Yet another Hacker News

ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program

361 points bhrlady 3 hours ago 160 comments

runako 2 hours ago | parent

"one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses."

Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?

Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?

Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?

Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.

US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?

1 - https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-d...

MattDamonSpace 2 hours ago | parent

Need to rollback the entire post-9/11 security mentality.

cucumber3732842 1 hour ago | parent

The part that gets me is how many useful idiots who are smart enough to know know better will cheer for these things when sold piecemeal. Your DEP starts trawling the cell phone location records to nab some guy who sold bad dirt. Your traffic cameras tell law enforcement how to tailor their revenue generation toward those who can't push back. Your school system monitors social media to nab some teenager for selling vapes his older relative bought. And people cheer. They call it progress.

Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.

shimman 1 hour ago | parent

Stop assuming that intelligence equates to morals, this has never ever been the case.

kakacik 1 hour ago | parent

I recall watching live when second tower was hit. US commentator immediately understood the situation and remarked how this is end of an era of freedom and how this will unavoidably bring massive surveillance state aparatus in place from now on and how entire world will be affected negatively. He was 100% correct in all he said.

But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.

Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.

SwellJoe 1 hour ago | parent

Abolishing ICE and DHS is the baseline for Democrats I support going forward.

https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-bill-abolish-ice-shut-do...

sandworm101 45 minutes ago | parent

>> Abolishing ICE and DHS

Ya, I am a fan of the coast guard... and I think we need the FAA/TSA to keep the planes running on time. And FEMA might be laughed at in some quarters but a federal disaster response is something we should have ahead of hurricane season.

SwellJoe 42 minutes ago | parent

What does the Coast Guard have to do with my comment? It was founded in 1915 in its current form and has existed since 1790. DHS is only 24 years old, and was a reactionary response to a terrorist attack.

sandworm101 28 minutes ago | parent

Coast Guard is DHS.

https://www.dhs.gov/operational-and-support-components

QuercusMax 21 minutes ago | parent

Obviously we're not talking about getting rid of FAA or FEMA, but rather breaking up DHS back how it was before and getting rid of ICE. TSA doesn't do jack squat and is almost entirely security theater; it needs to go.

jkestner 10 minutes ago | parent

Okay, then take those back out before dissolving DHS.

bko 7 minutes ago | parent

I think most Americans think we should have a sensible border policy and some way to identify and remove the 5-10m illegal immigrants that came in over the Biden administration.

You should rethink your position as it's not going to give you the electoral wins you think it will.

usernomdeguerre 2 hours ago | parent

So long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts, congress, or the whitehouse then these things will continue to metastasize.

The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.

biddit 1 hour ago | parent

While Republicans certainly have a focus on illegal immigration, support for spying on American citizens is hardly a partisan issue.

ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself

There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.

rapind 1 hour ago | parent

Even so, scale, severity, and flaunting of the law matter. Current political powers have turned it up to 11. You can absolutely "both sides bad" in general, but I don't think you should be doing so within this context or it's disingenuous / whataboutism.

biddit 1 hour ago | parent

My response is not whataboutism.

It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.

Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.

CodingJeebus 1 hour ago | parent

I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?

It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power

usernomdeguerre 1 hour ago | parent

If you have some information on how much they approve or support these programs i'm open to hearing it, but i'm not sure how much "Both parties have bad people/policies" contributes to a discussion on this specific program.

CodingJeebus 1 hour ago | parent

In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.

Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.

usernomdeguerre 34 minutes ago | parent

Which is exactly what i'm advocating, to make the issue a self-preservation concern via voting.

pc86 1 hour ago | parent

This is shifting the goal posts. You said this will continue to happen as long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts[0], congress[1], or the whitehouse [2; sic] - which kind of implies (actually not kind of, it directly implies) that if only there were some more Democrats around this wouldn't happen. So "both parties do this" is absolutely a valid criticism of your point and one you probably have to address.

[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.

[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes

[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?

usernomdeguerre 55 minutes ago | parent

If anything i'm asking for the conversation to stay 'on-goal'.

If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicitly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.

So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?

I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.

jasonlotito 35 minutes ago | parent

> Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.

Doesn't matter if the damage is already done. Raise dead doesn't exist in the real world. And the courts don't decide things. The executive has proven it will just ignore the courts.

> Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes

First, this it 100% not true, and secondly, if you ignore congress, it doesn't matter. And once again, the damage is already done by the time congress gets around to it.

> The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?

Expect? None. Hope for? Basic respect to the rule of law to start. But with pdf in the white house, all bets are off.

insane_dreamer 14 minutes ago | parent

There's bad. And then there's extremely bad.

So let's not conflate the two, ok?

dpkirchner 1 hour ago | parent

Republicans have suggested for years that there is a counterbalance in the bill of rights.

distortionfield 1 hour ago | parent

That has shown to be nothing but hot air and wishful thinking. The second they got into power they’ve thrown any hint of caring about the constitution out the window.

guhidalg 1 hour ago | parent

Can I buy the same weapons the American military has access to?

Until that's true, the 2nd amendment is meaningless when USAF can buy JDAMs and F35s and I, an American citizen, cannot.

AlotOfReading 1 hour ago | parent

The primary mechanism for redress of constitutional right violations under current law are monetary damages under FTCA, especially now that universal injunctions are dead. There's no actual counterbalance.

insane_dreamer 16 minutes ago | parent

in theory, yes; in practice, no.

bunderbunder 16 minutes ago | parent

The Bill of Rights is just words on paper. For it to mean anything, the judicial needs to be willing to uphold it and the executive needs to be willing to enforce those decisions.

That becomes much less likely when they are allowed to become overly partisan. The officials who wield power lose the ability to distinguish between civic duty and the rule of law, and loyalty to the party itself.

pc86 1 hour ago | parent

Surveillance expanded under Obama and Biden. It would have expanded under Clinton or Harris. It will expand under the next Democratic President and it will expand under the next Republican one.

Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.

runako 1 hour ago | parent

Let's be clear here that this is explicitly not just surveillance. This is surveillance in service of abducting people without due process. We can debate surveillance in the abstract, but this specifically is a feeder program to a system that has illegally deported US citizens without any due process. (Which would have, at step 1, indicated that US citizens cannot be deported.)

This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.

All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.

mpalmer 37 minutes ago | parent

18 U.S.C. § 242: Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

A DOJ with its ducks in a row would be charging this left and right.

QuercusMax 23 minutes ago | parent

5 year statute of limitations, unlimited if it results in death.

Unless he pardons literally every ICE agent, a new administration can and certainly should levy all kinds of charges. That's one reason folks have been documenting so much about what's going on even if it can't be stopped right now.

trimethylpurine 1 hour ago | parent

> US citizens "can't" be deported

Source: I'm a naturalized citizen.

Naturalized citizens can be deported and their citizenship can be revoked in cases of violent crime or other immoral behavior. That information is provided when swearing in.

It's more accurate to say that US citizens who are law abiding and moral, or who are born in the US, can't be deported.

bilbo0s 29 minutes ago | parent

This.

Also, with this administration, if you didn't dot an 'i' or cross a 't' somewhere in your paperwork, citizenship can be revoked.

Basically, if they catch you in any kind of lie. It's fraud.

Could be ex post facto and seemingly innocuous act unconnected to paperwork as well. You came in. Applied for asylum. Went through the process. And, finally, you were naturalized.

Only you traveled back to your hometown in your country of origin at some point. Before or after naturalization.

Boom.

They got you. That's fraud.

Everyone needs to stay extra careful going forward.

runako 16 minutes ago | parent

> after naturalization

Say more about this. You are hinting at a kind of conditional citizenship that I do not believe exists under US law.

Are you suggesting that there is a class of citizens who did not commit fraud on their naturalization paperwork, yet who are barred from travel to countries that other citizens are able to travel to?

runako 18 minutes ago | parent

Since we're nitpicking, you are still not correct.

US citizens cannot be deported.

Naturalized citizens cannot be deported for crimes they commit after they became citizens.

Naturalized citizens who obtained their citizenship through fraudulent means can have their citizenship revoked. Then, they are not citizens and can be deported.

US citizens cannot be deported.

(There should be a time limit on revocation after which citizenship becomes permanent and irrevocable.)

icantevenhold 49 minutes ago | parent

If you want to build a stasi-like system then the answer to all that’s yes - which seems to be what the majority of us citizens is in favour of, otherwise they wouldn’t have elected this admin

andrewla 36 minutes ago | parent

Characterizing the propublica pieces as "fake immigration charges" is pretty misleading. All of their arrests of non-illegal-immigrants has been for (bogus) charges unrelated to immigration, usually some variant of "obstruction".

"Some US citizens have been deported" is also a mischaracterization. Aside from minor children of deported parents, the only case where an American citizen was deported was Brian Morales Garcia.

runako 22 minutes ago | parent

"fake immigration charges" are what they apply to people born here, so that they can deport them. The charges are facially fake because a person born here cannot have immigrated here.

There is no such thing as a legitimate immigration charge levied against a person born in Chicago or Los Angeles. It's definitionally fake, even if ICE says otherwise. This is part of the reason they deport people before the courts can weigh in.

> "Some US citizens have been deported" is also a mischaracterization

You are simply wrong on this, as you admit in your next sentence. I wonder at the motive for knowingly something flagrantly incorrect, then admitting as much in the next sentence.

In any case, the link I provided includes links to cases where native-born US citizens have been illegally deported without due process. In one case, the prosecutor admitted that the deportations were illegal. But because ICE is supralegal and does not follow due process, those citizens never went before a judge before being deported.

andrewla 13 minutes ago | parent

The situation under which citizens have been detained have always been claimed to be for obstruction. I am not aware of a single case where an individual was detained for immigration charges who was not specifically targeted for enforcement, although since ICE is not public about this (and they cannot be in order to protect the accused) it is hard to say for sure.

The link recounts one case, the one I mentioned, Garcia, and the circumstances around his deportation are complex at best. No question that ICE was mistaken on the facts, but the situation was complex -- he had crossed the border into the US illegally; he did have a Mexican passport with a different spelling of his name. I am not aware of any others and the propublica does not cite any others. Please give names if you are aware of any.

My claim was that you mischaracterized the propublica article and I stand by it. You claimed that US citizens were being detained on fake immigration charges and this is not the case (Garcia was a mistake but the charges were not fake, they were just incorrect). You claimed that US citizens have been deported, and the article only provided a single example, which does not support the claim of "people", that being the plural of "person".

neya 15 minutes ago | parent

> Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?

You know what's funny, everything you said is valid, but, I've never seen this much outrage over flock cameras on here or on most tech forums. It's actually the opposite. Somehow spying is ok if they like the company.

A lot of users here have vocally admitted that having Flock cameras was okay because they were a HOA member and it gave them security of some sort and they had "nothing to hide"

Another example was Anthropic getting caught stenographically marking requests[1] and Anthropic's response when they got caught was simply "it was just an experiment" and everyone on here said it's okay.

> Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?

I wish we asked this question to all our favorite tech companies too, this being a tech forum and all.

[1] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

frereubu 13 minutes ago | parent

> I've never seen this much outrage over flock cameras on here or on most tech forums

I have entirely the opposite impression of HN - I feel like I hear a huge amount of (rightful) resistance to that kind of surveillance.

bko 10 minutes ago | parent

> I've never seen this much outrage over flock cameras on here or on most tech forums.

Are we on the same platform? Search Flock on HN, below are the top results

Stop Flock

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers

US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera

YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops

Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]

I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed

An interactive map of Flock Cams

Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=flock

gib444 2 hours ago | parent

So, a Stasi more or less? Or perhaps KGB is more accurate

java-man 1 hour ago | parent

Guess is where Kash is right now and what dictators our dear leader really likes.

outside1234 2 hours ago | parent

It is just crazy to me that people traded their rights away just because they got mad at some DEI programs and trans people.

pixelready 1 hour ago | parent

Keep people in “system 1” thinking to control them. Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up, it’s clear that although these fault lines always existed in US society, fringe opinions have been massively signal-boosted by bots for quite some time. I suspect there’s been a psychological Cold War going on online for at least the last decade or two, with a whole ecosystem of grifters and ragebait view farmers bottom-feeding off of state sponsored PsyOps, leading a corrupt inner circle of elite opportunists to take advantage of the resulting anger for personal gain. We’ll probably never get to tease apart what was a natural side effect of social media and what was engineered deliberately but I bet the story would be every bit as fascinating as the Manhattan project.

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

> Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up

This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.

We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.

veqq 1 hour ago | parent

If you oppose them, it'd be good to understand them instead of being shocked about straw men. If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders sharing eg. demographic data. "Remigration" is the key term, now.

ceejayoz 1 hour ago | parent

> If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders…

You can't really understand a hypocrite by taking their public utterances at face value.

sophacles 1 hour ago | parent

Its been a bad habit since 9/11 and the disgusting mess that is the PATRIOT act.

Never underestimate how much most Americans will gladly shit on their freedoms if they're told it will hurt someone slightly different than them.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

Look what the Europeans did from their antisemitism in the 1940s. We need to criminalize hate politics like we've banned other antisocial behaviors such as assault and rape. This just feels so obvious to me. Political hatemongering isn't some mystifying slippery ghost.

But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"

Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.

t1234s 2 hours ago | parent

This seems like a problem, reaction, solution scenario where Big Tech was always the solution and needed a problem and a reaction.

ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago | parent

It's also their preservation mechanism. expect some of the people investigated to be "anti tech extremists" https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago | parent

"enforcement and removal", from the actual name, sounds lots worse than "spying"

in fact it sounds uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens, like NKVD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka

ourmandave 2 hours ago | parent

The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated as VChK, and commonly known as the Cheka, was the first Soviet secret police organization.

antonvs 1 hour ago | parent

> uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens

I'm sure Trump has had plenty of input from Putin about all this. Even if he's not formally an "asset", it's more a case of shared goals.

atoav 1 hour ago | parent

If they can make illegal migrants disappear without any option for them to defend themselves in front of the legal system, they can make anybody disappear, including you.

And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.

bilbo0s 16 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, they're not disappearing anyone.

They don't need to, because the US has a finely honed system of railroading.

They push captured migrants through the system to deportation via a "rocket docket" and our rubber stamp justice system.

The system being discussed simply allows them to lay their hands on more migrants to feed that existing quick deportation pipeline.

It's worse than disappearing people. Disappearing people implies they need to hide what they're doing from an objectionable public. Clearly, the people currently in power are blessed with a constituency they don't need to hide from.

HoldOnAMinute 2 hours ago | parent

Hot take: This is a grifting and jobs program, not an actual solution to a real problem.

ourmandave 2 hours ago | parent

The starting people will have top secret security clearance. =(

hobo123 1 hour ago | parent

I think it's a Curtis Yarvin take that political power is based on a party's jobs program. In that sense this is never surprising.

pixelready 1 hour ago | parent

Grifting, purchasing loyalty, and building a police state panopticon in case of inconvenient election results. A real dystopic trifecta!

lifeisloving 1 hour ago | parent

Whats the "real" problem? People working for roofing companies? American citizens commit more crime than immigrants by an order of magnitude.

parineum 1 hour ago | parent

People doing illegal things is the problem. Change the law if you think it's wrong but it's the executive branch's duty to enforce the law.

You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.

This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.

lifeisloving 1 hour ago | parent

Nope, I can distinguish between what is right and "wrong" without arbitrary laws decided by <1k corrupt politicians (Ds and Rs).

I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.

If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.

I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.

parineum 35 minutes ago | parent

> If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense

That isn't the root of the problem at all. The root of the problem is we have certain laws that, under some administrations, are barely enforced. Then, under another administration, there are a large group of people who have been flouting the law because it wasn't being enforced.

You've now created huge class of people who have very tenous legal status, based on the whims of the executive. That's the problem.

US immigration laws are some of the most relaxed in the world. There's plenty of debate on whether that should change or not (and how). But circumventing the legislative process might make you feel good about the immediate problem but it creates a side effect of having an underclass of non-citizens that live under constant threat of deportation and have limited access to social programs.

The only judgement I've made of you is that you seem to think not enforcing the law based on personal feelings is right and you've only confirmed that.

In a democracy, the law isn't just some words on papers, it represents the collective moral judgement of the voting population. It is inherently antithetical to democracy to ignore laws you don't agree with.

> Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.

Pretty ironic considering this entire situation is caused by people ignoring the system rather than patching it.

jimmydoe 2 hours ago | parent

I'd rather my tax money wasted on get US people watched and silenced, than bombing schools and killing children in Middle East.

I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.

collinmcnulty 1 hour ago | parent

If the people in the US get watched and silenced, how will they effectively pressure the govt to not bomb children in the Middle East?

rhyperior 1 hour ago | parent

I can’t fathom this kind of thinking. It’s not a case of having to choose between the lesser of evils, it’s a case of having some principles and making decisions based on them.

You can say no.

newspaper1 31 minutes ago | parent

It's the same forces doing the bombing and the spying. Want to object to Israel/the US murdering a school full of girls? Guess what, now you've got a Palantir tag on you. Push hard enough and maybe Bill Ackman will jump on Twitter and get you blacklisted.

binlog 2 hours ago | parent

No one spoke out when the government started abducting US citizens (who happened to be brown) off the street and killing them in detention centers or putting them on deportation planes to random countries without any due process. This is just the next logical step of the program. All authoritarian governments handle dissidents in this way.

klipt 1 hour ago | parent

Plenty of people spoke out but none of the people with power to stop it (courts, Congress)

georgeecollins 1 hour ago | parent

Many citizens and some politicians spoke out.

bradleyankrom 1 hour ago | parent

Lots of people have spoken out... some have even died while speaking out.

nightpool 1 hour ago | parent

Many people spoke out against it. I don't think "nobody spoke out" is the problem here

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

I mean, it's cliche but vote! Use your right to vote and vote in people who will hold those who abuse their power accountable.

If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.

Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.

vrganj 1 hour ago | parent

Voting is important, but your voice doesn't stop there. Take to the streets. Block some roads. Occupy some buildings.

The Serbians did that for two years straight, until their government resigned and called for new elections. Look at videos from a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jc29fk/breathtakin...

If a much poorer country with (for now!) much worse repression can do it, what's your excuse, Americans?

Politics isn't just the ballot box every couple of years. Politics is always and everywhere.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

I don't disagree with anything you said. I'm just saying that voting is something that's a right given to US citizens [1] that is woefully underutilized. Only about half of those eligible bother voting! If you don't like the current state of politics, you should at the very least do the minimal effort to participate in our republic.

That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.

[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.

criddell 1 hour ago | parent

Blocking roads seems like a very fast way to have people turn on you and your cause. It might be effective in some places, but in much of America I think it's counter productive.

TFNA 24 minutes ago | parent

"Calling for new elections" is a regular process in a parliamentary system, and so protestors can pressure a government into that. The US runs on a fixed election schedule and change doesn't happen outside of that (Congressmen and Senators resigning en masse is a pure fantasy).

vrganj 14 minutes ago | parent

Sure, you can't have the exact same outcome. But you sure can force change in ways that are feasible in your system. The problem is the lack of even trying.

Capricorn2481 1 hour ago | parent

When the government is shooting citizens in the face, disenfranchising voters, dismantling election committees, and encouraging militant groups to show up to polling places and intimidate vote counters, all while claiming every election they've been a part of was rigged against them, it's natural for people to look outside of voting to make an impact.

I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not saying you vote instead of doing other things. I'm just saying that this right is really underutilized and anyone who can vote should.

eatsyourtacos 1 hour ago | parent

Lots of people did.

And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.

We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.

Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.

pasquinelli 1 hour ago | parent

yes, people spoke out, but i take your point. a lot of people seemed cool with it or were even excited for it when they thought it wouldn't effect them, but obviously, if they could get away with it with a subset of the population, that subset would only grow.

mjburgess 45 minutes ago | parent

Do you have any references for these claims?

* Which US citizens have been abducted and by who? Which have been killed?

* Which US citizens found themselves in US detention centers (without lawful arrest) ?

* Which US citizens were placed in other countries without judicial review?

As far as I can tell:

No US citizens have been deported. No US citizens have been detained after evidence of their citizenship has been produced, which is a fast process in practice (taking a few hours), and has affected a few hundred people in total swept up during larger enforcement operations. The worst examples I can find are "At least 36 citizens were held at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or family." No US citizens have died in detention, nor been killed. In detention, deaths have risen on previous years, but are due to existing medical issues being untreated rather than anyone being killed.

cogman10 34 minutes ago | parent

It's hard to say exactly how many because ICE isn't keeping records precisely to make it easier to hide their captives. There are more than a few reports of midnight flights around the country with lawyers being unable to contact their clients.

But for just a taste, here's a propublica article on the matter.

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

mjburgess 29 minutes ago | parent

Yes, this is the only evidence I can find of anything even tangentially claimed in this comment. "At least 36 citizens were held at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or family."

It's unclear how that number could be "0" if there's any immigration enforcement at all. That is: supposing a person is likely to be present without authorisation in the country, and is unable to offer any evidence of citizenship, then what?

It seems this is an incredibly small number for such a large operation, ie., the worst case treatment of US citizens appears to be 36 held for a day.

Could this be improved? Presumably.

taco_emoji 6 minutes ago | parent

"No one spoke out" <- this is just demonstrably false. If you want to live in a doomfantasy be my guest, but don't lie.

lurker919 1 hour ago | parent

So 700k a year for 142 analysts who might analyze this very comment someday and trace it back to me, great.

ourmandave 1 hour ago | parent

And I upvoted and replied. Great.

redanddead 1 hour ago | parent

Now I’m lumped into this! Greaaat just great

singingtoday 1 hour ago | parent

Hey, analyst reading this: You should ask for a raise. Seriously look up income in your area, you're getting scammed.

matteoraso 35 minutes ago | parent

I'm liking and commenting under my real name. Fuck ICE.

rl3 1 hour ago | parent

The specific clearance requirement may suggest Section 702/FISA capability being employed.

If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.

It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.

huslage 1 hour ago | parent

This would be illegal of course.

groby_b 1 hour ago | parent

I mean, so is murdering people in cold blood, that's why ICE doesn't really do that.

zerotolerance 41 minutes ago | parent

When the courts have no power or are complicit then legality is irrelevant.

kittikitti 1 hour ago | parent

YCombinator and their lackies in Big Tech have promoted these types of abuses to occur. The comment section here will be filled with people who lack any substance but will gladly provide lip service. The stories of the modern day Gestapo cannot be told without Silicon Valley.

georgemcbay 1 hour ago | parent

YC loves domestic spying. They can't get enough of it. Flock, Conntour, Lexius, Protent, Ornadyne, AvairSense, etc.

chinathrow 1 hour ago | parent

US of A fone fully rogue. With the help of the tech bros.

christkv 1 hour ago | parent

I thought the NSA already was the internal spy agency?

brookst 1 hour ago | parent

NSA has a culture of at least sort of following the laws that govern them. This needs to be ICE to land with people who will happily ignore court orders.

parineum 1 hour ago | parent

NSA has a culture of technically following the law while blatantly subverting them.

distortionfield 1 hour ago | parent

That seems like a strict improvement over ICE still lmao.

singingtoday 1 hour ago | parent

Why have one when you can have two?

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

Genuine question for people here who still like Trump...does this kind of stuff not scare you?

distortionfield 1 hour ago | parent

It doesn’t, because they think he’s on their side. As long as he keeps hurting the right people, they’ll tolerate anything he throws at them.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here. I suspect you and I have a lot of overlap on our opinions, which is great but sort of tangential to what I want to know.

ceejayoz 1 hour ago | parent

> Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here.

  That didn't happen.
  And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
  And if it was, that's not a big deal.
  And if it is, that's not my fault.
  And if it was, I didn't mean it.
  And if I did, you deserved it.

(Sometimes called The Narcissist's Prayer.)

mercanlIl 58 minutes ago | parent

You’re replying to a comment that is re-iterating that they are asking for the opinion of actual Trump supporters. Presumably you are not yourself a Trump supporter, and what you posted is not your opinion.

It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.

SpicyLemonZest 39 minutes ago | parent

As a matter of intentional political strategy, I and many other people do not want to see or hear the opinions of actual Trump supporters. I feel it's important to communicate to them that they're bad people with shameful opinions who don't get to have a voice in my circles. In the modern US, this is unfortunately an effective and important component of politics; Trump himself routinely deploys this strategy to great effect.

I really do hope that in the future this strategy will stop being necessary, or that we can at least restore the norms against it. But I'm not going to unilaterally disarm.

tombert 28 minutes ago | parent

I doubt I like trump any more than you do, but if we accept what you said as true, wouldn't that suggest that the entire concept of "free speech" doesn't work?

ceejayoz 17 minutes ago | parent

I think you're mixing up the right to speak with the right to be listened to. "Shut up, fascist, get out of my house" is free speech, too. (And free association.)

ceejayoz 30 minutes ago | parent

> It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.

It's more the belief that a genuine answer will come I'm chuckling at.

tedggh 1 hour ago | parent

Once they have deported the last undocumented immigrant this system won’t be just decommissioned, it will be repurposed.

adfgaionio 47 minutes ago | parent

Remember those horrible vicious ni… I mean Haitians in Springfield? The ones who are "poisoning the blood of the country", "probably have AIDS", and are "eating the dogs" and "eating the cats"?

They were legal, every last one of them. They were under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). There was no "law and order" justification to object to their presence. Didn't stop the GOP from going after them. Trump and Vance viciously attacked them with the full support of the conservative media. The administration repealed their TPS protection, turning people who had done no wrong into fugitives.

This is about race. Always has been. When they run out of "illegals", they'll turn people into "illegals". When they run out of immigrants entirely, they'll overturn the 14th Amendment and start stripping citizenship from native-born Americans of the wrong color. They've already tried just that, and three motherfuckers on the Supreme Court voted to let them.

whatever1 38 minutes ago | parent

Everyone can be stripped off their citizenship now that birthright is debatable (Supreme Court upheld with a narrow 6-3). At which point they are illegals.

The infra we are building for our future dictator is awesome.

nirav72 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone cheering for this fail to realize that these kinds of programs never ever go away. Even if their budget is restricted by a future congress, some forms of this will remain. Also, political changes occur every 4-8 years. Sooner or later, the other side will control the same levers. Instead of targeting immigration, it could be used to target a community/ideology/group of individuals you align with.

runako 1 hour ago | parent

This is all correct. The implication is the only long-term solution is dissolution of DHS.

Whatever functions we need can be rebuilt from scratch later. But this is a rebuild moment, not a refactor moment.

deadbabe 1 hour ago | parent

Nonsense. This administration erased entire programs with the stroke of a pen. A future administration could do the same. Everything this administration has done can be unraveled.

krunck 55 minutes ago | parent

Unless it involves the pet projects of those who are really in control.

nirav72 52 minutes ago | parent

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or actually believe that. History clearly show its naive to think that will happen. See Post-9/11 domestic surveillance programs by the NSA ramped up during the GW Bush years continuing or even increasing under Obama. We just haven't had a Snowden level leak to show what programs have persisted in the last two administration.

cogman10 41 minutes ago | parent

No, what they are saying is the future Democrat administration which will hem and haw at how their hands are tied will be lying.

They will have the power to at very least lay off every person involved. But will they? Probably not (your point). Trump (illegally) shut down the DOE and USAID by simply firing everyone employed there.

Ancalagon 1 hour ago | parent

Most un-American 142 intelligence operatives to ever exist.

blobbers 1 hour ago | parent

Okay, who here doesn't read this $100M and think something along the lines of Dr. Evil...

Let's add some levity to the situation, and here's the link: https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE?si=lGJ7_L0IN31WNMKE

Gurgle1041 59 minutes ago | parent

(un)fun fact, Deloitte currently staffs what looks like a smaller version of this contract, that this may be intended to replace based on the timing. Example, award ID 70CDCR21FR0000022 on USAspending.gov

m3047 40 minutes ago | parent

As flawed as the civil service is, it's the notion of "contractors" which concerns me most.

penguin_booze 35 minutes ago | parent

Don't let the US shove this down to other countries' throats. Because, that's what they do, and they're very good at it.

emsign 28 minutes ago | parent

This was once known as Gestapo and Stasi.