alt Hacker NewsEvidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
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Not clear how central the patriot act was to this operation, but it does pop up here.
Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.
Fun-fact™ Wednesday:
One person has appointed every single judge to the current US FISA Courts (whose jurisdiction includes domestic surveillance rubberstamping).
You can thank the concessions of Bush v. Gore (2000) for giving this executive-level privilege to the hoNoRAblE [SCOTUS Chief] Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
ICE is rogue* agency. They need to be disbanded. Fine if we still have an agency doing ICE work or whatever, but every single person employed by ICE needs to be fired, potentially prosecuted, definitely black listed from federal government work, and their funds returned for the blatant unconstitutional and dangerous use they've been put towards.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
* Misspelled initially
Where are all the Don't Tread on Me people who prepped for decades for precisely such cases?
It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.
Great. So when the dems get back in power they can go after all the far right militant movements that are armed to the teeth and breaking countless laws?
I change countries a lot and my default assumption for any new country is that overstaying your visa will be treated seriously, resulting in something like immediate detention (in a very lousy environment), probably a fine, and near-immediate deportation (at your expense), and probably some sort of quite serious ban (probably greater than merely months). And that's if the individual has a clean record; I'd expect it to significantly less benign otherwise.
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
Abolish ICE, abolish DHS. Put every single ERO officer and person involved in efforts like this on trial and/or bar them from any public service of any kind going forward.
Stop voting for these assholes.
Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/ice-is-running-one-of-the-largest-anti...
> Operation Puppet Master
They're not even trying to pretend to not be evil.
Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
Let's say some friends and family looks are their target demographic.
We know the drill, a suspicious vehicle follows you until, we assume, check your profile after they look your plates, then they suddenly stop showing interesting in being close.
Nice surveillance state we got guys!
Seems like they shouldn't put this behind a pay wall or should make it easy to pay for just this article. I'm not subscribing, even with a free trial, to read it.
State resources and armed officers taking a political stance like this is how democracy withers
The logical conclusion for republicans is to import their own illegals (east germans, venezualians, etc) and play the same game.
You have the power to stop them. There are plenty of technical opportunities out there and every internal security memo with your hn handle on it is another piece of grear they can't use and time they've wasted ratcheting their own paranoia.
For years the social contract was that neither side did it to the other because once that rubicon was crossed, both sides would do it.
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
Ahhh, the SuperMax in El Salvador will soon be overflowing ...
What the US needs to do to survive is basically do to the ultra left extremists what Bolivia did to their gangs. Arrest them in quantity and prosecute. Doing this rapidly before the country collapses requires measures which inevitably will catch some false positives.
I'm tired of these guys trying to one up McCarthy.
They don't seem to be doing a very good job. It's a dog and pony show highlighting low hanging fruit getting reaped.
I read the article and the facts don't match up with the title. The thesis is actually
The Minnesota 15 case is the clearest example yet of DHS pursuing the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on what have long been upheld as First Amendment–protected activities
Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is anti-democratic.
Man, this is chilling. Between this and those "anti-ice" protestors that got a collective 450 years of jail time, it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
Brought to you by the people who have complained bitterly for decades about federal overreach and excessive government spending. Oh, the irony.
Ah, the ICE Nazguls at work.
Anyone mind explaining to me why an Immigration enforcement agency is being used to spy on the political behaviour of citizens?
Another highly upvoted article shadow-banned off HN’s front page. Ridiculous!
What's new? Gov been doing this to every dissident group for decades now. Funny that "left" now care about it since it's pointed at them. Making this a left vs right debate is so tiresome.
I'm having flashbacks to when I was in high school in the 1970's while Nixon was at the height of his powers.
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
Tech fascism alright.
Read The Nerd Reich.
This is fascism.
Not really the bent of the article, but it's also worth pointing out that this shows some really terrible opsec practice by the activists in question. Like, no, you don't just spin up a cloud server to coordinate your protest activity and then ssh into it from your home IP. Dude...
I think the history of the FBI suggests this will continue long after Trump himself leaves office, effectively becoming a state run gang.
> Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
For 40 years left wingers have in no particular order:
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion and ethnic background up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as they say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
the pendulum will eventually swing back and most of these fucks will be thrown in prison.
It is eerily similar to the 1930s era in central Europe.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should never be confused with having an agenda other than fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power to their cronies.
What gets me is how much of this stuff is just bought, not built. Agencies can purchase location and social media data from brokers and skip the warrant step entirely, so I'd honestly put more energy into closing that loophole than into fighting any one agency.
anti-left sure, but more like "anti everyone who isn't part of a small set of VERY far right movements by general western standards, many affected people just don't know about it yet or are willful ignorant about it"
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
/s
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> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson- Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly registered vehicles.
Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!
The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.