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Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
- taylodl 8mo ago[flagged]
- baby_souffle 8mo agoIf you're a participant in one of the federated platforms and your native home server is in European territory but your content is federated to a server in the US, can the US server do anything to reveal your identity other than point to the home server?
- edoceo 8mo agoAre you a US citizen? If Yes then USA has some jurisdiction over you. If not they could try to compel the operator.
- pojntfx 8mo agoFor the non-US-American part, that's the Fediverse, the only network that isn't developed and used primarily by US-Americans. As for "wont turn over our data" - it's push-based, that helps to make it a bit harder to crawl, but it's public social media, and by definition the data will be out there as a result of that.
- pphysch 8mo agoWhat? Telegram and Weibo are developed by US-Americans?
- KnuthIsGod 8mo agoHow long before they come for Hacker News ? Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump. A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.
- lokar 8mo agoOr, adjust your priorities and resist more. Authoritarians win when people let them.
- jmclnx 8mo agoPlus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,
- assimpleaspossi 8mo agoNah. People who sit on social media would rather stand on street corners and yell at people.
- 8mo ago
- scottscambaugh 8mo ago[dead]
- krautburglar 8mo ago[flagged]
- ryanmcbride 8mo agoNo I wasn't?
- phainopepla2 8mo agoSome of us were against it then and are against it now
- infotainment 8mo agoThis is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS. Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.
- throwawayq3423 8mo agojust to be clear trump administration is not using Patriot Act era standards. They're going far beyond what any previous administration has done and openly breaking the law. I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.
- hodgehog11 8mo agoThis is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoThe interesting thing is that the time to oppose it these encroachments was somewhere between 2001 and say.. 2015 ( some events, but nothing in particular other than general acceptance by general populace ). And now the masses are crying foul? Now is absolutely not the time to try to get online invisibility cloak.
- salawat 8mo agoSome couldn't vote then broskie. In particular because of things like age, and school, and parents being spoonfed propaganda and having the desire for vengeance stoked for dat Middle East invasion and things. So since that couldn't happen, it seems the next best time to address the issue is now.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoHere is a thing. I am not sure anyone really can at this point. I am not being hyperbolic.
- salawat 8mo agoNot with the assholes we have running the tech industry right now trying to groom every nation state into letting them help them morph into a technocratic hellhole, no.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoFWIW, I don't mean to extinguish your fire. It is useful, but I do want you to see the sheer enormity of the issue.
- notepad0x90 8mo agotwitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request. What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones. I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.
- whynotmaybe 8mo agoThe good old choice between plague or cholera.
- unnamed76ri 8mo ago[flagged]
- bediger4000 8mo agoIt's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"? And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.
- softwaredoug 8mo agoBasically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas. Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
- rtkwe 8mo agoI hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago> I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. I hope courts go further and find them in contempt, or engaging in something akin to barratry, or otherwise abusing the legal system.
- rtkwe 8mo agoI mean more is better here for sure.
- throwawayq3423 8mo agoGood faith by the federal government can no longer be assumed. Donald Trump's real legacy is not any single action, but a complete inversion of trust of the US government by its citizens. And the world.
- GaryBluto 8mo ago[flagged]
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- Herring 8mo agoReminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.
- idle_zealot 8mo agoApparently something like 30% of Democrats (voters, not representatives) now identify as "Democratic Socialists." I assume this is because it's what Bernie and Mamdani call themselves while advocating for the above mentioned measures. The establishment Democrats will fight like hell to stem the tide, but there does seem to be increasing support for these populist policies among liberals.
- metabagel 8mo agoI think it's because the Democratic Party has moved away from socialist policies, e.g., Medicare For All.
- rayiner 8mo ago[flagged]
- Herring 8mo agoThose three examples all implemented some kind of austerity, which reduced safety nets and increased economic insecurity. Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.
- rayiner 8mo agoThe idea that there's been meaningful austerity isn't borne out by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun?time=2000..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... There was a dip after the financial crisis and a blip that returned to normal after COVID. But Germany, Italy, and the UK all spend a slightly greater share of their GDP on social welfare now than they did in 2000. And while the U.S. has less social spending overall, the trend shows the opposite of your story. In 2000, when the U.S. elected pro-immigration George W. Bush, social spending was 14.1%. In 2024, when people voted for "mass deportations" Trump, social spending was 19.8% of GDP. The U.S. was spending more of its economy on social welfare in 2024 than Australia, Canada, and the U.K. were spending back in the early 2000s--but the far right is much stronger today than it was back then.
- aa_is_op 8mo agoImagine organizing an anti-government movement on the platform of a guy who sponsored said government.
- hackyhacky 8mo agoWhat are the alternatives for organizing large groups of regular (non-tech savvy) people? Carrier pigeon?
- willturman 8mo agoWord of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.
- hackyhacky 8mo agoMany of these (word of mouth, community organizations, religious organizations, meetups, neighborhood meetings) don't work beyond the local area. Many of these (radio broadcast, independent websites) aren't accessible to non-technical people. Many of these (cultural traditions, town criers) are obviously unserious.
- willturman 8mo agoEvery single one of these has been effectively used to organize at geographic scale within this most recent century before "non-technical" even existed as a possible descriptor of a human being. Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.
- wellf 8mo agoImagine electicity in the home is made availiable but the deal is you can have it only if you don't use said electricity to exercise freedom of speech against the government, e.g. use a lamp to help you write the speech. And they have a way to track you if you do. And the alternative is no electrcity. Online services like email and social media even are utilities.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoI'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-levison-fbi-encryption-keys-snowden https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...
- throwawayq3423 8mo agoEdward Snowden had stolen the most sensitive classified secrets from The United States Intelligence Community and Donald Trump is looking to squash dissent of his attempts to nullify the Constitution and establish a dictatorship. I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoFriend, if you followed Snowden's saga at all, you would know that those events don't need to be similar to be relevant to the discussion at hand. In other words, just because you have a problem with Trump, does not mean the two issues are not connected.
- throwawayq3423 8mo agoWho was imprisoned for their speech against the US president by Obama and how did Snowden stop that? Because that is exactly what we're talking about here. And if you don't have a like-for-like comparison, then we have nothing to discuss.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoIf you think for a moment of arguing that throwing people in jail is the only way to impede someone's liberty, you are in for a world of a surprise.
- otikik 8mo ago[flagged]
- Aeolun 8mo agoI just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.
- PearlRiver 8mo agoI played Deus Ex and the FEMA camps are now ICE camps. Empires do not fall with dignity or grace I suppose.
- culi 8mo agoThe ACLU released a report on these camps in August of 2024 called "Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention". Here's some of the issues it highlighted: - forced labor in order to afford to eat. The $1/day "Voluntary Work Program" is the only way you're gonna get enough food to live. And if you refuse to work or try to protest, ICE doesn't have to give an excuse to send you into solitary confinement. CoreCivic sells this labor to companies - extensive use of solitary confinement often for "minor disciplinary infractions or as a form of retaliation for participating in hunger strikes or for submitting complaints" - dozens of documented deaths from forced labor and medical neglect No doubt these issues have only gotten worse since the publication of this report. https://www.aclunorcal.org/publications/resistance-retaliation-repression-two-years-california-immigration-detention/ https://www.aclunorcal.org/publications/resistance-retaliati...
- reaperducer 8mo agoIt makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.
- Terr_ 8mo agoHmmm, how many of our past account email-settings are kept?
- nxobject 8mo agoI'll need to look this up, but IIRC HN is one of the sources included in a fairly popular LEO market "online media presence" aggregation tool.
- viraptor 8mo agoYou know this is all public and almost every person here has zero opsec, right? There's no point even asking YC for the data, unless you want to target that one very specific person.
- sneak 8mo agoYou should assume that the IP address used for any online service (which for most people maps with timestamp to their home address and credit card for the cable bill) is not secret. I use a VPN router that sends all of my traffic to a public VPN; if you don’t want HN having your location and identity, stop giving it to them.
- fleroviumna 8mo ago[dead]
- riazrizvi 8mo ago[flagged]
- nxobject 8mo agoWhy would you assume that this was astro-turfed? I'd argue that, like other domestic surveillance that require FISA judicial approval, justifications for acts like these require a very high level of proof.
- riazrizvi 8mo agoI spent ten years on reddit looking closely at the evolution of manipulation patterns from its early days to what it has become. The current anti-Trump admin positions are maintained far beyond the subtle techniques, the moderators on mainstream subreddits like /r/news will permanently ban you for not towing the line on left positions in your commenting. I don't assume it's astro-turfed, I assess it is, and I want answers to confirm or refute it.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 8mo agoIs this satire?
- roxolotl 8mo agoI was talking to a long time coworker the other day and they said straight faced basically you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. There are those who genuinely believe even at this point everything being done is justified.
- crummy 8mo agoDo you think Americans have to be paid or manipulated into making anti-ICE statements on social media?
- mpyne 8mo ago> It's fine for citizens to voice positions, beliefs etc. It's not fine for organizations of hostile origins to astro-sturf and manipulate people into positions they wouldn't normally take. As the Supreme Court has already apted noted, organizations enjoy free speech rights in the U.S. as well, including the right to advocate for positions you or others wouldn't normally take.
- yanhangyhy 8mo agooh boy, ICE will mess up with the mid-term selection and make sure Trump get another 4 years.
- phendrenad2 8mo agoMAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.
- tempodox 8mo agoFar too many criminals are being protected from prosecution by the Donald. He now has literal armies of criminals in whose best interests it is to keep him in office. Will they scoff at committing more crimes to make sure their protection doesn’t evaporate due to an election?
- pixl97 8mo agoAssuming Trump lets us have elections at the midterms. It's public knowledge he's been talking about stopping them or re-writing the rules so only his lackeys can win.
- barbazoo 8mo ago> this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi. I don’t get that vibe honestly but I might be in my own bubble.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bmitch3020 8mo agohttp://archive.today/kqLpX http://archive.today/kqLpX
- keernan 8mo agoThe Trump administration has demanded fealty to Trump, the man, not the office holder. Any Executive Branch employee who refuses to issue a subpoena that the Trump administration wants issued will lose their job in seconds. The subpoenas are intended as part of the database the Trump administration is building identifying American citizens with anti-Trump views. There can be only one reason for such a database: to punish and terrorize the citizenry of this county.
- keernan 8mo agoSome further context: NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.” Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents-protester-home-visits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents...
- jjwiseman 8mo agoThis went from #2 on the front page to the bottom of page 2 very quickly. It's unfortunate.
- xannabxlle 8mo ago[flagged]
- mahoivan 8mo agoJoinmastodon.org
- tsoukase 8mo agoDuring the past months I have written enough online and now I am sure I will be unwanted at the US borders. I wait for the Dem POTUS to revert the situation and welcome the now "criminals" as heroes. I will miss the coming Olympic Games though.
- everdrive 8mo agoExtraordinarily troubling. This recent case was especially dystopian. https://newrepublic.com/post/206088/homeland-security-67-year-old-us-citizen-criticized-email https://newrepublic.com/post/206088/homeland-security-67-yea... The letter written by Jon was about as benign and constructive as possible. There was not even the possibility of pretense in this case, but nonetheless his gmail got subpoenaed. The privacy community seems extraordinarily bad at dealing with nuance, so I want to lay this out specifically. This is a new threshold which has been crossed. No matter what angry commenters online will tell you, it was never previously so easy to to subpoena this sort of information. If you have not already started cleaning up your online presence and thinking critically about your online OPSEC, the hour is getting very late.
- praptak 8mo agoI'm in EU and I'm 100% okay with being blacklisted from ever entering US. Just as I'd be okay with being blacklisted by 1933 Germany. To be honest I don't even think it's ethical to work for a US company anymore. (This is admittedly easy for me to say because I left Google some time ago for unrelated reasons. Call this "virtue signalling" if you want - I still believe it is good to discuss virtues and vices).
- wellf 8mo ago1st and 4th amendment are just wallpaper I guess.
- keernan 8mo agoThe bigger issue is their purpose; how do they intend to use the names they are collecting.