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DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app
- ipnon 1y agoThe developer has not been charged.
- jkaplowitz 1y agoBut he has been publicly threatened by the Attorney General: > "We are looking at him," she said on Fox News, "and he better watch out." (Source: The submitted Apple Insider article, citing Wired, which as noted in the quote was citing Fox News.) When the head of the DOJ publicly threatens someone, saying that she "goes after" that person is entirely accurate.
- gorlilla 1y agoHow is that not prior restraint?
- akerl_ 1y agoSort of by definition, prior restraint is when the government prevents someone from doing something (in the context, of the term, generally always speech/expression) prior to it happening. This is the kind of bluster that has certainly become more common in recent years, but has to some extent always been part of political theater. You'll see the same kind of thing every now and then if somebody tweets about how they'd love to feed a political figure into a wood chipper, or that the government should be launched into the sun. The Secret Service or some executive official will post that they're "investigating the matter and will take all available action", only for it to turn out that the comment was obviously protected speech.
- Fluorescence 1y agoThis doesn't seem to be true. Implications of Government speech are not taken lightly and I can see examples of "informal censorship" including implied threats of legal action being classed as prior restraint. Pretty moot given today's US legal environment though. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantam_Books,_Inc._v._Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantam_Books,_Inc._v._Sullivan "Justice William J. Brennan Jr. delivered the majority opinion that stated that the actions of the Rhode Island commission to Encourage Morality in Youth were unconstitutional due to their actions violating the First Amendment by placing a prior restraint on free speech. Justice Brennan's opinion stated that the commission's practice of notifying book distributors and retailers about "objectionable" publications, combined with implied threats of legal action, effectively made a system of informal censorship."
- jkaplowitz 1y agoIt's certainly some inappropriate kind of intimidation, but the concept of prior restraint includes some claim that the person is forbidden from doing something, and it typically pertains to speech acts rather than to the distribution of functional tools. "He better watch out" from the AG is certainly a serious threat, but its meaning is too vague and implicit to reach the level of a prohibition or to definitively pertain to speech acts.
- msgodel 1y agoJust a reminder for those who aren't aware: Apple typically makes you upload your government ID to publish apps. I used to be part of their developer program (although I never finished any of the apps I wrote) and was forced to upload mine. For those of you who think there's no problem with forcing everyone to go through the app store, here's just one more serious issue that creates. Now they can be subpoenaed for something that could otherwise have been done anonymously.
- vdfs 1y agoanonymous app submissions will make the app store more dangerous. You can go the extra mile and create a company or legal entity if you want to hide your name, but it's straightforward for gov. to get your identity no matter what, they can just ask Apple or Google
- msgodel 1y agoThere still should be a way to share software anonymously. Just saying "it's dangerous so the whole use case is invalid" is retarded, lazy, and if you're an OS vendor benefiting from an app store the way Apple does, malicious.
- spacemadness 1y agoMaybe it’s better as a web app in that case.
- haswell 1y agoFTA: > "We're working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations," Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said to press, "and we're going to actually go after them and prosecute them... because what they're doing, we believe, is illegal."
- epistasis 1y agoGuilty, until proven innocent, or until it's proven that there's no law that is being broken.
- bb88 1y agoThe defendant still has to pay for their defense, even if the charges were frivolous.
- epistasis 1y agoExactly, and defense of a federal prosecution is a multi-million dollar defense.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoFederal criminal prosecutions have a 91% conviction rate. 89% plead guilty, only 2.3% go to trial and most of those are convicted. A Just Us system.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoA crime will always be found.
- i80and 1y agoWhen I played Half-Life 2 for the first time as a teen, the dialogue of man 1: "They have no reason to come to our place." man 2: "Don't worry, they'll find one" felt so abstract
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- i80and 1y agoIt's not really relevant in a greater sense that they haven't been charged, if the DOJ is making credible threats. Which they are.
- bb88 1y agoAnd there's no punishment for Pam Bondi, she's got a get out jail free card with a Trump pardon.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoShe just needs to be convicted of state charges or hauled to the Hague.
- akerl_ 1y ago"credible threats" is a term of art, and these comments aren't that.
- i80and 1y agoI think this is pretty clearly outside the context of the term of art, but whatever, "threats of applying dubious legal force that a reasonable person might gnaw their fingernails at".
- ajross 1y agoCare to explain why? The threats are specific and made by people in power to execute them. What standard for "credible" would fail here?
- bb88 1y agoCorrection: The developer has not been charged... yet. If you dig into someone's past, you can probably find something, or make it look like there's something. Pay informants. Frame people for other crimes. Etc. When a justice department doesn't believe in the laws they're supposed to uphold, they don't have to follow their own rules. They can send people through the judicial wringer by merely filing a complaint against them. That in itself is a punishment.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThere are so many (especially commerce) laws and the lawless regime will find an excuse to deport them to CECOT without due process.
- roody15 1y agoAgree one worrying idea is using rumors to discredit or just put pressure on the individual in question. Can simply monitor the individual and then report any odd behavior to friends, co-workers, etc. The result is the individual has to focus on these issues and will likely seize the behavior. No charges ever even need to be filed, and nothing is illegal on doing this activity.
- spacemadness 1y agoMight be a good career move for a lawyer to represent him since it’s an obvious violation of his rights.
- duxup 1y ago[flagged]
- notimetorelax 1y agoWell, the sad part is that they keep trying until something sticks.
- healsdata 1y agoIt's not absurd if the grift keeps working. He sues companies that he knows want something from the government and they, in turn, readily donate millions of dollars to him. He's also immune from prosecution for anything he does in his "official capacity" and the DOJ has already demonstrated they're willing to claim everything, even things done in years he wasn't President, are in his official capacity. There will never be 2/3rds of the Senate willing to remove him from office and the Supreme Court is very ready to give him almost anything. It's all a con with no downside for him -- and he can just pardon his hangers-on for anything they might do to aid him. Heck, Biden (and maybe others before him) set a precedent for pre-emptive pardons, so I expect we'll be seeing "anything you did while I was in office" pardons here soon.
- bamboozled 1y agoThey believe that he is saving them from an existential threat and everything he does is justified because of that, it's quite terrifying. Quite similar to what's being taught in Russia actually. They also like it because he is bully and he is their bully, so it's fun to watch him hurt their perceived enemies. Its very, very sad.
- budududuroiu 1y agoWhat's the difference between this and Waze?
- throwawaygmbno 1y agoThere is an argument to be made that Waze helps white people avoid prosecution where as an anti-ICE app based on their current focus mostly does not. There is no point in pretending there isn't an explicitly racist goal in many of the administration's policy, even if it isn't the only thing that motivates them.
- bb88 1y agoWell... there's no "ICE" button in Waze. /s There's not. But it attempts to thwart the administration's efforts into conducting raids.
- m3kw9 1y agoEven Google has a traffic police spotting function, but not a general police locator. It’s a gray area
- Gigachad 1y agoWaze doesn't get in the way of fascists
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bb88 1y agoThis is what weaponization of the DoJ looks like. Under Bush 41 they would try to hide it to make it look like they weren't because of political fallout. But now they don't have to hide it anymore. The DoJ is supposed to uphold the law, and not be criminals themselves.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dluan 1y agoThere was a time when the Hacker part of Hacker News meant something. But now I look around and see faces like Shaun Maguire's, Dario Amodei's, millions of engineering man hours being poured into the "Salesforce for Killing People". What are we even doing here.
- labster 1y agoWe are getting back to the original meaning of hacker from a millennium ago, one who chops, cuts, and hews apart, especially hacking apart our fellow man.
- bb88 1y agoIt's interesting that money has no morals, it's just money. The reality is that the more money you have, the more freedom you have too. The easier it is to pay off officials. The easier it is to escape juris diction. The easier it is to live the way you want, laws be damned.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- busterarm 1y agoOh puh-lease. The origins of the term hacker wrt computers is meant to mean somebody reckless without self-discipline. One of the earliest uses of it in print was to describe folks working in MIT's AI lab in the mid-70s. People working in a field on the fringes of respectability. That was just as accurate a description back in that day as it was of the 80s-00s "hackers" that people associate with counter-culturalism and building cool shit. I remember what technologists were like in the 90s. The same amount of effort that went into building the world wide web went into insane shit like cryogenics. Y'all complain about the fringe ideologies of people like Musk and Thiel, but that's exactly who we're talking about when we're talking about old school hackers. That and a half dozen other fringe personalities with fringe ideologies. If we were to talk about people working at the frindges of respectability, "Salesforce for Killing People" is exactly the kind of company that they would work for. Heck, back in those early decades your options were also research labs or defense industry... We were never all one team of good guys with good intentions. I mean, a sizeable percentage of people in our industry have at some point worked for Meta...
- overstay8930 1y agoI mean even putting the politics aside, you do kind of ask for this to happen when you start putting actual pressure on real people. Someone was eventually going to do something about this. Pretty authoritarian but it's not like this just didn't happen under previous administrations. It just didn't happen publicly. You could definitely get someone visiting you at your door if you made apps that make certain things too easy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- epistasis 1y agoOnly under authoritarian governments would one expect something like this. Real police would not be alarmed at having their presence noted. Secret police that are masked up to avoid identification, and equipped with more military equipment than was typical for daytime patrol by soldiers in Fallujah is not anything like what happened under prior administrations.
- overstay8930 1y agoThis is completely normal in Germany, try and make an app that is too good at IPTV and you get a visit from the police.
- epistasis 1y agoThis reminds me of Aaron Swartz's persecution, which seemed to be under a law on the books that was unjust. This appears to be an even more brazen abuse of prosecutorial power, threats without even the cover of an attempt at enforcing a law, just plain thuggery.
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- bamboozled 1y agoI look at this and think open source devices with mesh networks, that's what people need, but I guess the bad guys (government agents) can get them and locate you via a signal that's being emitted?
- Gigachad 1y agoYou'd have to make sure no persistent identifiers are emitted. Like how phones use a randomized MAC while scanning for wifi.
- goku12 1y agoSomeone always objects when I say this. But here's the issue. You can't resolve political crises with technical solutions. You need political solutions. The regime shouldn't have been allowed to make such activities illegal and persecute citizens for that. But that isn't even the worst concern at this point. Remember that the military is being used to oppress political dissent within the country. Technical solutions may give you a temporary upper hand in pursuit of a political resolution. But without the latter, technical solutions will simply devolve into a technical arms race that you cannot possibly win, due to the near infinite resources the regime commands. If at all they can't defeat you technically, they'll just order an indiscriminate crackdown.
- bamboozled 1y agoI think you're right, but I also think it's important to be able to communicate outside of the control of central authority. But yes, it's probably wishful thinking because as I said, they would be able to track you down with the signal your device emits and stomp you with the boot of authoritarianism. Maybe in the future we'll able to communicate anonymously with quantum entanglement :)
- salawat 1y agoSorry sir, to buy your entangled Q-bit card, we'll need to see some ID. <ID scan kept on file or forwarded to LE> Please, if you haven't noticed, network effects are designed to work against you punching up.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646
- tomhow 1y agoThanks! ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646 - July 2025 (836 comments)
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoWired source from last week: Trump officials want to prosecute over the ICEblock app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459075
- ryandrake 1y agoThis article went from #3 on the front page of HN to #260 in ten minutes[1]. Talk about someone wanting to keep you from reading about it! 1: https://hnrankings.info https://hnrankings.info
- tomhow 1y agoSeveral users flagged this submission, correctly. The topic of the app's launch was on the front page for several hours last week and generated a huge discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496729 This latest story doesn't seem to carry any "significant new information", which is a critical qualifier for a new HN thread. The article's topic is the quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview, and even that was made – and reported – last week when the topic was still active on HN. It's a detail in the overall story that has already had major coverage here. If there was an arrest or some other material legal action, that would likely warrant a new thread. Edit: I updated the comment to remove the incorrect implication that there is any new information in the article at all.
- octo888 1y agoWas it the actual flagging by users that deranked it? Or mod intervention based on those signals? Not disagreeing with the action just curious about the ambiguity in your comment
- tomhow 1y agoIt's always a combination of upvotes, flags, vouches, auto-penalties and manual penalties that affect the ranking. I don't know which was the particular one of the downweights that pulled it off the front page; it was already off when I first saw it. But it's a clear-cut case of a duplicate post, so there was no need for me to do anything to alter what had already happened.
- rsynnott 1y ago> The only new information is a quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview This feels like an illustration of just how unhinged the US has become, that the _AG threatening a private citizen_ is not considered major news. The frog is, if not boiled, at least sous-vide'd.
- JohnTHaller 1y agoFor folks wondering why this is newsworthy, the Attorney General of the United States is threatening a US citizen with curtailing his protected speech.