There seems to be wild speculation about freedom of speech rights or hacking Signal.
The FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff.
This is one of the reasons it's crucial that the next set of secure messaging systems does away with tying real phone numbers to accounts.
One phone gets compromised and the whole network is identified with their phone numbers.
I haven't tried it, but Signal supports not sharing your phone number/just communicating with usernames: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
> You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
Which defeats the whole point. What if the FBI politely asks Signal about a phone number?
All they'd learn that way is that that phone number has a Signal account, when it was registered, and when it was last active. In other words, it doesn't tell them whether it's part of a given Signal group. (See https://signal.org/bigbrother/.)
They publicly publish these requests. You can see how little information is provided — just a phone number and two unix timestamps IIRC. https://signal.org/bigbrother/
I might be misremembering or mixing memories but i remember something about them only storing the hash of the number.
So the FBI cant ask what phone number is tied to an account, but if a specific phone number was tied to the specific account? (As in, Signal gets the number, runs it through their hash algorythm and compares that hash to the saved one)
But my memory is very very bad, so like i said, i might be wrong
Brief research says that Signal does store phone numbers.
Regarding hashing: while unsalted phone number hashes would be easy to reverse then I doubt that any hashing scheme today is set up like that.
If the Signal Messaging LLC is compromised, then "updates", e.g., spyware, can be remotely installed on every Signal user's computer, assuming every Signal user allows "automatic updates". I don't think Signal has a setting to turn off updates
Not only does one have to worry about other Signal users being compromised, one also has to worry about a third party being compromised: the Signal Messaaging LLC
Signal Messaging LLC is US-based and needs to follow CALEA[1] by law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
But does it? In what way?
They aren't allowed to tell you by law, and courts work with prosecution to keep implementation details away from the public, and investigators will engage in parallel construction to obfuscate the sources of evidence. That's just on the normal law enforcement side.
Once you get into the national security side, the secrecy is even higher.
"Carrying this speculation a step further, it is possible that the available tools have been compromised either in individual instances or en masse. Even where security products are open-source, adequate security evaluations are difficult to conduct initially and difficult to maintain as the products evolve. Typical users upgrade their software when upgrades or packages are offered, without even thinking of the possibility that they may have been targeted for a Trojan horse."
Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2007), 372
Italics are mine
Using any mobile phone connected to mobile network is breach of OPSEC, period. Even more in countries, where you cannot get anonymous SIM card.
Not using phone numbers in chat app doesn't protect you against someone locating you.
When phone is turned on, even without SIM, your location is saved, in inches. Thanks to 5G.
And some phone turns itself on automatically, lol.
Using laptop (without any wifi card) -> Wifi card (rotating fake MAC) -> wifi network/LTE modem with IMEI spoofing
Agreed, but people are going to people and will use phones, anyway. Might as well not include identifying information during registration.
Signal is a desktop app, as well. Even if you wanted to run it on Qubes in a Faraday cage, you'll need a phone number to register to use the app.
In the ideal situation, no one would be using Signal, phones or computers, the design of the internet is inherently identifying and non-anonymizing.
Hiding your phone number is a setting now. Has been for well over a year.
You can't sign up without one, and it being an option means people who are in danger won't do it.
Also, if someone's phone is confiscated, and you're in their Signal chats and their address book, it doesn't matter if you're hiding your number on Signal.
It's better to just not require such identifying information at all.
That's true for any system where you have contacts linked. Same thing happens when you have names and avatars.
If you don't want to link your contacts... don't link your contacts...
But this doesn't have the result that the GP claimed. The whole network doesn't unravel because in big groups like these one number doesn't have all the other contacts in their system.
For people that need it:
| Settings
|- Chat
| |- Share Contacts with iOS/Android <--- (Turn off)
|- Privacy
| |- Phone Number
| | |- Who Can See My Number
| | | |- Everybody
| | | |- Nobody <----
| | |- Who Can Find Me By Number
| | | |- Everybody
| | | |- Nobody <----
| |- App Security
| | |- Hide Screen in App Switcher <---- Turn on
| | |- Screen Lock <---- Turn on
| |- Advanced
| | |- Always Relay Calls <-----
Some of these settings are already set btw
Signal's messages are encrypted at rest though? Because Android and iOS are both full disk encrypted.
I do agree with that when you can't hide from the company, you can't hide from the US government either.
Regarding attacks, even if your current app is e2ee then this could be subverted by simply updating it to a newer version that isn't. Yet another is that when somebody gets full control over your phone, then no system will protect you as the device is functioning as intended (showing you the messages), it just doesn't know that it's no longer the owner of the phone reading them.
Can you easily sign up without a phone number though?
Gee, like any of competing systems like Session.
Session is a low-privacy fork of Signal.
source:
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
hn discussion:
What better alternatives do we have? Not tying my account to a phone number, but rather saving thirteen words, is exactly the UX I've always desired. I don't even need privacy, but I hate losing things when I inevitably lose my phone number.
Ricochet (chat via Tor .onion circuits): https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/
Tox (if you're addicted to phones): https://tox.chat/
>What better alternatives do we have?
Set up your own XMPP or Matrix server and only expose it via Tor.
Physical keys are the real path. Sign every message with your Yubikey.
Same with internet trolls: make it possible to authenticate privately to social media platforms and the bots would disappear!
Bots can authenticate just as well as human users. Both bots and trolls are completely different set of issues that cannot easily be solved, regardless of your approach.
You will need to implement some very invasive issuing mechanism to ensure that only those with a pulse can procure new keys. Even then, keys will still be bought or stolen - as was the case with pre-Elon Twitter checkmarks.
Zangi does this. No idea on their overall security posture compared to Signal, however.
If only we knew this would happen when these products were launched...
Oh wait, we did.
> it's crucial that the next set of secure messaging systems does away with tying real phone numbers to accounts.
Keep in mind that with secure messaging, if the other side gets compromised, your chats with them are compromised. This seems obvious, but with signal groups of a large size, they're effectively public groups. Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
Don't use Signal for organizing anything of this sort, I promise you'll regret it. I've heard people having better luck with Briar, but there might be others too. I only know that Signal and Whatsapp are what you want to avoid. Unless your concern is strictly cryptographic attacks of your chat's network-traffic and nothing more.
> Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.
For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.
It doesn't mean much if it isn't the default, even then people who got it prior to that use phone numbers, you can protect yourself maybe, but not other people in the group. But it's good they're doing this now.
No cryptography will protect a group that allows a traitor to join. The fundamental problem is vetting, and you really just can't do that remotely.
Not traitor, but compromised user. Given enough targets, one of them will have their device compromised. Of course the FBI has access to things more powerful than pegasus I'm sure (Just guessing).
It can protect the identity of the members, though.
Apparently, one member of the group uploaded a personal photo as an avatar.
I've also heard of side-channel attacks on Signal that could allow for profiling a user's location, which with the FBI's resources could presumably eventually result in identification.
Bitmessage is/was awesome, but it fundamentally doesn't scale.
Every user has to attempt decryption of every message sent by any sender. Later they cobbled on some kind of hokey sharding mechanism to try to work around this, but it was theoretically unmotivated and an implementation minefield (very easy for implementation mistakes in the sharding mechanism to leak communication patterns to an observer).
Bitmessage would be great if we had something like Schnorr signatures (sum of (messages signed with different keys) = (sum of messages) signed with (sum of keys)) that could tell you if any of the sum of a bunch of messages was encrypted to your secret key. Then you could bisection-search the mempool.
Maybe they should investigate why the idiots in ICE tried to get into the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis and then threatened staff when they were denied access.
source:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2026/jan/28/footag...
What I can tell is ICE starts to open a door, and a clerk immediately stops them and ICE shut the door a second later. The clerk opens the door to further tell them they are not allowed to enter. The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building. ICE then leaves.
I'm not ok with what ICE has been doing. But, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call this threatening staff, to me. Saying what will happen if the other party escalates feels like a different axis than threatening. Def taken as another data point in a sea of overreach however.
> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.
I'm not sure what the agent has to do to qualify as a threat to you, but at the very least this is thuggish behavior. The embassy is Ecuadorean sovereign territory where the staff have immunity from US laws, threatening to yank someone out of there is like extracting someone from Ecuador by force. It's highly offensive.
If you tried that at a US embassy you'd probably be shot, but it's generally impossible because they are all heavily secured and fortified.
I don't think that it's reasonable to see this behavior as anything but threatening given the location and the ample context provided by ICE's behavior up to this point.
> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.
Does that not amount to a threat?
It sounds as though most of these agents are poorly trained at best. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-unloads
> “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me.
> The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”
> Does that not amount to a threat?
"If you touch me, I'll break your jaw" has been ruled by courts to not be a threat.
If it were said by a masked agent who is part of a group of rampaging thugs murdering bystanders in the street, I would see it as a threat.
Reading the comments on this is the first time I've hoped that most HN comments are made by bots.
I think it's important to assess the quality of the comments - they aren't bringing facts, just stating opinions; doing so quickly and agreeing with each other. You can test this out - pick a few names on the comments that disagree, ctrl+f, and you'll quickly find one individual with 29 comments at the time of writing all over the thread; with a handful of others with 1-4 responses.
This is not actually what the majority of people think and feel.
IE; from recent polling > 55%+ of Americans have “very little” confidence in ICE, while 16 percent only have "some".
That's ~71% of ordinary US folks; and I would wager many international folks are very clear eyed about the situation.
But why don't you see a ratio of 7/10 of top level comments critical? It's reasonable to assume that about half of those people are just keeping to themselves or part of the political middle that feel something is a "bit wrong"; but not quite enough to go yell into the internet about it. For the others, arguing is tiring and doesn't seem to change much. Watching the situation induces feelings of dread, despair or helplessness.
On the opposing side, that 29% of people are faced with the fact that they might actually be the "baddies" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY), and a good number of them are flooding conversations to prove they are in fact "not"... because admitting otherwise would mean they are actually doing something quite morally or ethically wrong by their own or their community standards. Since that would be unthinkable! the only logical reaction is to post frequently in shrill defense.
If you keep that in mind - the relative psychology of each group - it's much easier not to despair if "everyone" seems to be saying the opposite of what you would expect.
In my comments, I add opinions after the facts. Nor have I been donwvoted to oblivion. IMO, the people who I reply to aren't really acquainted with the facts.
I on the other hand happen to be a "bootlicker", while their opinion seems to be that it's ok to interfere with police work, and that the person that got shot did nothing wrong..
One model for this type of behaviour/response in reaction to feelings of shame is known as the "Compass of Shame" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233600755_Investiga...)
Here's a 3 minute explainer from the researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ1fSW7zevE
This model defines a few different categories of how people respond - "Withdrawal","Attack-Self" and "Avoidance", "Attack-Other".
If you were to look at your comments through the threads here, would you be able to classify your responses as matching any of the categories above?
As a hint, you may be surprised to learn the person with multiple comments in question I was referring to isn't you. Yet you've sought this out and decided the most suitable response to why are two groups posting responses at different rates is to attempt to relitigate an imagined argument.
I don't live in the US and do agree that Trump is hectic at times. I don't really argue for ICE because of some emotional reason.
Trump had deportions of illegals on his agenda, they were creating trouble at certain locations (perhaps a tiny minority on US map), people voted Trump, he is keeping his promises. The protesters probably don't even know who is being currently captured..
They are protesting against the democratic outcome. But don't understand that when you're the minority, you can't have both the (1) "what you want", and (2) democracy.
ICE isn't doing police work (police are somewhat accountable to their local populace for keeping people safe), they're ostensibly (selectively) enforcing federal immigration regulation.
But please for the love of god explain how "not following orders" is grounds for immediate extrajudicial execution? because your
"their opinion seems to be ... that the person that got shot did nothing wrong"
Lethal force wielded by unmasked, uniformed, badge-wearing, and bodycam'd police officers is already fraught with enough issues as it is... And at least they occasionally face investigation and punitive measures when they fuck up on the (admittedly very difficult) job and harm civilians unlawfully.
A woman not getting out of the car when being ordered to by unknown masked men bearing weapons is reasonable.
Shooting an unarmed civilian who poses no threat to you is not reasonable. It only serves to undermine the entire apparatus of civil governance as well as the bill of rights that the US government was founded upon. It's shameful and disgusting.
And yes, you're accurately labled a bootlicker if you make excuses to the contrary about how it's _ackshually ok_ to shoot and kill people who don't listen to you because boohoo they made your job harder.
If instead you decide you don't actually want to make such an indefensible stand, and instead motte and bailey your way around the issue by trying to talk about obstruction of enforcement of laws, and fall all the way back to "well ICE is allowed to invade places to get the dirty immigrants, so really all the law-abiding citizens would be fine if they just got out of the way", then you're a coward who wont accept the consequences of their own line of argumentation.
Murdering people (Renee Good) who pose no threat to you is wrong. Full stop. Whether that person did something worthy of a misdemeanor, or arrest, or some other LAWFUL CONSEQUENCE is a different matter entirely.
ICE's continued and flagrant misconduct is a breakdown of the Rule of Law, which literally only works if the populace maintains enough trust in those entrusted to enforce and uphold the law. Destroying that (precious little remaining) trust in a politically motivated boondoggle to "own the libs" is a colossal fuckup.
Protesting ICE while they work is constitutionally protected free speech.
You are saying that people should give up their most important rights simply to avoid inconveniencing the government. It is the grossest form of bootlicking I've ever seen.
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Bots are more intelligent than MAGAs.
With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced, it won't take more than a few minutes for FBI to start taking actions, IF they had anything tangible.
This is just an intimidation tactic to stop people talking (chatting)
I'm never sure why people assume that Palantir is magically unlike the overwhelming majority of tech startups/companies I've worked at: vastly over promising what is possible to create hype and value while offering things engineering knows will never really quite work like they're advertised.
To your point, but on a larger scale, over hyping Palantir has the added benefit of providing a chilling effect on public resistance.
As a former government employee I had the same reaction to the Snowden leaks: sure the government might be collecting all of this (which I don't support), but I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
Incompetence might be the greatest safety we have against a true dystopia.
Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.
It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible.
Until we learned that they were.
Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.
Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.
I question the wisdom of that path though. Like yes the government can probably read a lot of your stuff easily, and all of it if they really want to. But why does that mean you have to live like a medieval hermit in a hut in the mountains?
I have opinions but at the end of the day I'd rather live within the system with everything it has to offer me, even knowing how fake a lot of it is. Living in remote huts is just not that interesting
Sounds like a guy who doesn’t enjoy the internet or cellphones. Shit, my grandparents never owned a computer, paid for internet, had cable tv, etc.
Are they suspicious of the government? No, just poor and uninterested.
The sentiment you're speaking of was definitely there, my response is more about how people felt about the government and, say, cybercrime.
At least from what I recall, law enforcement were portrayed as bumbling idiots when it came to computers and anything internet-related.
Same thing with legislators and regulators, with the "series of tubes" meme capturing the sentiment pretty well.
When it came to spying, yeah you were (and still are to an extent) considered to be insane if you think the government was spying on you or anyone you know, let alone everyone.
The very same day Mark Zuckerberg's "The Facebook" launched. A total coincidence, with zero evidence that the two are related in any way whatsoever ;)
> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.
pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.
the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.
Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.
Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else.
I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".
Because saying "experts said things were impossible and then Snowden" could mean literally anything. Which experts, what things?
Like I said: I've read a ton of stuff, and apparently what people are sure they read is very different to what I read.
that takes effort :)
You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response is what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY.
If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!
Incompetence could also be incredibly dangerous given enough destructive willpower.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-...
They're not trying to use the data to act efficiently (or in the public good for that matter), and they sure as fuck don't want you to see it. They're trying to make sure that they have dirt on anyone who becomes their enemy in the future.
I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous.
As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw
[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
>I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.
> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.
The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!
There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.
It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
Secrecy enables several things, including:
- abuse
- incompetence
- getting away with breaking rules and laws
Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons.
For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere!
Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit.
In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially).
Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).
In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.
Any statistics that didn't endanger the intel would also be unverifiable and easily falsified, and therefore not particularly trustworthy for the proposed purpose.
I see palntir as a techno whitewashing Mckinsey consultant. But the tech is there to make a much bigger problem than prior art, halucinations et al.
They are still dangerous even if theyre over promising because even placebos are dangerous when the displace real medical interventions.
doing Bad Things poorly is still doing Bad Things.
Because palantirs selling proposition is: you can’t find the answers in your own data, but we can.
You've never seen it because when it's efficient you won't see it.
If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected.
That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.
They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.
Fuzzy Dunlop (it's from The Wire). Their CI was a tennis ball (with an unauthorized camera inside).
I honestly tempt fate for fun to see how good police surveillance tech is the last few years.
I let one of my cars expire the registration a few months Everytime, because I'm lazy and because I want to see if I get flagged by a popup system Everytime a police officer passes near me. My commute car is out of registration 3 months right now. And old cop friend told me they basically never tow unless it's 6 months. I pay the $50 late fee once a year and keep doing my experiment for the last 6-7 years. Still no real signs they care.
My fun car has out of state plates for 10 years now. Ive been pulled over once for speeding, and told the officer I just bought it. I've never registered it since I bought it from a friend a decade ago. They let me go. It makes me wonder if one day they'll say "sir, we have plate scanners of this vehicle driving around this state for a year straight.. pay a fine." Not yet.
Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when.
In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest.
Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.
> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin.
A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.
One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough".
IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8
- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.
- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm
- push to human operators
You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!
But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?
When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.
To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Debt calculations were flat out wrong
The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover)
It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions.
It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it.
No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this
Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions.
If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.
No, incompetence is terrifying. No one wants to get caught in a machine driven by imbeciles who don't care about truth or honoring the Constitution.
Competence is also terrifying, but for different reasons.
It sure would be convenient if they were always ineffective. Sadly there have been periods in history where governments have set themselves to brutality with incredible effectiveness.
Except you don't need to solve any remotely hard technical problems for the capabilities to be terrifying here.
[dead]
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The algorithm was sorting punch cards and then putting the cards in different stacks on a table.
We can only hope that the surveillance state is still working with the same algorithm…
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Hitlers security group that transformed a small section of the SS into brutal killing machines happened rather fast and that is what people are talking about when they are digging up the Totenkopf wearing brown shirts. These never existed in the United States of America and never will. Not even the modern day skin-head neo-nazi's or the neo-nazi militias could be compared. They would have been extinguished by the SS nearly instantly for daring to wear the insignia.
Yeah if deportation is now Nazism, then the Allies after WW2 were Nazis too for the millions of mass displaced persons to match new borders.
lol. came here to say pretty much the same thing.
I've generally held this position, but assume a sufficient combination of models could do a lot more than was possible before.
It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
Maybe now is exactly the right time to publicly call out the apparent uselessness of Palantir before they fully deploy their high altitude loitering blimps and drones for pervasive surveillance and tracking protestors to their homes.
(My greater theory is that the slide into authoritarianism is not linear, but rather has a hump in the middle where government speech and actions are necessarily opposite, and that they expect the contradiction to slide. Calling out the contradiction is one of the most important things to do for people to see what is going on.)
I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.
Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".
>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.
Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.
But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.
They are two points and they are both true.
> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
Generally speaking, that is a tactic of oppression, creating a general sense of fear for everyone. Anyone can be arrested or shot.
Yes obviously, but as my central point was, it is the complete opposite of their narrative of targeted operations backed by data.
ICE/DHS are not NSA, they probably don't share efficiently. All the intelligence services are rivals and duplicate capabilities to some degree.
> And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
If the end goal is that the broad, general public are intimidated, then they're not necessarily "finding the wrong people." With the current "semi random" enforcement with many false positives, nobody feels safe, regardless of their legal status. This looks to be the goal: Intimidate everyone.
If they had a 100% true positive rate and a 0% false positive rate, the general population would not feel terrorized.
That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.
What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.
Maybe the wrong people are, in reality, precisely the people they intended to target.
> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people
There is a difference between what you are seeing and what is actually happening.
99.9% of the time they are finding the right people, but "illegal alien was deported" is as interesting a news story as "water is wet".
They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.
They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.
The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.
The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/
I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)
The evidence goes strongly against your claims.
[Citation needed.]
How does Palantir defeat Signal's crypto? I suppose it could be done by pwning everybody's phones, but Palantir mostly does surveillance AFAIK, I haven't heard of them getting into the phone hacking business. I think Israeli corps have that market covered.
My guess is that Signal has been compromised by the state for a very long time. The dead canary is their steadfast refusal to update their privacy policy which opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." even though they started keeping user's name, phone number, photo, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud years ago. Even more recently they started keeping message content itself in the cloud in some cases and have still refused to update their policy.
All the data signal keeps in the cloud is protected by a pin and SGX. Pins are easy to brute force or collect, SGX could be backdoored, but in any case it's leaky and there have already been published attacks on it (and on signal). see https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice.... and https://community.signalusers.org/t/sgx-cacheout-sgaxe-attac...
It doesn't, they're infiltrating the groups and/or gaining access to peoples' phones in other ways.
Which is not much different than how the January 6th people were caught.
As ever xkcd holds true - https://xkcd.com/538/
I can easily think of reasons why an intelligence agency might not want to act immediately against members of a group they're interested in, simply because they've managed to identify those members.
I'm sure that people who actually work in intelligence agencies could think of more reasons.
I admire your optimism. They already started killing civilians openly on the street in bright daylight.
I'm far too lazy to go to a big protest or do anything terribly interesting, but at this point I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid publicly criticizing this administration. Palantir is weird and creepy and has infinite resources to aggregate anything that the government wants, and they could be building a registry of people who they're going to deem as "terrorist-leaning" or some such nonsense.
It's not hard to find long posts of me calling the people in the Trump administration "profoundly stupid", with both my "tombert" alias and my real name [1]. I'm not that worried because if Palantir has any value they would also be able to tell that I'm deeply unambitious with these things, but it's still something that concerns me a bit.
[1] Not that hard to find but I do ask you do not post it here publicly.
> I'm far too lazy to go to a big protest
Then you are part of the problem. Get off your ass and do something, before it's too late. FFS!
How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse.
My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.
I don’t really disagree in principle, as I said I do try and donate to organizations that help with these things (e.g. ACLU, EFF).
I guess I am trying to say that there are multiple ways of fighting this, and without going into which is “better”, I think I am doing a little and I dispute being “part of the problem”. As I said, I vote in every election I am allowed to vote in, and I haven’t missed one in a bit more than a decade.
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While we’re getting rid of the first amendment maybe we should also get rid of the fourth and fifth amendment too since they make law enforcement harder? I’m sure cops in North Korea have a much easier and safer job.
So are you saying that the first amendment should protect government insiders leaking personal employee info to the public for the purposes of endangering those government employees, and to cause harm to their families? based on subjective opinions on whether the people think the actions of said employees are just or unjust?
That's wild if so. That's quite the precedent to set.
Note: I don't support ice or their actions. nor do i support vigilante justice.
Honestly answer: What are the intentions of people tracking these officers?
> for the purposes of endangering those government employees, and to cause harm to their families?
Isn't this also subjective and depends on the information leaked.
Not sure what you are talking about. License plate information that is plainly visible is not “personal employee info”.
Can't argue with their 110% conviction rate, North Korean tactics work.
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4th amendment???! Osama killed that decades ago… they may as well take it off the books… Once we were OK having our junks touched to go from here to there the 4A effectively ceased to exist.
You only have rights you exercise. Don't let the cops trample on your rights. Though... this does seem to work better for white, rich, older dudes than for other people.
I’m reminded of (I think) people in Shanghai complaining that their posts about covid lockdowns were censored, saying “we have free speech”. And if you believe in universal rights, they’re right. They do.
The question is whether the government will respect and protect those rights or not.
I love that THIS is the post that gets me down-voted.
Thanks.
Seems like citizens are the ones who need protection from law and immigration enforcement, considering the public executions we've all witnessed in the past week or so.
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Woof
If ICE agents were actually in danger or subject to "vigilante justice", the administration would be CROWING about it SO LOUDLY we'd never hear the end of it. They're spending their entire working days searching for evidence of it. They can't hardly wait!
That's not what is happening here.
s/searching for/manufacturing
Remember, they're accusing the people they killed of heinous motives for their narrative. They can't find it, so they make it up. Keep filming, y'all.
“Citizens of law enforcement”
What a phrase
you're aware that LEO are citizens right? with rights as well?
The comment was trying to replicate the same feelings as “people of color” but in regards to a lifestyle choice instead of an immutable characteristic, hence my flabbergasted statement at the audacity
If they completed their I-9
the fine nation of law enforcement, which has only colonised the united states for its own good and to bring civilisation to the heathen masses
... that is correct.
The whole premise of the second amendment is about citizens being armed in order to resist/overthrow a government
Of course, if you're taking up arms to resist/overthrow a government, then you should be entirely anticipating that the government will shoot back. Or shoot first.
If protest is approaching/crossing the line into insurgency, people need to seriously consider that they may be putting their life on the line. It's not a game.
> Just this week there were Catholic PRIESTS who were advised to draw up their last will and testament if they were going to resist ICE in Minneapolis
Episcopal (the US branch of the Anglican Communion), not Catholic, and it wasn't conditioned on going to Minneapolis, it was a statement about the broad situation of the country and the times we are in and what was necessary for them, with events in Minneapolis as a signifier, but not a geographically isolated, contained condition.
> How can you think it's a "game'?
Everything seems fueled by social media radicalisation, and the social media side of things is very much 'gameified', all about scoring likes/upvotes/followers (and earning real revenue) for pushing escalating outrage.
In which case it's no longer relevant because nobody is going to overthrow a government that has nukes, tanks, drones, and chemical weapons using a hunting rifle or a handgun. The idea was cute enough back when the firepower the government had to use against the people was limited to muskets and cannons, but currently the idea of guns being used to overthrow a government with a military like the US is a complete joke.
Today you'll still find a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters insisting against common sense regulations because they need their guns to stop government oppression and tyranny yet you can open youtube right now and find countless examples of government oppression and tyranny and to no surprise those guys aren't using their guns to do a damn thing about any of it. In fact they're usually the ones making excuses for the government and their abuses.
There are reasonable arguments for supporting 2nd amendment and gun ownership but resisting/overthrowing the government is not one of them. That's nothing more than a comforting power fantasy.
I think that it's fair to say that the military power Russia had in the 90s was very different from what the US has today. Even back then, as you say, the war still wasn't won with rifles and handguns. That isn't to say that what the Chechens accomplished wasn't impressive though.
Which is why Chechnya today is an independ... Oh wait.
The text of the second amendment, as written, would seem to indicate that the premise of the second amendment is to arm "a well-regulated militia" (which was relevant to the government that adopted the second amendment, as it had no standing army).
It was basically crowdsourcing the military. We've been running through all the various problems with that idea ever since, including:
- oops, turns out not enough people volunteer and our whole army got nearly wiped out; maybe we need to pay people to be an army for a living (ca. 1791)
- oops, turns out allowing the public to arm themselves and be their own militia can lead people being their own separate militia factions against the government, I guess we don't want that (e.g. Shay's Rebellion, John Brown and various slave rebellions fighting for freedom)
- oops, turns out part of the army can just decide they're a whole new country's army now, guess we don't want that (the civil war)
- oops, turns out actually everyone having guns means any given individual can just shoot whomever they like (like in hundreds of school shootings and mass shootings)
- oops, turns out we gotta give our police force even bigger guns and tanks and stuff so they won't be scared of random normal people on the street having guns (and look where that's gotten us)
Honestly, the whole thing should've been heavily amended to something more sane back in 1791 when the Legion of the United States (the first standing army) was formed, as they were already punting on the mistaken notion that "a well-regulated militia" was the answer instead of "a professional standing army".
No it isn't -- that's an ignorant myth. Madison was the last person in the world who would have endorsed overthrowing his new government ... the Constitution is quite explicit that that is treason and the penalty is death. The first use of the 2A was Washington putting down the Whiskeytown Rebellion.
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[citation needed]
This was posited as the nice sounding reason for the second amendment, when the more accurate reason was to ensure citizens had guns to drive out the indigenous peoples and steal their lands.
We rather quickly saw the federal government rolling over the people even with weapons in the Whiskey Rebellion.
In 46, Madison was discussing foreign danger in response to Hamilton in 29. but... thx for providing a citation. That's a much better response to downvoting.
Meh. Palintir is optimized to sell data to the government. Said governments usually don't care about the quality of data about any one individual. Wear sunglasses when you go out and stay off facebook and it's amazing how little palintir signal you send up. Bonus points if you created an LLC to pay your utility bills. But... Palintir is not as good as you seem to be implying.
Oh, you don't need to have Facebook account to have a very comprehensive and accurate profile: https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
cell phone cameras work both ways.
>With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced
Palantir is SAP with a hollywood marketing department. I talked to a Palantir guy five or six years ago and he said he was happy every time someone portrayed them as a bond villain in the news because the stock went up the next day.
So much of tech abuse is enabled by this, and it's somewhat more pronounced in America, juvenile attitude toward technology, tech companies and CEOs. These people are laughing on their way to the bank because they convinced both critics and evangelists that their SAAS products are some inevitable genius invention
You don't need sophisticated tech to cause damage, you just need access to data. Palantir is dangerous not because it has some amazing technology that no one else has, it's that they aggregate many data sources of what would be considered private data and expose it with malicious intent (c.f. any interview with the Palantir CEO). Reading my email doesn't require amazing programming, it just requires access.
Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.
Why would they be the ones cutting deals to gain access to data? The Party is cutting those deals and has been for ages. Deals like these:
> Spyware delivered by text > In August, the Trump administration revived a previously paused contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded company that makes spyware. A Paragon tool called Graphite was used in Europe earlier this year to target journalists and civil society members, according to The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto with expertise in spyware.
> Little is known about how ICE is using Paragon Solutions technology and legal groups recently sued DHS for records about it and tools made by the company Cellebrite. ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about its Paragon Solutions contract and whether it is for Graphite or another tool.
> Graphite can start monitoring a phone — including encrypted messages — just by sending a message to the number. The user doesn't have to click on a link or a message.
> "It has essentially complete access to your phone," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a legal and policy group focused on privacy. "It's an extremely dangerous surveillance tech that really goes against our Fourth Amendment protections."
Deals with Flock, and so on. It makes no sense for Palantir to be the one doing those deals rather than the Party. They've been doing so for a long time now. That's the whole point of data brokers, on this site alone there are hundreds of comments and posts about how the Party abuses those to get around laws on mass surveillance - can't legally (or are too incompetent to) gather data ourselves? Just buy it off a data broker. And Snowden showed us more than a decade ago that even without them they can just.. not care about the "legal" part.
It's not illegal to track law enforcement, but if any of their still visible chats show intent it will hurt them. They'll also want to find out how many people in the group chat are outside of the US, if any money was being exchanged, etc.
Hopefully they can unwind these groups, because it's just pitting people against law enforcement who have no idea what they're up against. They don't seem to have a sense for when they have gone beyond protesting and have broken the law. There's this culture about them, like protesting means they are immune to law.
If this all ties back to funded groups who are then misinforming these people about how they should behave to increase the chance of escalatory events with the knowledge that it will increase the chance of these inflammatory political highlights to maximize rage, it won't surprise me.
If they want to follow ICE around and protest them, fine, but that's not what they're doing. These people are standing or parking their cars in front of their vehicles and blocking them. They'll also stand in front of the street exits to prevents their vehicles from leaving parking lots and so on. They refuse to move, so they have to be removed by force, because they are breaking the law. Some people are just trying to get arrested to waste ICE's time, and it's particularly bad because Minneapolis police won't help ICE.
A lot of video recordings don't even start until AFTER they've already broken the law, so all you end up seeing is ICE reacting.
Any time someone dies, there'll have to be an investigation to sort out what happened. Maybe the ICE officer made a mistake, but let the evidence be presented. Being that this is Minneapolis, hopefully they do a better job than the George Floyd case. I absolutely recommend you watch the entire Fall of Minneapolis documentary to get a better sense for what the country may be increasingly up against in multiple states: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPi3EigjFA
> because it's just pitting people against law enforcement who have no idea what they're up against.
i think people know exactly what theyre up against: a lawless executive, many members of which have never had to work in places where they are held accountable to the constitution before.
its more important for the government to follow the constitution than for citizens to follow the law. if the government isnt following the law, there is no law
If you're talking about the Trump administration, they're surrounded by lawyers and constantly battling things up to supreme court decisions, which is not what lawless looks like. ICE is also enforcing existing laws that simply haven't been enforced in recent years. Whatever you think about those laws, they are the laws. Many people agree those laws need to be reformed, but elect people who are willing to change the laws. Unfortunately congress has trouble passing laws around some of these more controversial issues, so it'll probably stay this way for many more decades.
It's not just the what, it's the how.
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And you have it completely upside down. The federal government serves the people, the people do not serve the feds. If, while attempting to enforce federal law through ICE, the feds break the Bill of Rights, they are doing more harm than good. We can live with a few illegals. We cannot leave the house if we expect to be murdered in cold blood on the street by the federal government. The instigating event of the American Revolution was the Boston Massacre, where protesters were shot and killed by British soldiers. Sound familiar?
So 2nd amendment yeah? I have a license to concealed carry in PA. You are saying I should be murdered in cold blood on the street? Again, this is PRECISELY what the bill of rights and our constitution is all about. Have you read Common Sense? Please try to get through it. It explains many things but chief among them is that the government exists only to ensure the maximum freedom of the people from fear. "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid". That is what America is all about. If someone comes into my city to evict violent illegals, yes, I voted for that, and would again. If someone comes in to my city to a) Evict legal immigrants of color, b) Take children away from parents c) Murder good citizens in cold blood, e) Punish political enemies, or f) attack, beat, and tear gas nonviolent protesters? Well as an actual American who believes in and understands the US Constitution, I will be right there, next to those protesters, and looking to abolish and defund whatever godless and ethic-free agency is purporting to carry out the will of the People.
It feels very strange to read someone describe these events as ‘LARPing as martyrs’ when there have been multiple tragic deaths.
Boot leather can't taste this good.
An American VA Hospital ICU Nurse was disarmed and executed. Which crime is it OK to be chemically and physically assaulted before being disarmed and shot dead?
As far as I understand it, he laid hands on the officer, then struggled against arrest. He had a gun on him, which is not in itself a problem, but he had already broken the law 3 times by this point and the fact he had a gun on him instantly escalates the potential threat. They don't know if he has multiple guns on him or just the one. Supposedly one of the videos shows him reaching for some black object. I don't know.
He wasn't killed for owning a gun or carrying a gun.
He wasn't killed for laying hands on the officer.
He wasn't killed for resisting arrest.
It was likely the entire combination of things that caused him to demonstrate he was a credible threat to their lives and reaching for an object. No matter what you think, Alex made a whole string of mistakes. The officer may have also made mistakes. With any luck investigation will reveal more details.
I'm not predisposed to assuming that Alex is innocent and the officer is guilty, because there is a lot of activist pressure to push exactly that perspective. I prefer to preserve the capacity to make up my own mind.
I have seen the videos. He was already on the ground, fixated by several ICE agents, when he was shot 10(!) times. That was after he had been peppersprayed and beaten to the head. At no point did he actually draw or reach for his gun. There was absolutely no reason to shoot him.
> With any luck investigation will reveal more details.
Kristi Noem said: "This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement." She even went so far as calling this an act of "domestic terrorism". At this point, do you seriously believe there will be a neutral investigation?
> Being on the ground doesn't remove any potential that he could be dangerous.
When the shots were fired, he was restrained by several agents and did not pose any immediate threat.
> Not sure how many times he was shot
It was ten shots, fired by two agents. That is a lot of shots.
Yes, the shooting itself was very likely an accident by grossly incompetent agents. (You can hear an agent shout the word "gun", which probably triggered the other agents to immediately start firing.)
However, it was the ICE agents who started the very situation that led to this tragedy: One agent violently pushed a women from behind. Why? Alex tried to help her and he immediately got peppersprayed in the face. Why? Then he was wrestled to the ground. Why? Then he was beaten to the head. Why?
All these actions are already outrageous in themselves. It is worrying how police brutality has been normalized in the US.
It is pretty rich to blame Alex when it was really the ICE agents who started this whole mess!
In fact, the videos are so damning that even Stephen Miller had to backpedal and admit that these agents "may not have been following proper protocol".
> I don't know what Kristi Noem is on about, but she's a political appointee and not an investigator.
What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?
Please do not spread misinformation! There is no indication that Alex' weapon went off.
> As far as I understand it, he laid hands on the officer, then struggled against arrest.
That's not how I understand it.
> Supposedly one of the videos shows him reaching for some black object. I don't know.
It would be good if you'd watch this review.
That's almost certainly not the start. It's very common to not show what you did to agitate the officers and to only record after they come after you. If there are longer videos I haven't seen them, but its a very common tactic to cut out critical context to maximize emotional reaction on social media.
> it's not really relevant
It's relevant because you said you didn't know. The review provides information that helps you to know.
> These activists appear to have followed the federal law enforcement.
Nothing illegal about that at all.
> That highly suggests they knew exactly who they were. ... No reasonable court is likely to determine that they were unaware who they were dealing with.
That's not relevant.
What's your point? No reasonable court would find that the activists did anything wrong, while they certainly would find two federal employees ("officers") are culpable in the murder of one of those activists.
> The officers didn't show up unannounced to the front door of someone who happened to be an activist.
So?
This is just lunatic speech. The one place he didn't have a gun was in his hands. You're out here acting like if he'd had a gun strapped to his ankle it would have been proof beyond any doubt he was intending to shoot and kill ICE officers.
He was pepper sprayed and on the ground surrounded by 6 agents when he was killed. At the time when an agent said that he had a gun (this was after his gun was removed), he was physically pinned with his arms restrained. He wasn't 'reaching for an object'. He was carrying his phone in his hand before he was restrained and shot a dozen times.
Again: he was on the ground, with his eyes sprayed with mace, and he was, at least until seconds before he was shot, physically restrained. It doesn't matter if he could potentially have had another gun. They aren't Neo but there were six of them surrounding him, and the one who shot him only took eyes off to mace another protestor.
There are multiple videos from multiple angles and a multitude of witnesses.
The only investigation being done is by the DHS, who is blocking all other state level investigations. The same DHS who lied about easy disproven things that were recorded and destroy evidences.
What are you waiting or expecting from a investigation to make up your mind?
Good lord. There's no helping you if you cannot see with your eyes, my friend. I'd have to be blind to not see this poor man trying to defend a woman, then tackled, beaten, disarmed, shot dead in the back and head with 10 bullets.
He was killed for carrying a gun. How do I know that? Thats what they've been saying over and over again. Absolutely gross.
Civil disobedience exists and does not deserve a death sentence.
At least, while decrying civil disobedience, you differ from the administration in one important aspect: You think there should be accountability for police shootings. That's different than the ICE leader, the DHS leader, the FBI director and the Vice President.
From a sort of naive perspective it doesn't matter whether it's police or not. If you kill someone illegally, you should be held accountable for it. In many cases, whether it's illegal depends on how reasonable it was to do so. This is where it being law enforcement starts to matter even more.
Law enforcement face a lot of violent resistance, so it can be very reasonable for them to see an uncooperative person as a serious threat to their life. If they kill someone, because they believe them to be a lethal threat even if that was not the reality, their perspective absolutely matters to the outcome.
Civil disobedience is basically understood to be breaking the law in a civil manner. What I'm seeing in a lot of videos is not civil disobedience. One expected attribute of civil disobedience is non-evasion, but resisting arrest is essentially attempted evasion.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/
Again, I don't think anyone should have died, but to my eye I can tell the people who are unreasonable and lacking in critical thinking, because they have already prejudged and sentenced people as if they've already sat through the entire court case and had their own hands on the gavel as it went down.
Social media, videos, news, activists and more are incentivized to rile people up. Let it be investigated.
Yeah, the victim is investigated. Kill anyone evading arrest. Bring in the tanks.
Yeah, sure, they'll "investigate" it. For some definition of investigate.
I'm not sure if you've been paying attention at all lately, but saying "let's investigate" with the current administration is farcical at best.
who is "they"? some moral shadow government?
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This wasn't civil disobedience. It was stalking law enforcement and then aggressively interfering. Not a capital crime, but still a recipe fir suicide by cop.
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This is what collaboration looks like
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> Don't let your compassion be weaponized.
It's telling on yourself that you think compassion for other people, the core idea that other peoples needs might be more important that your own, is objectively a weapon. You're not wrong that there's a lot of disinformation about, but from a purely historical view, the one position that has never been right is fence-sitting.
You're not arguing in good faith, which is clear from your other replies, but I'm not saying vigilantes are the solution, just that compassion is not a weapon.
But also, just within your moral framework, I think it's really important to understand that the systems of justice have been compromised and we are, right now, seeing people treated as guilty until proven innocent. It's just not happening to you. It *is* happening to people like me.
Let me say that again: I'm not saying that vigilante justice is better, only that the legal system has become vigilante justice. People who share my moral values are being gunned down right now. And people like you are spreading excuses about how its shades of grey.
No, of course not. I don’t think it’s a crime to be punished.
I’m just saying I think you’re helping an authoritarian regime, and I think that’s bad.
I’m saying it because I think you should feel shame, not to suggest you should be punished beyond those basic social consequences.
> Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat.
Let me stop you right there. It's not a both sides issue, is it? It's one side forcing gridlock? A party of obstruction, even.
> People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on.
No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is the people thinking he's fit to be in any kind of leadership position.
The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution. And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base. People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.
"Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat. As a result, presidents have increasingly been leading by executive order rather than legislation. That is not Trump's fault, that is just the state of the country."
"People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on."
So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?
Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king?
Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?
"Talk about taking over Canada or Greenland is just rhetoric to get better deals and improve ally strength, because this is what Donald Trump has been doing since the 1980s. Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?
Just trying to understand.
"Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?
If it's just part of our national strategy, why'd the rational change so frequently and why does no one seem to have heard that before Trump decided to start focusing on it and amassing weapons off their coast?
"This doesn't mean you have to like a current president personally or morally, or even agree with everything they are doing, but at least you can gain more perspective around what is real and what is not."
Primo ending though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
When the government wants to oppress people, they surveil the activists trying to fight oppression.
Was true then, is true today with Project Esther.
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Nope, but executing law abiding citizens in the streets is
Neither of them were abiding by the law. Nor were either of them executed. Such hyperbole.
One person showed up with a gun, the other tried to flee (or run over) an officer.
Wold you as a police officer always behave perfectly in any urgent situation?
What laws did they break?
This kind of made up bullshit makes you look like a total lunatic.
Acting without due process is oppression.
they way they are going about it very much is. update your understanding.
Killing your own citizens is.
One person showed up with a gun, the other tried to flee (or run over) an officer.
These were accidents, not court proceedings where you have weeks or months to think things over.
My prediction is that if you investigate them, then in the case where the woman was trying to drive away, the officer likely has no fault at all, as the drive may have easily be interpreted as driving towards him. On the armed protestor occasion, there might be some fault as the gun seemed to have gone off unexpectedly. But it won't be punished too hard, if at all, as the victim was actively escalating the situation.
These weren't punishments ("death sentences" as someone else called them). These were accidents where the victims themselves were (mostly) at fault.
Neither of which is justified in being killed.
Unless you live in China or North Korea perhaps, maybe then the officers are allowed to blast you to pieces for any of these situations.
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A wise man told me, you know signal works because its banned in Russia. I also find it incredibly ironic that they have a problem with this, when the DoD is flagrantly using signal for classified communications.
I have full confidence in Signal and their encryption but this argument doesn't make sense to me. It could be the opposite, that Russia knows it's compromised by the US government and don't want people using it. I don't believe that's the case but the point is you can't put too much weight on it.
Wouldn't the Russian government just say that then?
They aren't taking issue with Signal, per se... they are upset that people are sharing the whereabouts and movements of ICE officers. Signal just seems to be the medium-of-choice. And this just happens to give them a chance to declare Signal as "bad", since they can't spy on Signal en masse.
My personal connections who are in the military use it for texting from undisclosed locations.
I've heard from people who have worked with the Signal foundation that it was close to being endorsed for private communication by one branch of government, but that endorsement was rescinded because another branch didn't want people knowing how to stay private.
> I've heard from people who have worked with the Signal foundation that it was close to being endorsed for private communication by one branch of government, but that endorsement was rescinded because another branch didn't want people knowing how to stay private.
The US government recommended Signal to for personal communication. See this article, in the section "Signal in the Biden administration and beyond":
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/27/biden-authorized-sign...
And here is the government publication:
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
It doesn't mean much. Roblox is banned in Russia.
They've been just gradually banning everything not made in Russia.
You know it works because they banned it in Russia? Works for whom?
Yes, at best it implies Russia cannot easily get confidential information from them. Everyone else, the jury is still out for.
There aren't a lot of things I would claim Russia is a leader in, but state sponsored hacking and spying on its own people would both definitely make the list. That's not to say no one has cracked it, but if the Russians couldn't do it there aren't many who could.
Sure, but using Signal for classified info is a violation of policy.
The DOD is not using "flagrantly using Signal." The Secretary of Defense, whatever his preferred pronouns are, is breaking the law.
CISA recommended Signal for encrypted end-to-end communications for "highly targeted individuals."
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.
The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.
Recommendations to the private sector don't condone violating security and retention laws for people working in the public sector.
Military personnel are currently only allowed to use Signal for mobile communications within their unit. Classified information is a different story, though.
I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:
> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
What do you disagree with?
> Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface.
That's true. A VPN service replaces the ISP as the Internet gateway with the VPN's systems. By adding a component, you increase the attack surface.
> Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies.
Certainly true.
> if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
Also true: That's not a VPN service; you are (probably) connecting to your organization's systems.
There may be better VPN services - Mullvad has a good reputation around here - but we really don't know. Successful VPN services would be a magnet for state-level and other attackers, which is what the document may be concerned with.
Come on, man. We're talking about classified information, not general OPSEC advice. I worked in a SCIF. Literally every piece of equipment, down to each ethernet cable, has a sticker with its authorized classification level. This system exists for a reason, like making it impossible to accidently leak information to an uncleared contact in your personal phone. What Hegseth did (and is doing?) is illegal. It doesn't even matter what app is used.
I have seen anti-Signal FUD all over the place since it was discovered that protesters have been coordinating on Signal.
Here’s the facts:
- Protesters have been coordinating using Signal
- Breaches of private Signal groups by journalists and counter protesters were due to poor opsec and vetting
- If the feds have an eye into those groups, it’s likely that they gained access in the same way as well as through informants (which are common)
- Signal is still known to be secure
- In terms of potential compromise, it’s much more likely for feds to use spyware like Pegasus to compromise the endpoint than for them to be able to break Signal. If NSA has a Signal vulnerability they will probably use it very sparingly and on high profile foreign targets.
- The fact that even casual third parties can break into these groups because of opsec issues shows that encryption is not a panacea. People will always make mistakes, so the fact that secure platforms exist is not a threat in itself, and legal backdoors are not needed.
The downside of opsec is that it breeds paranoia and fear about legal, civic participation. In a way, bullshit investigations like this are an intimidation tactic. What are they going to find - a bunch of Minnesotans that were mad about state-backed killings?
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The only reason you think this is because all of your opinions are predetermined by MAGA elites.
Also the current US government think it’s secure enough for their war planning!
They actually used a hackish third party client (interesting since Signal forbids those) which stores message logs centrally, assuming it’s for required USG record keeping. Turns out that it’s possible to invite unwanted guests into your chat whether you’re a protestor or a government official. (It also appears that government contractors still write shitty software.)
> If NSA has a Signal vulnerability they will probably use it very sparingly and on high profile foreign targets.
Sort of. They wouldn't use such a client vulnerability but a protocol vulnerability is essential for the data-collection-at-scale the NSA is now infamous for.
Thanks. This really should be the top comment.
Feds and ICE are using Palantir ELITE.
That’s only for targeting. From what I understand ELITE does not include device compromise or eavesdropping. If feds want to compromise a device that has Signal, they would use something like Pegasus that uses exploits to deliver a spyware package, likely through SMS, Whatsapp, or spear phishing URL. (I don’t actually know which software is currently in use but it would be similar to Pegasus.)
As mentioned by someone else, they just need to take the phone of a demonstrator to access their signal groups.
https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/new-leaks-on-police-phone...
True, physical interception is probably the easiest method, at least for short term access. Once the captured user is identified and removed from the group they will lose access though.
Tracking the murderers who executed citizens in the street and then fled the scene of the crime and any sort of trial or investigation? That ICE and Immigration and Border Patrol? I wonder why. And since when is tracking public officials operating in public in the capacity of their government jobs illegal?
These federal goons need to be tracked and observed to record their crimes. That much is indisputable.
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Are you holding up some random unverified substack, featuring an obvious AI-generated photo, as a reliable source of information?
> You should probably read the original source before taking the opinion of your favorite pundit.
This is not an "original source" of the article in question.
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Great add
And you need to watch the videos but I imagine the cognitive dissonance is too uncomfortable.
When Trump saw the video of Renee Good's execution, he faltered. He hadn't seen that before.
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No, the ones on broadcast television news where they go scene by scene breaking down any claims of Alex being at fault being bogus lies that you are now repeating.
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I don't know signal very well but when I have spoken to others about it they mention that the phone number is the only metadata they will have access to.
This seems like a good example of that being enough metadata to be a big problem.
The steps to trouble:
- identify who owns the number
- compel that person to give unlocked phone
- government can read messages of _all_ people in group chat not just that person
Corollary:
Disappearing messages severely limits what can be read
Unless they compel people at gunpoint (which prevents the government from bringing a case), they will probably not have much luck with this. As soon as a user sets up a passcode or other lock on their phone, it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.
It's much more likely that the government convinces one member of the group chat to turn on the other members and give up their phone numbers.
> which prevents the government from bringing a case
Genuinely, from outside, it seems like your government doesn't give a damn on what they are and aren't allowed to do.
They are capable of putting you in prison until you unlock your phone, or simply executing you.
Yes and all of the credulous rubes still whinging about how they "can't imagine" how it's gotten this bad or how much worse it can get, or how "this is not who we are" at some point should no longer be taken as suckers in good faith, and at some point must rightly be viewed as either willfully complicit bad faith interlocuters, or useful idiots.
The courts may (still) be independent, but it feels like they are pointless because the government just wholesale ignores them anyway. If the executive branch doesn't enforce, or selectively enforces court judgements, you may as well shutter the courts.
Evidence goes before a judge
What evidence went before a judge prior to the two latest executions in Minneapolis?
If civil rights are unconstitutional, you don't have a country.
The civil rights acts had firm constitutional grounding in the 14th and 15th amendments.
All they have to do is pretend to be a concerned neighbor who wants to help give mutual aid and hope that someone in the group chat takes the bait and adds them in. No further convincing is needed.
social engineering for the win.
They'll just threaten to throw the book at you if you don't unlock your phone, and if you aren't rich, your lawyer will tell you to take the plea deal they offer because it beats sitting in prison until you die.
If you aren't saving people's phone numbers in your own contacts, signal isn't storing them in group chats (and even if you are, it doesn't say which number, just that you have a contact with them).
Signal doesn't share numbers by default and hasn't for a few years now. And you can toggle a setting to remove your number from contact discovery/lookup entirely if you are so inclined.
Which is just a redux of what I find myself saying constantly: privacy usually isn't even the problem. The problem is the people kicking in your door.
If you're willing to kick in doors to suppress legal rights, then having accurate information isn't necessary at all.
If your resistance plan is to chat about stuff privately, then by definition you're also not doing much resisting to you know, the door kicking.
> it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.
I'm sure the Israeli spyware companies can help with that.
Although then they'd have to start burning their zero days to just go after protestors, which I doubt they're willing to do. I imagine they like to save those for bigger targets.
Cellebrite still requires the device to be confiscated. So if they are trying for mass surveillance, they'll have to rely on phishing or zero day exploits to get their spyware on the device to intercept messages. These tend to get patched shortly after being seen in the wild (like the recent WhatsApp one), so they need to decide if its worth it to burn that zero day or not.
There are multiple companies that can get different amounts of information off of locked phones including iPhones, and they work with LE.
I’m also curious what they could get off of cloud backups. Thinking in terms of auth, keys, etc. For SMS it’s almost as good as phone access, but I am not sure for apps.
or convince one member of a group chat to show their group chat...
I'm confident the people executing non-complaint people in the street would be capable of compelling a citizen.
Or just let the guy to enter the country after unlocking her phone.
hunh. we haven't even started talking about stingray, tracking radios and so forth.
Someone knows who they are and they can bash different skulls until one of them gives them what they're looking for.
I mean they have a lot of tools to figure out who you are if they catch you at a rally or something like that. Cameras and facial identification, cell phone location tracking and more. What they also want is the list of people you're coordinating with that aren't there.
It's even easier than that. They're simply asking on neighborhood Facebook (and other services too, I assume) groups to be added to mutual aid Signal groups and hoping that somebody will add them without bothering to vet them first.
I think disappearing messages only works if you activate it on your local device. And if the man compromises someone without everyone else knowing, they get all messages after that.
But yes... it does limit what can be read. My point is it's not perfect.
Is the message on storage zero'd out or just deleted?
compel that person to give unlocked phone
Celebrite or just JTAG over bluetooth or USB. It's always been a thing but legally they are not supposed to use it. Of course laws after the NSA debacle are always followed. Pinky promise.
Presumably this is data taken from interdicted phones of people in the groups, not, like, a traffic-analytic attack on Signal itself.
I wonder whether the protesters could opt for offshore alternatives that don't require exposing their phone number to a company that could be compelled to reveal it by US law. For example, there is Threema[1], a Swiss option priced at 5 euros one-time. It is interesting on Android as you can pay anonymously[2], therefore it doesn't depend on Google Play and its services (they offer Threema Push services of their own.) If your threat model includes traffic analysis, likely none of it would make much difference as far as US state-side sigint product line is concerned, but with Threema a determined party might as well get a chance! Arguably, the US protest organisers must be prepared for the situation to escalate, and adjust their security model accordingly: GrapheneOS, Mullvad subscription with DAITA countermeasures, Threema for Android, pay for everything with Monero?
It's worth noting that the way Signal's architecture is set up, Signal the organisation doesn't have access to users' phone numbers.
They technically have logs from when verification happens (as that goes through an SMS verification service) but that just documents that you have an account/when you registered. And it's unclear whether those records are available anymore since no warrants have been issued since they moved to the new username system.
And the actual profile and contact discovery infra is all designed to be actively hostile to snooping on identifiable information even with hardware access (requiring compromise of secure enclaves + multiple levels of obfuscation and cryptographic anti-extraction techniques on top).
Yeah it should be technically feasible to do "eventually" but it's non trivial. I linked a bunch of their blogs on how they harden contact discovery, etc. And of course you can turn contact discovery off entirely in the settings.
Settings > Privacy > Phone Number > Who can find me by number > Nobody
Note that Threema has had a recent change in ownership to a German investment firm. Supposedly nothing will change but I can’t help but be wary
The alarming extent of US-affiliated signals intelligence collection is well-documented, but in the case of Threema it's largely inconsequential; you can still purchase the license for it anonymously, optionally build from source, and actively resist traffic analysis when using it.
That is to say: it allows a determined party to largely remain anonymous even in the face of upstream provider's compromise.
It appears to be primarily getting agents into the chats. To me the questionable conduct is their NPSM-7-adjacent redefining of legal political categories and activities as "terrorists/-ism" for the purpose of legal harassment or worse. Whether that is technically legal or not it should be outrageous to the public.
I don't think it's much of a problem at all. Many of the protesters and observers are not hiding their identities, so finding their phone number isn't a problem. Even with content, coordinating legal activities isn't a problem either.
I would never agree with you. protestors behaving legally or practicing civil disobedience can still have their lives ruined by people in power.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-supreme-court-s...
The literal point of civil disobedience is accepting that you may end up in jail:
"Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."
-- Letter from the Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr: https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/201Stuff/F14/B%20SophistSocr...
It's not that the point of breaking a law is that you go to jail, it's that breaking the law without any intention of going to jail isn't a sacrifice. 'Martyrs' who don't give anything up, who act without punishment aren't celebrated, they're just right.
It makes it a problem that's inherently present for any act of civil disobedience, unless you truly believe that you can hide from the US government. I'm pretty sure that all of the technical workarounds in the world, all of the tradecraft, won't save you from the weakest link in your social network.
That's life, if you can't take that heat stay out of the kitchen. It's also why elections are a much safer and more reliable way to enact change in your country than "direct action" is except under the most dire of circumstances.
What? No, he didn't. The police went after peaceful civil rights protesters with clubs and dogs. They knew they could be badly hurt or killed and did it anyway.
>If you let the government stomp on your constitutional rights and willingly go to jail on unconstitutional grounds, then that's not respect for the law. That's respect for injustice.
My point is about civil disobedience, not disobedience generally. The point of civil disobedience is to bring attention to unjust laws by forcing people to deal with the fact they they are imprisoning people for doing something that doesn't actually deserve prison.
Expecting to not end up in prison for engaging in civil disobedience misses the point. It's like when people go on a "hunger strike" by not eating solid foods. The point is self-sacrifice to build something better for others.
https://www.kqed.org/arts/11557246/san-francisco-hunger-stri...
If that's not what you're into -- and it's not something I'm into -- then I would suggest other forms of disobedience. Freedoms are rarely granted by asking for them.
Materially impeding law enforcement operations, interfering with arrests, harassing or assault officers, and so forth is not 1A protected and is illegal. There’s lots of this going on and some of it is orchestrated in these chats. They may nevertheless be civil disobedience, maybe even for a just cause, but I have no problem with people still being arrested for this. You obviously cannot have a civil society where that is legally tolerated.
It isn’t just people walking around holding signs or filming ICE. Can we please distinguish these cases?
Importantly this definition references an individual’s conscience. Seditious conspiracy is another matter. Here is the statute:
> If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
A group chat coordinating use of force may be tough.
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> protestors behaving legally or practicing civil disobedience can still have their lives ruined by people in power.
They surely can. But the point was more than the people in power don't really need Signal metadata to do that. On the lists of security concerns modern protestors need to be worrying about, Signal really just isn't very high.
This is the price we pay to defend our rights. I would also expect any reasonable grand jury to reject such charges given how flagrantly the government has attempted to bias the public against protesters.
Some of the signal messages I've seen screenshotted (granted screenshots can be altered) make it seem like the participants have access to some sort of ALPR data to track vehicles that they think are ICE. That would probably be an illegal use of that data if true.
> make it seem like the participants have access to some sort of ALPR data to track vehicles
The whole reason cops love ALPR data is anyone's allowed to collect it, so they don't need a warrant.
The government falling victim to ALPR for once might actually be the push we need to get some reform. That said, they'll probably try to ban it for everybody but themselves. Never before have they had such comprehensive surveillance and I don't expect them to give it up easily.
I remember having to explain to you that the CFAA doesn't apply to German citizens in Germany committing acts against a German website, so I'll take that legal advice with a few Dead Seas worth of salt.
Tow trucks have ALPR cameras to find repossessions. Plenty of private options for obtaining that sort of data; you can buy your own for a couple hundred bucks. https://linovision.com/products/2-mp-deepinview-anpr-box-wit...
Government intimidation of the practice of constitutional rights... what ever could go wrong.
I was replying specifically to this:
> This seems like a good example of that being enough metadata to be a big problem
I was not saying it's not a problem that the feds are doing this, because that's not what I was replying to.
Why does a person have to be "for" something?
That seems like a weak argument.
I mean, carrying a weapon is a 2nd amendment right, but if I bring it to a protest and then start intimidating people with it, the police going after me is not "Government intimidation of the practice of constitutional rights".
Protesting is a constitution right, but if you break the law while protesting, you're fair game for prosecution.
How do you connect a strangers face to a phone number? Or does it require the ELITE app?
Palantir steps in indeed
conspiracy charges are a thing, and they'll only need a few examples of manifestly illegal interference.
it will be quite easy for a prosecutor to charge lots of these people.
it's been done for less, and even if the case is thrown out it can drag on for years and involve jail time before any conviction.
If they could arrest people for what they've been doing, they would have already arrested people. And they have arrested a few here and there for "assault" (things like daring to react when being shoved by an annoyed officer), but the thing that's really pissing DHS off is that the protesters and observers are not breaking the law.
The J6 insurrectionists committed real crimes, and it's very good that they were rounded up, but afaiu most of the evidence had to do with them provably assaulting officers, damaging property, and breaking into a government building. Not that they messaged other people when they were legally demonstrating before the Capital invasion.
The real protection for the legal protesters and observers in MN is numbers. They can't arrest and control and entire populace.
Fortunately for us (or really unfortunately for us) most of the competent FBI agents have been fired or quit, with the new bar simply being loyalty to the president.
The FBI is weak now compared to what it was even two years ago.
That was a different, Biden's, FBI
That may be true in the abstract (although it doesn't matter if the cops think you're breaking the law. What matters is whether or not a judge does).
However, neither Border patrol nor ICE have been exhibiting thoughtfulness or patience, so I doubt they're playing any such long game.
Conspiracy requires an agreement to commit an illegal act, and entering into that agreement must be intentional.
I highly recommend this book. It goes into who funds these things.
https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
Was starting to think about setting up a neighborhood Signal group, but now thinking that maybe something like Briar might be safer... only problem is that Briar only works on Android which is going to exclude a lot of iPhone users.
Why wouldn't you just use random abandoned forums or web article message threads? Iirc this is what teenagers used to do when schools banned various social media but not devices. Just put the URL in a discrete qr code that only a person in the neighborhood could see.
I spent a dozen years in SF, where my friend circles routinely used Signal. It's my primary messaging app, including to family and childhood friends.
I live in NY now. Just today, I got a message from a close friend who also did SF->NY "I'm deleting Signal to get more space on my phone, because nobody here uses it. Find me on WhatsApp or SMS."
To a naïve audience, Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother maintaining yet-another messenger whose core competency is private messaging?" Signal is reasonably mainstream, and there are still a lot of people who won't use it.
I suspect you'll have an uphill battle using something even more obscure.
> Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother ..."
Aside: I see similar attitudes when I mention I use VPN all of the time
What about BitChat?
but this is not a technical attack that returns the metadata.
much more closer to the $5 wrench attack
I've been hearing for years people say "Signal requires phone number therefore I don't use it", and I've been hearing them mocked for years.
Turns out they were right.
They weren't though? Signal requires a phone number to sign up and it is linked to your account but your phone number is not used in the under the hood account or device identification, it is not shared by default, your number can be entirely removed from contact disovery if you wish, and even if they got a warrant or were tapping signal infra directly, it'd be extremely non trivial to extract user phone numbers.
https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
In past instances where Signal has complied with warrants, such as the 2021 and 2024 Santa Clara County cases, the records they provided included phone numbers to identify the specific accounts for which data was available. This was necessary to specify which requested accounts (identified by phone numbers in the warrants) had associated metadata, such as account creation timestamps and last connection dates.
I would think being able to subpoena records for all active signal users would be a cause for concern.
Ironically enough Reddit seems to have a pretty good take on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qogc2g/comment/o21aeh...
I was genuinely surprised when I went to Reddit and saw that as the most voted comment on the story.
Others mention you must still register with a phone, although you can remove it from your account after you go through the username stuff? Usually HN is pretty good about identifying that the default path is the path and that opt-out like behavior of this means very little for mass usage.
Which of those links actually say that your phone number is private from Signal? If anything, this passage makes it sound like it's the reverse, because they specifically call out usernames not being stored in plaintext, but not phone numbers.
>We have also worked to ensure that keeping your phone number private from the people you speak with doesn’t necessitate giving more personal information to Signal. Your username is not stored in plaintext, meaning that Signal cannot easily see or produce the usernames of given accounts.
> it'd be extremely non trivial
Extremely non trivial. What I'm hearing is "security by obfuscation".
Absolutely nothing in this article is related to feds using conversation metadata to map participants, so, no they weren’t.
If you follow the X chatter on this, some folks got into the groups and tracked all the numbers, their contributions, and when they went "on shift" or "off".
I don't really think Signal tech has anything to do with this.
Yeah. It's notable they didn't crack the crypto. In the 90s when I was a young cypherpunk, I had this idea that when strong crypto was ubiquitous, certainly people would be smart enough to understand its role was only to force bad guys to attack the "higher levels" like attacking human expectations of privacy on a public channel. It was probably unrealistic to assume everyone would automatically understand subtle details of technology.
As a reminder... if you don't know all the people in your encrypted group chat, you could be talking to the man.
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Yes, but they have their own weaknesses. For instance, Briar exposes your Bluetooth MAC, and there's a bunch of nasty Bluetooth vulns waiting to be exploited. You can't ever perfectly solve for both security and usability, you can only make tradeoffs.
Neither does Signal.
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whoa, losing access to a throwaway account created for specifically posting trolling comments? i'm sure they're shaking in their boots at the prospect
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Signal's use of phone numbers is the least of your issues if you've reached this level of inspection. Signal could be the most pristine perfect thing in the world, and the traffic from the rest of your phone is exactly as exposing as your phone number is when your enemy is the US government who can force cooperation from the infrastructure providers.
Your point is correct but irrelevant to this conversation.
The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that.
The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.
I talked to Moxie about this 20 years ago at DefCon and he shrugged his shoulders and said "well... it's better than the alternative." He has a point. Signal is probably better than Facebook Messenger or SMS. Maybe there's a market for something better.
Is there any reason they didn't use email? It seems like something that would have been easier to keep some anonymity., while still allowing the person to authenticate.
I wasn't assuming the actual messages would go through email. I assumed they just needed that for a onetime setup. Isn't that the only reason for using a phone number currently?
Briar and Session are the better encrypted messengers.
Session lacks forward secrecy, which isn't ideal.
I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.
All easily activated over the air.
Indeed. The only reason this is not used by customer support for more casual access, firmware upgrades and debugging is a matter of policy and the risk of mass bricking phones and as such this is not exposed to them. There are other access avenues as well including JTAG debugging over USB and Bluetooth.
I don't think the FCC requires DMA channels. That's done out of convenience because it's how PCIe works.
Any citation on this? I’ve never heard that.
I have no idea if that was true 20 years ago, but it's not true now. XMPP doesn't have this problem; your host instance knows your IP but you can connect via Tor.
Tor has the problem that you frequently don't know who's running all the nodes in the network. For a while the FBI was running Tor exit nodes in an attempt to see who messages were being sent to. maybe they still are.
Is that good? According to the wikipedia page it seems last stable release was 9 years ago. Is anyone using that? Last time I had a look at XMPP everybody was using OMEMO.
my mom can use signal no problem. she doesnt know what half the words in your comment mean, though.
I could have sworn Signal adopted usernames sometime back, but in my eyes its a little too late.
Suppose they didn't require that. Wouldn't that open themselves up to DDoS? An angry nation or ransom-seeker could direct bots to create accounts and stuff them with noise.
I think the deal is you marry the strong crypto with a human mediated security process which provides high confidence the message sender maps to the human you think they are. And even if they are, they could be a narc. Nothing in strong crypto prevents narcs in whom ill-advised trust has been granted from copying messages they're getting over the encrypted channel and forwarding them to the man.
And even then, a trusted participant could not understand they're not supposed to give their private keys out or could be rubber-hosed into revealing their key pin. All sorts of ways to subvert "secure" messaging besides breaking the crypto.
I guess what I'm saying is "Strong cryptography is required, but not sufficient to ensure secure messaging."
Yes. Cheap–identity systems such as Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to this, and your only defence is to not give out your address as they are unguessable. If you have someone's address, you can spam them, and they can't stop it except by deleting the app or resetting to a new address and losing all their contacts.
SimpleX does better than Session because the address used to add new contacts is different from the address used with any existing contact and is independently revocable. But if that address is out there, you can receive a full queue of spam contacts before you next open the SimpleX app.
Both Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to storage DoS as well.
There are a lot of solutions to denial of service attacks than to collect personal information. Plus, you know, you can always delete an account later? If what Signal says is true, then this amounts to a few records in their database which isn't cause for concern IMO
What is it like in the US these days? I'm on the outside (occasionally) looking in, and it looks like something out of European history class! The ice seem to have roughly the same priorities and roughly the same methodology as the SA had in the beginning.
Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things? I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying. But I'm curious to hear Americans view on matters?
As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about? Have all the second amendment supporters been employed by ice/agree with what they're doing, or was it just empty talk?
Stuff seems rough over there, if they actually are, take care everybody! Also please tell me how things actually stand inside the US cause it's making very little sense right now.
People are experiencing wildly different Americas depending on their circumstances and level of political involvement.
If you're a tech worker and you still have a job and you think AI is pretty cool and you don't follow news very closely, things seem okay...ish. You are maybe dimly aware of some social problems, but they're all somebody else's problems.
If you're one of the many many thousands of people who have been abducted by federalized lunatics, or you have a child or family member in one of our concentration camps, things seem urgently and unimaginably bad.
If you're politically involved, things seem tenuous, at best. You likely know someone who either feels justifiably terrified by what's going on, or someone whose life has been seriously impacted by it.
I've spent several months successfully combating one of YC's contributions to all this mess. Tonight, federal law enforcement fired pepper rounds, flashbangs, and tear gas into a crowd of protestors who were noisy -- not violent, not even causing property damage, just noisy. One of the officers aimed the tear gas weapon directly at a protestor's head and caused a serious head injury (the kind that causes convulsions and foaming at the mouth after impact). And, they'll get away with that.
The local police department was flying half a dozen drones directly over this, but they are only there to surveil and look for an excuse to put on riot gear.
There were an assortment of reporters there, but most of them have editors or owners that won't run much of a story about any of it. A few politicians showed up, but they made a short speech and then left immediately. The building where this all happened is in a city center, so, just a block away, life and traffic continues as normal and most people are entirely unaware.
So that's also why nobody's really been making an organized 2A effort either. For most people, this isn't "real", in the sense that it isn't something they're experiencing, and for those that are experiencing it, they're trying to walk a tightrope that resists the current administration without spiraling into a widespread civil war.
The US has less than 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's incarcerated. So we're already exceptional in terms of numbness to incarceration.
> in one of our concentration camps
As a European, I find the use of "concentration camp" to be a very strong word. Trump and its administration are often touted as a Nazi and such. How much of this is hyperbole, and how much of this is real?
Nazis were systemic against a religion and disabilities. They made systemic ways of exterminating those deemed "unpure". The concentration camps had gas chambers to kill people. Is this really what is happening in the US?
Note: this is not snark to defend Trump, I'm French and I could not care less. I genuinely want to understand. I feel like the Nazi lexical field is much much weaker in the US, and people are more eager to use it over there than here in Europe.
I think maybe OP was using the traditional definition of the word, and hopefully not trying to imply we have Treblinka’s across the US.
But there is some cause for concern regarding the detention centers and the lack of oversight.
For example, even Congress members have to provide 7 days of notice if they wish to visit a center [1]. So, the only real oversight is from the executive. And these centers are often ran by private companies somewhat notorious for bad conditions and lawsuits related to bad conditions / civil rights violations.
Here’s a story about where we’re holding families and children:
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2026/01/27/inside-the-dilley...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-facilities-homeland-securit...
This doesn't even touch our, ahem, overseas facilities, which certainly do not have the same standards.
Nazis were systemic against a religion and disabilities. They made systemic ways of exterminating those deemed "unpure". The concentration camps had gas chambers to kill people. Is this really what is happening in the US?
It is often useful to differentiate between "concentration camps" and "death camps" or "extermination camps". The Nazis had both. Some of their concentration camps were focused on concentrating and detaining people, some of them also systematically killed them -- they are not the same. If you fail to make this distinction, then saying "America has concentration camps" could make it sound like they're running extermination camps.
The US does to my knowledge not yet have those, nor as large-scale application of concentration camps as Germany did, and whether you even want to use the term "concentration camp" rather than something more like "detention facility" is up to you, but the federal government certainly has camps where people detained by ICE are being concentrated. Sometimes they are also subject to human rights abuses and/or die there.
Here's one of these camps, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_East_Montana
Here is a list of people dying under ICE detention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_in_ICE_detentio...
> Here's one of these camps, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_East_Montana
Thats a textbook concentration camp. You are correct in your descriptions and distinction from extermination camps, concentration camps are not that rare even these days around the world in troubled places.
They are as name suggests just to herd bunch of people behind the fence, not much more. Of course, the reasons are usually far from nice and thus due to at most OKish treatment even there some sad things happen due to amount of people crammed together for a long time.
In Europe during WWII we had tons of concentration camps all over conquered Europe but only few were actual extermination ones, usually converted/expanded from concentration ones. When allies were coming nazis often turned concentration -> extermination due to orders given from above.
>even having detainment camps for non-convicted civilians is already too much.
How do you suggest enforcing immigration law when millions have entered your country illegally? (If you believe in enforcing it all.)
> Nazis were systemic against a religion and disabilities.
Just a note that Nazism was systemic primarily about a race: atheists with ethnically Jewish backgrounds were targeted, converts were few but they would have been considered 'Aryans'. It's an important distinction because many groups (specifically the Muslim Brotherhood) try and draw false equivalence between their beliefs and actual innate characteristics.
I understand the sentiment, but it’s the correct term for such facilities. You don’t need gas chambers to qualify. As far as I know, the terms is also used for historic ethnical imprisonment facilities for Japanese people in the USA, which seems very comparable.
Fellow European. They are not death camps, but what information does come out of them does sound a lot like concentration camps, already prior to Trump coming to office.
These are all stories about the facility the 5 year old toddler from last week is kept, a facility known as "baby jail".
https://www.proskauerforgood.com/2018/06/pro-bono-for-immigr... https://www.aila.org/blog/volunteering-in-family-detention-s... https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/stories-reve...
The first nazi concentration camp was founded in 1933, gas chambers and systematic killing were only added in 1941 when the "final solution" was implemented. Those last four years are the most well-known period, but for the majority of Hitler's rule concentration camps were just what it says on the tin: camps where undesirables were concentrated. Places that became overcrowded, hotbeds for disease, labor camps and places of medical experimentation. Plenty of people died there even in that period, but from causes like illness, work accidents, malnutrition and bad medical care.
ICE detention centers are not comparable to a 1942 nazi death camp, but comparisons to a 1939 concentration camp seem apt
> The concentration camps had gas chambers to kill people.
First concentration camps were create right after the election 1933 and the gas chambers were not invented yet. They were used against political opposition first, minor criminals second and only then Jews/homosexuals/etc. The regime had to consolidate power and invent the gas chambers first. The deportations, general violence, arrests on made up excuses, exclusion of jews and opposition from public life happened at the beginning.
Trumps rhetoric against Somalis in particular has strong echoes. So does the strategy of arresting and beating people on ethnic membership only.
> Nazis were systemic against a religion
Kinda yes kinda no. Religion was competitor against power ... but klerofascism was a thing. The pope was kinda neutral. And then you have places like Slovakia where catholic church priests were not just facilitating holocaust, but literally leading it. Religion was fairly frequently anti-semitic itself.
> it's not an actual parallel as the Jews were scapegoats for the whole economic ruin of Germany after WWI (ruin caused by France and others).
In case you missed the rhetoric, illegal immigrants as a whole are being blamed for economic ruin.
The meaning of "concentration camp" did not changed. European historians and writers use them exactly like I did. So does wikipedia. In particular, European historians writing about WWII can not possibly limit the meaning of that word to extermination camp only, because concentration camps as such played pretty important role the whole time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps
Immigrants including Somali are blamed for economic situation, lack of housing, meat price. And just like Jews back then, they are accused of being the source of criminality, rape, child abuse. And as before, by actually criminal government (Literally Trump accused people attacked by ICE of that raping kids. Go figure.) I genuinely believe it is OK to not closely follow what Trump, Vance and Miller write and say. But, if you don't, maybe you should not make confident assumptions about their rhetoric.
> ruin caused by France and others
Common here. You are switching one scapegoat for another.
> This is why I wrote a religion, not religion. They were helped by the rules of Judaism that makes the religion and race the same set of people.
The racial component of nazi ideology came from Germans themselves, they perceived it as science. They thought they are being scientific men. In fact, quite a few atheistic Jews were shocked to find they are the hated Jews themselves. German jews were frequently atheistic, integrated, married Germans a lot and considered themselves Germans. Race theory was not inspired by Judaism and was not helped by Judaism. You are kind of blaming the victim here.
> At any rate, I do have a better picture now of what is happening and what is colloquially called "concentration camps" by Americans in this context, thanks!
European historians, writers, politicians, journalists use concentration camp like I did. YOU did confused it with extermination camp. It was you who simply did not knew the term is not limited to the single digit number of nazi extermination camp, that nazi had many more concentration camps and that the term was routinely used for non german concentration camps too.
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Are those not people? Right into the 'subhuman' rhetoric?
Are those not people?
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Then you need better reading glasses, unless you killing of two innocent people is actually people guilty or illegals.
I’m no fan of guns but showing up with a gun is not illegal or criminal in itself that deserves instant death sentence. So you might want to introspect what you’re saying here.
And this is a clear give away you haven't seen either footage of the actual killing.
I don't know of any nice, calm, non-roided ICE agent who would say "fucking bitch" to a person that was shot and killed because they drove away from them.
Nor do I know of any officer in general who would be considered an upstanding on-duty officer doing so, especially one where they push you to the ground for filming, pepper spray you, put you to the ground and then shot you 10 times.
> or you have a child or family member in one of our concentration camps
I must be one of those comfortable and oblivious tech workers because I don't know about any concentration camps in the US. So you'll have to tell me what this is about.
For example reported on The Majority Report: https://youtu.be/rapv7V78SZo
I believe this[0] article shows the other side of that door. To clarify, I believe the seeming lack of justice system involvement is what chafes for most.
[0] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/like-handmaids-tale-footage-shows-...
There aren’t Nazi-style extermination camps in the U.S., but an extermination camp is just a subset of concentration camps. There are large-scale immigration detention facilities, with 60k+ people on any given day, where tens of thousands of people are held without criminal trials. Enforcement often targets identity proxies like race, accent, neighborhood, sweeps up citizens and legal residents, uses expedited deportations with effectively suspended habeas, and operates with extremely limited judicial oversight and blatantly ignores judicial rulings.
These are concentration camps, or at least so close that I’m rhetorically OK with it. All of the famous concentration camp programs of history started the same way. And there’s always an excuse for why “no no no, our program is different, these people are illegal, we have to operate like this (suspended legal rights and oversight) to stop the bad people, it’s not targeted by race/religion/etc it’s just the bad people all happen to be like that…”
This is not a good place to be.
Scope of camps: https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/
Formal suspension of habeas was enabled en-masse by: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/thuraissigia...
There’s always an excuse. “They” are always unlawful invaders. “They” are always a danger to our children and our posterity. “They” are always not deserving of the same rights as “us”. The excuse is always “justified” in the eyes of fascists and people fooled by their rhetoric.
Hemingway was right when he said “There are many Americans who are fascists without knowing it.”
> Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things?
If you think what you've seen is bad, consider how bad the stuff you don't see is, and then consider how bad it is for those who aren't the type to post on HN.
Also consider that there are 340 million people in the US. With that sort of population size, you can construct whatever narrative you want out of daily video clips of 1-in-a-million events.
>the type to post on HN.
When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site? The userbase here is considerably further left than a very left-wing state such as California. That will very much be reflected in what gets posted here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791909
> When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site?
Today, several. They made themselves known in several threads related to recent events.
It's against the guidelines to call out posts/posters, but you can use the HN Algolia to list the most popular threads from this week/month and you'll see plenty of them.
dang has mentioned several times that witchhunting is against the rules, and I'm not going to compile a list of witches for you, mostly because it is both toxic to communities and not conducive of interesting conversation, especially when you can just use the HN Algolia yourself.
Trump supporters aren't stupid, they understand they lose credibility if they just say they have blind faith in Trump.
They demonstrate it through their actions and misinformation tactics. You'll find many outright wrong comments on the recent ICE shootings, and many emotionally charged comments suggesting it's good that people got what they deserved.
They'll also misinformation about the types of undocumented people, and how many there are. These are obvious falsehoods, including things such as claiming random citizens are actually terrorists when they're just not. Or claiming we somehow have 100 million undocumented people.
If someone is parroting official speech from the DHS, which these days is almost always outright lies, then we can safely assume they are a trump supporter. We're well past the point of healthy conversation or skepticism. If you believe just about anything this administration or DHS says, you are closer to a cult member than a rational, reasoning human.
Yeah, but what he's doing to the country is so much worse than illegal immigration that it would be silly to bring it up.
Theres a scale involved.
You can support deportation without being a trump supporter.
But if you willfully ignore the scale, the lack of due process, and try and make it binary deportation/open borders, the Trumpometer starts reading stratospheric.
Most techies are libertarians and/or moderates. They definitely live in liberal hot spots, but they aren’t going out of their way to address social wrongs and protest. Heck, most Californians are moderate, mostly concerned about making money and living the good life, the only reason they are called liberal at all is because Pete Wilson alienated most of the states Hispanics from the Republican Party in an ill planned illegal immigration witch hunt. It didn’t just go from Reagan to Newsom overnight, the change was mostly for anti-racism reasons.
California is also hardly a far left state, it still has more trump voters than Texas.
Techies even more moderate if they aren’t on HN, si I don’t get your point.
>When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site?
Many in this very thread, actually.
>The userbase here is considerably further left than a very left-wing state such as California.
Considering any fixture in American politics "very left-wing" is already an indicator of how skewed right the perspective is. The signature policy goal of the stereotypical "far-left" American politician (Bernie Sanders) is a government healthcare system already present in many countries around the world, including many less developed than the US.
California isn't "very left-wing". It's liberal, centre-left if you're being kind. The democrats are a centre-right party with some mildly-leftist pockets of members.
Democrats are (or were) considered "right wing" on some stuff and really "left wing" on other stuff. It's really futile trying to compare the political parties with different incentives internationally and putting a single left/right wing label on them.
Democrats were also just a big tent party for a long time, with more 'real right wing' members than 'real left wing' members, maybe that's the reason for the platitude.
Almost 40% of California voted for Trump. The political polarity of a group can be measured in multiple ways. If you measure it by the views of its elected representatives or leaders of its institutions, it will look quite extreme because every 55/45 gets converted to a +1. In other words, you can have nearly 30% of a state being against gay marriage, yet "obviously" California is extremely gay-friendly.
I suspect (for no concrete reason in particular besides a feeling) that the readership of HN is fairly similar to California in political demographics. Active commentators are considerably more left-wing due to selection effects.
unrelated tangent, sorry. i agree with your comment, just ranting/venting about a detail.
> a very left-wing state such as California.
seeing any US state being described as "very left-wing" is interesting to me, think it just shows how different these views are depending on who you ask. i'd describe California as Centrist. sure, socially open, no issue with sexuality or heritage. but also, free markets, corpo power, $$$, generally pro-system. the Orange is disliked heavily, but after all it's not the system which is the problem, it's the Orange!
> The userbase here is considerably further left
can't agree, from my own experiences of discussing political topics on here. again, socially open, free minds, sure. but positive towards Silicon Valley, VC-funding, investments and a general lean towards Imperialism(for freedom, of course, not the bad kind). yes, overtly racist comments get downvoted until they're dead.
"further left than very left-wing" could be the description of an anarcho-communist, self-hosted mastodon instance, not a US state.
to end on a funny note, https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQAfP-2...
sorry for being pedantic, and maybe wrong. please show me y'alls POV, i'm not saying that i'm right, it's just kind of my opinion, man.
Thats not left/right, thats lib/auth. But I guess you cant scare people with "ooooh the government likes elements of civil freedom" it just isnt spooky enough, you gotta try and tangle it up with leftism somehow to really push the point home.
> It's the Europeans who want us to ship more weapons to Ukraine.
well, you chose the one "good" example, where weapons are actually used for defense against a different Imperialist. what about the money going towards the Palestinian Genocide? what about other wars/invasions/operations, started or backed by Democrats/Bi-Partisan support.
> California is considering a wealth tax
a one-time tax of 5% on the net worth of residents with over $1 billion, bunch of commies! some decades ago, wealth tax was a high, double-digit number.
even so, do you think a one-time 5% wealth tax is enough to be called very left-wing?
I'm a Trump supporter, generally. I see a lot of comments at the bottom of threads by people who I assume also are. The reason you don't often hear this admission when you're in a forum with downvotes like this one is twofold. One, obviously, the person gets immediately downvoted, so those posts are harder to find. Two, if a person admits to it in a post, that often functions as a thought terminating trigger for everyone else involved, and it doesn't matter what point he was trying to make; the interlocutor just calls him a racist or something and moves on.
Actually, I like using HN because I find it has a much higher proportion of right wing or centrist thinkers than Reddit, or at least less downvote propensity towards those groups. And crucially, I won't get banned from HN just for voting for Trump, unlike a terribly large number of subreddits. This userbase is definitely more right-leaning than Reddit, of that I'm sure.
You were supposed to say silent and let them pretend to be persecuted on an internet forum
Use of 2nd amendment rights to combat government overreach is an outright declaration of rebellion. Cross that line and you are no longer playing rebel. If you dont have enough people behind you it will not go well.
The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy.
This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?
> The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy. This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?
If it's that easy, why did we spend 20 years in Afghanistan only to suffer defeat by goat herders holding AK-47s?
A quick review of the last 100 years will educate you on the viability of asymmetric warfare.
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Lol thats so untrue, are we already at the phase of rewriting this recent history?
US and coalition held Kabul (mostly) and their bases, and that was about it. Rest of the country was lets say contested territory, never really conquered, never yielding to Kabul government or coalition.
Ambushes, attacks, suicide bombers were daily grind. Not really conquered territory, is it.
Whether it was or wasnt defeat - when you see soldiers desperately running away from the country in a very similar fashion that happened in Vietnam, I struggle to not describe it as a full military defeat. The fact that it was orchestrated by politicians doesn't change much.
>The NATO forces defeated the Taliban in a timeframe that could be measured in hours. The remaining years were an exercise in nation building, there was never “defeat.”
There was never a "defeat" indeed but the taliban grew in numbers manifold over the course of the occupation so saying you defeated them in hours is also a funny take.
Think of a rebellion as national "unbuilding" and you get some idea of how things might go.
If things get that hot, there will be substantial defectors and various state and federal security services fighting each other.
I don’t think it’d be easy to get a Chinese ABM to Minneapolis without anyone noticing.
What could happen in this scenario would be either local military defecting or guerrilla warfare while the US military targets them from afar. You can easily bomb anyone back to Stone Age in hours, but taking control of the ground can be a lot more challenging if the locals don’t cooperate.
Anyway, a full-on civil war is a very unlikely - and undesirable - scenario.
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If Trump bombed a US city there are enough people that would head to DC for his head he wouldn't last long. This is not Iran.
I very much doubt, at this point in time, that anybody in the military would follow that order. The correct response to that order is to arrest the president. Their oath is to the Constitution not the president.
Before such missiles even get launched, there's a serious risk of the US military saying "you are no longer the president".
Even with a room full of sociopaths, a president ordering a missile sent to Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, etc. is the kind of thing that makes the stock markets very unhappy, what with those missiles hitting expensive business property and/or staff and/or customers.
Even if the military and the local business leadership are all on board with the plan, foreign investments will crater, and the US needs that even just to handle the lack of balance in the budget.
And that's all true even without the 2nd. I don't, and never have, bought into the story Americans tell about the 2nd keeping them safe from tyrants: it's neither powerful enough to do that, nor necessary to do that. But all those easy-to-access firearms and training to use them would make the second civil war extra brutal.
There are examples of 2A being used against tyrants in the US. Just not the federal level. The higher up you are rebelling against the more people you need to support you. The point of 2A is that you don't need to continue to suffer under tyrants because they have guns and you don't. If you decide it is 2A time before everybody else you are just an idiot. Actual rebellion requires support of the people and planning.
The Battle of Athens, Tennessee is one example of 2A rights being used against government successfully. The Fat Electrician has a great video about it.
USA is not Russia. I don't think an order could ever be made to level a "rebellious" city, and even if it were, it would never be followed.
> Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about? Have all the second amendment supporters been employed by ice/agree with what they're doing, or was it just empty talk?
It was never really a practical idea, more a sort of latent threat that has proven to be ineffective. Also, yeah, the "don't tread on me" folks mostly aren't very principaled and don't mind authoritarian actions so long as they're dressed up right. Obama wants a public healthcare option? How dare the government institute Death Panels to decide who live or dies! ICE shoot random protestors? That's what they deserve for "impeding" and "assaulting" law enforcement.
The Second Amendment was written so that the US could avoid having a standing federal army and quickly gather up defense forces from States as necessary when attacked. It was thought that having a standing army would lead to bad incentives and militarism. Just like the Executive branch only has enumerated powers, with all main governing functions belonging to Congress. The founders were worried about vesting too much power in one man, so made the President pretty weak. Of course, we've transmogrified ourselves into a nation primed for militarism and authoritarianism by slowly but surely concentrating power into one station. Exactly what the Constitution was written to prevent. I guess they did a bad job.
> The Second Amendment was written so that the US could avoid having a standing federal army and quickly gather up defense forces from States as necessary when attacked.
Too narrow. It secures an individual right, not a federal mobilization clause.
> Isn’t this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about? Have all the second amendment supporters been employed by ice/agree with what they're doing, or was it just empty talk?
Only if you think the second amendment is an on demand partisan defense force. It is not. It is a personal guarantee and a reserve of capacity, not a subscription service where “second amendment supporters” are obligated to show up on cue.
> It was never really a practical idea, more a sort of latent threat that has proven to be ineffective.
“Latent” is largely the point. Deterrence is not measured by constant use, and a right is not refuted by the fact that strangers do not take on extreme personal risk to prove it to you. The first line checks are still speech, courts, elections, oversight. This right exists for when those fail.
> Exactly what the constitution was written to prevent. I guess they did a bad job.
If power has drifted, enforce the constraints. It is the second amendment, placed immediately after speech and assembly, not the third or the tenth. Do not redefine the right into irrelevance and call that proof it failed.
As a footnote, it was also written at a time when a bunch of guys with muskets could face down another bunch of guys with muskets. When one side has tanks and attack helicopters and training and outnumbers you a hundred to one it doesn't really work any more.
That would explain why it was so easy for the US to suppress insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan...
It's actually rather difficult to think of tyrannical regimes which persisted against an armed citizenry in the long term.
Yeah realistically if there was actual mass repression of citizens (i.e. things like "courts" have essentially ceased to be a factor in much of anything), simply going on strike would be a pretty good start. You demonstrate peacefully, and carry arms as a deterrent so they can't crush the demonstrations the way they did in Iran.
> Is armed with knives enough?
It depends on the numbers. Do they have 100,000 guys with guns but you have a hundred million with knives? Then you have a chance. But your chances improve a lot if your side is starting off with something more effective than that.
> Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.
You don't need parity, you need a foothold to leverage into more.
> So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons?
In a civil war, you take the domestic facilities and equipment by force and then use them. But first you need the capacity to do that. Can 10,000 guys with knives take a military base guarded by a thousand guys with guns? Probably not. Can they if they all have guns? Yeah, probably.
Then the government has to decide if they're going to vaporize the facility when you do that. If they don't, you get nukes. If they do, now you have a mechanism to make them blow up their own infrastructure by feigning attacks. And so on.
Knives are basically obsolete technology in military terms. Firearms are not obsolete; that's why almost every soldier (or "paramilitary") carries one. Your technological parity point is technically correct, but it doesn't really apply here.
There are more privately owned guns than people in the US. We are already profusely armed.
> If you tried building drones to stop US tanks and IFVs then the Californians would tell you that your factory needs to first go through environmental review. By the time the review is done the war will be lost.
this would very obviously not be the case if California needed them for war, or had been in on again off again war already for a decade
If the US military wasn't willing to simply flatten cities all over Iraq and Afghanistan, why would you expect them to do that in their own country to their own homes and family members?
People in Iraq and Afghanistan were willing to eat grass and blow themselves up to resist the foreign invaders. How long do you think Meal Team Six will keep going if they can't get to a Burger King?
>in iraq, the insurgency was the former iraqi military, not just random citizens with small arms
We are quite far from a situation of mass repression of citizens in the United States like you see in Iran. But if it came to that, I imagine the 15 million+ veterans in this country might have something to say about it. They outnumber active duty military personnel by a factor of 5.
And even Iran had to pull in outsiders because their military wasn't willing to fire on their own people.
Ukraine is taking out tanks and helicopters, as well as infrastructure daily, using 3D printed drones and AliExpress electronics.
Not suggesting anyone tries it, but modern warfare has evolved. Just like the tanks changed warfare in WW1, and tanks/planes changed warfare in WW2, drones are changing warfare once more.
a $10000 drone took out a multi million dollar Russian warship, and while not exactly 3D printed (at least not all of it), drones are cheap enough to manufacture to be expandable, especially if they can target and destroy things that are not that.
For comparison, a single cannon/mortar shell fired on the Ukrainian front costs €3500, and they fire up to 10000 of them per day. Making a few hundred $10000 drones is cheap compared to that, and while they likely don't hold the same "barrage level" destructive power, they are focused weapons and can destroy much more with less.
It also applied to other things existing at that time, like warships, canister shot in cannons or machine guns.
Have you seen expensive tanks and helicopters being taken out by 500$ drones? No? I have a surprise for you
I see a lot from the left about how right-wingers are supposedly hypocritical on gun control. However, concrete examples of hypocrisy are rarely provided. In terms of actual concrete statements, what I'm seeing from gun rights people like Thomas Massie and the NRA is consistent with previous stances:
https://xcancel.com/NRA/status/2015227627464728661#m
https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/20155711073281848...
I'd say the left is actually much more hypocritical. Just a few years ago they had essentially no issue with the government taking everyone's guns. Now suddenly they understand the value of an armed citizenry as a final last resort against tyranny, something the right has understood for years, and then they start calling the right "hypocritical"...
Massie is the odd man out out of 1000s of Republican politicians in being willing to publicly criticize his own party. He is very not typical. Everybody else marches in lockstep with whatever insanity trump puts out.
PBS: "Republican calls are growing for a deeper investigation into fatal Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti"
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/republican-calls-are-gro...
The NRA is not a very honest or good gun association, their immediate statement was quite different:
> “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs. Unsurprisingly, these calls to dangerously interject oneself into legitimate law-enforcement activities have ended in violence, tragically resulting in injuries and fatalities.
https://x.com/NRA/status/2015224606680826205?ref_src=twsrc%5...
(they then go on to say "let's withhold judgement until there's an investigation" despite them passing quite extreme judgement, with a direct lie, and getting their judgment extremely wrong when there was lots of video showing it wrong when they posted...)
In light of their large change of attitude, the initial critiques were quite correct.
In another Minnesota case, they refused to defend a gun owner that was shot for having a gun, despite doing everything right when stopped by police.
Other gun associations besides the NRA have been more principled and less partisan.
Rep. Massie is barely a Republican, he's pretty much the only one willing to go against Trump on anything. Right now the Republican party is defined by one thing only: slavish obedience to Trump. For Republicans' sake, and the sake of the Republic, I hope that changes soon.
Always being able to come up with some exception [0] doesn't mean that you're not being hypocritical, it just means that you've tricked yourself into being unable to see it. For another incident that resulted in a widespread display of hypocrisy, look at the public reactions to what happened when Kenneth Walker exercised his right to night time home defense - one of the basic scenarios the NRA is always rallying around. But I'm sure you've settled on some coping excuse for that one as well.
The real thing you need to understand is that this fascist movement will always find some grounds to characterize its targets as worthy of othering. If (when) you get tripped up by it, no amount of conforming or having supported it is going to redeem you in the mind of the mob. Rather it's going to be people just like yourself condemning you.
[0] this one seemingly based on an outright shameless lie of "resisting arrest"
It's not hard to find examples.
"You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple."
- Kash Patel
“I don't know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign."
- Kristi Noem
“With that being said, you can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t.”
-Donald Trump
That's MAGA, which is the overwhelming majority of the right in the United States.
You didn't say "rank-and-file gun rights supporters", you said "right-wingers". These are all MAGA, which today, whether you like it or not, is the majority of "right-wingers". MAGA lives on a lack of principles, and that's why it's popular. Things are getting real now, huh?
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> Now suddenly they understand the value of an armed citizenry as a final last resort against tyranny, something the right has understood for years
What? I thought it was pretty clear that I don't consider an armed citizenry to be doing us any good. The government can take the guns, I don't give a shit. It should also stop arming Police and other goons. We can all slug it out in the streets with batons ;)
It's confusing and messy, like most of American history.
Most cosplayers exit when they meet a real villain
It’s the same as in the EU or Britain or the US ten years ago, where unauthorised migration is handled by law enforcement, except in some states the organised vigilante groups form this article exist and endanger everybody. The government hasn’t run amok: the laws are the same.
I'm wondering pretty much the same thing ...
> As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
Americans, yes - not illegal immigrant invaders. As it would turn out, American citizens aren't ready to die for these people just yet.
The man killed was not an illegal or immigrant
Nobody said he was? Are you in the right thread?
The best way I can put it... All the people I know are at work when most of this protest news is happening.
The news media is not saying a lot of what is happening. So if anything you are missing some of the insanity.
Depends which side you’re on and how far. If you’re far-left, you’re thinking the administration is the Fourth Reich, you’re watching movies with Leonardo DiCaprio doing terrorist attacks on border patrol, and fighting the Gestapo. If you’re far right, you’re thinking the administration isn’t going far enough, Trump “is a cuck”, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive if they had just protested in front of a government building.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but most places for most people are fine. Good even. Great, by historical standards. But that just goes to show how much room the US has to decline, and how well off the average American really is by global standards, even if they don't subjectively feel that way. Donald Trump and the politics of the last few decades have definitely been pushing things the wrong direction, but most people in most places live relatively well, by global standards. As it is, all we would need is a decade of politics and policies gently tugging the right direction and we'd be good to go.
Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things?
If you live anywhere else, which in most cases are places thousands of miles away, it's business as usual. You have money, you go to work, the grocery store is full, you see your friends on the weekends. The only bad things in life are home prices and the news.
Minneapolis has 0.1% of the total USA population. It is to the USA as Dresden, Lisbon, or Genoa is to the EU in terms of population.
While ICE is mass deporting people nationwide, the murders of citizens and general mayhem they’re perpetrating are primarily just in Minneapolis.
2A supporters are mixed. Some genuinely outraged at the gov, some just making up reasons to support Trump anyway. Following the definition of conservatism, liberals are the group the law binds but does not protect, and they are the group the law protects but does not bind.
In the US, Republicans managed to stack the judicial system with acolytes in a well organized, long term operation over years. They broke rules to steal Supreme Court seats, giving them a majority. They control all branches of government. In that situation, the president has massive power to do what he wants. So he is.
Trump doesn’t really seem to care about any issue really. He’s not much of an ideologue. But his advisors certainly are. Stephen Miller is an open fascist who’s playing Trump like a fiddle and loving every minute of the chaos.
But for most of those of us lucky enough to be citizens, most of the time, we’re just dealing with institutional dysfunction exacerbated by Federal dysfunction. Funding cuts, broken commitments, uncertainty.
We also are all seeing the Federal government pre-emptively brand the citizens it’s new gunning down in the street every two weeks or so “domestic terrorists” and posing with signs saying “one of ours, all of yours,” and so on. So it’s very clear that the government is now building right wing paramilitary forces to try and intimidate us. Clearly that’s not working too well in Minnesota, however!
Liberal Americans overall are: 1. Disgusted with Trump et al 2. Keeping relatively calm and carrying on, because he genuinely did win the popular vote in a free and fair election 3. Figuring out constructive ways to deal with ICE, pressure the Democratic Party to pick better candidates, and thinking about how to protect elections in 2026 and 2028.
On a day to day basis, life feels normal where I live, for me, for now.
What you describe seems to fit the term 'Dual State', and you live your day to day life in the normative state. I hope foe your sake you don't get much contact with the prerogative one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-e...
Interesting, that was a work I wasn't familiar with.
It doesn't feel like you keep calm 'because he won the elections'. It's either that citizens can't do much in the US, fear of getting killed is real especially when disobeying police orders, or, you aren't too affected by Trump's actions to act.
The point is that the overwhelming majority of the country isn’t facing down ICE brutality right now, not the way Minneapolis is. So yes, most are much less immediately and violently affected by Trump. Hence, calm.
The question I was getting at is why those of us disgusted by Trump are protesting less vigorously, despite his government being much worse this time around. It’s a phenomenon widely noted.
For me, that largely comes down to the fact Trump not only won 2024 fair and square, Biden really was manifestly not up to the task of governing. Biden, and careerist Democrats hoping to ride on Biden’s coattails to another term in the White House failed utterly at the critical moment.
A democracy or republic isn’t guaranteed to deliver good governance. The primary goal is to enable peaceful transitions of power.
Trump is threatening that, explicitly. But how to actually address that threat is less clear.
In 2016, we were outraged to see a turd like Trump win. But at that time, the story wasn’t about electoral threats and fascism, it was his disgusting personal character.
The election threat only really manifested on Jan 6. It failed, he exited office, and was facing prosecution. It looked potentially done and dusted, and like the Democrats in federal government were successfully dealing with the problem, as is their role. We were ridin’ with Biden.
Then they slow walked the prosecution that mattered. Biden got on stage to debate Trump and we were absolutely horrified. Then we noticed how vacant he was at other public appearances. It was “my god, he’s not just sleepy, he is incapacitated, and they’ve been lying about it to us for who knows how long?”
Then there was the last ditch effort to field Kamala instead, another weak candidate who wasn’t even liked in the Biden admin. That was pathetic.
So we got Trump. And it wasn’t “we could have had ultra-qualified Hillary, but we got this POS from out of nowhere” like in 2016. It was “holy shit, I am extremely disappointed in my own party.” Nothing added up. We lost trust in our own party and leadership, and it hasn’t come back. Nobody’s excited for any Democrat. We all just know Trump’s gotta go and we’ll line up for Any Democrat (TM). But that doesn’t mean we are proud to do so. It’s a bitter, demoralizing pill to swallow.
Of course fundamentally, we are dealing with all the normal politics problems. Bad voting system, fake news, social media brainwashing, economic illiteracy, checked out voters. American presidential history (and its history as a whole) is full of depressing candidates and terrible shit, political violence, and disenfranchisement we’ve only even approximated eliminating for the last 61 years, since the Voting Rights Act.
So I am hopeful that in the grand sweep of things, we will pull through and keep finding ways to make progress. I think the main thing right now is to keep your energy, hope and belief in the future. They’d like to take that away, and I just won’t let them.
They should have had an open convention. I said this on reddit before the elections and was heavily downvoted for whatever reason. People don't want to face reality. Trump's election this time around was much easier to explain and both parties have now lost the trust of the people.
> Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things? I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying. But I'm curious to hear Americans view on matters?
The US media is downplaying things because they are terrified of Trump, who now has either direct or indirect control of most of it.
If you're talking about EU media, I can't assess, but I did see a clip of an Italian news crew getting harassed in Minneapolis that's fairly accurate.
It's bad. Really bad. I never thought this would happen in the US. But it's also inept. Really inept. Minnesota is super-majority white, but has taken great pride in being a home for refugee communities, and has gained many from around the world. Minnesotans are, of all the places I've lived in the world, the most open-hearted, caring, and upright moral I've encountered as a group. Hard winters make people trust community. The Georgy Floyd murders, and the riots afterwards, have made communities very strong as they had to watch out for each other, there were no police that were going to come.
For this area with hundreds of thousands people, there are only 600 cops, but 3000 ICE/CBP agents swarming it, a HUGE chunk of their forces. Yet people self-organized to watch out for their schools and their neighbors. Churches serve as central places for people to volunteer to deliver meals to families that can not leave the house due to the racialize abduction of people. Several police chiefs have held news conferences where they say in so many words "You know I'm not a liburul but my officers with brown skin are all getting harassed by ICE when they're off duty, until the show that they are cops, and that's pretty bad." A Republican candidate for Governor withdrew his candidacy because he felt he couldn't be part of a political party that was doing such racialized violence against his own people, and his job was literally to be a defense lawyer to cops accused of wrongdoing!
The deaths are so tragic, but because Minnesotans have been so well organized, so stoic, so non-violent, it fully exposes ICE/CBD for the political terror campaign that they are. That the entire endeavor has nothing to do with enforcing the law, it's all about punishing Minnesota for being Minnesota, for its politics, for its people. If the legal deployment of cameras and whistles and insults and yells is enough to defeat masked goons who wave guns in people faces, assault non-violent people with pepper sprays directly to the eyes, and tear-gas canisters thrown at daycares, then these stupid SA-wannabes are not going to win.
I live in a coastal California bubble that's even whiter than Minnesota, but here we are all rooting for Minnesota. I was talking to another parent today at the elementary school, an immigrant from Spain, a doctor, whose husband is from Minnesota. They are rethinking their choice of staying in the US.
The second amendment thing was always a charade. There are a few people that think it's for protection from the government, but what they really mean is it's for shooting liberals. There's no grander principle. There are a bunch of people that enjoy guns as a hobby, and support the 2nd amendment for that. But we all know that the time for armed defense against the government is only when you're in a bunker in woods or when you're storming the capital to overturn an election because you've been tricked into saying it's a fraudulent election.
They are buffoons, as the Nazis were, but they are very unpopular buffoons and I think the past week shows that after a few more years of grand struggle, normal americans will win. It will be hard. We need to have truth and reconciliation afterwards, and the lack of that after the Civil War and after January 6 are huge causes in today's struggles.
I'm just glad Minnesota is defeating ICE/CBP, as many states would give in to violence faster, and many states would give up faster.
Tremendous post. Is there anything people in other parts of the country can do to help in Minnesota?
Yes, there are many ways to help from out-of-state!
Call your senators and representatives to hold ICE accountable. It's fine to enforce the law but they cannot be breaking other laws doing it.
Boycott business that support ICE for as long as ICE is being so heavy-handed. Enterprise rents them cars, Hilton Hotels puts them up, Target & Home Depot allow use of their parking lots for staging and their bathrooms. Get rid of your Ring doorbell, which partners with Flock. Call the companies and tell them what you're doing.
Donate money to any one of these MN orgs: https://www.standwithminnesota.com/
Get prepared. There's no reason to think this won't come to you once they pull out of Minnesota. Meet your neighbors, especially those of color. Start a Signal chat with them. Read how to start a Rapid Response Network [1]
[1] https://docs.proton.me/doc?mode=open-url&token=J5A88MFHRR#hI...
And very sincerely: thank you.
> The ice seem to have roughly the same priorities and roughly the same methodology as the SA had in the beginning.
How do you figure?
> I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying.
Media coverage of the Pretti shooting has been awful. All seem happy to show the slow-mo recap of the officer disarming Pretti, but none show him reaching for/toward his holster in the moment before being shot (0:12-13 in this video https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1qm4b0v/slow_m...). If the officer heard the "he's got a gun" callout but didn't see him be disarmed, this would obviously justify the response.
> As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
This is the reason for the second amendment. Trump and some others have seriously fumbled the messaging on this point. The issue isn't that Pretti had a gun, nor that he had a gun at the protest, but that he had a gun at a protest, obstructed law enforcement (a felony), then resisted arrest. Of course, doing so didn't mean that "he deserved it". Fighting the cops while armed with a firearm was extremely reckless and stupid, but that alone doesn't justify a shooting. Most attacks from the left are (whether honestly or disingenuously) based on only these facts, but ignore the most pertinent fact in play here, which is that cops have rights, too. Among these is the right to defend themselves. If a police officer perceives an imminent threat of lethal force, they are permitted by law to use lethal force in self defense. That is why it was so reckless for Pretti to fight the cops--because it is extremely easy, when fighting someone who is armed with a lethal weapon, to reasonably perceive an imminent threat of lethal force. Pair this with Pretti's aforementioned rapid movement of his right hand toward his hip in the moment before the first shot, and it is not a stretch at all to see this shooting as a justifiable use of force. Tragic, of course, but still legally justified.
> Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about?
2A supporters often spitball about scenarios that might justify a revolution. I've never heard anyone suggest that they would fight for protestors' imagined right to fight cops with total immunity from consequences.
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This is simply not true.
Some people are investigated because they spread lies, insults and threats. Things that would be investigated (and punished) as well, if done "off line".
The freedom of speech does not mean "freedom to harass, threat or insult people".
The oppression of free speech seems to be happening much more in the USA, where you are not allowed to criticize the politics of the ruling party any more.
You should look up the number of lawsuits German politicians dish out for being criticized online. Funded by the tax payer of course.
So you claim that all 12,000 arrests in the UK and all 3,500 arrests in Germany for online speech are justifiable? https://x.com/croucher_miles/status/2010716875190161614?s=46
Except it does mean exactly that if you have money
Deportation of illegal immigrants happened in the previous administrations and nothing like the current chaos unfolded.
I grant that some people protesting against the raids are likely doing that because they don't want illegals to be deported,
but I suspect most of the pushback is against the way this whole thing has been set up and the way agents handled the encounters with protesters so far, leading towards a spiral of distrust and a polarization of the issue.
There seems to be an indication that many of the ICE agents have been insufficiently trained to perform police work in a proper and safe way. and instead behave very aggressively. The abuse of racial profiling is making non-white citizens (including native Americans!) feel unsafe too. To make things worse, there is a loud group of people who are cheering the though guys from the sidelines/armchairs.
People who share those concerns are not necessarily pro-illegal immigration. I know things can be done differently because they have been done differently.
But in this case, one political movement is leveraging the deportation rhetoric to rile up their base, providing another political movement the ammonito to call them tyrannical and riling up their base, which in turn causes the first movement to justify their aggressiveness as counterinsurgence.
This doesn't lead to a good place and it has nothing to do with the fact that the country deserves a sane immigration policy.
The current immigration situation is utterly broken, but it has become such over time (and has many complicated facets) but the idea that this can be fixed in a haste by applying lunt force is the product of a new low point in politics.
This misses the point of how "deportation", snatching of those from communities and decision-making for whom is illegal is actually occurring, and how people are being snatched with disregard to their actual state as a citizen, resident or otherwise of the United States of America.
When facial recognition is said to outrank any other proof, such as a birth certificate, one cannot claim to be operating in good faith when one allows for fallible systems to decide the lives of American citizenry, encourages false imprisonment and allows for violence to be recklessly committed against people who were guilty of no crime at all.
(also, the United States and Canada are alike in their statuses as countries formed of immigrants; we close the door now simply because we feel those coming today are ineducated or don't fit our racial preferences? No different than was done to Chinese people say a hundred years prior.)
Is any law enforcement guaranteed to be exactly correct? No, because every person is fallible, and every system is made up of fallible people. This is why we separate arrest (police) from trial (judge) and judgment (jury), to mitigate those risks.
To malign a system because it is imperfect is to be unrealistic. Surely, we should minimize those harms, but they are not a reason to abdicate our laws.
There's a difference between honest mistakes and gleeful assholery.
These things are not being separated though. Your agents are executing citizens in the street. This is not about illegal immigration at all. It's just straight up oppression.
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FYI, as a center left from a European perspective that is a beautiful picture of just how right-leaning American politics is. The Democrats is such a big tent it contains pretty much the complete political spectrum in Europe, but for the actuall politics they have been doing, at least regarding economics (excluding identity politics) they are pretty solid right / center right from a European perspective.
In what way have we become left leaning?
From my perspective right-leaning economic views have won. We have new public management, we have privatisation, we have death of unions, and we have reduction in wealth and inheritance tax over the board (with some exceptions), and increased inequality.
I would probably argue the opposite, given that Y Combinator is a venture capital firm. This would be more true for Lobsters than here.
(Edit: to go further, it's like... ok, if HN is far-left, what does that make Bluesky? What does that make the Fediverse? It feels almost reductive to compress the range of HN onwards down to "far-left".)
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Yikes - I know that emotions are understandably running hot right now, but you can't attack another HN user like this, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. (The same goes in the other direction, of course - indeed, in all directions.)
I'm sure you know that we ban accounts that break the rules like this. You've been a good HN member for a long time, so I don't want to do that.
The best way I know of to make the moderation point here is the "you may not owe" pattern (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - in this case: you may not owe people who disagree with you on critical political issues better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
>What is it like in the US these days?
Pretty normal unless you're an illegal immigrant. Despite what the media tells you and all your pearl clutching coworkers are told to think by said media.
It's bad, we are living under Hitler 2.0 in every single sense of the word. He admires Hitler and says he keeps Hitler's books by his nightstand.
That said, do not rely on a single or even a few Americans for insight into what is going on, as you might get a wildly different perspective from each one, as a consequence of the billions of dollars put into generational propaganda and subliminal mind control out here. We are a nation divided.
To put things in perspective, US is a massive country. All this news is coming from one tier 3 city. (Roughly speaking LA, NYC etc being tier 1. Seattle, Dallas etc being tier 2)
While being the focus, Minnesota is not the only place it's happening. For example, ICE took at least 15 people in the Los Angeles area today[1].
That article is from a local food publication that has largely shifted to covering all ICE behavior in the greater LA area. It's a good place to get a better picture of the kind of stuff that has just become background noise to the degree that it doesn't make the news elsewhere. People could also throw a few bucks their way if they think documenting this is important.
And I'll point to a single example from 13 hours ago[2] for the "the deporting of illegal immigrants is not oppression" type of people like that other commenter. Just a video of a nameless person, taken who knows where, for who knows what, screaming and crying out. This just doesn't make the news, but it's happening countless times every day all over the country in the name of the American people.
[1] - https://lataco.com/daily-memo-january-27th-border-patrol-att...
Twin cities are 16th largest metro, between Tampa/St. Petersburg and Seattle/Tacoma.
Yeah it’s a slightly blurry line. What metric are you using? I’d say Seattle is way ahead of Minneapolis in terms of economic influence.
Population
> What is it like in the US these days?
For the average American citizen, status quo.
For the scofflaws and illegal immigrants, the realization that accountability for their actions might be right around the corner must be unnerving.
People aren't shooting yet because they know it will turn into a blood bath and should only be used as a last resort. Also as bad as it is in some areas, vast swaths of the US are still only really seeing this in the news. I think the outcome of whats going on in Minnesota will be a sign of whats to come so we won't be waiting long. If citizens start shooting at government employees though, it will be chaos, the US population has had a VERY negative attitude about the government for a long time now.
For anyone downvoting this, I don't see you fighting to the death over this, why do you expect others to do it for you and then complain when they don't? I guarantee many of you would be screaming about terrorism if people were shooting back right now. You can't have it both ways.
i suppose what he means is that the phones of protestors which have signal chat will be investigated.
Assuming they dont have disappearing messages activated, and assuming any protestors willingly unlock their phones.
> willingly unlock their phones
Or they are running any mainstream iPhone or Android phone, they've unlocked the phone at least once since their last reboot, and the police have access to graykey. Not sure what the current state of things is, since we rely on leaked documents, but my take-away from the 2024 leaks was GrapheneOS Before First Unlock (BFU) is the only defense.
I don't think locked[1] GrapheneOS is considered vulnerable for AFU attack anymore: https://www.androidauthority.com/cellebrite-leak-google-pixe...
Notice even unlocked doesn't allow FFS.
[1] assuming standard security settings of course.
Where has there been any allegations iPhone before first unlock has been bypassed?
GrapheneOS isn't quite as secure in the real world. Pixels continue to have baseband and OOBConfig exploits that allow pushing zero interaction updates, or system memory access.
Here's the iPhone spreadsheet from the 2024 leak: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZESd9Zj5HkMZnIjLStS...
It only goes up to iOS 18 since that was the latest version at the time.
Here is an article about the leaks: https://archive.ph/JTLIU
Thanks. That's not really bypassing iPhone before first unlock. It says only 'partial' metadata, so it's likely just looking at encrypted blobs and making guesses just like file recovery tool would on an encrypted drive. So it's a bit of a marketing gimmick to "leak" that document
> The document does not list what exact types of data are included in a “partial” retrieval and Magnet declined to comment on what data is included in one. In 2018, Forbes reported that a partial extraction can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, including file sizes and folder structures.> Pixels continue to have baseband and OOBConfig exploits that allow pushing zero interaction updates, or system memory access.
That is greatly reduced since the releases of the Pixel 9 and 10.
Isn't latest iPhones also have similar security profile on BFU. The latest support table I saw from one of the vendors was also confirming this.
>is the only defense.
Or you know, the 2nd amendment.
Id be willing to bet that ICE would have a much smaller impact if they would be met with bullets instead of cameras. In the end, what ICE is doing doesn't really matter to Trump, as long as MAGA believes that things are being done, even if nothing is being done, he doesn't care.
Never fear, the 2nd amendments days are numbered too. Trump just said 'You can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns' (the 'in' in this context being 'outside')
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-you-cant-have-gu...
They already continue to support him after proposing (twice!) taking people's guns without due process.
Nothing about the 2nd amendment legalizes shooting law enforcement officers.
This has always been the absurdity of the moronic claims of the 2nd amendment being to overthrow government tyranny: You may own the gun legally, but at no point will your actions be legal. If you've decided the government needs to be overthrown, you are already throwing "law" out the window, even if you have a valid argument that the government you are overthrowing has abandoned the constitution.
Why the fuck do you need legal guns to commit treason? Last I checked, most government overthrows don't even involve people armed with private rifles!
If you are overthrowing the government, you will need to take over local police stations. At the moment, you no longer need private arms, and what you are doing isn't legal anyway.
Meanwhile, every single fucking time it has come up, the gun nuts go radio silent when the government kills the right person who happens to own a gun. Every. Single. Time.
It took minutes for the "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" people who raised a million dollars for Kyle Rittenhouse to defend himself for driving to a protest in a different state while armed to the teeth to of course get to shoot someone to turn around and say "Actually bringing a gun to a protest makes you a terrorist and you need to be shot". Minutes. They have also put up GoFundMes for the guy who executed that man.
If you are too scared to stand up to your government without a fucking rifle, you have never been an actual threat to your government, and they know that.
You would think that this makes a difference in the long run of who people vote for, but it won't unfortunately.
For most conservatives, it all comes down to "liberal=bad, conservative=good". They will vote for Trump as long as Trump as seen as conservative.
Fed
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That's a strange take. It also feels like exactly what they are hoping to have happen. Encouraging gun violence is not something condoned, so not sure why you are posting that nonsense. Are you an agitator?
Strange take? Are you kidding me?
The second amendment is literally in the constitution for the EXACT reason where if a governing entity decides to violate the security and freedoms of people, the people have the right to own weapons and organize a militia.
Plus nobody really needs to die. Having enough people point guns at them is going to make them think twice about starting shit. Contrary to popular belief, ICE agents aren't exactly martyrs for the cause. There are already groups of people armed outside protecting others, for this exact reason.
You are the actual fed lmao.
anyone promoting for people to start showing up and shooting at law enforcement, even if it is ICE, is what if not an agitator?
There are already people on X who have infiltrated chats and posted screen captures. Getting the full content of the chats isn't going to be difficult. They have way to many people in them.
Or has biometric login turned on and didn't lock their phone behind a passcode before being arrested.
Unlocking isn't necessary, We've already seen that Apple and Google will turn data over on government requests.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-complies-percent-us-go...
Non-paywalled link?
It wasn’t paywalled for me, BTW.
Unfortunately not everyone in a group chat may be fully vetted, in which case they could be feds collecting "evidence". Some chats may have publicly circulating invite links.
But any judge that doesn't immediately reject such cases on a first-amendment basis is doing the business of an authoritarian dictator. This is fully protected speech and assembly.
> any judge that doesn't immediately reject such cases on a first-amendment basis
If you say something illegal in a chat with a cop in it, or say it in public, I don’t think there are Constitutional issues with the police using that as evidence. (If you didn’t say anything illegal, you have a valid defence.)
Not sure what difference that makes, it's not like the current regime limits their actions to respect constitutional bounds.
Sure. Can you give me an example of something that's illegal to say in a group chat that coordinates legal observers?
> Perhaps if someone is misusing their access to an administrative or law enforcement database to ‘run plates’ and report on who owns the vehicle, this could be unlawful.
But that's not an example of something that would be illegal to say in a chat. It would be an example of something that's illegal to do regardless of the chat.
> Can you give me an example of something that's illegal to say in a group chat that coordinates legal observers?
Actual examples? No. I don’t believe it happened.
Hypothetical examples? Co-ordinating gunning down ICE agents. If the chat stays on topic to “coordinat[ing] legal observers,” there shouldn’t be liability. The risk with open chats is they can go off topic if unmoderated.
"ICE are at (address)" apparently
> Unfortunately not everyone in a group chat may be fully vetted,
Curious how many group chats have unknowingly allowed a well known journalist into their groups.
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> Patel said he got the idea for the investigation from Higby.
This is confirmation that this wasn't being investigated until just now. This is surprising, I would have thought that "how are these people organizing" would have been an obvious thing to look into.
> I would have thought that "how are these people organizing" would have been an obvious thing to look into.
You assume competence. Have you heard (or heard of) Kash Patel?
Why is it so obvious to you to investigate something that is perfectly legal?
> something that is perfectly legal
The goal is to prevent ICE / BP from doing their jobs. Which I rather suspect is not actually legal.
Thinking they're incompetent doesn't change that. Thinking the specific laws they're (nominally) enforcing are evil doesn't change that. Thinking that national borders are fundamentally illegitimate doesn't change that.
Perhaps the FBI had been ignoring this out of incompetence. Perhaps they'd been ignoring it as a form of protest. Either is interesting.
Indeed, as sibling commenter notes, it's not to prevent ICE from doing their jobs. Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP. Observers are there to
1) get the name & some other info from the person being abducted so that their family can be contacted
2) record the encounter so that ICE/CBP has some check on their behavior, or legal action can be taken in the future to prosecute them for violence and destruction of property
3) recover the belongings of the person abducted and ensure family/friends can get these things, as often wallet, cell phone, shoes, coat, and vehicle (even still running) are left behind
4) get a tow truck for any vehicle left behind, preferably from one of the tow services that is towing for free or low cost
4) connect family/friends with legal resources, if needed, or simply let them know that their lawyer needs to get to the Whipple Building ASAP
None of those things are illegal. In some of the small rural towns in Minnesota, there aren't observers there, and the phones/vehicles/wallets of people kidnapped from Walmart are just... left in the parking lot, in the snow. It adds insult to injury to have your phone & wallet gone, your car window smashed in, and a big fee from the municipal towing lot if you're a US citizen who is then released from detainment 12 hours later. And if you're not a US citizen but you have legal status, you want your family to get an attorney working ASAP to ensure you're not flown to Texas -- because if you're flown to Texas, even in error, you need to get back on your own (again without your wallet/phone/etc if those things didn't happen to stick with you).
Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.
> Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP.
As clearly seen in multiple videos, including at least one video of almost every major incident we're supposed to get outraged about, yes, they clearly do.
> Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.
How come the cold weather doesn't justify ICE wearing "masks" which often appear to just be face/neck warmers?
> The goal is to prevent ICE / BP from doing their jobs.
No. The goal is to protest ICE / BP doing their jobs in criminal ways.
The current bias is so large for the administration that most people haven't even clocked that what they are doing is legal
- Don't join giant group chats unless you're Whiskey Pete inviting journalists into a "clean" opsec group.
- Know others very personally or not at all.
- Don't take a phone to any event without it being in a proven good RF blocking bag.. I wished they made a bag that allowed taking pictures and video with audio.
- New people can potentially be liabilities such as crazy, stupid, undercover cops or adversaries, and/or destructive without a care.
- Avoid people who think violence is "the way" because there's rarely a positive or politically-acceptable offramp for it.
- Destruction of property can be effective non-violent resistance in limited circumstances, e.g., The Boston Tea Party, but that's becoming a criminal in the eyes of the current regime and 95% of rebellions fail.
Ah yes, the typical language of peaceful protestors
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Yeah Cam Higby & friends have "infiltrated" the Signal groups. It's not that hard frankly, and most of the chats emphasize that 1) they're unvetted, 2) don't do anything illegal, anywhere, including taking a right on red if the sign is there saying not to 3) don't write anything you don't want read back to you in a court of law. Higby and friends do have "How do you do, Fellow Kids?" energy in those chats.
Here's what I'm interested in: anyone know what Penlink's tools' capabilities actually are? Tangles and WebLoc. Are they as useful as advertised?
Schrödinger's HN story: Is it a tech story (in which case it's uninteresting) or is it a political story (in which case it's against the rules)? It's both.
I’d be curious to know what they plan to charge people with.
Jaywalking, misappropriating funds during a renovation? Whatever the police state wants...
I heard a totally unsubstantiated rumor that the participants were sending (ICE agent) plate numbers to people with NCIC access to run the plates. If that's the case it would be a pretty easy felony charge for all involved.
I have no reason to believe that's true, just what word on the street was they might be charged with.
If you have no reason to believe it's true, and understand the rumor to be unsubstantiated, why bother to spread it?
Because the question was what they might be charged with, not what they did.
Did you expect the government to charge people in good faith? It doesn't matter it if it's true or not, even putting them in the slammer for a long time while awaiting trial and forcing them to hire expensive attorneys is a win.
Several undercover reporters have reported this. They are obviously lying. If the administration confirms the same, they are obviously lying. Who shall we believe then? The NYTimes?
domestic terrorism, of course
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18 U.S.C. § 372 — Conspiracy to impede or injure officer
If two or more persons in any State, Territory, Possession, or District conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof, or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave the place where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or to injure him in his person or property on account of his lawful discharge of the duties of his office, or while engaged in the lawful discharge thereof, or to injure his property so as to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties, each of such persons shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six years, or both.
Federal felony
> by force, intimidation, or threat
You seem to be glossing over the key piece of that statute. Peaceful protest is protected by the first amendment (free speech, right to assembly).
Intimidation, or threat at the very least seems applicable here if you have any idea of what's going on in Minnesota and what these Signal chats are being used for.
This statute defines the conditions where free speech transitions to criminal activity.
You can interpret it however you like.
Blocking law enforcement's vehicles and their person (I saw several protestors put hands on officers), when they are conducting arrests, certainly seems to fit the bill.
If you threaten to kill somebody then follow them around for days at a time, is that intimidation?
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> I've seen pictures of someone with a damaged finger.
The finger was completely removed and pictured separately.
> Could easily have been hurt by their own flashbang devices or caught it in a car door.
I can't fathom either of these explaining what I saw.
The point is to establish that the protest has not been entirely peaceful, which raises the possibility of conspiracy covering non-protected actions. The subthread is about what they plan to charge people with, not about exactly what actually happened and whether it meets legal standards. That's what investigations and trials are for.
Coming soon, treason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e_BbsDgLmI gives a pretty good summary of the possibilities.
The article subhead implies obstruction of justice.
Or, at the very least, what they want to try to convince a grand jury to indict people on.
That's another angle that needs to be discussed more often with respect to Trump's DoJ: if you're impaneled on a grand jury for charges coming out of these investigations, you don't have to give them a bill.
Presumably Seditious Conspiracy, like many people involved in J6. Conspiracy to use force to prevent or delay enforcement of laws.
Terrorism seems to be their default claim if you're against the Trump admin.
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Not voting for them.
They don’t need to if they just shoot them on the street.
I hope they're just looking for foreign influence I'm not sure what you could charge peaceful protestors with that would survive in court.
Just a reminder that we're dealing with propagandists here.
As many have already stated, Signal is overwhelmingly secure. More secure than any other alternative with similar viability here.
If the feds were actually concerned about that, publicly "investigating" Signal chats is a great way to drive activists to less secure alternatives, while also benefiting from scattering activist comms.
Don't want to spoil the fun here. But easy:
Don't write anything that you don't want LEO to read.
The FBI should investigate the murders done by ICE and until done with that, remain silent.
And importantly the DoJ attorneys who would be responsible for investigating g the murders resigned because they were prevented from performing the standard procedure investigation that happens after every single shooting. They were instead directed to investigate the family of the person who was shot:
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/nyt-6-federal-prosecutor...
We are through the looking glass, folks. This will be dropped and ignored like so many other outrages unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
> unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
You can demand answers from Congress, but until a significant portion of the GOP base demands answers, they are just going to ignore your demands. As of now 39% of Americans support the administration. Also, you can't hold SCOTUS responsible, only Congress can.
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> you can't bring a gun to a protest" when yes the 2nd amendment directly allows that.
They conveniently forgot their excuses for Rittenhouse. Guess they all changed their mind and think he should be arrested.
As often happens these days, I’m confused at the hysteria here.
Police messed up and someone got killed. I feel like outrage is warranted if nothing is done about it, but after seeing the videos I’m fairly confident this won’t get swept under the rug. Will we retract our outrage when a conviction is delivered? Is there a reason we expect nothing to come of this?
This is what I don't understand about American authoritarians. Historically speaking, if you try to take away the liberty of Americans, they respond with lethal violence.
Britain tried to tax Americans without government representation, and they started sending the tax man home naked and covered in tar, feathers, and third-degree burns. These stories are then taught to schoolchildren as examples of how Americans demand freedom above all else.
If the powers that be keep doing whatever they want without consequence, eventually there will be consequences, and those consequences very well could be the act of being physically removed from their ivory towers and vivisected in the streets.
According to Urban Dictionary, cat as a noun means:
> an epic creature that will shoot fire at you if you get near it. you can usually find one outside or near/in a house. its main abilities are to chomp and scratch but they can also pounce, shoot lasers out of their eyes, be cute, jump as high as they want, and fly. do not fight one unless you are equipped with extreme power armor and heavy assault cannons. […]
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That's straight up corrupt third world country stuff.
"Sh*thole countries" was projection
Everything is a projection with these people. Including the pedophilia.
How is it corrupt? The DA chose to resign, they weren't forced out.
"Just policy"?
If you boss asks you to do something that is a legitimate request, and you refuse for personal reasons, that's on you.
It is in no way "corruption".
> I have doubt you have the balls t
Reported for personal attack.
It is going to get a lot worse. Trump's eventual goal is to send the military to all Democrat-controlled cities. Back in September Trump gathered military leaders in a room and told them America is under "invasion from within". He said: "This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within."
We went from the "War On Drugs" to the "War On Ourselves".
Right. Meanwhile the military is preparing to deploy... not to the middle east, but to Minnesota.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/us/politics/military-poli...
I see you all over these comments. People were denying it would get as bad as it has already gotten.
If those shooters don't get presidential pardons, they're going to get prosecuted sooner or later. No statute of limitations for murder, right?
Presidential pardons have no impact and their liability for state-law murder charges (though federal seizure of crime scenes and destruction of evidence might, in practice.)
In re Neagle (while, unfortunately, it does not state as clear of a rule as Horiuchi on the standard that should be applied) conducts an expansive facts-based analysis on the question of whether, in fact, the acts performed were done in in the performance of his lawful federal duties (if anything, the implicit standard seems less generous to the federal officer than Horiuchi’s explicit rule, which would allow Supremacy Clause immunity if the agent had an actual and objectively reasonable belief that he acted within his lawful duties, even if, in fact, he did not.)
But, yeah, any state prosecutions (likely especially the first) is going to (1) get removed to federal court, and (2) go through a wringer of federal litigation, likely reaching the Supreme Court, over Supremacy Clause immunity before much substantive happens on anything else.
OTOH, the federal duty at issue in in re Neagle was literally protecting the life of a Supreme Court justice riding circuit, as much as the present Court may have a pro-Trump bias, I wouldn't count on it being as strong of a bias as it had in Neagle.
I'll eat your hat if any of these goons ever see in the inside of a holding cell
That depends, the civil service has a lot of leverage because most of them cannot easily be fired. And POTUS needs the civil service to execute his policy goals so his fellow party members and possibly himself can get re-elected.
Therefore there is considerable leverage for allied servants to form an alliance that more or less offers their allegiance in exchange for non-prosecution. I would expect especially DHS to basically become a non-functional (or even seditious) department if they prosecute those guys and they could purposefully make the president look bad by making his security apparatus look incompetent.
> Therefore there is considerable leverage for allied servants to form an alliance that more or less offers their allegiance in exchange for non-prosecution.
Won't help if the prosecuting sovereignty isn't the one they work for (state vs federal charges.)
Also won't work if the agency is disbanded and they are dismissed en masse before the prosecution happens.
> the civil service has a lot of leverage because most of them cannot easily be fired
Unless, as Doge showed us, you ignore the law, fire them anyway, and the SCOTUS says, "Yeah, whatever."
But pardons only apply to federal crimes… murder is a state offense.
So ... you're saying that this militia as every incentive to overthrow democratie so that they never get prosecuted, right ?
See where this is going ?
Well, they are entirely Presidential pardon proof, but each state usually has its own pardon provisions. Unlikely to benefit ICE agents as a broad class in any of the places where conflicts over their role are currently prominent, though.
They should charge it as a criminal conspiracy and use the state felony murder statute to go after leadership.
They're wearing masks. Have they been identified?
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The person in front said "I've got the gun, I've got the gun", and I can tell that quite clearly in the videos.
That means there is an even better version that what I saw and heard which means normies will figure out fairly quick this was not malicious intent. Perhaps malicious incompetency but certainly not an intentional execution.
I just want to highlight a reason why you may feel that this level of unrest is meant to "radicalize people".
I would accept that if these were just protesters, stood at the side of the road holding up signs but a number of them are far from it. They have formed military squads, dox agents and attack them at home and in their personal vehicles, coordinate their attacks between multiple groups of "vetted" agitators. They are tracking their personal vehicles and their family members. They are blocking traffic and forcing people out of their cars. At best this is an insurgency being coordinated from out-of-state agitators and at the behest of the state governor. They are egging people on to break numerous laws, obstruct federal agents, throw bricks at agents or anyone they think is an agent, use bull-horns at full volume in the ears of anyone supporting the agents. I could go on for hours regarding all the illegal shenanigans. So yeah these are people trying to radicalize others and trying to get people hurt or killed. This is primarily occurring in sanctuary cities where the government is actively encouraging their citizens to attack federal agents. That is not even close to anything that resembles protesting and is not anywhere near a protected right.
I also blame President Trump for not invoking the insurrection act and curtailing this very early on.
Circling back to this, the Minnesota state police moved in and gave the violent rioters a few minutes to disperse. Those that did not have been rounded up, arrested and jailed. I have no doubt they will be released in a matter of hours but it should be peaceful for a few hours at least and the origin of these people will be documented and possibly how much some of them were paid.
congress isn't going to do anything. All it would take is about 20 republican sentors to bring this shit to a halt. They are not doing anything, they all have blood on their hands.
At this point I think the only thing that will work is organizing a month where the nation stops spending money and going to work.
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imagine reporting comments on HN because you're butthurt your political idol raped children
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law” ― Oscar R. Benavides
The police (FBI and ICE included) are never your friends. They work to protect the rich and powerful and not us.
They work to protect the government. Now, for peasants there isn't much of a distinction, but the rich and powerful would do well to remember it.
Cynical responses like this are meant to make the speaker sound smart, but actually what you're doing is making further tyranny more likely, because you're deliberately overlooking that-- whatever the existing problems with the FBI-- there is a significant difference between their behavior now and their behavior before.
Not even bothering to run the established investigation playbook when law enforcement kills a civilian is a major departure, and one worth noticing. But if all you do is go "same old same old", then you can safely lean back in your chair and do nothing as the problem worsens, while calling yourself so much smarter and more insightful than the people around you.
I would disagree to a certain extent. "Law enforcement is not your friend" is a good mindset as a citizen. You should never hand them information without a lawyer and you should always push for oversight.
I agree that the "same at it ever was and always will be" attitude isn't great. It's defeatist and I choose not to live my life that way, even if it would be much easier mentally.
I think part of the reason I see this attitude so often is that, especially since 9/11, a large portion of the US population has decided that the police and military are infallible and should be trusted completely, so any large-scale attempt at reform runs into these unwavering supporters (and, in the case of the police, their unions).
I won't disagree that the people inside the system are making it worse but the system is currently setup to incentivize bad behavior.
- Overly broad qualified immunity
- The power of the police unions
- Lawsuit settlements coming out of public funds
- Collusion between prosecutors' and the police
These are all issues that need to be resolved to restore the sanity in policing.
At the federal level, the FBI needs to be reigned in...somehow. They all to often work outside the bounds of their defined role and powers. This isn't a new problem and one could argue it has been an issue since the beginning.
Furthermore, going back as far as I remember, if you take part in a protest the police personally disagree with they will use violence against you regardless of your occupation.
Nothing cynical, that’s just the truth. They’re called law enforcement for a reason, not emergency hugs.
Whether they behave like civilized people or like thugs should be besides the point regardless of your political leaning in the matter of the system. Naturally from a basic human perspective civilized law enforcement is much more preferable than the alternative, but they aren’t your friends!
The only significant difference is that law enforcement is treating white people the way they've always treated everyone else. Which is a difference in degree, but not character.
ICE just hired 12000 Ruby Ridge types as their untrained SA brownshirts. It is inevitable that they have no understanding of basic civics and rage against lawful protestors they see as the enemy.
The irony is that Ruby Ridge and Waco were big rallying points for the “patriot” right when it was precisely this mentality that led to those events.
Now a lot of those same patriot right types are cheering this on if not enlisting.
Considerable amount of cops are white nationalists themselves.
I guess nothing matters and there's no point to expecting any sort of justice from the system. And at least now I can laugh at those other people being hurt. (</s>)
By before, what do you mean? COINTELPRO?
COINTELPRO included assassinations. They kind of didn't stop there either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201130225/http://www.nytime...
They drugged and executed Fred Hampton and no one suffered any consequences for that as far as I know.
Software engineers are definitely among the class of people protected by the police
Depends on the race of the engineer. If you're gay or live in a blue city/state then you also lose your protection
911 informs the cops of your sexual preferences when they dispatch them?
Sorta, if you live in a blue city—so really just a city at this point-then it wraps around a small amount and your local police are, at least when it comes to this crap, largely on your side. ICE is making huge messes and leaving it to the local PD to clean it up which is not exactly endearing. Nobody likes when a bunch of people come in and start pissing in your Cheerios. Especially when those Cheerios are "rebuilding trust with your local community."
Have any of you tried talking to a police officer in real life? If you're just polite to them they treat you like they're your private protection force.
Moreso in blue cities, I have no idea what point you're making there other than crime you've seen on TV is scary.
It’s conditional on whether you are affirming the opinions of your employer or oppositional
I'll be sure to bring my mechanical keyboard and secondary vertical monitor out in public so they'll know I'm one of the good ones.
There is no protected class from malevolent government. Everyone from oligarchs down to the have nots can be targets. Let's not keep relearning that lesson.
Engineers are just workers
They will, one day. No statute of limitations on murder.
Biology is definitely a limit.
The lack of a legal limit means they are never safe from justice catching up, even decades later. This lawless administration won't last. Some perpetrators may die of natural causes before that point, but 2026 and 2028 elections aren't far away.
When the crime is murdering people in cold blood, I will take nailing the “lowliest of perpetrators” (e.g. cold blooded murderers) to the fucking wall.
Yes, I hope future administrators go up and down the chain of command looking at everyone who was involved in the cover-up, and charges them with conspiracy to commit murder, but a future Democratic administration will at least identify and prosecute the murderers themselves. While Republican administrations will conceal the identity of the killers and continue to have them out on the streets
No. They should investigate both.
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In case anyone thinks you're kidding, Kash Patel's embarssing sychophancy includes publishing a election denial children's "book" portraying Trump as a king and himself as a hero.
51 senators voted to confirm this unqualified moron to lead the top law enforcement agency.
It's literally not a joke, probably the most egregious example of a completely unqualified doormat that will do whatever dear leader wants. It's also by design, no roadblocks for the fanta menace.
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Stop acting like we're talking about two kids who did an oopsie
Small town cops in third world countries are more professional than any of these ICE clowns, these mistakes happened because they keep hiring the lowest if the low, both in term of intelect and morality
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Sounds like something for an investigation to figure out - wonder why they are fighting that so hard. Also sure sounds like a lot of victim blaming considering he died without ever doing anything warranting his death.
Are we still doing the "he was carrying" thing. Like for real?
Yet, he was. Are there any points in the list that aren't correct. ("Like for real?")
I don't. But if your point was that carrying a gun doesn't matter, then why carry one at all?
The "bystander" was walking along with the officers blowing a whistle, and the guy that got between that bystander ("bystander") carried a gun. I don't think it's wise to interfere with police work by walking with them and doing that whistle thing and it's neither wise to bring a gun into this situation.
I'm sure the officers to whom this happened aren't happy either as this turned out, but I don't think they are the the only ones to blame.
Similar with the woman who was shot: should you be doing any police getaways or even driving towards any police officer?
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It's a good thing FBI has capacity to do more than one thing at a time. Also Trump agreed to allow MNPD to handle the wrongful death investigation.
Two things can be true: the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East, and ICE agents wrongfully killed a man.
> the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East
This is a horrifying and very unpariortic thing to say about people who are trying to prevent their daycares from being tear bombed, prevent masked thugs from beating detained law-abiding citizens before releasing them without charges, from masked thugs killing law-abiding people for exercising basic rights.
King George would have used that language. We sent him the Declaration of Independence, and the list of wrongs in that document is mostly relevant again today.
If you are framing this as insurgency, I place my bet on the strong people fighting bullets with mere whistles and cameras, as they are already coming out on top. If they ever resort to a fraction of the violence that the masked thugs are already using, they will not lose.
Their daycares, or their "daycares"? Not clear which one you mean.
I was not aware of that fake daycare propaganda until someone else exposed its meaning later in the thread.
As a parent, you should know that believing this obviously false propaganda requires both 1) a weird and overly specific interest in daycares, and 2) not enough normal healthy exposure to kids to understand what daycares don't let weird freaks come inspect the children. Namely, repeating this obvious lie gives off pedo vibes, and I would never let you near my children after hearing you gobble up that propaganda uncritically and then even going so far as to spread it. Ick
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Not a MN resident, but both the daycare my child attended before starting school and every daycare in my area have a combination of tinted/obscured windows and strict access control, even for parents (eg: a parent isn't allowed to make a "surprise inspection" without a court order).
If anything, I'd be suspicious of (and not send my child to) any daycare that _didn't_ have those security features.
Ah yes, Tim isn't running again because there is no truth to it. My god. Some of you are so obsessed with the "narrative" that you'll look at the sun and say it's night.
oh good, people on Hacker News Dot Com are taking Nick Shirley at face value.
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They're using IEDs and suicide bombings???
>I don't what you are talking about but it's nonsense and offensive
This just reads as "I don't know whether you're on Other Team.. but, I'll assume you are, here goes:"
Trump is morally obligated to deport felon illegals to protect americans. 70 million plus americans voted for it. Trump can't give up because a few thousand people are playing "im not touching you" with ICE.
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Yes because the US was famously the good guy in its forays into the middle east.
I love this example because it demonstrates like 5 different levels of ignorance about American politics and foreign relations, plus a good helping of propaganda.
You're projecting a values claim on the American wars in the middle east on me that I didn't make. It's pretty clear that the ME wars were all around bad and evil.
It doesn't change the organization and tactics used to identify targets are the same methods and strategies used by insurgent groups to select targets and attack. AQI was very sophisticated for the technology they had. Their warriors were brave, cunning, and true believers with efficacious systems for what was available to them.
Twenty years of that, plus the rest of the middle east has now made it particularity common knowledge how to run insurgency cells worldwide. This combined with American expertise brought back and with people legally aiding these groups in setting up their C2 structures with what is effective and what works is no surprise.
This investigation should be no surprise to anyone. They use these techniques because they work. They are so effective at target acquisition, monitoring, and selective engagement that if they flipped from their current tactics to more violent ones it would be a large casualty event.
You have an occupation force killing bystanders in your streets. Resistance is exactly what is needed.
"bystanders"
What's needed is MNPD sharing their data around the criminal illegal aliens with ICE so that they can execute the deportation orders that have already been issued by judges.
The structure of your message implies you are not American. DHS posts the people they deport here:
It's really hard to go down that list and say "yeah i'd rather have these people here than have ICE deporting people".
I'm guessing they would be 70 actual undocumented immigrants with actual criminal records then?
Not "brown looking" native americans or "foreign looking" US citizens that have been incorrectly identified and dragged without warrents from their homes and families barely dressed into the snow?
The people you don't like are always guilty, right? Two people are accidentally killed, somewhat due to their own actions, but do you this can mean nothing else than "oppression".
Equating civil resistance, even in heated forms like disrupting raids or blocking roads, with decades‑long insurgencies that involved organized armed groups, territorial control, foreign combatants, and protracted guerrilla campaigns is like comparing a neighborhood disagreement over lawn care to Napoleon invading Russia.
Like i've said over and over, the tactics used are the distilled what works from those insurgencies honed over decades. They are incredibly effective. The network that was built (several max signal chats, organized territory, labor specialization) has essentially created an effective targeting mechanism.
This isn't a bunch of people organically protesting, this is an organized system designed to "target" ICE agents. The only difference is the payload delivery between physical disruption vs weapon based attacks.
So what's the supposed goal of this "targeting" of ICE agents? Because that's a key to the insurgency vs protest thing.
We have chats, organized territory and labor specialization in a company I work for, too. It doesn't say anything by itself. It's just describing a means of human cooperation. Goal is to write software. You can have organized protest movement too. Unless the goal is to overthrow governing authority, or whatnot, it's not insurgency.
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> agreed to allow
pardon my ignorance, but why would that be up to your President?
Not a lawyer, but there's a lot of back and forth around jurisdiction between local and federal enforcement. If the President directs the DoJ to not fight to own the investigation over local, then it is up to the Executive Branch.
Both can be true, but only one is.
They might not have the capacity to do more considering they still need to redact the rest of the epstein files that show their president is a child trafficking pedophile
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They are running communications rings geographically distributed across the city via Signal. They organize into specialized roles for identifying suspected agents (spotters), tailing them, and moving to contact with ICE. They use the ARMY SALUTE[0][1] method to handle their reports.
Anyone who ran convoys in the Middle East, patrolled, or did intel around it will know this playbook. The resistance is impressive because it's taken lessons learned from observing the US Military overseas dealing with insurgencies.
0 - https://www.usainscom.army.mil/iSALUTE/iSALUTEFORM/ 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHIPEVj0pRo
It's more like Minneapolis has been "chosen" as the battle point by people opposed to Trump in every step. It's the same person leading deportations as under Obama, they deport less than Obama did, yet they have been demonized almost immediately after the Trump administration took over. Why?
During the Obama administration, state and local LEO worked with ICE to deport. Now they are directed not to. Without that protection and cooperation from local officers, it becomes significantly harder and more dangerous to execute these operations. So they put masks on because the local agitators are doxxing them, threatening their families, and making life unsafe for the agents.
So now we have this lack of cooperation from local government that creates unsafe and dangerous operating conditions for ICE. What are they supposed to do? Not enforce the law because the local government says no? We already fought a war about Federal power versus state power. Heck, Obama (whom i voted for 2x) sued Arizona (Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387) over supremacy of the Federal Government with respect to immigration.
There would be no problems if Minneapolis and Minnesota leadership reacted the way other cities like Memphis did. Instead they've explicitly, or tacitly, endorsed this escalating resistance movement. I can't imagine ever putting my hands on a LEO and expecting it to go well, yet they do it freely. Officers are only human, and day-in day-out of this, combined with very real actionable threats against your life, and family life are only going to create more tensions and more mistakes.
This is no invasion hostile force, this is a chosen focal point to challenge the will and ability of this administration to enforce the democratically made laws.
You're missing the forest for the trees here. The network and techniques used here are the same, but even more refined and tech enabled, of those insurgency groups. The power is the network of people in their specialized roles that can quickly target the enemy (ICE) and deliver a payload (obstruction).
The FBI has a long history of attempting to infiltrate and destabilize these groups. In the early 2010s there was a push to infiltrate right leaning groups. They especially called out in their published documents disgruntled veterans returning from the wars and unhappy with leadership noting a worry they would use the skills picked up at war at home.
It's absolutely no surprise that the FBI would investigate this behavior.
Interesting, this may result in showing how secure signal really is.
https://www.phreeli.com/ lets people use phones without revealing identity.
Not sure what the point of the service is. Given that it's more expensive than other MVNOs, and isn't even more private. You can still buy prepaid SIMs in store with cash, so it's harder to get more private than that. Not to mention this company asks for your zip+4 code (which identifies down to a specific street), and information for E-911. It's basically like Trump Mobile but for people who care about "privacy".
I was unaware that you could buy a SIM with cash and no private data collected. I thought they had KYC laws like prepaid cash cards.
>I thought they had KYC laws like prepaid cash cards.
You don't. You could even order sim cards off ebay/amazon if you wanted to, which definitely doesn't have any KYC.
Clearly there is no point in it for you. The stores would ID you. As for the nine digit zip, I don't think they validate it. Your anti-privacy agenda is crystal clear.
>The stores would ID you
Source?
>As for the nine digit zip, I don't think they validate it.
Why collect it then? Imagine having a service promising "lets people use phones without revealing identity" but for whatever reason asks for a bunch of info, then brushes it aside with "yeah but you can fill in fake information so it's fine".
>Your anti-privacy agenda is crystal clear.
Your inability to take any criticism without resorting to personal attacks is crystal clear.
The answer to that question is so obvious that anyone raising it must necessarily be doing it in extremely bad faith. It's because the government mandates 911 service, and that the 911 service must be given the user's primary "location" when required. Your "criticism" is hereby redirected at yourself.
Can prepaid eSIMs be used anonymously?
Yes, but it's harder than just buying an esim from silent.link (or whatever) and installing it. The biggest issue is that phones have IMEIs that you can't change, so even with an esim you bought "anonymously", that won't do you any good if you install it to your iPhone that's linked to you in some way, eg. bought in Apple store with your credit card, inserted another SIM/esim that has your billing information, or simply the phone has pinged cell towers near your home/work for an extended amount of time.
For max privacy, remember to buy the phone anonymously as well. Be cognizant of links to non-anonymous IPs, emails, and identities.
They're going to give this more scrutiny than they did to Hegseth leaking sensitive government information.
Why? That's unequivocally constitutionally protected speech. Why is our tax money being wasted on this?
To intimidate. They're probably quite aware they'll lose in court. But in the mean time they might discourage some folks from turning out on the street.
Are you under the impression that the current administration cares about what the law says?
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"
They're "investigating", presumably with data gleaned from arrests and CIs; you have a right to speech, and a right not to be prosecuted for speech, but a much, much narrower right not to be "investigated", collapsing to ~epsilon when the investigation involves data the FBI already has.
Yeah whenever people say “the first amendment is not a freedom from consequences” it is only a freedom from certain consequences (and that freedom only goes as far as the government is willing to protect it). It is a freedom from being convicted. They can still arrest you, you can still spend time in jail, prosecutors can even file charges. A court is supposed to throw those charges out. And in extreme cases you can be convicted and sent to prison for years before SCOTUS rules.
Nobody has been charged.
I think GP is speaking generally, not with regard to this situation specifically; obviously people have been charged for constitutionally-protected speech before.
No. According to the latest reports, while searching for ICE vehicles, the protesters are unlawfully scanning license plates, which strongly suggests they are receiving insider help.
There is nothing unlawful about scanning license plates. You are allowed to photograph them in the same way you are allowed to stand around writing them into a notebook if that activity is your idea of fun. Where do people get these ideas?!
Why would that even be necessary? They are almost certainly just contributing confirmed ICE plate numbers to an Excel file and then checking against it. Low tech and simple. This “criminal insider” angle is just building a bogeyman.
"Unlawfully scanning license plates"? What does that even mean?
Like searching a vehicle database? That's available to all sorts of people, like auto body repair shops.
Taking a photo of a license plate? Nothing illegal about that.
Journalists doing ride alongs have already identified the system and it doesn't really on "restricted databases", they rely on observation and multiple attestation. In any case, there are indeed commercial services for looking up license plate data, and they rely on watching the notices that are published when you register your vehicle. It's the same reason why you receive all sorts of scammy warranty "notices" when you buy a car.
In fact the first clue that they look for is having Illinois Permanent plates because that is a strong indicator that they are using rental vehicles. That doesn't take a database, it's just a strong signal that can be confirmed by other evidence.
If that was what you meant, you should have said that. Do you have any actual evidence this is happening, or are you just confusing possibility with probability?
> through law-enforcement/ALPR systems
Were they doing that? I haven't read the article, that's why I'm asking.
There is no evidence of this at all.
Can you rule out the much less technically advanced explanation that this information was crowdsourced? And people are simply observing the license plates that are plainly displayed?
Frankly I don’t think it should have to come to license plate numbers. In a free society law enforcement should clearly identify themselves as such. We should not need secret police.
What the law is, is a question for lawyers. What the law should be is a question for the people.
For example, a lot of people thought it was wrong that federal agents could cover their faces. Sacramento agreed. Now there is a law preventing it.
When has the constitution mattered to this administration?
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No, they haven’t. This kind of advocacy crosses from lazy nihilism to negligence.
> > > Why is our tax money being wasted on this?
> > The fascists won. That’s why?
> No, they haven’t.
Yes, they did, that’s why they are able to use the executive branch of the federal government to enforce their wishes at the moment, with virtually no constraint yet from the legislative branch, and no significant consequences yet for ignoring contrary orders from the judicial branch.
They may lose at some point in the future, but something that might happen in the future is irrelevant to the question of why what is happening now is happening, and it is happening because they won. Unambiguously.
Impeached and replaced with someone just as bad. This just happened with Tom Homan getting Bongino's spot. No one is being prosecuted for the murders, and in fact at least one investigator has quit their career position in the FBI for being asked to bury it.
I'm not seeing a whole lot of meaningful checks.
They inarguably won the last election and control 2 branches of government.
I'm not arguing they've won forever, but having the executive branch and a majority (albiet not a an opposition-proof supermajority) in the legislative branch is significant. I would say MAGA is well represented at the state level also.
I hope the midterms go smoothly and the GOP loses heavily at the polls and legislative power changes hands in January, but I'm not 100% confident of that any more.
I should’ve clarified. They won the 2024 election. And the democrats are controlled opposition who take money from fascists. For all intents and purposes they have won. That may not be a permanent state of affairs.
> I don't think it makes sense to call winners and losers before the battle is anywhere close to being over.
I don't think it makes sense to reject an explanation of current events grounded in a battle that is clearly over having been won and the victor using the ground they’ve gained to produce the events being discussed merelt because the broader war isn’t over and that victor may potentially lose some subsequent battle.
Given that Newsom was on a podcast just last week caving to even the slightest pushback, I wouldn't count on him to be bombastic to anyone. He's 100% optics-driven-cowardice.
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i think it sets the framing that beating them back is from a losing position rather than equal.
if you want the fascists to un-win, you need to treat the world as it is: the fascists are ascendent.
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Because too many people dismissed the claims that electing Trump would lead to a fascist administration as alarmist. Turns out he meant every word he said during his campaign.
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Yes - very, very dumb people did vote for him.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is typically not included in protected speech. Whether you think that's happening here will depend mostly on what side you take, I suspect.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Are you pro or against this?
18 U.S.C. § 372 - Conspiring to impede or interfere with a federal officer
Freedom of expression does not include freedom from prosecution for real crimes.
Interesting. Donald Trump would be a criminal under this rule because Jan6.
The statute defines a crime that is distinguishable from peaceful protest/1A. You are free to interpret that however you like in relation to what is occurring.
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You can refer to what you like, but we have seen the actions of protesters thus far on video.
Interesting that there would be people on a "side" that think there was a conspiracy to commit a crime. What crime?
Interference with a law enforcement investigation?
It's a crime.
What do you have against crime?
Nonviolent political action is often criminalized.
18 U.S.C. § 372 - Conspiring to impede or interfere with a federal officer
> This refers to physical impediments. Spreading legal information is not an impediment, it is free speech.
Yes, but physical impediments are physical impediments. The protesters have been repeatedly seen to impede, or attempt to impede, ICE physically.
In this case conspiracy is using communication to coordinate illegal impediment.
In the fascist's mind, anything that isn't supporting Dear Leader's vision of "greatness" is a crime.
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We already know that "doxxing" on its own is not a crime, and moreover that [non-undercover] federal agents are not entitled to keep their identities secret.
We also know that legal observation and making noise does not constitute interference.
So those may be their stated reasons, but they will not hold up in court.
Federal felony, not free speech.
18 U.S.C. § 372 - Conspiring to impede or interfere with a federal officer
There's been lots of legal writing pointing out these statutes basically refer to impeding an officer by threat or physical force, which that statute you cite states. It doesn't refer to anything about providing food to someone who is fearing for their lives and won't leave the home, or communicating about the publicly observed whereabouts of law enforcement.
"molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties"
The explicit coordination of things like: vehicle blocking, personnel blocking, personnel removal, disruptive distraction could clearly qualify.
How the courts choose to interpret & prosecute is up to them.
Are these federal officers? They’re men in masks with camo and body armor kidnapping people off the streets and refusing to show identification beyond a patch that says “ICE”.
That is who is alleged to be impeded.
Yes, they are federal officers. There is no pattern of mass kidnappings by impersonators occurring here.
Interpreting masked officers in tactical gear as kidnappers, or claiming that a patch saying “ICE” is insufficient identification, is not a legally valid basis for suspicion or resistance.
Insurrection is a choice with consequences
Sure, but you should read what "impede" and "interfere" mean both in the regs and court precedent. Following ICE agents around is neither impeding or interfering by current federal court definitions. But yeah... that can change quickly.
“Free speech” is a concept not a law. The first amendment protects certain types of speech. Whether something is free speech or not does not depend on the US government’s opinion or the Chinese government or your mother in law.
Publishing locations alone is not conspiracy to commit a crime. If ICE is impeded as a result of this information, that’s not enough. Conspiracy requires the government to prove that multiple people intended to impede them.
Which is probably the easiest thing ever to prove, since people are openly trying to impede them
Coordinating roadblocks, "dearrests", warning the subjects of law enforcement operations, and intentionally causing the maximum amount of noise in neighborhoods neighborhood are not things you will be able to get a federal judge to characterize as "constitutionally protected speech".
The “arrests” are being done in a deeply unconstitutional way. Acting to uphold the constitution is beyond speech, it’s a duty of all americans.
Actually... making noise in a neighborhood is constitutionally protected speech (as I have learned when my neighbors crank the sub-par disco up to 11.)
> “You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way”
Remember when words, at least usually, meant things?
For real, if you're legitimately worried about your officers being legally entrapped, you've got some really untrustworthy officers.
This sounds like IMAX level projection
I remember a time when people were better at lying, at least.
The FBI should investigate the first item in the Bill of Rights.
How many rights can Trump trample in one year? This is a big deal. I realize most of the problems started with the patriot act (most members of congress are culpable for that). We should all have zero tolerance for the erosion of our rights, zero tolerance for fake emergencies!
Osama bin Laden won.
Couple of minor nits:
1. Some rando on X saying "OMG! I infiltrated a lefty signal group" doesn't mean said rando actually did infiltrate a signal group.
2. Signal was not the app Hegseth, et al. used. They used TM SGNL, which is a fork of Signal. But that's a minor nit.
3. Encryption is not the same thing as authentication. And authentication is somewhat meaningless if you let everyone into your encrypted group chat.
Anyone organizing your neighborhood and events keep inner circle chats to only people you have personally vetted and use a new group chat for every event/topic and delete the groups for past events.
Be mindful of what you share in a big group chat where you don’t know everyone
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I’ve never seen a set of voluntary fall guys like Noem, Patel and Miller. (And Hegseth for when a military operation fails.)
Every one is a potential fall guy except the King. First sign you're a liability and under the bus you go. And unless you're on Truth Social you're usually the last to know.
Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him. He's the most hard-core fascist in the bunch.
I don't know if I'd classify Noem as a patsy or fall gal, either.
When you mention an anecdote about shooting a hunting dog in your autobiography, that shows something beyond just being a "true believer" or stooge. That is willingly pointing out that you are willing to act out your lack of empathy through violence towards an animal.
I'm not a clinician (and haven't met Noem) but that just seems to me to be something indicative of a personality disorder.
Noem strikes me as a loyalist and a team player through and through, so probably a fall gal.
Miller is different. He has his own agenda, a lot of which has becomes trumps agenda. But trumps agenda changing does not change what Miller’s agenda is.
From the outside it seems like he is so far gone that his inner circle is actually making all the decisions now.
Honestly Miller strikes me different. It’s not coincidence he’s survived so long.
He’s not an idiot. He knows how much damage he can absorb and how to position himself to not take more than that. He never positions himself as the implementation person who will take the hits. He’s the idea guy, and the manipulator/cheerleader. He doesn’t seem to expect trump to take care of him for his loyalty, so he doesn’t position himself to require it.
I think ultimately he won’t be thrown under the bus because his relationship with Trump is mutually beneficial, and they both see it as transactional. For both of them, the other is a means to an end. Soul mates in hell I guess.
She's complaining (via 'sources') that she's 'being hung to try' for parroting Stephen Miller's approved line, so I have a hunch she'll bite their ankles on the way out.
She's an opportunist. For someone like her to be nationally relevant they have to latch onto MAGA and embrace the crazy. See MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz.
To me, those people you list are absolutely opportunists, but there's just something different about Noem. Like they're hedonists who are engaging in a grift and know that they have to sling arrows that will own the libs in order to keep the gravy train rolling. MTG seems to have, at least for a while a few months ago, found her limit on what she'll put up with. Gaetz had at least enough shame/self-awareness to realize that his continued career was untenable at the time he was being considered for AG. Boebert's the girl who told your science teacher to go fuck himself when he caught her smoking behind the high school gym with her age-inappropriate boyfriend.
Maybe I'm just really hung up on the dog thing, but that is the crux of it. There's basically no one who hears a story of shooting a dog for misbehaving and thinks, "yeah, that'll show the libs". That's not a story out of a politician's biography as much as it is a story out of a book profiling a serial killer's childhood.
71% of American households have pets [0] and there's a good chance that those who don't have had at least one in the past. There was absolutely no benefit to including that in the book, and I'd be stunned if the publisher didn't at least try to talk her out of putting it in there, given her political ambitions. If they didn't try to get it cut, they didn't do their jobs; if she ignored them, then she really does display a tendency to take pride in behavior that is recognized across the political spectrum in American society as cruel and antisocial.
She genuinely gives me the creeps.
[0] https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/pet-ownership-sta...
That's because miller is the only "smart" one to never defy trump. Of course, that means being his lap dog, but that's the position he chose.
> Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him
He’s going to jail in a way Trump isn’t. That’s ultimately a fall guy.
I no longer have any reason to think that justice will prevail.
A lot of comments that don't go along the liberal hivemind are being downvoted and flagged, even though they don't break hacker news rules. If this community can not hear opposing opinions, then let's just ban political and politically charged news from being shared and discussed here.
Can I suggest that using the term "liberal hivemind" is really never going to help your case no matter what your "opposing opinion" is?
Ah, yes, that liberal hivemind saying that first amendment rights are a thing and that mild resistance is not grounds for summary execution. Classic liberal hivemind.
> “As soon as Higby put that post out, I opened an investigation on it,”
So when a right wing 'reporter' highlights people are doing things within their legal right, there's an investigation straight away.
But they can release the Epstien files when the victims themselves are asking them to.
> if that leads to a break in the federal statute or a violation of some law, then we are going to arrest people
That's not how the justice system works, you can't just go on fishing expeditions to find a crime.
Perspective from Central Europe (Austria): I can tell you that essentially nobody here has any doubt that bad faith is at play.
Our mainstream news outlets are openly calling the "official" versions from the Trump administration what they are – lies. The video evidence is clear to anyone watching: this was murder. No amount of spin changes what the footage shows.
As citizens of a country that knows firsthand how fascism begins, we recognize the patterns: the brazen lying in the face of obvious evidence, the dehumanization, the paramilitarized enforcement without accountability. We've seen this playbook before.
What Americans might not fully grasp is how catastrophically the US has damaged its standing abroad. The sentiment here has shifted from "trusted ally" to "unreliable partner we need to become independent from as quickly as possible." The only thing most Europeans still find relevant about the US at this point is Wall Street.
The fact that the FBI is investigating citizens documenting government violence rather than the government agents committing violence tells you everything about where this is heading.
Look, there’s little I can do about my government. Maybe I can help you fight yours? They can’t harm me and you can bet I’m not visiting.
Can we help somehow?
I'm convinced all this talk around Signal, including Hegseths fuckup, is to discourage "normies" (for lack of a better term) from using it. Even in this very HN thread, where you'd expect technical nuance, there are people spreading FUD around the phone number requirement as if that'd be your downfall... a timestamp and a phone number? How would that get someone convicted in court?
They don't have to get a conviction if they know your address and have a gun.
So more nonsense. How about tracking down the murderer first.
I can't believe there are so many boot licking fascist-lovers on hacker news. ICE are executing Americans on the streets and a bunch of people here are defending that. The US is cooked.
Maybe your understanding of things is wrong? Maybe the information you are getting on the situation is misleading?
I am a democrat who does support ICE. If there are any issues, as there are given the numbers, they should be investigated. There have been many instances where an “execution” is claimed but they, the agents, were reasonable to assume imminent harm and self defense.
Are you capable of accurately describing the other sides argument?
your comment will surely help!
an old lady and a fucking nurse shot by goons in masks and tactical gear... and they are labelling who as terrorists??? ffs america
Url changed from https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/kash-patel-..., which points to this.
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Yeah! Signal has nothing to do with technology. The government trying to snoop on a private E2EE service is not worth discussion.
> trying to snoop on a private E2EE service
They are not trying to break encryption. They got a tip-off from a private citizen who got past vetting and infiltrated the group.
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Many people on hacker news have a reason to care about the united states government's position on signal and their evolving efforts relating to civil rights.
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Sounds good, until you realize that they've now murdered two peaceful protesters, who they post facto smear as terrorists to justify their murder.
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How is a history of constitutional violations not on topic?
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That's not what happened. Watch the video. What you'll see is an undertrained bully with no accountability who was looking for an excuse to use violence. That's why the victim was shot from the side, and why the administration refuses to allow a serious investigation.
putting them at risk by trying to dodge them? What?
"fucking bitch" right?
He just misspoke slightly. What he meant to say:
"What we will defend: using chaos, riots, and volatility as cover to escalate violence against peaceful protesters."
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Why is it so hard for someone like Trump to admit that a mistake was made by one of his agents, put him in jail and leave Minnesota alone at least for a while? It was predictable that things would get worse if he didn't back off and tell the truth.
I suspect they're going to find it challenging to turn protected speech into something prosecutable like obstruction - assuming activists exercise even a modicum of care in their wording. Seems like just another intimidation tactic but in doing that, they've also given a heads-up to their targets.
For all the complaints about the previous DOJ, one thing nobody ever argued was that they weren't intending to get convictions. They only brought cases they thought they could win.
To see DOJ use its power the way we've seen (and I know the original story here is only with FBI at this point), it makes me think there should be some equivalent of anti-SLAPP laws but aimed at federal prosecutions. Some way to fast track baseless charges that will obviously never result in anything and that are just meant to either (a) punish someone into paying a ton of lawyer fees, (b) to intimidate others, or (c) grab some short-term headlines.
Considering ICE is executing people in the streets and were already breaking laws before this something little like free speech won’t help
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Your causality is reversed.
The dude was literally just standing there on a public sidewalk with his hands up. He never initiated the altercation or otherwise impeded any lawful investigation.
The agent chose to initiate the altercation during which the victim was pepper sprayed, pinned to the ground by six people, disarmed, and then shot ten times.
Not what happened.
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Congrats on being able to recount the official version of events.
She was stopped by the ICE pigs and the pig who was “in front” literally walked in front of the car and wouldn’t have been in the way even had she driven off as he was on her front left and she had her wheels turned all the way to right.
Only one having bad faith are you MAGA clowns
Three letter agencies do three letter agency things
Yep
People need to investigate the FBI. They would be shocked at their crimes. The recent Epstein news comes to mind but that is only the smallest tip of it.
Always use encryption for anything. Encrypted messengers are great, but I would never trust Signal. It requires phone numbers to register among other issues, has intelligence funding from places such as the OTF, and their dev asset Rosenfeld is a whole other issue.
Next step: Those citizens will disappear and only turn up again in a mass grave 50 years later.
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"Accidents"
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https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nbc-news/
and what is NBC "news"'s motive/agenda for framing this info the way they are?
"LEFT-CENTER BIAS These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation
NBC News is what some call a mainstream media source. They typically publish/report factual news that uses moderately loaded words in headlines such as this: 'Trump threatens border security shutdown, GOP cool to idea.'
Story selection tends to favor the left through both wording and bias by omission, where they underreport some news stories that are favorable to the right. NBC always sources its information to credible sources that are either low biased or high for factual reporting.
A 2014 Pew Research Survey found that 42% of NBC News’ audience is consistently or primarily liberal, 39% Mixed, and 19% consistently or mostly conservative. A more liberal audience prefers NBC. Further, a Reuters institute survey found that 46% of respondents trust their news coverage and 35% do not, ranking them #5 in trust of the major USA news providers."
What are you getting at? The idea of any of the major news outlets in the US being left-leaning is risible nowadays.
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Recognizing the US federal government is behaving in a way consistent with facism is no longer a left leaning position.
Hmm? These are mostly news reports of one person calling another person a fascist. Notably, one of the people doing the calling is Donald Trump!
>Last week, after being found guilty of falsifying business records, former President Donald Trump said Americans today live in a “fascist state,” building on his unfounded conspiracy theory that somehow President Joe Biden is behind his prosecution in Manhattan.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/politics/fascism-trump-bi...
Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that.
If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.
The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point. A particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago.
As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.
>particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago.
iirc that was something more than infiltration. The FBI found an extremist loser who lived in a basement, egged him on, helped him network & gave him resources. Without them, he probably would have been thinking really hard about it, not much more.
That's basically the FBI's MO.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/29/politics/aby-rayyan-fbi-terro...
Munger's Law - Agents know they'll never get recognition or promotions by rounding up hothead wannabes.
They've been doing it from day 1.
It's how they found about Martin Luther King's affairs and what led them to write him a letter telling him to kill himself.
I’m not sure how that’s in any way the same thing.
> The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point.
That (US domestic political groups, anyway) is their job, after all?
> As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.
Given FBI Director Kash Patel is a Trump appointee, and I might even go so far as to say a Trump stooge, I think we have to assume that that is exactly what will happen.
> grassroots political opponents
Organised criminal activity.
Edit: I’m not complaining about moderation but it would be fascinating to know what part of this others believe is incorrect:
- Do you think the Anti ICE groups are not organised?
- Do you think obstructing federal officers is not criminal?
- Something else.
Organized as in they have meetings, serve cookies, and coffee? Most likely not. These anti-ice groups seem to be extemporaneous meetups.
Define obstruction. Everything reported, blowing whistles, encouraging businesses not provide service to ICE agents, and recording from a distance is not obstruction. It's a First Amendment right to keep government forces in check.
You claimed organized crimes; not simply organized resistance. What crimes are they organizing?
Resistance itself is not criminal, especially when many of the actions they are resisting are themselves illegal. In fact, it is our civic duty to resist illegal or immoral actions by the government.
To answer your question, no, I don't think the organized activity is criminal, and I don't believe the alleged criminal activity is organized.
A question for you: using your definition, do you think that ICE is an organized crime group?
Comments like this just make me think people are jealous that right wing groups aren't good at organizing.
Preventing out-of-control federal officers from committing crimes is NOT criminal. Especially when you don't even know if they ARE federal officers, and won't show their faces, badges, or warrants.
Do you agree with the ICE agent who said "You raise your voice, we erase your voice?" Is that an acceptable thing for federal officers to do, or is that unconstitutional, criminal violation of civil rights?
I care more about reining in the overweight GEDstapo agents murdering people in the street than people blowing whistles at them.
No badge, no warrant, with faces covered, indiscriminate attacking people. That's a criminal, not law enforcement. We already have seen people impersonating ICE agents to kidnap, rob, and rape. There's a reason police don't cover their faces.
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I don’t like political power being used to go after an intimidate opponents at all, but we can’t pretend that it wasn’t a constant during the previous admin.
If I recall correctly, they actually set the precedent here by adding civil war era conspiracy charges to put an additional 10 years on women who protested in front of an abortion clinic.
AI summary…
> Six of the protesters (including Heather Idoni) were convicted in January 2024 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—a misdemeanor carrying up to one year in prison—and felony conspiracy against rights under 18 U.S.C. § 241, which carries a maximum of 10 years. The conspiracy charge stemmed from evidence that the group planned and coordinated the blockade in advance to interfere with clinic operations.
Here's one the members of that group: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tennessee-woman-sentenc...
> As a Health Center staff member ('Victim-1') attempted to open the door for the volunteer, WILLIAMS purposefully leaned against the door, crushing Victim-1’s hand. Victim-1 yelled, "She’s crushing my hand," but WILLIAMS remained against the door, trapping Victim-1’s hand and injuring it.
> On the livestream on June 19, 2020, WILLIAMS stood within inches of the Health Center’s chief administrative officer and threatened to “terrorize this place” and warned that “we’re gonna terrorize you so good, your business is gonna be over mama.” Similarly, WILLIAMS stood within inches of a Health Center security officer and threatened “war.” WILLIAMS also stated that she would act by “any means necessary.”
The reason they could prosecute to this degree? https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/18/anti-abortion-surgi-clinic...
A member of the conspiracy admitted to the planning; they have text messages and detail of deciding who will risk arrest, after going over the fact they'd be trespassing and violating the FACE act.
Do you think the administrative and medical staff present in 2020 would agree with you? That the group that blockaded, threatened and assaulted in one instance access to health services are in fact the victims here of government overreach?
Replied on another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46798663
'protested' by forcibly precenting individual civilians access to medical care? Sure, this seems the same.
> Conspiracy? If that's a conspiracy then virtually any protest that involves any planning whatsoever could also be twisted into a conspiracy.
Yes, that's what a conspiracy is. In other news, the sky is blue.
Conspiracy, to conspire.
Conspire, to make plans, usually in secret.
The reason conspiracy is a more serious crime is because it's worse; it's one thing to go to a protest with a bunch of friends, and then decide in the heat of the moment, when everyone's emotions are raging, I don't wanna leave yet. It's completely different crime to decide before the protest starts, in a secret group with a bunch a friends. There's nothing they can do to make you leave. And when the cops show up, and when they say you have to leave you're gonna throw a frozen water bottle at them.
In this case, they planned to actively stop someone from receiving the medical care. Do you feel that's reasonable? Should I get to decide what medical care I think you should have? Only on days I'm free to go out and protest, obviously.
Somewhat related, after reading florkbork's post, I'm excited to hear your reply about if you think crushing someone's hand in the door counts as protesting?
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> "An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents"
Are you referring to how a Democratic party AG's entire campaign was to "pursue Donald Trump". And then she found a victimless "crime", that every real estate developer is guilty of, in which nobody was harmed, and the banks were equally guilty, for which the statute of limitations has expired, to get her 34 felonies just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?
> just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?
Being convicted of a crime does not stop you from running for president. Being in prison also does not stop you from running for president -- one person has. The only qualifications necessary to run for president are to be a natural born citizen, have spent the last 14 years living in the country, and be at least 35 years of age.
Also, the criminal trial against him started after he assumed office for the second time. EDIT: Got my years mixed up. Ignore that last bit.
> Also, the criminal trial against him started after he assumed office for the second time
Nope. He was convicted even before the election started.
Maybe that was also bad. And maybe the current admin is still more brazen, less accountable, more selfish and more vindictive. Why even bring this up? Should we not care about this because other people did bad stuff?
> When you let the cat out of the box yourself...
I could say the same thing to you. Go back a few more years to his first term, to his campaign. He is absolutely the main architect of the chaos that has ensued. You don't get to start fights and then get mad when people fight back. The selective outrage you're demonstrating here is baffling.
That is more proof that the democratic party isnt corrupt and do care about fair elections(in the eyes of the public). He SHOULD have been thrown in jail and he IS a criminal.
Seems like there are hundreds of people in those groups.
Can't be hard to get into for some skilled undercover cops. TV shows have shown me they do these things all the time!
They had already been outed by internet sleuths possibly, but not necessarily, informed by leaks from the police. The FBI is making a press release about an investigation only to save face because the criminal conspiracy is already common knowledge among those interested. In the universe of a competent FBI, which I think is ours, they already know who is in the network. They have well-publicized, patently unlawful dragnet signals intelligence collection capabilities. The targets are people who organize openly on Zoom and Discord, and broadcast volumes of their ideology on bumper stickers, Mastodon, and Blue-Twitter. So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate? I feel like ICE is Floyd/BLM repeated as farce.
> So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate?
So why does (if the service manual is to be believed) not changing my car's oil still allow my car to keep operating?
(does this kind of ignore-any-sort-of-abstract-model "insight" sway anybody who is not extremely stoned?)
> In the universe of a competent FBI, which I think is ours, they already know who is in the network.
Certainly they know the handles of those people, and what they've said and what documents they've exchanged.
Connecting Signal accounts to real-world identity... well, that's definitely the FBI's wheelhouse, but some might make it easier or harder than others.
But there are a few cases where even the Internet sleuths are pretty confident about identity.
> So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate?
Rationality requires treating behaviour inconsistent with a quality as evidence against that quality.
It would help if they stopped holding demonstrations in front of facilities with huge amounts of facial recognition technology.
Protesting is not something you should do "casually."
Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity. It was enshrined in the First Amendment as a fundamental check on the federal government in order to recognize the natural right of a self-governing people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.
What is not something that should be gone casually – or really at all – is an attempt to engage in insurrection with black bloc or globalized intifada insurgency tactics to prevent the enforcement of law.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
…
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
…
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.
- Some insurrectionists
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Martin Luther King said while all should aim to follow the law and obey, if a law is unjust then one should break it proudly and in the open.
Militarized police with general warrants going door to door, going into schools, hospitals, places of worship to detain the dehumanized untermensch is legal.
People loudly protesting and sabotaging these efforts via their first amendment is a far more moral and honorable stance, despite being illegal in a round-about way.
It's quite literally a protest against state violence via non-violent means.
> Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity.
I am unwilling to risk protesting against this administration given the combination of facial scanning, IMSI catchers, ALPRs, and surveillance cameras in general. I cannot think of a way to stay truly anonymous when protesting, with enough access and time, you could be tracked back to your home even if you leave your phone at home and take public transportation. I believe the aforementioned technology chills free speech in combination with the current administration.
I’m not particularly worried about protesters being targeted by this administration, I worry about future administrations that could be far worse.
> How does "tracking ICE" _prevent_ the enforcement of the law? Your views on the first amendment suddenly became quite narrow.
Because the whole point of tracking ICE is to help people dodge them. It's absurd that people cry foul when the government goes after people actively opposing the rule of law.
Protesting is a fundamental human right and obligation. It is something that you should do as casually as you would voting, volunteering, and taking out the garbage: something you do from time to time when the moment demands it.
See also: https://enwp.org/Chilling_effect
> a certain class of protestors
Yes, a proportionally large and significant number of local Minnesota community members of long and good standing.
> are intentionally provoking a response from the government
are reacting to excessive over reach by outsiders, directed by the Federal government to act in a punative manner.
> Inevitably someone is arrested, hurt, or killed,
This has already happened. Multiple times. As was obvious from the outset given the unprofessional behaviour and attitudes of the not-police sent in wearing masks.
> [the people aren't] exercising a "fundamental human right"
they are exercising their Constitutional rights. Including their right to free speech, to bear arms, to protest the Federal government, etc.
> the correct answer is to vote, talk to your neighbors and friends, and peaceably protest,
Which they have done and they continue to do.
See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defe...
for more about the local community of neighbour loving US citizens acting in defence of their community.
Your framing places nearly all moral responsibility on protesters while treating state action as reactive and inevitable.
> That doesn't include vandalism, it doesn't include blocking roads, looting, or assaulting people. What's obvious to me is that a certain class of protestors are intentionally provoking a response from the government by breaking the law.
If protestors are doing this sort of thing to ICE agents, then ICE has probable cause to arrest them while they’re doing it. I don’t support people interfering or obstructing ICE, but standing 20 feet away and filming or blowing a whistle is not obstruction.
What I’ve seen is ICE agents losing their shit and shoving people because they can’t emotionally handle being observed and yelled at, both of which are legal. I would not be able to handle that either, I’d lose my shit too, but I’m not an ICE agent.
I’m sure there are protestors crossing the line too, they arrested a bunch of people for breaking windows at a hotel the other night. I just don’t see the need to add conspiracy charges if they can just directly charge them with obstruction when it happens.
Yeah, this is what I don't get. People have the right to peacefully protest (and they should). However, once you actively get in the way of official federal policing business, you are no longer a peaceful protester. Interjecting yourself into already stressful situation will only make things worse for you.
> No. It's not. Governments are not natural. So you have no "fundamental" rights here.
You could make the same moot point about all societal laws. Fundamental rights are determined by the constitution, the UN declaration of human rights, as well as any other local charters.
Governments are natural; nature abhors a vacuum.
Governments which at least pay lip service to the premise of respecting people's rights are another matter entirely.
> Protesting is not something you should do "casually”
Neither is violently undermining our Constitutional order.
These folks should be on notice that they will be prosecuted. If we played by Trump’s book, we’d charge them with treason and then let them appeal against the death penalty for the rest of their lives.
That only works for federal charges. Just don’t tell that to the president. Or do, he won’t remember anyway.
> we now know that the Hunter Biden Pardon (preemptive) is available and the Capitol Riots Pardon (mass pardon) is available
No we don’t. Nobody has tested these in court. Trump has no incentive to.
> played by Trump’s book
I'm betting that's exactly what will happen - the FBI will single out some core organisers and let them serve as an example.
Unnecessary when he owns the Supreme Court and his thugs routinely ignore court orders.
Here is a more pedantic description then for you - "undermine the constitutional order by employing elevated (to various degree) amount of violence."
> If Trump actually wanted to violently undermine the constitutional order there would be a lot of dead judges by now
Hitler’s brown shirts didn’t start by killing judges. They started with voter (and lawmaker) intimidation.
> Is this something you want applied _against_ you?
It’s literally happening. And sure. If I try to murder the Vice President or murder Americans as part of a political stunt, hold me to account. Those were the rules I thought we were all playing by.
> If you want something to change you stand no chance with this attitude
Strongly disagree. There are new political tools on the table. Unilaterally disarming is strategically stupid.
> if you want to avoid FBI attention then take your heart off your sleeve and smarten up
I’m going to bet I’ve gotten more language written into state and federal law than you have. That isn’t a flex. It’s just me saying that I know how to wield power, it and doesn’t come from trying to avoid crooked federal agents. If they’re crooked, they’ll come for you when you speak up. In my experience, they’re more bark than bite.
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Or just got control of 1 person’s phone/account.
"FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff."
Isn't the simply inserting an agent into the secret circle the most time honored way to crack security.
People downvoting don't know security.
Technology often fails around the human factor.
You have a private chat? Ok? and you let people in? So sorry your encryption didn't help with who you let in.
Yea, I just assume any easily joinable movement like this is a honeypot of sorts.
Most of these groups are centered around a neighborhood, or a school, or a church. For anything school related, people are very suspicious of outsiders trying to join. Churches and neighborhood groups might be more open, I suspect, but still gotta get somebody who lives there or goes to the church to vouch for you.
But the worst case for an outsider joining is not very bad; they get to see what's going on, but the entire point of the endeavor is to bring everything to light and make everything more visible. And if an outsider joins and starts providing bad information or is a bad actor, typical moderation efforts are pretty easy.
Most people are not professional conspiracists and know how to handle secret meetings, communication etc.
But the more the whole thing shifts towards that, the closer civil war is.
In other words, if you think any easily joinable movement is a honeypot you already seem to think along the lines of resistance movement in a dictatorship. (If it is .. I will not judge, I am not in the US)
That seems like quite a stretch from reality. I just know the glowies enjoy lurking websites where people openly post how to use Tor.
Funny how HN discussions about the development of encrypted messaging apps often include remarks from commenters about the need for a "group chat" feature
In some cases, popular messaging apps that initially did not provide "group chat" have since added this "feature", apparently in response to "user demand"
The so-called "tech" companies that control these apps from Silicon Valley and Redmond have aligned with one political party, generally whichever party is in power, for "business" reasons, e.g., doing whatever is necessary to ensure their continued profits free from regulation
Surveillance is their core business
More specifically, right-wing agitators joined the chats and posted screenshots online.
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> The Pretti shooting has been ruled a homicide, by the way.
I don't see anything in e.g. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/27/alex-p... to substantiate that; and as far as I can tell there have not yet been any other investigations, and thus no other opportunity for such a ruling.
No it hasn’t. Cite a link if you have one.
>The FBI simply
i don't think an investigation by FBI has ever been "simply" to the subjects of such an investigation. And to show bang-for-the-buck the "simply reading chat" officers would have to bring at least some fish, i.e. federal charges, from such a reading expedition.
In general it sounds very familiar - any opposition is a crime of impeding and obstruction. Just like in Russia where any opposition is a crime of discreditation at best or even worse - a crime of extremism/terrorism/treason.
Don’t be disingenuous. The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
These groups are also documented to have harassed people who are _not_ federal officers under the mistaken impression that they are. That’s just assault. Probably stalking too. Anyone who participates in these groups will be committing crimes, and should be prosecuted for it.
If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.
These groups exist to observe and document the actions of federal agents and share that information with their communities. That is constitutionally protected activity.
Their stated purpose and their actual function can be different, and speech that would otherwise be free can be illegal if involved in incitement, bribery, collusion, etc.
If I’m having a conversation with my friend, it’s free speech. If we’re plotting the overthrow of the government, it’s insurrection.
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>The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs.
To observe them, and prevent them from committing crimes. Which if it isn't legal, is moral as all get out.
"Jobs" Nurmberg lol. Not an argument.
>Being Disingenuous
Crying disingenuous when I disagree with you isn't an argument.
>but it won't change anything about what the FBI should and shouldn't do.
What does that have to do with the price of wheat.
>And neither does crying "Nazi" whenever someone does something you don't like.
Why do you suddenly cry "Crying Nazi". Do you have sins to confess?
well, DHS does openly use white supremacy memes in their recruitment posts
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/white-national...
> to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
Filming officiers performing their jobs is not obstruction, even if it does make them uncomfortable. If it makes their jobs harder that's only because they know what they're doing is unpopular and don't want to be known to have done it.
> If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.
Yeah, there's a massive disconnect between politicians and their voters. This is pretty strong evidence of that disconnect. Even now Democrats refuse to support abolishing ICE, despite majority support among their constituency. Who are voters who want immigration reform supposed to cast their ballots for? There hasn't been such a candidate since ICE was created in the wake of 9/11. Conservatives got to let out their pent up frustration with an unresponsive government by electing Trump. Liberals have no such champion, only community organizing.
> Have you heard the constant blowing of whistles in these videos? Did you know that protesters have organized the mass 3d-printing and distribution of these whistles (https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2025/12/not-just-a-toy-how-wh... ; https://www.startribune.com/whistle-symbol-ice-protest-minne... ; https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/01/21/chicagoa...)? Can you imagine how this level of noise interferes with a job that involves verbal communication with both coworkers and civilians?
Not to mention that the point is also to alert illegals of the LEO presence so that they can get away.
First you are lying. Second, noise is not an obstruction. It is ok and legal to produce whistles.
What is not legal is point guns at journalists, beat people who record you on the phones and shoot people in the back because they had phone in hand and you are frustrated. What is not legal is to throw pepper spray at people who are no threat. One gotta love the "they mass produce whistles" as a grave accusation while ICE men literally openly threaten to kill people who are no threat. Or kill them and then are proud of their murdering colleagues.
> I'm not mistaken in my understanding that Tim Walz is a Democrat, am I? The one making public speeches falsely claiming that ICE aren't LEO and encouraging "peaceful protest"
Yes, he had good speeches.
> without mentioning anything about obstruction of justice or resisting arrest?
Lol, heavily armed cowards jump at observer, 8 on one, there is no resistance and then they call it resisting arrest.
> For that matter, exactly what do you mean by "abolishing ICE"? Should it not be replaced? Should immigration law not be enforced? Should the USA allow everyone to reside within its borders who wishes to do so, with no barriers to entry?
ICE is basically a violent gang with impossible to reform culture. You dont hire gangmembers to do law enforcement. It needs to be abolished and people in it need to be banned from working in law enforcement.
> This is irrelevant, because many people have been observed physically obstructing officers, whether or not they were filming at the time.
Not the last guy they executed. He was recording, then backed away when an officer approached him. Then he got dogpiled, his holstered gun was taken, and then he was shot repeatedly.
> Have you heard the constant blowing of whistles in these videos? Did you know that protesters have organized the mass 3d-printing and distribution of these whistles?
I'm quite aware of the intentionally annoying whistles. You're taking a pretty broad interpretation of "interference." I didn't realize that feds had a protected right to a calm and quiet work environment.
> I'm not mistaken in my understanding that Tim Walz is a Democrat, am I? The one making public speeches falsely claiming that ICE aren't LEO and encouraging "peaceful protest" without mentioning anything about obstruction of justice or resisting arrest?
Yeah, Walz is a weak Democrat who can't even condemn the organization killing and abducting his State's citizens. Exactly the kind of politician voters are tired of. All he can say over and over is to "not take the bait" by resisting occupation more forcefully.
> And you're aware that the Signal groups in question are alleged to include Democratic state officials and a campaign advisor?
I've not heard that alleged, but it wouldn't be surprising for some to be monitoring the situation. If you mean to imply that Democrat officials are organizing the resistance then that's laughable. If you're a Conservative then there are only a handful of Dems you should be afraid of, and the rest of the Dems will help you make sure they're not too influential.
> For that matter, exactly what do you mean by "abolishing ICE"? Should it not be replaced?
A more focused INS under the DoJ would be a good reset. A paramilitary with twitchy trigger fingers is no way to enforce any law, much less something as nonviolent and bureaucratic as immigration. If someone is being violent, send the Police, hold a trial. If you need to sort out immigration status you can send a pencil pusher to get papers in order.
> Should immigration law not be enforced? Should the USA allow everyone to reside within its borders who wishes to do so, with no barriers to entry?
No barriers? No. Extremely low ones though, absolutely. You do realize that almost all undocumented people living in the US are on overstayed visas, right? We let them in after checking they weren't dangerous, then they started working and living here. Now they make up a sizable chunk of the population. Clearly our immigration system is broken if it leaves this many residents undocumented. And your proposed solution is strict enforcement?
Imagine, if you will, applying this standard to, say, speeding. Repeated instances of speeding result in increasing fines, and eventually revocation of your license. That's what the law says! Should we not enforce this law?? Well. If we used cars' and phones' GPS and cameras to reconstruct a few days of driving behavior, then handed out punishment as dictated by law, 90% of drivers would instantly lose their license. Half of the population would be unable to go to work, buy food, of get their kids to school. It would be a disaster of historic scale. The problem then, is the law. To put it more succinctly: I am not a proponent of enforcing bad laws, and neither is just about anyone else here in reality.
If she was trying to blokade the street she was doing a pretty bad job. A car goes past hers in the video where the murderer shoots her three times and calls her a "fucking bitch" while her corpse weights down the gas and her SUV goes careening down the road.
That's just normal law enforcement behavior though. I'm sure if she hadn't been short with him he would've otherwise been well-behaved and enforced our immigration laws without incident.
You are factually wrong.
Jan 23rd General strike, Minnesota: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Downtown... https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1ql7eva/mn_01232...
This is not a 'vocal minority'.
Oh, that's one blue state; right? What do the rest of Americans think?
> The Economist/YouGov poll, 55 percent of respondents said they had “very little” confidence in ICE, while 16 percent said they have “some” confidence in the agency. Sixteen percent said they have “quite a lot” of confidence in ICE and 14 percent said they have “a great deal.”
Source poll: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor...
It's a majority of Democrat voters.
> Democrats overwhelmingly support eliminating ICE (76% vs. 15%), as do nearly half of Independents (47% vs. 35%). Most Republicans (73%) continue to oppose abolishing ICE. Only 19% of Republicans support eliminating the agency
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53939-more-americ...
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Can you quote the part of 8 USC chapter 12 subsection II where it says you get to murder everyone you disagree with?
Why change? I've just randomly clicked through, and it is a good law, for example :
(1) Right of counsel The alien shall have a right to be present at such hearing and to be represented by counsel. Any alien financially unable to obtain counsel shall be entitled to have counsel assigned to represent the alien. Such counsel shall be appointed by the judge pursuant to the plan for furnishing representation for any person financially unable to obtain adequate representation for the district in which the hearing is conducted, as provided for in section 3006A of title 18.
When you're saying that ICE is executing that law, are you saying that the guys sent to that Guatemala prison were afforded that right of counsel and were given a lawyer? Or anybody else in those mass deportations.
I also couldn't find in that law where it makes it legal to randomly catch dark skinned people on the street, including citizens.
which part of the immigration code lets ice agents kill citizens?
> The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
If that's the case, then why has no one been prosecuted on those grounds?
She was fully within her legal rights, as has been pointed out many times by US civil rights lawyers including those that have successfully defended MAGA people deplatformed during the past administration.
Your "assumption" is simply incorrect.
> any opposition is a crime of impeding and obstruction
No; conspiracy to impede and obstruct is a crime.
If you are about to do something I don't want you to do, but which is lawful for you to do, 1A covers me saying "hey, don't do that". It does not cover me physically positioning myself in a way that prevents you from doing it. And if you happen to be an LEO and the thing you're about to do is a law enforcement action, it would be unlawful for me to adopt such positioning. It is unlawful even if I only significantly impede you.
And ICE are federal LEO.
Portland Ave at 32nd St E is a one-way two-lane road with a bike/bus lane. It was formerly a three-lane one-way road.
One of the victims was blocking half the low traffic road and intending for people to pass freely on the other half. The other was filming from a distance.
Does parking on a road justify a death penalty without trial?
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Conspiracy to impede and obstruct criminal behaviour is not a crime, it's legitimate self-defence.
The fact that federal agents are breaking the law doesn't change that. At all.
In spite of what you've been told federal LEO are bound by the law.
Executing random bystanders on a whim, operating without visible ID, failing to allow congressional oversight of facilities, failing to give those captured access to a lawyer - among many, many others - all put this operation far outside of any reasonable claim to proportionality or legality.
> The behaviour being impeded and obstructed is not criminal. It is, in fact, law enforcement.
If the behavior appears criminal at a glance, it is reasonable to step in; law enforcement should be aware of this and exhibit accordingly professional behavior such that it does not appear to be so criminally violent. The simple fact they're law enforcement is moot to whether said behavior is criminal, seeing as law enforcement can still be charge with crimes.
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