and are making decisions about their finances and other life impacts such as the case you mentioned where people might realize that they can’t afford a larger home. Prospective mothers, even if they really want kids, are also being told advanced education is key or that mothers tend to have lower lifetime earnings even adjusted for field, so the questions aren’t just “can we feed them?” but “would I avoid future layoffs if I finish a masters degree before becoming a parent?”
I think that’s great, everyone should control their life trajectory, but it means that to the extent we want to reverse the trend we need to be lowering the costs so people aren’t looking at trade offs like permanently lowering their career trajectory or locking themselves into a limited, highly-competitive corner of the housing market.
Consider that many women… want to work? And some even want to work and have kids?
They can't be good little wives like republicans want if they have a career.
Because of eroding worker rights and raise cost of living.
You need free time for kids and if the salaries are too low for a single income household a lot of people will end up opting out of having kids.
This isn't unique the the US. Basically every country with a whack work life balance is looking at population replacement problems.
I think this is an oversimplification. History has shown that as soon as a country is developed enough that children start increasing the family expenses rather than decrease them (I.e. helping out with the farm, or whatever the sustaining family business is, but in developing countries this is overwhelmingly agriculture) the pressure to have children slacks off to a large degree and becomes more of a luxury. So it’s just a byproduct of industrialization.
The US is actually better off with replacement rate than a lot of countries that have industrialized since them because of the way it happened and the wars that were fought. More rapidly-industrializing countries (China, Japan, a few other Asian and SA countries) have way shorter runways despite industrializing much later than the US. And those with one child policies really just made things worse for themselves.
A very large part of what the future is going to look like in my opinion is how different countries are able to grapple with this issue and come up with solutions to the problem of a large aging population and a service, hospitality and medical industry with not enough bodies.
That's what happens when you make your population poor by outsourcing large chunks of your economic base and stomping on worker rights.
Considering at least a third of potential replacement partners are Trump voters, can you imagine women feeling sexy about them? LOL
I'd be surprised if the elections of '16 and '24 even register as a blip in demographic data.
What does this even mean?
Cat-brained response
If you have any better sources of minimum wage labor, now's your chance to say it.
For the line must always go up crowd, they feel a need. Not everyone is in the line must always go up crowd.
The line is always going to be going up somewhere. I’d rather it be where I live than not.
Makes no sense at all imo, especially when you consider the origin story and melting pot ethos that made the US what it was in the first place.
That logic doesn't hold up.
Legal immigration - as is today - is about 1% of the US population. That's pretty standard, and would result in an slowly increasing population.
But regardless, saying "we need immigrants" then jumping to "illegal or not" is not a logical argument. We absolutely can have a system that prevent illegal immigration, while carefully screening legal immigrants. Heck, every country in the world does this except the US.
Can, if we had a functioning Congress that actually passed material laws. We’ve been trying to pass immigration reform for the last couple of decades.
Republicans did not support that bill. A single Republican Senator negotiated it in secret. You guys mischaracterize this bill as some amazing thing that everyone was excited to pass until Trump told them not to. That isn't reality.
You can hear it from the horse's mouth here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
Changing laws is irrelevant if the executive chooses to ignore them.
It would be better to actually enforce the immigration laws we have right now, and see where we land. Then make changes from there.
The US values individual freedom, has porous borders, a diverse population, and a large land mass. Citizens would have to put up with some pretty draconian living conditions to ensure zero illegal migration.
Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.
We can disagree on where the threshold of unacceptable intrusion into our lives should be. But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment. Or--as is happening now--pretending the 4A doesn't exist and hope whoever is in power next won't prosecute them.
> Citizens would have to put up with some pretty draconian living conditions to ensure zero illegal migration.
I don’t agree. It’s a matter of incentives. If you know entering the US illegally means you stand a high chance of being deported, have almost no ability to be employed and no access to any social services, the problem mostly solves itself.
Lots of other countries ask why the US has problems other countries have already solved and immigration is a great example of it. It’s a solved problem, our leaders intentionally don’t want it fixed.
> Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.
The amnesty was an agreement that substantial legislation would be passed later than would stop illegal immigration. That’s why Reagan agreed to it. But the changes never happened.
> But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment can stay as is. Just stop people from staying illegally in the country and the 4th amendment becomes a non-issue.
Yeah I'm against ICE and I don't want any immigrants deported.
Why? Deportation is a reasonable response when a person violates a country’s immigration laws. That is the standard around the world.
Alternatively, you have an essentially open border, which obviously can lead to unmanageable waves of immigration that strain a country’s housing, healthcare, schools, welfare, and other resources, among other effects.
Disruption to peoples’ lives happens when we have administrations who arbitrarily decide not to enforce the immigration law (e.g. the previous administration). It sends mixed signals to potential immigrants, and leads to the outcomes we have today when we decide to resume enforcing our laws.
> obviously can lead to unmanageable waves of immigration that strain a country’s housing, healthcare, schools, welfare, and other resources, among other effects.
I don't agree that this is "obvious". Immigrants bring important social and cultural capital. Who do you think is building a lot of the infrastructure in the US? The people putting a strain on the system are actually the aging baby boomer generation.
I have many other reasons for supporting open immigration that are less transactional, but the suggestions that immigrants "strain" our infrastructure is incorrect.
The US is not like many countries in that it was formed by illegal immigrants, and not just immigration, literal genocide and land theft of the indigenous people.
That being said, all immigration policy is out of date. The world is connected now and the policies are an anachronism.
> How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react
I don't agree that this is reality. Our system is not under strain from immigration. It's under strain because we spend our money on the military instead of improving infrastructure. It's also under strain due to wealth inequality and corporate friendly policy. None of which has anything to do with immigration.
Everyone on Earth should have a country they could call home.
That you single out specifically one tiny country when it’s off topic and not “rational criticism” reflects more on you as a person and the value system that guides your thinking.
/s?
Otherwise you're proving his point, which is that there's no middle ground, only "ICE raids terrorizing people" and "sanctuary cities/states where local governments refuse to do any sort of immigration enforcement and specifically turn a blind eye to immigration status".
Yes, well I don't think we should deport people and I think immigrants improve the US, so I would be in the latter category. He's "waiting to hear of alternatives that don't involve deporting illegal immigrants", and I have one: don't deport anyone.
I think the Democrats are also culpable for supporting anti-immigrant policy and sentiment. I absolutely believe that I'm in the minority, as this country has a deep history in racial bias (in fact, it was founded on that).
What actual, concrete benefit do you see from deporting immigrants?
What if a law only has consequences for the people it's intended for?
Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?
Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
> I think the main benefit is the same as with any law: if you have a law with no consequences for the people who break it, you don’t really have a law.
How do you feel about ICE raiding citizens homes without warrants? How about door to door raids?
If ICE cannot even follow the 4th and 5th amendments then they should be jailed themselves.
>you see from deporting immigrants?
Nice job sneakily changing "immigration enforcement" to "deporting immigrants".
It's a false dilemma either way. "You are with ICE or you are pro-illegal immigration".
...and that's best case scenario, giving the benefit of the doubt.
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No, I do not think immigration laws should exist. There is zero chance of 400 million people sleeping in my backyard.
I think this racist comment is a great example of how the immigrants have a superior culture to many people who live in this country.
The alternative is better trained officers with more accountability.
You can’t fix this by giving them more money for training. This is how they’re trained to act.
Bovino says "the officer [who killed Pretti] has extensive training as a range safety officer and less lethal officer,” and had served for eight years.
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Most of these people didn't protest ICE under Biden and Obama, who both deported more than Trump 1. That's because we see a difference in how illegal migrants were prioritized (violent offenders first) and treated (more humanely) then compared to now. And how citizen protests were handled then and now.
Yeah, deportations are clearly beside the point, now.
You're wrong, simple as that.
Deporting people is cringe
You’re right. We should throw away the constitution so we can deport.. (checks notes) 600,000 undocumented immigrants, only 5% of which have committed a violent crime.
I mean, I don't like CCP tech or public executions of disarmed citizens but saying only 5% is a bit nuts.
Another way to look at it: the native born are twice as likely to be arrested for violent and drug crimes.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
What percentage of illegal immigrants have committed violent crimes?
The stats are pretty clear. Based on DHS own numbers
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/number-deported-im...
I'll read it for them.
This basically states that the figures are based on self reported ICE data and are unreliable at best.
The figure is within a rounding error, and regardless does nothing to change the CCP tech and public executions of citizens in the street in broad daylight in front of dozens of cameras.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I do have a question. If you don't deport illegal immigrants, why not just open the border to everyone to come in? (let's ignore criminal records, etc for this exercise). What's the point of not letting people in but then if they manage to come in illegally, assume it's all good and they can stay?
That's the question, isn't it? Why not just do that? Who are you trying to keep out of the country, and for what end, and is that end best attained by removing people from the country who aren't the ones you are trying to keep out?
For instance, if you believe the border should be strict to keep out serial killers, what does that have to do with removing Korean car factory workers who aren't serial killers?
This is a slippery slope argument at best and jingoist rhetoric at worst.
I don't understand. Can you elaborate?
Which river is it in Ireland that they dye green every year for St Patrick’s day like they do in Chicago?
So for the United States, it would primarily be family-oriented Spanish speaking Catholics whose kids will be bilingual and grandkids will speak only English? There have been waves of immigrants before where the Irish or Italians or Germans were seen as "invaders" undermining the character of the country. And then their descendants fully integrated and became part of the culture.
Also the US and Western European countries are in much better economic and civic conditions that the immigrants can take advantage of to live better lives and contribute.
> then it makes total sense to remove them, regardless if they are serial killers or not.
Why?
> A company shouldn't even hire anyone who is not eligible to work legally in the country.
Apart from the legal punishments themselves, why not? What goal is achieved by this?
No horse either but here is an attempt (ignoring criminal record as you say): Opening the border and letting her rip is clearly not sustainable in the medium term. So you try to make it (reasonably) hard to get in incl. turning people away at the border.
Once they are in (incl illegally so) you concede you have lost on this instance. Now you admit that forcefully removing immigrants carries too high a cost (literally + damage in the communities you remove the immigrants from + your humanitarian image). So you don't.
Somehow that balance seems really hard to get right and edge cases (criminal record) matter.
I'm not a big fan of this solution since it rewards people who knowingly did something that is illegal. It also allows businesses to take advantage of these people, unless you decide to give them legal status immediately. However, I agree with you that getting the balance right is really hard and that deporting people, esp families with kids who grew up here and did nothing wrong, is very problematic.
Because we like second-class citizens because its easier to exploit their labor.
That's no longer immigration; that's an invasion. You can't just let unfettered immigration into a country because that would drain resources and have a negative cultural impact. Yes, people in a country pay taxes and as such should enjoy protections against invaders.
As if those were the only two possibilities.
Buying into the narrative that any of this is about illegal immigrants is a red herring. Immigration is merely a pretext for enabling an unaccountable fascist police state using big data from the consumer surveillance industry to both keep enough people believing the regime's abject reality-insulting lies (the carrot), while extralegally punishing anybody who might be too effective at speaking out (the stick). This is painfully obvious as they move on to target US citizens - both the boots on the ground terror gangs, as well as the increasing political rhetoric about deporting citizens.
For me, it's the summary execution of US citizens that gives me pause.
Exactly.
Who needs to care about the Constitution, Individual Liberty, or limited government when there are iMmIgrAnTs around?!
It's like these people never got past their childhood phase worrying about the monster in the closet. In fact I do have to wonder how much of the non-Boomer+ support for this regime is just from naive kids who have zero life experience.
Tons of young people either voted for Trump or didn't vote at all this time around.
Undoubtedly influenced by social media, they're now realizing that what they voted for was their own future's destruction and are now abandoning him in droves.
We'll see if it's too late or not.
Delete your social media, shit is poison.
Thanks for coming out!!
At the walkout on Monday, it was a smallish group of us out, and then like a class of high schoolers came out and joined us and it was such a nice burst of energy.
"New York City get litty! Donald Trump is shitty!" lol, they were having some fun with the chants.
Would love to see more young people come out
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You are proof that propaganda works because nobody is telling illegals to go to their cities.
Forced movement is cringe, actually
You're right, maybe calling people "illegal" is just shitty and we should be the welcoming county we were taught about on history class.
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You're right. I guess that means we should deny them any due process, target them (and anyone who looks like them, even vaguely) indiscriminately, and murder anyone who deigns to get in our way.
Yes, your rewrite is known as propaganda.
Say it with the class:
Propa-
-ganda
Propaganda!
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There is a lot of room between unfettered immigration and having a roving band of apparently unaccountable agents violating 1st, 4th, and 6th amendment rights while also gunning down unarmed citizens in the streets.
We could try mandating e-verify with increasing penalties before we start asking people for papers and kicking down doors.
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There is a reason ICE wasn't shooting unarmed civilians prior to operation metro surge, which only started in December, 2025. Standard ICE operations are targeted and generally quite. Operation Metro Storm is neither.
These are intentionally provocative and involve agents performing traffic stops and harassing people on the street for no other reason than (it increasingly appears) the color of their skin.
Lets see them deploy 3000 agents to West Texas or Hialeah for a few weeks. I am guessing those local populations might have a few problems with it as well.
This feels like an argument that the feds have no choice but to trample on our rights because we’re not agreeing to it up front. There was a memo that they didn’t need a warrant to enter peoples houses. That is morally wrong and also a recipe for violence. Why should local leaders trust the feds at all when they claim that Alex Pretti was an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist”?
Account created 20 days ago.
> discouraging local law enforcement support of federal law enforcement.
Strawman. You can't blame ICE's failure to sustain due process on local law enforcement, even if you think they're against you. Their hands are clean because they avoided cooperating with ICE.
I think people are forgetting that ICE has been around for decades at this point and some if not most of the stuff they do is routine(Not including some recent enforcement behaviors). I agree with you that is not necessarily bad that the government is using its own data fed in to a vendor tool to enforce immigration.
Wish the proponents of stricter immigration would push for a proper national ID first.
Right now you have all the cons anyway, with none of the pros. A stitched-up database that has no laws attached to prevent its misuse. Just like with gun control, law enforcement could've made their job easier decades ago.
The government already has every record ever generated, and no law has ever permitted or prevented it. Once it was revealed, the only thing that happened was they exiled the guy the told us. A codified national ID doesn't afford any benefit to anyone. On top of that, nobody, regardless of political persuasion, wants it. At least we can agree on that.
Don’t act like the current policy is the only possible alternative to open borders. In spring of ’24, a bipartisan bill negotiated with Republicans included the following:
* Personnel surge: 1,500+ new Border Patrol agents, 4,300 asylum officers, and 100 immigration judges with staff to address 5-7 year case backlogs
* Emergency shutdown authority: Presidential power to close the border and suspend asylum processing when daily encounters exceeded capacity thresholds
* Fentanyl enforcement: 100 cutting-edge inspection machines at Southwest ports of entry, plus sanctions authority against foreign nationals involved in transnational drug trafficking
* Detention and support: Funding to address overcrowded ICE facilities, $1.4B for cities/states providing migrant services, and expedited work permits for eligible applicants
* Asylum system overhaul: Faster and fairer asylum process with massively expanded officer capacity to reduce years-long delays in adjudication
This bill had flaws and reasonable people disagreed on details, but it represented serious bipartisan compromise. Republicans walked away from it after Trump opposed it and it was blocked in congress. If you think that specific bill was bad, show me the Republican legislation introduced to solve the immigration crisis. They don’t want to solve the problem because it fires up their base.
This is not accurate. The details were kept secret during negotiation which consisted of 2 Democrats (1 "Independent" who caucused D) and 1 Republican. When the text of the bill was released, it was widely disparaged by Republicans.
>Several Senate Republicans Issue Blunt Dismissal Of Bipartisan Border Security Bill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It never had a chance of passing. It wasn't some amazing bill that everyone loved until Trump told them not to. That is a fantasy that fits the narrative.
And I used to roll my eyes at the homeless guy who ranted about the mark of the beast
I hope that we can agree that blowing off the 10A and allowing all of this federal bloat has not been a swift call.
Social services left at the State level would be subject to a smaller pool of votes for approval and are more likely to be funded by actual tax revenue instead of debt.
That is: sustainably.
Furthermore, the lack of One True Database is a safety feature in the face of the inevitable bad actors.
In naval architecture, this is called compartmentalization.
There are good arguments against this, sure, but the current disaster before you would seem a refutation.
Some states are too poor to effectively fund and maintain their own safety nets. It's common for folks laid off in these states to get a dubious mental health diagnosis to justify SSDI, because doctors know they have no prospects and could well become homeless without it.
Funny how often those are red states...
So we mug other States rather than address the problem?
These states may be fundamentally too resource poor to effectively maintain their populations. So collectively we agreed that richer states should subsidize them, because no one wants to see their neighbors suffer unnecessarily. And in the hope that newer generations may invent or unlock other resources to break the cycles of poverty.
My fear is that many of these states are locked in a bubble of lies, a culture that longs for an imaginary and idealized past that never existed. That they'll continue raising generations of people who think they need to be an independent, 'rudged' individualist when that's never been possible anywhere. And once they fail they'll settle for punching down on people different than them.
Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?
A lot of people who support the current US government do not want the laws to be enforced, they just want to see people who look brown or foreigners to be deported, regardless of if they are in the US legally or illegally.
The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.
But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).
In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".
Where are you getting the idea that 10 innocents are being deported for every 1 illegal? Or that the "majority" of people supporting the crackdown would support that?
The information I can find suggests only a handful of cases, maybe a dozen, out of 600,000 or so.
I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?
I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.
This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.
edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".
(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)
> I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old).[1]
Federal district judges in mpls are releasing dozens of illegally detained individuals per day. You may not be hearing about it, but it is absolutely happening. Your not hearing about is part of the problem.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca8.113...
Would love a source
> I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
That's my point and the reason of my first comment, which answered to a comment saying
> Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?
I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)
> If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be ...
Somehow, I doubt it. You are yourself saying "they think (rightfully or wrongly)". They are not interested in evidence, they don't really care to check if what they think has any evidence supporting it, it is just convenient for them.
If there are evidence of widespread false positive, they will just hold tight to the idea that "they were traitors anyway". It is more convenient for them. (and in fact, there currently is a lot of evidence of a high number of false positive, but they deny it exactly like that)
The proof of that is that there are already plenty of red flags everywhere showing that officials are incompetent. The officials say that there are plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, and yet, the only people they manage to shoot just appear to be non-illegal with no history of extremism. Then, when it happens, they starts fabricating excuses that turn out are total lies. And then ... it happens again. Even if you buy into the idea that there are indeed plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, you have to admit that they are awful at fixing it.
It is not technically a "widespread false positive", but it is already something that a neutral reasonable person will be incapable to deny that there is a problem. And yet, right now, these people who, according to you will totally "start to speak up", don't hesitate to bury their head in the sand and insist that it is all normal.
It is totally unrealistic to pretend that suddenly, when there is widespread evidence of false positive, they will not continue to find excuse and pretend that these evidences are fake news and lies propagated by traitors.
There’s a lot more nuance than might be obvious at first thought. For example, many of the people being violently deported now came here legally, followed the rules, and are now being targeted because their protected status or asylum cases were cancelled under highly suspicious circumstances, with a lot of the rush being to get them out of the country before the shady revocations are reviewed.
We also have a lot of inconsistent enforcement because some employers love having workers who can be mistreated under the threat of calling ICE. If we really wanted to lower immigration, we’d require companies to verify status for everyone they hire. You can see how this works in Texas where they’ve had a ton of bills requiring that get killed by Republican leadership on behalf of major donors:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...
Have you actually read immigration laws? They are not as Manichean or prescriptive as many commenters make them out to be. Enforcement-first proponents often seem unaware of or indifferent to the difference between civil and riminal violations and the lack of mandatory remedies. I've also noticed a distinct tendency to hyperbolize and outsize lie about past policy choices in order to justify their position.
I don't think most people on either side of this issue can speak to the nuances of immigration law.
No, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it should be ruthlessly enforced with dangerous and deadly action or even enforced at all when the majority of the public doesn't support them. Do you believe the feds should go into marijuana legal states and start arresting everybody for breaking the law? Marijuana is illegal after all.
If the president campaigned on a promise to arrest everyone breaking marijuana laws, then maybe.
Like that law that says it's illegal to HIRE workers that cannot show work authorization? IIRC that carries pretty steep penalties. And if enforced, will have a huge chilling effect on the whole illegal immigration thing. But, as sibling commenters have pointed out, it's not about enforcing laws but punishing outgroups. This is only not obvious to the willfully ignorant.
Yes, with humanity and with respect for due process. And laws should not be applied selectively against people you don't like while turning a blind eye to violations by people on 'your side'.
This has nothing to do with immigration law. If it did, there would be no offer on the table to withdraw the ICE troops in exchange for the MN voter database.
Why do you have voter databases? I always thought it's a bad idea, who doesn't?
It reminds me of when Eric Schmidt, then CEO of google, tried that argument about people's worry of google collecting so much personal data. Some media outlet then published a bunch of personal information about Schmidt they had gathered using only google searches, including where he lives, his salary, his political donations, and where his kids went to school. Schmidt was not amused.
That questionable-sounding stunt by the media outlet wasn't comparable: Google/Alphabet knows much more about individuals than addresses, salary, and political donations.
Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.
Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.
We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.
It was probably a decade ago and I recall using something within Google that would tell you about who they thought you were. It profiled me as a middle eastern middle aged man or something like that which was… way off.
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...
I think its their currently targeted ad demographic or whatever. Its probably a "meaningless" label to humans, but to the computer it makes more sense, he probably watches the same content / googles the same things as some random person who got that label originally, and then anyone else who matched it.
I think you're on about the ad preferences settings or whatever? I usually wipe those.
Creepy and oppressive, go figure.
OG = Original Gangster?
Yes but its a slang term that just means original/old-school now (unless you're an actual criminal maybe).
Yep, the 70s Crips and Ice-T somehow made it into everyday speech.
It's mostly meaning "original". The OG XBox for example.
The research that kicked off Google was funded by US intelligence orgs.
Stop pretending like Schmidt was or is "one of the good guys." They all knew from day one what the score was.
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> Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
> But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks
I feel that as the consumer surveillance industry took off, everyone from those OG Internet circles was presented with a choice - stick with the individualist hacker spirit, or turncoat and build systems of corporate control. The people who chose power ended up incredibly rich, while the people who chose freedom got to watch the world burn while saying I told you so.
(There were also a lot of fence sitters in the middle who chose power but assuaged their own egos with slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot)
Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.
The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.
The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.
And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.
And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).
Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.
And barely so.
It would be nice if the top people in open source land weren't disheveled and looking like sterotypes. It's pretty easy to paint him as a predator.
Having met him one time he seemed like just a really intense dude who embodied the chestnut “the CEO is the guy who walks in and says ‘I’m CEO’.” I dunno if there’s more to it than that.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...
erm hes a creep, claimed to be rapist... not many redeemable qualities.
Eric Schmidt the rapist?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...
He's got a whole lotta people doing over-time trying to bury this.
For some specific quotes, here are some excerpts from In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34931437
Eric had also once said in a CNBC interview "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Nowadays we got doxing laws in my country, but... the guy behind Palantir (look up where that name stems from, too) is called Peter Thiel.
Back in the day, Google eng had pretty unguarded access to people's gmails, calendars, etc. Then there was a news story involving a Google SRE grooming children and stalking them through their google accounts...
And this is what every hacker on the planet should be doing: exposing all of the secrets of the rich parasites. Leave them no quarter, no place too hide.
Thiel lost his shit because Gawker mentioned he was gay in an article on their site. Something _everybody_ in Silicon Valley already knew. Then he goes and forms what essentially amounts to a private CIA.
How about Musk? He felt he had a right to hoover up data about people from every government agency, but throws a massive temper-tantrum when people publish where his private jet is flying using publicly available data.
How about Mark Zuckerberg? So private he buys up all the properties around him and has his private goon squad stopping people on public property who live in the neighborhood, haranguing them just for walking past or near the property.
These people are all supremely hypocritical when it comes to privacy.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
- Eric Schmidt
> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
Apparently any time they do anything horrifying, they will just declare that victim as a "terrorist" or something, and their sycophantic supporters will happily agree.
What I find amusing is that when the Snowden leaks happened and I would discuss it, when I said something like "let's pretend for a moment that we can't trust every single person in the government" I would usually get an agreeable laugh.
But using these same arguments with ICE + Palantir, these same people will say something like "ICE IS ONLY DEPORTING THE CRIMINALS YOU JUST WANT OPEN BORDERS!!!". People's hypocrisy knows no bounds.
How do we know whether they're people or bots?
Well in my case I was referring to actual vocal conversations I've had with humans, either in person or on MS Teams.
I suppose that there could be an extremely elaborate LLM to control humanoid robots to try and fool me, but I do not believe that's the case.
I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.
Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.
Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.
Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.
Sure, but until then I'm reasonably certain that the people I have discussed this with were not bots.
I mean, tens of millions of people voted for this. So even if social media sentiment is mostly bot-driven, it's provably backed up or supported by what real people deeply believe and want and will continue to vote for in mid-terms.
I think one of the issues is that bots can flood the zone faster than reasonable/rational humans can counter them.
Bots are not necessary for indoctrination, Fox does that already. But bots help creating dissent and make people busy defending against all the crap.
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Yes, exactly. But, I’ll admit it took me until the republican primary before the 2016 election for this to register in my mind. I was born in the US in the 80s & fell into the “what you see is all there is” bias (and hadn’t read enough history before then either).
Another opinion that I’m sure will get me downvoted is that this is the primary reason I support gun ownership by private citizens. I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.
Bottom line is that human nature has not changed. Some of us westerners take comfortable lives for granted because we’ve been lucky.
> I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter
This would be questionable 100 years ago, let alone today's technology. Civils just can't organize efficiently, and "heads" (like someone locally coordinating civils) can be cut off easily by a central force (like it's just a drone strike away). The only real power is that a sane military will not turn against their own people. You don't need weapons for that.
> I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.
That won't stop the mass government slaughter, if anything it will accelerate it.
Apparently even if you legally own a gun they'll shoot you just for owning it anyway, so I'm not sure that will help.
> Bottom line is that human nature has not changed. Some of us westerners take comfortable lives for granted because we’ve been lucky.
Which I bet our luck has run out. This year and the next 5 or 10 years from now, its going to be really bad.
I don't even trust local state governments at this point.. It all seems like a big ploy on the people to keep the grift going.
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> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
There are an estimated 100K illegal immigrants in Minnesota,[1] and about 2M in Texas.[2] With 900K in Florida, 350K in Georgia, 325K in North Carolina, etc. [3]
Why doesn't ICE concentrate on fishing where the fish are… but of course that would mean doing stuff in red states.
[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-unauthorized-immigra...
ICE officials are pretty consistently saying that they do more visible immigration enforcement in places where the local police are forbidden by local or state law from giving information about people they arrest to ICE, compared to places where the local police do this happily. Legally-forbidding local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement is a prototypically blue-state policy that red states do not generally do.
The visible disruptive protests against ICE activity are also the sort of thing that you'd expect the sorts of voters that make a blue state blue to do, so when ICE does arrest illegal immigrants in red states, there's much fewer people who are inclined to protest it and therefore less publicity in general.
Of course they can perform more than one task at the time, the question is why have they started prioritizing Minnesota? Which dont have a lot of illegal immigrants.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-se...
Yeah, true, they're just murdering civilians in the blue states.
Considering the AG demanded the voter rolls for MN to remove ICE it becomes obvious what game is being played. It’s a shame the USA is a terrible place.
Without going into a long tangent talking about each point, I would like to point out that ICE doesn't actually seem terribly concerned with whether or not the people are illegal aliens or criminals. The last two people they murdered were US citizens, there are many US citizens, some natural born, that have been detained.
If they have access to all this information that was volunteered, then why are they so utterly incompetent at actually deporting illegal aliens?
That said, the disturbing part of Palantir and ICE isn't just that they are reading my driver's license or my legal status, it's the fact that they know everything.
You are absolutely, unequivocally incorrect that anyone in any significant numbers wants "open borders". I know this is a meme, but it's a meme that isn't true.
Yeah I don't give a shit about the illegal immigrant situation. I don't want that agency to have all of my information for no reason at all. There's is no world in which that is appropriate, regardless of your views on immigration.
The "crime" is the same severity as driving drunk or bringing a gun into a restroom in a National Park.
Are you saying it's OK for Federal officers swarm your house without a warrant, and then just shoot you for that?
It’s more on the level of a speeding ticket.
> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
I 100% agree with this sentiment and that is why I strongly support speeding the asylum application process through redirecting immigration enforcement funding to bolstering the courts. Our backlog should be 0 before we start knocking door to door and stopping people for the suspicious behavior of being brown at Home Depot.
I agree the administration's goal is not to restore legal order or even public safety. Hate makes you stupid. Hating a people makes you really stupid. I don't think it really has a goal, not even Project 2025 or whatever. It's too stupid. It's like a teenager breaking its own xbox because its gf didn't text it fast enough. Nonsensical anger directed towards random innocents.
It's not even that big of a leap. We've seen a off-duty ICE agent drunk driving his child, getting stopped by the cops, implied threats to one of the officers for being black with payback, spent the whole time saying "come on man" using his position as a federal officer as a way to get out of trouble, and ends to the point that I wanted to make, complained about his and I quote "bitch ex-wife" for divorcing him.
What is stopping this lowlife from going after his ex-wife, or one of those cops by using databases that they have access to? We know from journalists going through the process that there's no curation or training involved to join ICE specifically.
But this goes beyond them. We know that cops can be corrupt to, we know politicians can be corrupt to, what is stopping any of these people from using private data to not only go after their spouses, but also business rivals, and people who slight them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_1X7MVrnPY
>What is stopping this lowlife
Same as with all other crime, we hope it's the law that stops him. We hope that more policemen want to be good men than bad.
The illusion of safety is based on the honor system. Society doesn't work without that.
Does it actually work like we hope it does?
Arguably, there are countries where it's pretty damn effective.
Depends where, I think. Where your neighbors are mostly honorable, it mostly works. There are plenty of nice neighborhoods, and no shortage of bad ones either, sadly.
That assumes that the people who enforce the law want good people to be police officers, and that has never been the case. It is certainly not the case with our current ICE officers.
It doesn't assume anything. It's literally what's happening right now. All of your neighbors don't want to steal all of your stuff. Think about the fact that this is only true in certain places, regardless of what laws exist. Laws have very little effect on criminal behavior. Your peers being cool people are all that really protects your safety and your property.
Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.
The reaction from the masses: "But that isn't true today, anything could happen in the future, and why should I invest so much work on something that's only a possibility?"
People do not have justifications for most choices. We watch YouTube when we would benefit more from teaching ourselves skills. We eat too much of food we know is junk. We stay up too late and either let others walk over us at work to avoid overt conflict or start fights and make enemies to protect our own emotions. If you want to know why Americans are allowing themselves to be gradually reduced to slavery, do not ask why.
This. As much as I would like to say 'individual responsibility' and all that, the sheer amount of information that is designed to make one follow a specific path, react in specific way or offer opinion X is crazy. I am not entirely certain what the solution is, but I am saying this as a person, who likes to think I am somewhat aware of attempts to subvert my judgment and I still catch myself learning ( usually later after the fact ) that I am not as immune as I would like to think.
It is not you who plants weeds in the garden but the wind, but the wind won't weed them back out again.
Don't forget murdering protesters.
>to make them think and act in specific ways.
with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person.
Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.
I sometimes imagine that HN was a professional collective. Maybe working with the supply chain of foodstuffs. Carciogenic foodstuff would be legal. Environmental harzards getting into foodstuff would be legal. But there would be a highly ideological subgroup that would advocate for something that would very indirectly handle these problems. And the rest of the professional collective are mixed and divided on whether they are good or what they are actually working towards. A few would have the insight to realize that one of the main people behind the group foresaw these problems that are current right now 30 years ago.
That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.
Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America?
The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already).
Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold.
To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
Don't forget your comments on HN, which, as we all know, don't go away. I think the chilling-effect is absolutely real now.
Privacy itself can become illegal just as easily as religion, etc. if we follow your argument.
What point do you think you're making?
My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term.
I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.
EU is literally debating about "Chat Control". Its purpose is to scan for child sexual abuse material in internet traffic. But its at the cost of breaking end to end encryption.
> Its purpose is to scan
That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.
The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.
I wouldn't be surprised that Trump goes one step further. He is so unleashed, and irrational. This guy is a liability for humanity
Yes, that is indeed the point.
Absolutely - there are quite a few attempts in this direction.
It's a hell of lot harder to enforce...
Without privacy of those things? Yes.
Data are immortal times of peace are not!
Which is why I generally vote for people who believe in freedom versus an overreaching state.
I need to get this super power.
I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.
Yeah, or county... but same kind of difference.
They want to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization. So anyone that is against fascism (ANTI-FAscist) will be labeled a terrorist. Let that sink in for a moment.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
Don’t forget about social media posts. In the UK, people are being jailed for those today.
Imagine if they used your past post history against you.
Which posts are people being jailed for?
"I asked an LLM and it said" holds no weight nor meaning, except to inform us on how easily your opinion is swayed.
Notice how the AI didn't answer the question — and you chose to post it anyway.
In the US if you make a social media post threatening the president you are breaking the law and can be sent to jail just as much as if you said it
Not anymore. Now in the US you can be arrested if cops think you disrespected a dead guy they liked[1]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...
> The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.
No they do not. Quote, from your own link:
> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.
Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?
> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.
With additional clarification[2]:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.
So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.
Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.
The text of the law as well, for anyone interested: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...
[2] https://archive.md/bdEqK#selection-3009.0-3009.194:~:text=A%....
Here are a few.
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...
No they're not. An incredibly small number of people might get arrested if policing cocks up. Nobody is being jailed.
Laws can not be applied retroactively.
>ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity).
Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.
Challenge.
Laws cannot an action a crime after it was committed. However,
- Civil rules can and do impact things retroactively
- Laws may not make something illegal retroactively, but the interpretation of a law can suddenly change; which works out the same thing.
- The thing you're doing could suddenly become illegal with on way for you to avoid doing it (such as people being here legally and suddenly the laws for what is legally changes). This isn't retroactive, but it might as well be.
It is _entirely_ possible for someone to act in a way that is acceptable today but is illegal, or incurs huge civil penalties, tomorrow.
> Laws can not be applied retroactively.
I would not be surprised if SCOTUS disagrees at some point.
> Laws can not be applied retroactively.
I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake
despots don't care about the law
Wait, so you think government that will make some "ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more" illegal is probable enough to consider such hypothetical situation, but government that will ignore law is where you draw the line?
A few years ago most people would think violating the Posse Comitatus act would be such a low probability scenario. And yet.
The US is currently descending into fascim. With each passing day, we see more bold and obviously illegal actions that we would not have dreamed up in our wildest nightmares.
> This is such a low probability scenario
how is it a low probability scenario?
it's happened before, in living memory (there are still people alive that survived the holocaust)
and you're seeing the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota
The thing also is, it doesn't matter what the truth is. If the computer says you did a thing, the thugs (ICE) will do what they want.
Here is someone out for a walk, ICE demanding ID, that she answer questions. She says she's a US citizen ... they keep asking her questions and one of the ICE people seem to be using a phone to scan her face:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qbawlr/minneap...
What she says, the truth, none of it would matter if his phone said to bring her in. And after the fact? The folks supporting ICE have made it clear they've no problem with lying in the face of the obvious.
People have a real hard time understanding that they are only as free as the most oppressed citizen in their country/state/city.
> I've got nothing to hide.
Some retorts for people swayed by that argument:
"Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"
"Let's send your mom all your text messages."
"Ain't nothin' in my pockets, but I'd rather you didn't check."
"Shall we live-stream your next doctor's appointment?"
"May I watch you enter your PIN at the ATM?"
"How about you post your credit card number on reddit?"
"Care to read your high-school diary on open mic night?"
I think the "nothing to hide" argument is made for a different reason.
People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them. The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal), but your church knowing your search history would absolutely be a big deal.
> The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal)
Until someone at or above the TSA decides they don't like you. And then they use your search history to blackmail you. Because lots of people search for things that wouldn't be comfortable being public. Or search for things that could easily be taken out of context. Especially when that out of context makes it seem like they might be planning something illegal
Heck, there's lots of times where people mention a term / name for something on the internet; and, even though that thing is benign, the _name/term_ for it is not. It's common for people to note that they're not going to search for that term to learn more about it, because it will look bad or the results will include things they don't want to see.
When someone said "I got nothing to hide" I always took it to mean "I will tell the nazis when they come which house to look in".
It's good to know in advance who they are.
> People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them.
A very famous quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Many people - particularly white people, but let's not ignore that a bunch of Black and Latino folks are/have been Trump supporters - believe that they are part of the in-group. And inevitably, they find out that the government doesn't care, as evidenced by ICE and their infamous quota of 3000 arrests a day... which has hit a ton of these people, memefied as "leopards ate my face".
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/trump-ice-ar...
I'm pro-privacy and I still think these retorts just make it sound like you've put zero effort into understanding what the "nothing to hide" people are trying to articulate.
E.g. "Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"
Very few people are arguing that nudity or bathroom use shouldn't be private, and they are not going to understand what this has to do with their argument that the NSA should be allowed to see Google searches to fight terrorism or whatever.
Privacy arguments are about who should have access to what information. For example, I'm fine with Google seeing my Google searches, but not the government monitoring them.
"I've got nothing to hide." is a rather extreme statement. The people who say it don't mean it literally. But saying something they don't mean aren't really helping their points across. I think OP’s retorts are simply to show how absurd the “I’ve got nothing to hide” claim is, regardless of how effective the retorts are.
> Some retorts for people swayed by that argument
Do any of these actually prompt someone to reconsider their position? They strike me as more of argument through being annoying than a good-faith attempt to connect with the other side.
I usually just quote Snowden instead:
People should have consequences for what they say, but not from the government. You should never be prosecuted for what you say, no matter how vile. But other people are free to exercise their rights in response, including freedom of association.
> I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts.
'Saying' is an example of 'doing', and the moderation to speech happens after the fact, including (yes) in USA. Consider the case of a person yelling fire or 'he's got a gun!' when there is none, or a death threat.
> whereas someone without anything to say for himself cannot be easily imagined as a good faith social individual
Huh? You can’t imagine boring people as a “good faith social individual”?
Quite. I think a lot of Americans are acculturated (partly via movies and TV) to constant one-upmanship and trying to end disagreements with zingers. Look how many political videos on YouTube are titled 'Pundit you like DESTROYS person you disapprove of!' You see the same patterns in Presidential 'debates' and Congressional hearings. It's all very dramatic but lacking in real substance.
Generally speaking, I think the point of statements like this is to shoot down the trite and thought-free cliche "if you have nothing to hide". And the point is rarely to convince the person you're speaking to, it's usually to get people who might otherwise be swayed by hearing the trite and thought-free cliche to think for a moment.
If you're talking directly to one person and trying to convince them, without an audience, there are likely different tactics that might work, but even then, some of the same approach might help, just couched more politely. "You don't actually mean that; do you want a camera in your bedroom with a direct feed to the police? What do you actually mean, here? What are you trying to solve?"
Option A: "Yes!", which tells you you're probably talking to someone who cares more about not admitting they're wrong than thinking about what they're saying.
Option B: "Well, no, but...", and now you're having a discussion.
Generally speaking, people who say things like "if you have nothing to hide" either (charitably) haven't thought about it very much and are vaguely wanting to be "strict on crime" without thought for the consequences because they can't imagine it affecting them, or (uncharitably) have attitudes about what they consider "shameful" and they really mean "you shouldn't do things that I think you should feel shame about".
You, someone's friends, and someone's mom are not law enforcement investigating a crime.
There's a big difference between these scenarios.
Law enforcement are civilians like you or me. It was a big mistake to grant them special rights. If they can arrest people then it should be legal for you and me to arrest a LEO. Why should any person have special rights in a Democracy?
Which are quippy and dismissed because they fundamentally misunderstand privacy. There is such a concept as "privacy in a crowd" - you expect, and experience it, every day. You generally expect to be able to have a conversation in say, a coffee-shop, and not have it intruded upon and commented upon by other people in the shop. Snippets of it may be overheard, but they will be largely ignored even if we're all completely aware of snippets of other conversations we have heard, and bits and pieces have probably been recorded on peoples phones or vlogs or whatever.
That's privacy in a crowd and even if they couldn't describe it, people do recognize it.
What you are proposing in every single one of these, is violating that in an overt and disruptive way - i.e.
> "Let's send your mom all your text messages."
Do I have anything in particular to hide in my text messages, of truly disastrous proportions? No. But would it feel intrusive for a known person who I have to interact with to get to scrutinize and comment on all those interactions? Yes. In much the same way that if someone on the table over starts commenting on my conversation in a coffee-shop, I'd suddenly not much want to have one there.
Which is very, very different from any notion of some amorphous entity somewhere having my data, or even it being looked at by a specific person I don't know, won't interact with, and will never be aware personally exists. Far less so if the only viewers are algorithms aggregating statistics.
> The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
Which has literally happened already for anyone who thinks “there’s controls in place for that sort of thing”. That’s with (generally) good faith actors in power. What do you think can and will happen when people who think democracy and the constitution are unnecessary end up in control…
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/
It doesn't even need malicious intent. If nobody rational is monitoring it, all it will take is a bad datapoint or hallucination for your door to get kicked in by mistake.
Plus there is inherent biases in datasets. Folks who have interactions with Medicaid will be more vulnerable by definition.
To quote the standard observability conference line "what gets measured gets managed".
The true problem is that it happens no matter who is in charge. It's like that old phrase about weapons that are invented are going to be used at some point. The same thing has turned out to be true for intelligence tools. And the worst part is that the tools have become so capable, that malicious intent isn't even required anymore for privacy to be infringed.
From everything we are seeing, the tools are not actually that capable. Their main function is not their stated function of spying/knowing a lot about people. Their main function is to dehumanize people.
When you use a computer to tell you who to target, it makes it easy for your brain to never consider that person as a human being at all. They are a target. An object.
Their stated capabilities are lies, marketing, and a smokescreen for their true purpose.
This is Lavender v2, and I’m sure others could name additional predecessors. Systems rife with errors but the validity isn’t the point; the system is.
This is the moment for Europe to show that you can do gov and business differently. If they get their s** together and actually present a viable alternative.
They are doing it differently alright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_control
You're saying a proposed bill which hasn't passed is comparative to recent events in the US or am I reading too much between the lines?
Nitpicking, many on your list are not part of the EU : NHS UK, UK Ministry of Defence, NATO, Ukraine, UBS, BP.
Plus, the EU is 27 countries, out of which 5 are listed on their wiki page, with various institutions.
Europe can't do business differently. Or at least it doesn't seem to be able to. China can.
Last I checked millions of europeans are living in a functioning civilization. I've lived in Europe. It is ok.
Don't confuse "GDP not as big as ours" with "totally non-functional."
I didn't say it was totally nonfunctional, I said they can't do business differently than they are currently doing.
China can
Yes, things are different in totalitarian states.
How is it not viable now?
What would you like to see changed in the EU?
"Best I can do is Chat Control 3.0"
The nazi's were easily able to find jews in the Netherlands because of thorough census data. Collection of that data was considered harmless when they did it. But look at what kind of damage that kind of information can do.
The simple response to that line of thinking is: "you don't choose what the government uses against you"
For any piece of data that exists, the government effectively has access to it through court orders or backdoors. Either way, it can and will be used against you.
For me, the angle is a bit different. I want privacy, but I also sense that the people who are really good at this (like Plantir) have so much proxy information available that individual steps to protect privacy are pretty much worthless.
To me, this is a problem that can only be solved at the government/regulatory level.
In principle, I agree with your point; in practice, I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving that still can't take a vehicle all the way across the USA without supervision in response to a phone summons.
The evidence I have that causes me to believe them to be overstated, is how even Facebook has frequently shown me ads that inherently make errors about my gender, nationality, the country I live in, and the languages I speak, and those are things they should've been able to figure out with my name, GeoIP, and the occasional message I write.
> I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving
They are not overstated, and they are far worse.
It’s funny when Facebook thinks you’re interested in aquariums and shows you aquarium ads when that isn’t your thing at all.
It’ll be a lot less amusing when Palantir thinks you’re interested in bombing government buildings.
Palantir don't sell data though, they just give you a software platform.
They don't sell the data, they sell access to that data
This is the same thing I thought when liberal-minded folk talked about giving the Federal government more power over States in order to enact some good work, or to achieve some policy win. Yes, for now, I thought, but you can't assume a good natured centralized power will persist, and when it doesn't, what is your alternative? I have watched as liberal minded folks rediscover the value of State Sovereignty and power in the face of an autocratic Federal executive, bearing arms when the an autocrat sends masked agents to terrorize your city. Lean into it, I say. Winner take all Federal system means no alternative but to win at all costs, rather than live and let live. We need more, smaller, States. We need more Representatives than 1 per 700,000 citizens...by 10x
> The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
There’s a world of difference between a government using legally collected data for multiple purposes and an individual abusing their position purely for personal reasons.
The parent's example is of an individual using that "legal" state collected data for nefarious purposes. Once it's collected, anyone who accesses it is a threat vector. Also, governments (including/especially the US) have historically killed, imprisoned and tortured millions and millions of people. There's nothing to be gained by an individual for allowing government access to their data.
There is 0 difference. None. There's not even a line to cross.
> legally collected data
In both cases, the information is legally collected (or at least, that's the only data we're concerned about in this conversation).
- government using
- individual abusing
^ Both of those are someone in the government using the information. In both cases, someone in the government can use the information in a way that causes an individual great harm; and isn't in the "understood" way the information would be used when it was "pitched" to the public. And in both cases, the person doing it will do what they want an almost certainly face no repercussions if what they're doing is morally, or even legally, wrong.
The government is collecting data (or paying someone else to collect that data, so it's not covered by the rules) and can then use it to cause individuals great harm. That's it, the entire description. The fact that _sometimes_ it's one cop using it to stalk someone or not is irrelevant.
That difference is looking very thin right now.
[dead]
Is this legal though?
& effectively if there is no checks on this is there actually a difference? There only difference is that the threat is to an entire cohort rather than an individual.
At this moment, the primary difference appears to be scale.
When did legality make something right?
The whole social battle is a constant attempt to align our laws and values as a society. It's why we create new laws. It's why we overturn old laws. You can't just abdicate your morals and let the law decide for you. That's not a system of democracy, that's a system of tyranny.
The privacy focused crowd often mentions "turnkey tyranny" as a major motivation. A tyrant who comes to power and changes the laws. A tyrant who comes to power and uses the existing tooling beyond what that tooling was ever intended for.
The law isn't what makes something right or wrong. I can't tell you what is, you'll have to use your brain and heart to figure that one out.
Musk and his flying monkeys came in with hard drives and sucked up all the data from all the agencies they had access to and installed software of some kind, likely containing backdoors. Even though each agency had remit for the data it maintained, they had been intentionally firewalled to prevent exactly what Palantir is doing.
There is also a world of difference between a government using data to carry out its various roles in service of the nation and a government using data to terrorize communities for the sadistic whims of its leadership.
Think I'm being hyperbolic? In Trump's first term fewer than 1M were deported. In Obama's eight years as president, 3.1M people were deported without the "techniques" we are witnessing.
Even if you trust the intentions of whoever you're giving your data to, you may not trust their ability to keep it safe from data breaches. Those happen all the time.
Or the person that takes over after them
The source of the problem is the respect of the rule of law and due process
Data collection is not the source of the problem because people give their data willingly
Do you think data collection is a problem in China, or do you think the government and rule of law is the problem?
Companies collecting data is not the true problem. Even when data collection is illegal, a corrupt government that doesn't respect the rule of law doesn't need data collection.
yeah, this is exactly it. all the arguments kind of boil down to
"well how about if the government does illegal or evil stuff?"
its very similar to arguments about the second ammendment. But laws and rules shouldnt be structured around expecting a future moment where the government isnt serving the people. At that moment the rules already dont matter
You just described the Bill of Rights. Constitutions should be structured around that.
One interesting point about the volume of data that might be available about any individual is that law enforcement will only look for data points that suit their agenda.
They won't be searching for counter evidence. It won't even cross their minds to do so.
You're on record saying one thing one time that was vanilla at the time but is now ultra spicy (possibly even because the definition of words can change and context is likely lost) then you'll be a result in their search and you'll go on their list.
(This is based on my anecdotal experience of having my house raided and the police didn't even know to expect there to be children in the house; children who were both over ten years old and going to school and therefore easily searchable in their systems; we hadn't moved house since 15 years prior, so there was no question of mixing up an identity. The police requested a warrant, and a fucking judge even signed it, based on a single data point: an IP address given to them by a third party internet monitoring company.)
Keep your shit locked down, law enforcement are just as bad at their jobs as any other Joe Clockwatcher. In fact they're often worse because their incentive structure leans heavily towards successful prosecution.
Sorry for the rant.
> The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
Or if you're currently married to an abusive partner and want to leave: how can you make a clean break with all the tracking nowadays? (And given how 'uncivilized' these guys act in public (masked, semi-anonymous), I'd had to see what they do behind closed doors.)
If ice only goes after undocumented or expelled immigrants, why are they in the medicade system?
Undocumented immigrants often have legally-resident and/or citizen family members who are eligible for Medicaid.
But yes, it's disgusting that ICE has access to that data via Palantir, or that this data is being used for anything other than administering Medicaid.
The same people saying that will also defend police wearing masks, hiding badges, and shutting off body cameras. They are not participating in discussions with the same values (truth, integrity) that you have. Logic does not work on people who believe Calvinistic predestination is the right model for society.
Anyone on the right who implicates Pretti for carrying a licensed firearm is a good litmus test for bad faith.
It's amazing how quickly the party of small government, states rights, and the 2nd amendment quickly turned against all their principles. It really shows how many people care more about party than principle.
It's not that amazing. The Republican party has repeatedly demonstrated my entire life that their goal is power and all stated ideals can and will be sacrificed as needed to achieve that goal.
We get things like philandering individuals running on family values platforms, anti-gay individuals being caught performing gay sex acts in restaurant bathrooms, crowing about deficits and the national debt during Democrat administrations while cutting taxes and increasing spending during Republican administrations, blocking Supreme Court nominations because it's "too close to an election" while pushing through another Supreme Court nomination mere weeks before a subsequent election, etc.
The fuel running the Republican political machine is bad faith.
Two percent of Americans changing their opinion in the face of state sanctioned murder is not a good number.
It's important to distinguish between their stated principles and their actually held principles. They are quite principled.
I assume the NRA are out in droves at a US citizen being executed for carrying a gun?
That's odd because I see him knelt with a gun to his head and a cell phone in his hand
The NRA is ostensibly pro guns but they are also pro oppression.
They are not where I would hold them to if they were truly a principled organization and not largely a political tool for the far-right on any and every talking point, but we got far more out of them than we usually do.
They publicly called out a Trump appointee for saying you're not allowed to bring a gun to a protest, and have urged that there be an investigation in to what occurred.
They also then blamed it on the MN government, because for some reason CBP (250 miles from a border, and thus 150 miles away from their remit...) pretending to be police officers when they also lack a remit to do that and them then fucking things up and murdering people because of the lack of remit, lack of training, lack of screening on the hiring... is because of Walz and co.
So... better than I expected, but still pretty dogshit.
Wait. Is calvinistic predestination the majority view of republicans? I thought most of them are some form of (tv) evangelism, or secularism
I am not American and genuinely curious on this.
A lot of American Christians aren't hyper committed to the specific theology of whichever flavor of Christianity they belong to, and will often sort of mix and match their own personal beliefs with what is orthodoxy.
That said, I'm ex-Catholic, so I don't feel super qualified to make a statement on the specific popularity of predestination among American evangelicals at the moment.
That said, in a less theological and more metaphorical sense, it does seem that many of them do believe in some sort of "good people" and "bad people", where the "bad people" are not particularly redeemable. It feels a little unfalsifiable though.
I don't believe there is any sort of conservative intellectual movement at this point. The right believes they have captured certain institutions (law enforcement, military), in the same way they believe the left has captured others (education/universities, media), and will use them to wage war against whichever group the big finger pointing men in charge tell them to.
Writing papers is not the same as being an intellectual.
The Heritage Foundation certainly publishes, but they don't have a coherent ideology.
Project 2025 is not an work of political philosophy, it's just a roadmap for seizing power at all costs.
Some, probably; not all (and certainly not the current president, who in his more senile moments muses about how his works have probably earned him hell [0]).
But the same observation applies to lots of other attitudes, too—like “might makes right” and “nature is red in tooth and claw” or whatever else the dark princelings evince these days. I feel like “logic matters” mainly pertains to a liberal-enlightenment political context that might be in the past now…
Does reality always find a way to assert itself in the face of illogic? Sure! But if Our Side is righteous and infallible, the bad outcomes surely must be the fault of Those Scapegoats’ malfeasance—ipso facto we should punish them harder…
https://time.com/7311354/donald-trump-heaven-hell-afterlife-...
You should lookup 'Supply-side Jesus' to get a better understanding of American Christianity.
No, none of that is true.
Remember, Republicans represent half the country, not some isolated sect living in small town Appalachia.
And honestly, with a Congress that allows every state, irrespective of population, two Senators, it is somewhat skewed. I mean San Jose, California is about double the population of the entire state of Wyoming.
27%* https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
>some isolated sect living in small town Appalachia.
Calvinists or Evangelicals?
I don't think that holds water either way.
Calvinistic predestination is a TULIP sense (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints) is an extreme minority position, like 7% to 5% of the American Church (Reformed Camp)
It's something they say in sociology 101 at colleges in the US and some people occasionally believe it.
Republicans are overwhelmingly Christian, and even though Calvinism, or its branches, may not be the religion a majority of Republicans “exercise”, predetermination is a convenient explanation of why the world is what it is, and why no action should be taken - so it gets used a lot by right wing media, etc.
Police absolutely should have body cameras - quite frequently they’ve proven law enforcement officers handled things correctly where activists have tried to say otherwise.
This is true.
Yet law enforcement officers are some of the most resistant to the idea, and Trump and DHS are extremely resistant to the idea of utilizing them for ICE and CBP, and have even cut funding for it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-moved-cut-funding-ice...
When we know that the body cams are frequently used in a way that benefits the people wearing them, I find it quite telling when those people are railing against the idea and those in power actively work to block it.
When talking about government services, how do you have privacy? Does one not need to perform audits, etc?
This is why I personally prefer more devolved spending – at the federal level it is far too much centralized power.
That is not a good argument for privacy. I don't see how more privacy would have prevented any evil that has been doing.
Respect, thank you for using your voice.
I don’t agree. I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse.
Problem today is ICE has no accountability of misuse data/violence, not they have means to data/violence.
> I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse
I agree with this in theory, but its a fantasy to think they have this restriction at this point. ICE seems to be taking all comers, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile, giving them "47 days of training," and sending them off armed into the populace. I have seen no evidence they believe they have any restriction on anything. It's basically DOGE but with guns instead of keyboards.
I was referring to principle, not ICE in its current state.
since you can’t turn ICE around overnight, I don’t think Americans should authorize ICE more data and power NOW.
principle is sometimes indistinguishable from fantasy
There has been no point post Patriot Act where there has been accountability for data misuse. You need to update your priors.
I'd rather ICE (or whatever government agency) not see my data... because, even if there are processes that are enforced, there might not be tomorrow. If that data isn't collected in the first place, that threat vector disappears.
> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
It should be mentioned that "illegal" is a definitive word. There are definitely people not willing to follow the law, including political entities which are dependent on it. The moniker of privacy in this respect is a shield for illegality, because there is no reason that Medicaid data regarding SSNs should be shielded from the federal government.
To take this to its logical conclusion, Americans must concede that EU/UK systems of identity and social services are inherently immoral.
I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph, but there is no reason at all for any part of the US government that isn't CMMS to have any access to Medicaid data, writ large, at all. And even CMMS should only see de-identified data. It's absolutely absurd to think that law enforcement has any reason to see anything in any MC database.
Are you against income tax?
Are you against business registration?
All of these are subject to the similar issues with the stalker ex abusing a position of power?
> All of these are subject to the similar issues with the stalker ex abusing a position of power?
You seem to be asking a question. The answer is no.
The IRS does not need to know my sexual orientation or circumcision status. Medicaid, on the other hand, may. (Though I'd contest even that.)
Are you saying that, because there is one way in which people are vulnerable, that it doesn't matter if we add more ways they are vulnerable? Because that makes no sense whatsoever.
Post on http://icemap.app anonymously
> how badly things can go if the wrong people end up in positions of power
This is why there shouldn’t be any organization that has that much power.
Full stop.
What you described is the whole raison dêtre of Anarchism; irrespective of whether you think there’s an alternative or not*
“No gods No Masters” isn’t just a slogan it’s a demand
*my personal view is that there is no possible stable human organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#No_gods,_n...
Have you read Graeber & Wengrow?
Of course. All of Graeber is fantastic and I’m trying to get an audience with Wengrow
See if you can understand my paper:
https://kemendo.com/GTC.pdf
If you can, let me know
Unfortunately, this also means that everyone is taking a risk when they participate in the US census.
https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/j...
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-ameri...
The business is equally blamed. But ever aince Uber showed up and violated laws in all jurisdictions, we always focus on the cops and not the criminals.
The "they look like us" fallacy is so deep in this.
The data isn't the problem, the jack-booted thugs kicking in doors is.
Which is now literally happening and people are still acting like their privacy is going to somehow prevent it.
ICE and DHS already were bloated and somehow grew from not existing 25 years ago to a $100 billion budget. Then the big Trump spending bill added another $200 billion to their budget. And there’s no accountability for who gets that money - it’s all friends and donors and members of the Trump family.
They have money for this grift of epic scale but complain about some tiny alleged Somalian fraud to distract the gullible MAGA base. And of course there is somehow not enough money for things people actually need like healthcare.
That's in their playbook to cherry pick the most extreme cases and pretend it's the majority of cases.
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More immigration has drastically improved this country. I don't understand your position at all. ICE is far worse for our culture than then people providing me an actual livable diet.
How do you feel about ICE shooting people dead in the streets?
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We've banned this account for repeatedly posting antisemitic tropes.
"I've got nothing to hide" is another way of saying "I don't have friends that trust me," which is another way of saying" I don't have friends."
Except in this case people are trying to hide their location because they are in the country illegally. Saying you should care about privacy because the law may be enforced against you is just proving people who say that right.
But there are people trying to hide their locations even though they are here legally; because ICE has made it very clear they don't care if you're here legally or not. They arrest and deport US citizens. They arrest and deport people that show up to court to become US citizens.
It's clear the government cannot be trusted to use information in a reasonable way; so we should not allow them to get that information.
>They arrest and deport US citizens
This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.
>They arrest and deport people that show up to court to become US citizens.
If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.
'systematically' doing a lot of work here/ It happens, you know it happens, the fact that it's not supposed to happen doesn't validate that.
>just have to say, why?
Those who disrespect my countries law do not deserve to benefit from my great country.
>Immigrants are net contributors in the US
This would not change my opinion one way or the other.
>are attempting to follow the rules
Well they clearly aren't trying hard enough if they are in the country without a proper visa.
The only examples given are kids leaving with a parent. That is not something the average citizen has to worry about.
I'm very sorry but even criminals have access to our constitutional rights.
"Hey I know that guy is a criminal" does not give people the right to search their property without a warrant. Too bad if that makes law enforcement more difficult.
Rank dishonesty. I'm hiding my location because I don't want you to have it when it's inevitably hacked. Friends are hiding it because they have Antifa-friendly posts on their social media. Etc.
"Everyone who does a thing I don't like is a criminal" is obviously and intentionally fallacious bullshit.