Yeah, that's some Gestapo level business... or since they don't like that word, Stasi.
As in, there were loads of people in the DDR (East Germany, 1949-1989) whose job it was to read people's personal mail, along with the network of neighborhood snitches.
All those out of work programmers here's an opprotunity to create some disruption, pad your resume, and possibly create a job.
While we still have a free internet, it would be great to see efforts to create technology to replace centralized social media, cloud-tech, and businesses.
We need to make it so fucking hard for the gov, advertisers to get access to your data that it very expensive to maintain a system like this. And please please please do not work for or lend talent these jerks!
The network effect and the funding is the hard part. People want to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because they spend billions hosting images for free and they have a million para social friends there
Any competitor will have to compete not on technical competence or privacy, but on "can I upload lots of HD video?" and "are my favorite celebrities there?"
Offramps to let people migrate easier, syndication to let people leave and still do POSSE, a solution to the problem that all free image hosting eventually attracts CSAM, those are difficult problems
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all took advantage of "viral marketing", ontop of lots of venture funding for advertising potential.
Distributed/P2P tech is essential because of the income from marketing maintains these systems, selling user data. P2P changes that by allowing people to own their data and share it their way. User-Hosting shouldn't be such a wild idea in 2025, especially if its like IPFS based which already has infrastructure for low-effort hosting such as a chrome plugin.
As long as transition is easy I dont see why change cant happen. A browser plugin to scrap your existing profiles and bring them to NEWSITE.com is all thats needed
There's No reason change cant happen especially when so many people see social media as despotic, and gov takeover of tiktok beckons. Be the motherfucking change yo!
They really should just create "report your fellow users" snitching website.
Oh, I should make such a website and sell it to the Stasi, I'm going to be rich!
Easier would be to hint at Zuck that Trump wants that feature built-in on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, and the subservient billionaire will get right on it.
With the right sorts of access given by companies seeking to avoid the ire of the administration, I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.
>I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is happening, the article itself talks about public posts.
It’s well established that if you post evidence of a crime publicly on social media the government will find it and use it. Illegal immigration is a crime by definition, using public information to find people who committed this crime is not the same as reading private mail.
Agreed that there's no evidence that's happening yet -- but I don't think that the median Discord user understands their discord posts to be public in the same way that an X user would.
And of course it's flagged. Because the use of technology built from companies funded by VC has nothing to do with Hacker News and Ycombinator.
Dang and company are such a joke (yes, that's a direct violation of the rules, maybe it'll get their attention) for allowing these sorts of stories to be flagged.
The idea that this is only about "politics" or it's "controversial" and thus should be hidden from view is such a copout. These are the important stories that should absolutely be discussed in a place like this.
Save your breath in replying: "well, it might make people upset and we want to have nice conversations here." And whatever other platitudes arguing for censorship of obviously important topics that deal directly with the technology, companies and employess that frequent this site.
For a more proactive approach, browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active to catch these kinds of stories. As far as I know, it ignores flags completely.
I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.
Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....
I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.
A force with significant capability to surveil US citizens.
> Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft instructions specify open-source intelligence: public posts, photos, and messages on platforms from Facebook to Reddit to TikTok. [...]
> They would also be armed with powerful commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which knit together property records, phone bills, utilities, vehicle registrations, and other personal details into searchable files.
Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about.
Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.
If it makes you feel any better, I can assure you we've been using these technologies all along. Only we used it for people we claimed were "street criminals" and "gang members". It's just that now we're rolling it out to have society-wide control instead of just using it for what we were told was simply "pacifying inner-cities".
If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.
But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?
Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)
All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.
And just in case people scrolling by haven't heard about the atrocities ICE has committed in Chicago, they were, quite literally, zip-tying naked children. They raided a residential building, detained multiple US citizens, wasted tax payer money, all to arrest a group of people who are statistically less violent than actual citizens.
And if anyone is still under the illusion that this is about "law enforcement" or "immigration", this should be a giant waving red flag that it's about racism and authoritarian control.
They've been saying 11 million for at least a couple decades that I can remember. It's probably a lot higher now, but no one in a position to find out has ever wanted to know.
The actions of ICE today (and the popular support for ICE) are the direct responsibility of everybody (both sides) who allowed the number of undocumented people to grow so much.
The problem isn't the undocumented people or how many we have, the problem is the rampant disinformation and populist messaging around them.
Basically, we can trivially tap into the human mind's natural inclination for tribalism and use undocumented people as a bargaining chip. We can tell people that THEY cause this problem and that problem, because THEY don't share our values, our skin, our culture, our mindset.
It works extremely effectively because:
1. Everyone likes to hear that they're not the ones causing problems, someone else is.
2. Humans naturally segregate based on commonalities. So people are in one group, and undocumented people in another. Sure seems like us versus them then.
3. The solutions are simple, so people have high confidence in them. Build a wall. So simple and easy, a toddler can understand that! Whether it works is not relevant.
4. Americans already have a strong sense of national identity.
5. The economy and perceived economy/QOL is actually in trouble, so we have legitimate justifications for our populist messaging.
But, had it not been undocumented people, it would've just been something else. We know that because we do see it successfully, time and time and time again, for other groups.
Trans people. That's another one that is in use today, right now, for populist messaging and it's highly effective.
A key lesson is that there is always a large proportion of the population which will cheer this kind of action.
You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.
The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.
Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.
We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.
Instead of this "lay[ing] blame" nonsense, we focus on owning our own personal responsibility and build from there. Without that solid foundation everything else eventually crumbles and we are no good for ourselves -- let alone others
My personal responsibilty involves holding the representatives I voted for accountable for their actions... or lack thereof and to call out anyone with the "we didn't do it, we were helpless to do anything" attitude.
Liberals and conservatives don't split support in the country 50/50.
It's more like 20/20 and then that apathetic majority who can't be bothered to care enough to even vote is the rest. Given the nature of liberal and conservative policies, we can all probably see why many of them would be apathetic if we're being honest. But I'm sure those people aren't cheering. They're moreso saying, "See. I told ya so." To any friends and family who thought Trump would be any different. Probably gleefully pointing out to friends who are liberal or conservative that now things are worse.
For that "apathetic majority", they probably now feel vindicated in their decision not to vote and their sense of hopelessness.
The question is when in this timeline will you get arrested or at least detained for questioning for it? We’re already at the point where you might get fired or deported for it.
So if they are using information people freely share to social media sites as the seeds for their investigatory and enforcement actions it follows that there is a simple trick people can employ or minimize their effectiveness.
Given how many accounts online are bots or anonymous, will they ever be able to shake out which real people which personas belong to? Or will it be a case of "we said this is you, so that makes it you"?
Yes, they’ll use bots to detect the bots. I guarantee it’s not hard to detect outliers (bots) via many different heuristics at this point. It’s going to turn into a perpetual game of whack a mole just like SEO and ad blocking.
Option+shift+dash, on a default English Mac keyboard. Easy to remember—"modify [option] the dash [dash] to make the biggest common form of it [shift]", or else you can think of it as modifying the underscore (shift + dash) to sit higher on the line (with option).
The latter. Checking for identity won't matter to ICE. They already break into apartment buildings without warrants and arrest children and US citizens. There's 0 logical reason to believe ICE will do anything in good faith considering their past and current behavior as well as by the words of Trump himself.
There are already attribution technologies that are reliable and definitive. There's no real technical reason that they wouldn't have the capability to directly attribute accounts.
Now..
is any of that gonna stop John or Joan Q Public who has a running disagreement with their asian or hispanic neighbor from calling in a "tip"? Probably not.
Will that tip result in an automated digital proctology exam that may land them, or people they may have been communicating with (like grandma), in ICE custody?
I'm thinking probably so.
The danger here is not really technology. The danger here is people. They are essentially automating the "snitch-to-detainment" pipeline.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you consider handwriting comparisons "reliable and definitive"?
Because juries regularly convict people in courts based on such evidence.
Maybe a better question is, what is the level of "reliable and definitive" that evidence would need to reach for you to believe it should be admissible in court?
I suspect that maybe that's the misunderstanding. The level for you is much higher than maybe it is in the justice system. Which is fine. But that doesn't change the justice system. In court, the currently accepted levels are still enough.
People will be free to try to refute the attributions during the proceedings if they think it will do any good. I mean the adversarial system is also part of the justice system.
What on Earth makes you think that the people who will be using this kind of tech will care how "reliable" or how "definitive" it is? False positives aren't a bug with ICE, they're a perk of the job!
I guess I had always just assumed this was the case for quite some time. Or I should say "someone" in the govt was always watching...not necessarily ICE.
Nationwide secret police with paramilitary capabilities only answerable to a few people in the executive branch? Completely unconstitutional, violating all the clauses on warrantless searches, detention without trial, etc.?
Looks like ICE should be abolished and its entire staff fired, just have INS take over all immigration issues.
> Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.
Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.
.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.
So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.
> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.
I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.
> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.
Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.
Well heck, I see an awful lot of people on the internet trying to argue that they somehow don’t drive wages down for Americans. The number of foreign born people living in the USA is at an all time high, over 5 times larger than what it was in the middle of the last century. Being able to throw cheap labor at a problem is a crutch that keeps people from having to innovate or pay their own countrymen a decent wage. The same argument was used by pro-slavery folks back in the day. “Who will pick the cotton?” was seen as a compelling argument. But when your business is forced to deal with a problem instead of throwing cheap labor at it, you often come up with much better ways to do things and your own fellow citizens share the benefits as well.
>cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin
The data shows clearly that immigrants drive up the cost of housing by increasing demand. Americans built our own housing for most of our history, this trend of cheap immigrant labor working most of the construction jobs was not always the case. We could afford to pay construction workers a little bit more and the cost of housing would be more than offset by the reduced housing demand.
>hasn't held up over the long haul
It has absolutely held up, take a trip to any major US city and visit one of its many ethnic enclaves. Many areas of Los Angeles speak exclusively Spanish, you can visit neighborhoods that are indistinguishable from a city in Mexico. The problem is so glaring that the left has switched tactics and hardly even argues that assimilation occurs anymore, rather they argue that “multiculturalism” is the new thing we are supposed to support. Where ethnic enclaves live alongside each other.
We ask things like this because we fundamentally misunderstand the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement's fundamental claim is that America is under attack by an insurgent force. The Trump regime (read: Heritage Foundation) is a counter-insurgency operating under emergency conditions.
We all voted for this, we are getting what we voted for. Why would we try to stop it?
ICE is scanning public info anyway, nothing they’re doing is illegal or even new. Many parts of the federal government are already scanning social media, like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
The Federalist papers, Thomas Jefferson, and the Supreme Court as recently as 2008 have all identified the right to bear arms as a mechanism for protection against a tyrannical state. It's surprising as a 2A supporter that you seem unaware of why the amendment exists.
They should. The president posted today on his official account [1] that ICE (among other law enforcement) should arrest anyone burning the flag, an act recently affirmed by SCOTUS to be legal. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Sounds like jack booted thugs to me.
The reference was to the somewhat bombastic set that like to talk about the reason for the second amendment being a backstop against government tyranny or whatever. You seem to be hiding behind a variant definition that covers only advocacy for the second amendment itself. Maybe you're not in the demographic, but there are a lot of them here on HN.
Or were. They've been extremely quiet the last few months. Turns out tyranny isn't so bad when it's aimed at the people you already hate.
> The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.
They don't want you on there, they need your silence. Your posting about injustice gives them great fear. They don't want your unsolicited commentary on state of affairs. You are a friend only if you boost their propaganda. So yes, go hide away and say nothing and pretend the world is normal, you will eventually have to deal with it in the real world.
Matrix, session, simplex seems like a interesting idea too.
Not sure if signal allows anonymous-ish personas for their groups but simplex definitely does but out of all the options given, maybe irc is the most well known :)
Yes, and has continued to spin over millions of years as various atrocities have occurred. The question for everyone: what are you going to do about it?
I won't be dismissing it with a trite line like "the world keeps spinning", for a start. Secondly, I am politically active and engaged, which is the most effective way to effect change right now.
Encouraging others to actually engage with politics instead of being dismissive, with the goal to build a coalition of people who want to protect our rights against this consolidating dictatorship.
You want to do something about it? Call your senator and voice your opinion.
Your senators and congress critters suck? Find a local challenger and work to build pressure against your sitting reps.
You think nothing can be done? Get out of the way.
Hey, more power to you! Fight for the change you want to see. I would like all people, of all political persuasions, to fight for the change they want to see.
Some other other people: "i can't tell the difference between rotten apples and fresh oranges. therefore all fruit is shit."
But which one do you think is accurate? Here's an article to consider, where ICE broke into an apartment building without warrants to arrest citizens and children. Does this sound like Gestapo tactics or no?: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-...
It doesn't matter what I think. The reality is most people who voted, voted for this or something like this. This will only change at the ballot box, assuming you believe in fair elections.
So what is your actual point? Is there a true reality in your world or is it just all political spin? Does ICE's violence against US citizens even exist in your worldview? Is ICE's violence against US citizens something that is objectively true in your eyes? Say something concrete.
Yeah, that's some Gestapo level business... or since they don't like that word, Stasi.
As in, there were loads of people in the DDR (East Germany, 1949-1989) whose job it was to read people's personal mail, along with the network of neighborhood snitches.
All those out of work programmers here's an opprotunity to create some disruption, pad your resume, and possibly create a job.
While we still have a free internet, it would be great to see efforts to create technology to replace centralized social media, cloud-tech, and businesses.
We need to make it so fucking hard for the gov, advertisers to get access to your data that it very expensive to maintain a system like this. And please please please do not work for or lend talent these jerks!
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
The network effect and the funding is the hard part. People want to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because they spend billions hosting images for free and they have a million para social friends there
Any competitor will have to compete not on technical competence or privacy, but on "can I upload lots of HD video?" and "are my favorite celebrities there?"
Offramps to let people migrate easier, syndication to let people leave and still do POSSE, a solution to the problem that all free image hosting eventually attracts CSAM, those are difficult problems
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all took advantage of "viral marketing", ontop of lots of venture funding for advertising potential.
Distributed/P2P tech is essential because of the income from marketing maintains these systems, selling user data. P2P changes that by allowing people to own their data and share it their way. User-Hosting shouldn't be such a wild idea in 2025, especially if its like IPFS based which already has infrastructure for low-effort hosting such as a chrome plugin.
As long as transition is easy I dont see why change cant happen. A browser plugin to scrap your existing profiles and bring them to NEWSITE.com is all thats needed
There's No reason change cant happen especially when so many people see social media as despotic, and gov takeover of tiktok beckons. Be the motherfucking change yo!
They really should just create "report your fellow users" snitching website.
Oh, I should make such a website and sell it to the Stasi, I'm going to be rich!
Easier would be to hint at Zuck that Trump wants that feature built-in on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, and the subservient billionaire will get right on it.
re: the extensive surveillance network of the stasi...
In case you missed it, check out the movie _The Lives of Others_.
Fantastic, heartbreaking film.
Reading public posts on a website is not the same as reading people’s private mail though. Not really an equivalent comparison IMO.
The distinction between public and private is obvious to the initiated, but probably not to everyone. e.g. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/charlie-kirk-assassination...
With the right sorts of access given by companies seeking to avoid the ire of the administration, I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.
>I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is happening, the article itself talks about public posts.
It’s well established that if you post evidence of a crime publicly on social media the government will find it and use it. Illegal immigration is a crime by definition, using public information to find people who committed this crime is not the same as reading private mail.
Agreed that there's no evidence that's happening yet -- but I don't think that the median Discord user understands their discord posts to be public in the same way that an X user would.
Hey, aspirations gotta start somewhere!
And of course it's flagged. Because the use of technology built from companies funded by VC has nothing to do with Hacker News and Ycombinator.
Dang and company are such a joke (yes, that's a direct violation of the rules, maybe it'll get their attention) for allowing these sorts of stories to be flagged.
The idea that this is only about "politics" or it's "controversial" and thus should be hidden from view is such a copout. These are the important stories that should absolutely be discussed in a place like this.
Save your breath in replying: "well, it might make people upset and we want to have nice conversations here." And whatever other platitudes arguing for censorship of obviously important topics that deal directly with the technology, companies and employess that frequent this site.
We need a diverse set of online communities again.
For a more proactive approach, browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active to catch these kinds of stories. As far as I know, it ignores flags completely.
It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.
I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.
Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....
I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.
Also, considering https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone that’s the right group legally speaking to use to get around constitutional issues.
A force with significant capability to surveil US citizens.
> Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft instructions specify open-source intelligence: public posts, photos, and messages on platforms from Facebook to Reddit to TikTok. [...]
> They would also be armed with powerful commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which knit together property records, phone bills, utilities, vehicle registrations, and other personal details into searchable files.
Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about.
Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.
If it makes you feel any better, I can assure you we've been using these technologies all along. Only we used it for people we claimed were "street criminals" and "gang members". It's just that now we're rolling it out to have society-wide control instead of just using it for what we were told was simply "pacifying inner-cities".
If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.
But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?
Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)
All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.
I'd say seedling now.
Given their recent actions in Chicago and elsewhere, it's clear they already are a paramilitary force.
And just in case people scrolling by haven't heard about the atrocities ICE has committed in Chicago, they were, quite literally, zip-tying naked children. They raided a residential building, detained multiple US citizens, wasted tax payer money, all to arrest a group of people who are statistically less violent than actual citizens.
And if anyone is still under the illusion that this is about "law enforcement" or "immigration", this should be a giant waving red flag that it's about racism and authoritarian control.
Is it true there like 15 Million undocumented people in the country?
I thought there were like 1 million max.
By definition, it is impossible to count this accurately and can only be estimated from shadow variables.
They've been saying 11 million for at least a couple decades that I can remember. It's probably a lot higher now, but no one in a position to find out has ever wanted to know.
The actions of ICE today (and the popular support for ICE) are the direct responsibility of everybody (both sides) who allowed the number of undocumented people to grow so much.
The problem isn't the undocumented people or how many we have, the problem is the rampant disinformation and populist messaging around them.
Basically, we can trivially tap into the human mind's natural inclination for tribalism and use undocumented people as a bargaining chip. We can tell people that THEY cause this problem and that problem, because THEY don't share our values, our skin, our culture, our mindset.
It works extremely effectively because:
1. Everyone likes to hear that they're not the ones causing problems, someone else is.
2. Humans naturally segregate based on commonalities. So people are in one group, and undocumented people in another. Sure seems like us versus them then.
3. The solutions are simple, so people have high confidence in them. Build a wall. So simple and easy, a toddler can understand that! Whether it works is not relevant.
4. Americans already have a strong sense of national identity.
5. The economy and perceived economy/QOL is actually in trouble, so we have legitimate justifications for our populist messaging.
But, had it not been undocumented people, it would've just been something else. We know that because we do see it successfully, time and time and time again, for other groups.
Trans people. That's another one that is in use today, right now, for populist messaging and it's highly effective.
Nobody really knows the true number.
You are naive if you think this is about undocumented folks.
And half of the country is cheering them on.
A key lesson is that there is always a large proportion of the population which will cheer this kind of action.
You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.
The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.
Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.
We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.
Instead of this "lay[ing] blame" nonsense, we focus on owning our own personal responsibility and build from there. Without that solid foundation everything else eventually crumbles and we are no good for ourselves -- let alone others
My personal responsibilty involves holding the representatives I voted for accountable for their actions... or lack thereof and to call out anyone with the "we didn't do it, we were helpless to do anything" attitude.
Liberals and conservatives don't split support in the country 50/50.
It's more like 20/20 and then that apathetic majority who can't be bothered to care enough to even vote is the rest. Given the nature of liberal and conservative policies, we can all probably see why many of them would be apathetic if we're being honest. But I'm sure those people aren't cheering. They're moreso saying, "See. I told ya so." To any friends and family who thought Trump would be any different. Probably gleefully pointing out to friends who are liberal or conservative that now things are worse.
For that "apathetic majority", they probably now feel vindicated in their decision not to vote and their sense of hopelessness.
And that's sad.
The apathetic majority are just as responsible as the group supporting the current power
Indeed. The timeline is probably going to play out like this:
2025: Get downvoted on HN for comparing Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel
2026: Get upvoted for it
2027: Get banned for it
2028: No voting allowed, here or anywhere else
The question is when in this timeline will you get arrested or at least detained for questioning for it? We’re already at the point where you might get fired or deported for it.
If I take a job with ICE, will they pay me to surf OnlyFans for big booty latinas? Asking for a friend.
You don't even need to take a job. You can just [dress up as ICE](https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/us/ice-impersonators-on-the-r...) and use the threat of deportation to assault them.
Or you could probably take the job and do that while getting paid. It's clear enough this admin would approve.
Apparently.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Y3imj6bYP8
https://archive.is/20251003143338/https://www.wired.com/stor...
That would create the risk of people generating, hundreds and thousands of fake profiles and giving ice the runaround, wouldn’t it?
So if they are using information people freely share to social media sites as the seeds for their investigatory and enforcement actions it follows that there is a simple trick people can employ or minimize their effectiveness.
https://signal.org/download/
Given how many accounts online are bots or anonymous, will they ever be able to shake out which real people which personas belong to? Or will it be a case of "we said this is you, so that makes it you"?
The causation chain here is "we don't like someone so we find dirt on him online and arrest them over thought crime"
Yes, they’ll use bots to detect the bots. I guarantee it’s not hard to detect outliers (bots) via many different heuristics at this point. It’s going to turn into a perpetual game of whack a mole just like SEO and ad blocking.
I'm going to modify my keyboard to generate em-dash when I input "-"...
Option+shift+dash, on a default English Mac keyboard. Easy to remember—"modify [option] the dash [dash] to make the biggest common form of it [shift]", or else you can think of it as modifying the underscore (shift + dash) to sit higher on the line (with option).
That works well until the following doesn't compile
int x = 1 — 2;
The latter. Checking for identity won't matter to ICE. They already break into apartment buildings without warrants and arrest children and US citizens. There's 0 logical reason to believe ICE will do anything in good faith considering their past and current behavior as well as by the words of Trump himself.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-...
There are already attribution technologies that are reliable and definitive. There's no real technical reason that they wouldn't have the capability to directly attribute accounts.
Now..
is any of that gonna stop John or Joan Q Public who has a running disagreement with their asian or hispanic neighbor from calling in a "tip"? Probably not.
Will that tip result in an automated digital proctology exam that may land them, or people they may have been communicating with (like grandma), in ICE custody?
I'm thinking probably so.
The danger here is not really technology. The danger here is people. They are essentially automating the "snitch-to-detainment" pipeline.
> There are already attribution technologies that are reliable and definitive.
Gonna stop you right there and ask you to back that up. It's not plausible. Especially not if people are actively trying to mess up the "attribution".
E.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 from 2022. Only N-gram frequency analysis, no modern ML techniques needed.
Probably time for somebody to revisit this topic with an actual model.
That's not even close to "reliable and definitive". I'll give you "suggestive". And it presumably has certain volume requirements.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you consider handwriting comparisons "reliable and definitive"?
Because juries regularly convict people in courts based on such evidence.
Maybe a better question is, what is the level of "reliable and definitive" that evidence would need to reach for you to believe it should be admissible in court?
I suspect that maybe that's the misunderstanding. The level for you is much higher than maybe it is in the justice system. Which is fine. But that doesn't change the justice system. In court, the currently accepted levels are still enough.
People will be free to try to refute the attributions during the proceedings if they think it will do any good. I mean the adversarial system is also part of the justice system.
What on Earth makes you think that the people who will be using this kind of tech will care how "reliable" or how "definitive" it is? False positives aren't a bug with ICE, they're a perk of the job!
I guess I had always just assumed this was the case for quite some time. Or I should say "someone" in the govt was always watching...not necessarily ICE.
Palantir can help with that
Why bother with the additional tender, the NSA have been doing it for decades?
You bother with the additional tender because Palantir is a commercial organization that will pay you handsomely for it.
This is the new there’s an app for that?
Can they? Or is the data just for
The social media companies must dislike this as it'll make people even less likely to post anything
Any creative chaffing or deception ideas?
Nationwide secret police with paramilitary capabilities only answerable to a few people in the executive branch? Completely unconstitutional, violating all the clauses on warrantless searches, detention without trial, etc.?
Looks like ICE should be abolished and its entire staff fired, just have INS take over all immigration issues.
Hold, citizen, you shall be arrested for your impure thought. By masked goons.
Goons arresting gooners. In the year of our Lord.
Gotta spend that gigantic funding on something that furthers the party's agenda.
The US is going down the gutter, it's sad and pathetic.
Certainly depends on who you ask
What’s the steelman argument for the US actually doing well?
The strongest arguments I've seen used seriously are economic: S&P500, unicorns, and nominal GDP.
I no longer find these arguments convincing.
Protecting us against Schrödinger's immigrant: Both stealing our jobs AND too lazy to do any work.
/s
Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.
Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.
Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.
The left has plenty of its own contradictory arguments.
> Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.
Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.
.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.
So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.
> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.
I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.
> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.
Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.
>Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.
Well heck, I see an awful lot of people on the internet trying to argue that they somehow don’t drive wages down for Americans. The number of foreign born people living in the USA is at an all time high, over 5 times larger than what it was in the middle of the last century. Being able to throw cheap labor at a problem is a crutch that keeps people from having to innovate or pay their own countrymen a decent wage. The same argument was used by pro-slavery folks back in the day. “Who will pick the cotton?” was seen as a compelling argument. But when your business is forced to deal with a problem instead of throwing cheap labor at it, you often come up with much better ways to do things and your own fellow citizens share the benefits as well.
>cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin
The data shows clearly that immigrants drive up the cost of housing by increasing demand. Americans built our own housing for most of our history, this trend of cheap immigrant labor working most of the construction jobs was not always the case. We could afford to pay construction workers a little bit more and the cost of housing would be more than offset by the reduced housing demand.
>hasn't held up over the long haul
It has absolutely held up, take a trip to any major US city and visit one of its many ethnic enclaves. Many areas of Los Angeles speak exclusively Spanish, you can visit neighborhoods that are indistinguishable from a city in Mexico. The problem is so glaring that the left has switched tactics and hardly even argues that assimilation occurs anymore, rather they argue that “multiculturalism” is the new thing we are supposed to support. Where ethnic enclaves live alongside each other.
going down? we are deep in cesspool
Who would want to live in a cesspool?
Thugs and bullies the lot.
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I think that is in fact contribution.
It’s really just as simple as that.
What happened to all those 2nd Amendment conservatives who needed their guns to protect us from the governments jack booted thugs?
The 2A guys have only ever been LARPers.
The 2A guys overwhelmingly voted for this and will be more than willing to take up arms when it's time to put the untermenschen against the wall.
The president is white so they can’t see any threat here. If Obama had tried this there would already be a revolt.
The 2nd amendment protects the 2nd amendment, that's it.
We ask things like this because we fundamentally misunderstand the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement's fundamental claim is that America is under attack by an insurgent force. The Trump regime (read: Heritage Foundation) is a counter-insurgency operating under emergency conditions.
We all voted for this, we are getting what we voted for. Why would we try to stop it?
ICE is scanning public info anyway, nothing they’re doing is illegal or even new. Many parts of the federal government are already scanning social media, like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
They joined ICE and proud boys.
Didn't you read the article? They're building a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team.
They are the jack-booted thugs, and they always have been.
This is such a lame comment, sorry.
The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
The Federalist papers, Thomas Jefferson, and the Supreme Court as recently as 2008 have all identified the right to bear arms as a mechanism for protection against a tyrannical state. It's surprising as a 2A supporter that you seem unaware of why the amendment exists.
Is that true, or is there something more here?
The leap you are making is that citizens perceive immigration enforcement as tyrannical.
They should. The president posted today on his official account [1] that ICE (among other law enforcement) should arrest anyone burning the flag, an act recently affirmed by SCOTUS to be legal. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Sounds like jack booted thugs to me.
1 - https://bsky.app/profile/dbernstein.bsky.social/post/3m2d7z7...
The reference was to the somewhat bombastic set that like to talk about the reason for the second amendment being a backstop against government tyranny or whatever. You seem to be hiding behind a variant definition that covers only advocacy for the second amendment itself. Maybe you're not in the demographic, but there are a lot of them here on HN.
Or were. They've been extremely quiet the last few months. Turns out tyranny isn't so bad when it's aimed at the people you already hate.
> The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.
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Yet another reason to dump Twitter, Meta, Tiktok and other social sites.
People can always go mack to USENET and IRC if they want to make it hard to be tracked :)
They don't want you on there, they need your silence. Your posting about injustice gives them great fear. They don't want your unsolicited commentary on state of affairs. You are a friend only if you boost their propaganda. So yes, go hide away and say nothing and pretend the world is normal, you will eventually have to deal with it in the real world.
Matrix, session, simplex seems like a interesting idea too.
Not sure if signal allows anonymous-ish personas for their groups but simplex definitely does but out of all the options given, maybe irc is the most well known :)
So irc it is lol
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America's Gestapo
Some people: "Great, this will help them get criminals and other bad people off the street."
Some other people: "More fascism. This is Trump's version of the SS. It's absolutely horrible and we are doomed if this continues."
The world continues to spin.
> The world continues to spin.
It kept spinning while millions were murdered during WWII as well. Did you have an actual point to make or did you just come here to be dismissive?
Yes, and has continued to spin over millions of years as various atrocities have occurred. The question for everyone: what are you going to do about it?
I won't be dismissing it with a trite line like "the world keeps spinning", for a start. Secondly, I am politically active and engaged, which is the most effective way to effect change right now.
Encouraging others to actually engage with politics instead of being dismissive, with the goal to build a coalition of people who want to protect our rights against this consolidating dictatorship.
You want to do something about it? Call your senator and voice your opinion.
Your senators and congress critters suck? Find a local challenger and work to build pressure against your sitting reps.
You think nothing can be done? Get out of the way.
Hey, more power to you! Fight for the change you want to see. I would like all people, of all political persuasions, to fight for the change they want to see.
Some other other people: "i can't tell the difference between rotten apples and fresh oranges. therefore all fruit is shit."
But which one do you think is accurate? Here's an article to consider, where ICE broke into an apartment building without warrants to arrest citizens and children. Does this sound like Gestapo tactics or no?: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-...
It doesn't matter what I think. The reality is most people who voted, voted for this or something like this. This will only change at the ballot box, assuming you believe in fair elections.
> It doesn't matter what I think.
Then do us a favor and stop sharing it.
So what is your actual point? Is there a true reality in your world or is it just all political spin? Does ICE's violence against US citizens even exist in your worldview? Is ICE's violence against US citizens something that is objectively true in your eyes? Say something concrete.
Many people are upset, many people aren't. My point is: what are you going to do about it?