mrtesthah · 5 months ago

Sure. Can you give me an example of something that's illegal to say in a group chat that coordinates legal observers?

tremon · 5 months ago

Not sure what difference that makes, it's not like the current regime limits their actions to respect constitutional bounds.

dylan604 · 5 months ago

That's a strange take. It also feels like exactly what they are hoping to have happen. Encouraging gun violence is not something condoned, so not sure why you are posting that nonsense. Are you an agitator?

mrguyorama · 5 months ago

Nothing about the 2nd amendment legalizes shooting law enforcement officers.

This has always been the absurdity of the moronic claims of the 2nd amendment being to overthrow government tyranny: You may own the gun legally, but at no point will your actions be legal. If you've decided the government needs to be overthrown, you are already throwing "law" out the window, even if you have a valid argument that the government you are overthrowing has abandoned the constitution.

Why the fuck do you need legal guns to commit treason? Last I checked, most government overthrows don't even involve people armed with private rifles!

If you are overthrowing the government, you will need to take over local police stations. At the moment, you no longer need private arms, and what you are doing isn't legal anyway.

Meanwhile, every single fucking time it has come up, the gun nuts go radio silent when the government kills the right person who happens to own a gun. Every. Single. Time.

It took minutes for the "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" people who raised a million dollars for Kyle Rittenhouse to defend himself for driving to a protest in a different state while armed to the teeth to of course get to shoot someone to turn around and say "Actually bringing a gun to a protest makes you a terrorist and you need to be shot". Minutes. They have also put up GoFundMes for the guy who executed that man.

If you are too scared to stand up to your government without a fucking rifle, you have never been an actual threat to your government, and they know that.

archy_ · 5 months ago

Never fear, the 2nd amendments days are numbered too. Trump just said 'You can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns' (the 'in' in this context being 'outside')

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-you-cant-have-gu...

nextlevelwizard · 5 months ago

Fed

craftkiller · 5 months ago

Here's the iPhone spreadsheet from the 2024 leak: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZESd9Zj5HkMZnIjLStS...

It only goes up to iOS 18 since that was the latest version at the time.

Here is an article about the leaks: https://archive.ph/JTLIU

handedness · 5 months ago

> Pixels continue to have baseband and OOBConfig exploits that allow pushing zero interaction updates, or system memory access.

That is greatly reduced since the releases of the Pixel 9 and 10.

layer8 · 5 months ago

https://archive.ph/copyn

It wasn’t paywalled for me, BTW.

direwolf20 · 5 months ago

Interference with a law enforcement investigation?

mycodendral · 5 months ago

18 U.S.C. § 372 - Conspiring to impede or interfere with a federal officer

rexpop · 5 months ago

It's a crime.

What do you have against crime?

Nonviolent political action is often criminalized.

mindslight · 5 months ago

In the fascist's mind, anything that isn't supporting Dear Leader's vision of "greatness" is a crime.

mycodendral · 5 months ago

18 U.S.C. § 372 - Conspiring to impede or interfere with a federal officer

Freedom of expression does not include freedom from prosecution for real crimes.

janalsncm · 5 months ago

Can you rule out the much less technically advanced explanation that this information was crowdsourced? And people are simply observing the license plates that are plainly displayed?

Frankly I don’t think it should have to come to license plate numbers. In a free society law enforcement should clearly identify themselves as such. We should not need secret police.

derbOac · 5 months ago

"Unlawfully scanning license plates"? What does that even mean?

Like searching a vehicle database? That's available to all sorts of people, like auto body repair shops.

Taking a photo of a license plate? Nothing illegal about that.

anigbrowl · 5 months ago

There is nothing unlawful about scanning license plates. You are allowed to photograph them in the same way you are allowed to stand around writing them into a notebook if that activity is your idea of fun. Where do people get these ideas?!

tptacek · 5 months ago

Nobody has been charged.

poplarsol · 5 months ago

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.72

mycodendral · 5 months ago

"molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties"

The explicit coordination of things like: vehicle blocking, personnel blocking, personnel removal, disruptive distraction could clearly qualify.

How the courts choose to interpret & prosecute is up to them.

spiderice · 5 months ago

Which is probably the easiest thing ever to prove, since people are openly trying to impede them

mycodendral · 5 months ago

Yes, they are federal officers. There is no pattern of mass kidnappings by impersonators occurring here.

Interpreting masked officers in tactical gear as kidnappers, or claiming that a patch saying “ICE” is insufficient identification, is not a legally valid basis for suspicion or resistance.

spankalee · 5 months ago

I was replying specifically to this:

> This seems like a good example of that being enough metadata to be a big problem

I was not saying it's not a problem that the feds are doing this, because that's not what I was replying to.

refurb · 5 months ago

That seems like a weak argument.

I mean, carrying a weapon is a 2nd amendment right, but if I bring it to a protest and then start intimidating people with it, the police going after me is not "Government intimidation of the practice of constitutional rights".

Protesting is a constitution right, but if you break the law while protesting, you're fair game for prosecution.

mrtesthah · 5 months ago

This is the price we pay to defend our rights. I would also expect any reasonable grand jury to reject such charges given how flagrantly the government has attempted to bias the public against protesters.

ajross · 5 months ago

> protestors behaving legally or practicing civil disobedience can still have their lives ruined by people in power.

They surely can. But the point was more than the people in power don't really need Signal metadata to do that. On the lists of security concerns modern protestors need to be worrying about, Signal really just isn't very high.

scoofy · 5 months ago

The literal point of civil disobedience is accepting that you may end up in jail:

"Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."

-- Letter from the Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr: https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/201Stuff/F14/B%20SophistSocr...

spankalee · 5 months ago

If they could arrest people for what they've been doing, they would have already arrested people. And they have arrested a few here and there for "assault" (things like daring to react when being shoved by an annoyed officer), but the thing that's really pissing DHS off is that the protesters and observers are not breaking the law.

jjk166 · 5 months ago

Conspiracy requires an agreement to commit an illegal act, and entering into that agreement must be intentional.

nicce · 5 months ago

Palantir steps in indeed

ceejayoz · 5 months ago

> make it seem like the participants have access to some sort of ALPR data to track vehicles

The whole reason cops love ALPR data is anyone's allowed to collect it, so they don't need a warrant.

chocolatkey · 5 months ago

Note that Threema has had a recent change in ownership to a German investment firm. Supposedly nothing will change but I can’t help but be wary

OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 5 months ago

It's worth noting that the way Signal's architecture is set up, Signal the organisation doesn't have access to users' phone numbers.

They technically have logs from when verification happens (as that goes through an SMS verification service) but that just documents that you have an account/when you registered. And it's unclear whether those records are available anymore since no warrants have been issued since they moved to the new username system.

And the actual profile and contact discovery infra is all designed to be actively hostile to snooping on identifiable information even with hardware access (requiring compromise of secure enclaves + multiple levels of obfuscation and cryptographic anti-extraction techniques on top).

jvanderbot · 5 months ago

If you follow the X chatter on this, some folks got into the groups and tracked all the numbers, their contributions, and when they went "on shift" or "off".

I don't really think Signal tech has anything to do with this.

OhMeadhbh · 5 months ago

I think the deal is you marry the strong crypto with a human mediated security process which provides high confidence the message sender maps to the human you think they are. And even if they are, they could be a narc. Nothing in strong crypto prevents narcs in whom ill-advised trust has been granted from copying messages they're getting over the encrypted channel and forwarding them to the man.

And even then, a trusted participant could not understand they're not supposed to give their private keys out or could be rubber-hosed into revealing their key pin. All sorts of ways to subvert "secure" messaging besides breaking the crypto.

I guess what I'm saying is "Strong cryptography is required, but not sufficient to ensure secure messaging."

ddtaylor · 5 months ago

There are a lot of solutions to denial of service attacks than to collect personal information. Plus, you know, you can always delete an account later? If what Signal says is true, then this amounts to a few records in their database which isn't cause for concern IMO

direwolf20 · 5 months ago

Yes. Cheap–identity systems such as Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to this, and your only defence is to not give out your address as they are unguessable. If you have someone's address, you can spam them, and they can't stop it except by deleting the app or resetting to a new address and losing all their contacts.

SimpleX does better than Session because the address used to add new contacts is different from the address used with any existing contact and is independently revocable. But if that address is out there, you can receive a full queue of spam contacts before you next open the SimpleX app.

Both Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to storage DoS as well.

Bender · 5 months ago

I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.

causalscience · 5 months ago

I have no idea if that was true 20 years ago, but it's not true now. XMPP doesn't have this problem; your host instance knows your IP but you can connect via Tor.

ddtaylor · 5 months ago

Briar and Session are the better encrypted messengers.

venusenvy47 · 5 months ago

Is there any reason they didn't use email? It seems like something that would have been easier to keep some anonymity., while still allowing the person to authenticate.

causalscience · 5 months ago

Your point is correct but irrelevant to this conversation.

The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that.

The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.

ddtaylor · 5 months ago

In past instances where Signal has complied with warrants, such as the 2021 and 2024 Santa Clara County cases, the records they provided included phone numbers to identify the specific accounts for which data was available. This was necessary to specify which requested accounts (identified by phone numbers in the warrants) had associated metadata, such as account creation timestamps and last connection dates.

gruez · 5 months ago

Which of those links actually say that your phone number is private from Signal? If anything, this passage makes it sound like it's the reverse, because they specifically call out usernames not being stored in plaintext, but not phone numbers.

>We have also worked to ensure that keeping your phone number private from the people you speak with doesn’t necessitate giving more personal information to Signal. Your username is not stored in plaintext, meaning that Signal cannot easily see or produce the usernames of given accounts.

causalscience · 5 months ago

> it'd be extremely non trivial

Extremely non trivial. What I'm hearing is "security by obfuscation".

pixl97 · 5 months ago

https://xkcd.com/538/

hedayet · 5 months ago

or convince one member of a group chat to show their group chat...

neves · 5 months ago

Or just let the guy to enter the country after unlocking her phone.

midasz · 5 months ago

> which prevents the government from bringing a case

Genuinely, from outside, it seems like your government doesn't give a damn on what they are and aren't allowed to do.

mrWiz · 5 months ago

All they have to do is pretend to be a concerned neighbor who wants to help give mutual aid and hope that someone in the group chat takes the bait and adds them in. No further convincing is needed.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 5 months ago

If you aren't saving people's phone numbers in your own contacts, signal isn't storing them in group chats (and even if you are, it doesn't say which number, just that you have a contact with them).

Signal doesn't share numbers by default and hasn't for a few years now. And you can toggle a setting to remove your number from contact discovery/lookup entirely if you are so inclined.

xmcp123 · 5 months ago

There are multiple companies that can get different amounts of information off of locked phones including iPhones, and they work with LE.

I’m also curious what they could get off of cloud backups. Thinking in terms of auth, keys, etc. For SMS it’s almost as good as phone access, but I am not sure for apps.

thewebguyd · 5 months ago

> it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.

I'm sure the Israeli spyware companies can help with that.

Although then they'd have to start burning their zero days to just go after protestors, which I doubt they're willing to do. I imagine they like to save those for bigger targets.

ddtaylor · 5 months ago

I'm confident the people executing non-complaint people in the street would be capable of compelling a citizen.

XorNot · 5 months ago

Which is just a redux of what I find myself saying constantly: privacy usually isn't even the problem. The problem is the people kicking in your door.

If you're willing to kick in doors to suppress legal rights, then having accurate information isn't necessary at all.

If your resistance plan is to chat about stuff privately, then by definition you're also not doing much resisting to you know, the door kicking.

heavyset_go · 5 months ago

They'll just threaten to throw the book at you if you don't unlock your phone, and if you aren't rich, your lawyer will tell you to take the plea deal they offer because it beats sitting in prison until you die.

Bender · 5 months ago

Is the message on storage zero'd out or just deleted?

not_a_bot_4sho · 5 months ago

> Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother ..."

Aside: I see similar attitudes when I mention I use VPN all of the time

paulryanrogers · 5 months ago

Recommendations to the private sector don't condone violating security and retention laws for people working in the public sector.

Cornbilly · 5 months ago

The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.

The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.

thomasrognon · 5 months ago

Come on, man. We're talking about classified information, not general OPSEC advice. I worked in a SCIF. Literally every piece of equipment, down to each ethernet cable, has a sticker with its authorized classification level. This system exists for a reason, like making it impossible to accidently leak information to an uncleared contact in your personal phone. What Hegseth did (and is doing?) is illegal. It doesn't even matter what app is used.

Scrounger · 5 months ago

I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:

> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.

jjk166 · 5 months ago

There aren't a lot of things I would claim Russia is a leader in, but state sponsored hacking and spying on its own people would both definitely make the list. That's not to say no one has cracked it, but if the Russians couldn't do it there aren't many who could.

lugu · 5 months ago

As mentioned by someone else, they just need to take the phone of a demonstrator to access their signal groups.

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/new-leaks-on-police-phone...

xmcp123 · 5 months ago

Noem strikes me as a loyalist and a team player through and through, so probably a fall gal.

Miller is different. He has his own agenda, a lot of which has becomes trumps agenda. But trumps agenda changing does not change what Miller’s agenda is.

spprashant · 5 months ago

She's an opportunist. For someone like her to be nationally relevant they have to latch onto MAGA and embrace the crazy. See MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz.

anigbrowl · 5 months ago

She's complaining (via 'sources') that she's 'being hung to try' for parroting Stephen Miller's approved line, so I have a hunch she'll bite their ankles on the way out.

metalliqaz · 5 months ago

I no longer have any reason to think that justice will prevail.

gruez · 5 months ago

>I thought they had KYC laws like prepaid cash cards.

You don't. You could even order sim cards off ebay/amazon if you wanted to, which definitely doesn't have any KYC.

gruez · 5 months ago

>The stores would ID you

Source?

>As for the nine digit zip, I don't think they validate it.

Why collect it then? Imagine having a service promising "lets people use phones without revealing identity" but for whatever reason asks for a bunch of info, then brushes it aside with "yeah but you can fill in fake information so it's fine".

>Your anti-privacy agenda is crystal clear.

Your inability to take any criticism without resorting to personal attacks is crystal clear.

gruez · 5 months ago

Yes, but it's harder than just buying an esim from silent.link (or whatever) and installing it. The biggest issue is that phones have IMEIs that you can't change, so even with an esim you bought "anonymously", that won't do you any good if you install it to your iPhone that's linked to you in some way, eg. bought in Apple store with your credit card, inserted another SIM/esim that has your billing information, or simply the phone has pinged cell towers near your home/work for an extended amount of time.

OutOfHere · 5 months ago

For max privacy, remember to buy the phone anonymously as well. Be cognizant of links to non-anonymous IPs, emails, and identities.

sb057 · 5 months ago

If you threaten to kill somebody then follow them around for days at a time, is that intimidation?

knubie · 5 months ago

Intimidation, or threat at the very least seems applicable here if you have any idea of what's going on in Minnesota and what these Signal chats are being used for.

refurb · 5 months ago

Blocking law enforcement's vehicles and their person (I saw several protestors put hands on officers), when they are conducting arrests, certainly seems to fit the bill.

mycodendral · 5 months ago

This statute defines the conditions where free speech transitions to criminal activity.

You can interpret it however you like.

mothballed · 5 months ago

Because the question was what they might be charged with, not what they did.

Did you expect the government to charge people in good faith? It doesn't matter it if it's true or not, even putting them in the slammer for a long time while awaiting trial and forcing them to hire expensive attorneys is a win.

forshaper · 5 months ago

I've generally held this position, but assume a sufficient combination of models could do a lot more than was possible before.

radicaldreamer · 5 months ago

They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.

wil421 · 5 months ago

In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.

rtpg · 5 months ago

The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!

There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.

It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.

XorNot · 5 months ago

Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else.

I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".

heavyset_go · 5 months ago

Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.

Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

ocdtrekkie · 5 months ago

Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.

jjtheblunt · 5 months ago

> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.

pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.

the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.

heavyset_go · 5 months ago

Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when.

In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest.

Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.

OhMeadhbh · 5 months ago

cell phone cameras work both ways.

fireflash38 · 5 months ago

As ever xkcd holds true - https://xkcd.com/538/

cmxch · 5 months ago

Which is not much different than how the January 6th people were caught.

freejazz · 5 months ago

But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.

strken · 5 months ago

Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".

nobody9999 · 5 months ago

>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.

Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone

fudged71 · 5 months ago

That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.

What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.

AgentOrange1234 · 5 months ago

[Citation needed.]

kaitai · 5 months ago

They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)

jibal · 5 months ago

The evidence goes strongly against your claims.

fudged71 · 5 months ago

Yes obviously, but as my central point was, it is the complete opposite of their narrative of targeted operations backed by data.

deaux · 5 months ago

Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.

tombert · 5 months ago

How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse.

My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.

SauciestGNU · 5 months ago

Furthermore, going back as far as I remember, if you take part in a protest the police personally disagree with they will use violence against you regardless of your occupation.

Cornbilly · 5 months ago

I would disagree to a certain extent. "Law enforcement is not your friend" is a good mindset as a citizen. You should never hand them information without a lawyer and you should always push for oversight.

I agree that the "same at it ever was and always will be" attitude isn't great. It's defeatist and I choose not to live my life that way, even if it would be much easier mentally.

I think part of the reason I see this attitude so often is that, especially since 9/11, a large portion of the US population has decided that the police and military are infallible and should be trusted completely, so any large-scale attempt at reform runs into these unwavering supporters (and, in the case of the police, their unions).

throwaway-11-1 · 5 months ago

cmon man seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter?wprov=...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/newb...

krapp · 5 months ago

The only significant difference is that law enforcement is treating white people the way they've always treated everyone else. Which is a difference in degree, but not character.

cess11 · 5 months ago

By before, what do you mean? COINTELPRO?

baq · 5 months ago

Nothing cynical, that’s just the truth. They’re called law enforcement for a reason, not emergency hugs.

Whether they behave like civilized people or like thugs should be besides the point regardless of your political leaning in the matter of the system. Naturally from a basic human perspective civilized law enforcement is much more preferable than the alternative, but they aren’t your friends!

smrtinsert · 5 months ago

There is no protected class from malevolent government. Everyone from oligarchs down to the have nots can be targets. Let's not keep relearning that lesson.

throwawaygmbno · 5 months ago

Depends on the race of the engineer. If you're gay or live in a blue city/state then you also lose your protection

tehjoker · 5 months ago

It’s conditional on whether you are affirming the opinions of your employer or oppositional

wahnfrieden · 5 months ago

Engineers are just workers

platevoltage · 5 months ago

I'll be sure to bring my mechanical keyboard and secondary vertical monitor out in public so they'll know I'm one of the good ones.

mothballed · 5 months ago

That depends, the civil service has a lot of leverage because most of them cannot easily be fired. And POTUS needs the civil service to execute his policy goals so his fellow party members and possibly himself can get re-elected.

Therefore there is considerable leverage for allied servants to form an alliance that more or less offers their allegiance in exchange for non-prosecution. I would expect especially DHS to basically become a non-functional (or even seditious) department if they prosecute those guys and they could purposefully make the president look bad by making his security apparatus look incompetent.

wizardforhire · 5 months ago

But pardons only apply to federal crimes… murder is a state offense.

dragonwriter · 5 months ago

Presidential pardons have no impact and their liability for state-law murder charges (though federal seizure of crime scenes and destruction of evidence might, in practice.)

b00ty4breakfast · 5 months ago

I'll eat your hat if any of these goons ever see in the inside of a holding cell

DangitBobby · 5 months ago

They're wearing masks. Have they been identified?

lateforwork · 5 months ago

It is going to get a lot worse. Trump's eventual goal is to send the military to all Democrat-controlled cities. Back in September Trump gathered military leaders in a room and told them America is under "invasion from within". He said: "This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within."

xnx · 5 months ago

"Sh*thole countries" was projection

refurb · 5 months ago

How is it corrupt? The DA chose to resign, they weren't forced out.

wyldberry · 5 months ago

Not a lawyer, but there's a lot of back and forth around jurisdiction between local and federal enforcement. If the President directs the DoJ to not fight to own the investigation over local, then it is up to the Executive Branch.

spiderice · 5 months ago

Their daycares, or their "daycares"? Not clear which one you mean.

wyldberry · 5 months ago

You're projecting a values claim on the American wars in the middle east on me that I didn't make. It's pretty clear that the ME wars were all around bad and evil.

It doesn't change the organization and tactics used to identify targets are the same methods and strategies used by insurgent groups to select targets and attack. AQI was very sophisticated for the technology they had. Their warriors were brave, cunning, and true believers with efficacious systems for what was available to them.

Twenty years of that, plus the rest of the middle east has now made it particularity common knowledge how to run insurgency cells worldwide. This combined with American expertise brought back and with people legally aiding these groups in setting up their C2 structures with what is effective and what works is no surprise.

This investigation should be no surprise to anyone. They use these techniques because they work. They are so effective at target acquisition, monitoring, and selective engagement that if they flipped from their current tactics to more violent ones it would be a large casualty event.

wyldberry · 5 months ago

What's needed is MNPD sharing their data around the criminal illegal aliens with ICE so that they can execute the deportation orders that have already been issued by judges.

The structure of your message implies you are not American. DHS posts the people they deport here:

https://www.dhs.gov/wow

It's really hard to go down that list and say "yeah i'd rather have these people here than have ICE deporting people".

HKH2 · 5 months ago

"bystanders"

wyldberry · 5 months ago

Like i've said over and over, the tactics used are the distilled what works from those insurgencies honed over decades. They are incredibly effective. The network that was built (several max signal chats, organized territory, labor specialization) has essentially created an effective targeting mechanism.

This isn't a bunch of people organically protesting, this is an organized system designed to "target" ICE agents. The only difference is the payload delivery between physical disruption vs weapon based attacks.

paulryanrogers · 5 months ago

The lack of a legal limit means they are never safe from justice catching up, even decades later. This lawless administration won't last. Some perpetrators may die of natural causes before that point, but 2026 and 2028 elections aren't far away.

inetknght · 5 months ago

> The goal is to prevent ICE / BP from doing their jobs.

No. The goal is to protest ICE / BP doing their jobs in criminal ways.

kaitai · 5 months ago

Indeed, as sibling commenter notes, it's not to prevent ICE from doing their jobs. Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP. Observers are there to

1) get the name & some other info from the person being abducted so that their family can be contacted

2) record the encounter so that ICE/CBP has some check on their behavior, or legal action can be taken in the future to prosecute them for violence and destruction of property

3) recover the belongings of the person abducted and ensure family/friends can get these things, as often wallet, cell phone, shoes, coat, and vehicle (even still running) are left behind

4) get a tow truck for any vehicle left behind, preferably from one of the tow services that is towing for free or low cost

4) connect family/friends with legal resources, if needed, or simply let them know that their lawyer needs to get to the Whipple Building ASAP

None of those things are illegal. In some of the small rural towns in Minnesota, there aren't observers there, and the phones/vehicles/wallets of people kidnapped from Walmart are just... left in the parking lot, in the snow. It adds insult to injury to have your phone & wallet gone, your car window smashed in, and a big fee from the municipal towing lot if you're a US citizen who is then released from detainment 12 hours later. And if you're not a US citizen but you have legal status, you want your family to get an attorney working ASAP to ensure you're not flown to Texas -- because if you're flown to Texas, even in error, you need to get back on your own (again without your wallet/phone/etc if those things didn't happen to stick with you).

Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.

actionfromafar · 5 months ago

Yeah, the victim is investigated. Kill anyone evading arrest. Bring in the tanks.

jimt1234 · 5 months ago

It's not just the what, it's the how.

oceansky · 5 months ago

There are multiple videos from multiple angles and a multitude of witnesses.

The only investigation being done is by the DHS, who is blocking all other state level investigations. The same DHS who lied about easy disproven things that were recorded and destroy evidences.

What are you waiting or expecting from a investigation to make up your mind?

inetknght · 5 months ago

> As far as I understand it, he laid hands on the officer, then struggled against arrest.

That's not how I understand it.

> Supposedly one of the videos shows him reaching for some black object. I don't know.

It would be good if you'd watch this review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIOwTMsDSZA

avcloudy · 5 months ago

This is just lunatic speech. The one place he didn't have a gun was in his hands. You're out here acting like if he'd had a gun strapped to his ankle it would have been proof beyond any doubt he was intending to shoot and kill ICE officers.

He was pepper sprayed and on the ground surrounded by 6 agents when he was killed. At the time when an agent said that he had a gun (this was after his gun was removed), he was physically pinned with his arms restrained. He wasn't 'reaching for an object'. He was carrying his phone in his hand before he was restrained and shot a dozen times.

spacechild1 · 5 months ago

I have seen the videos. He was already on the ground, fixated by several ICE agents, when he was shot 10(!) times. That was after he had been peppersprayed and beaten to the head. At no point did he actually draw or reach for his gun. There was absolutely no reason to shoot him.

> With any luck investigation will reveal more details.

Kristi Noem said: "This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement." She even went so far as calling this an act of "domestic terrorism". At this point, do you seriously believe there will be a neutral investigation?

platevoltage · 5 months ago

He was killed for carrying a gun. How do I know that? Thats what they've been saying over and over again. Absolutely gross.

tasuki · 5 months ago

What better alternatives do we have? Not tying my account to a phone number, but rather saving thirteen words, is exactly the UX I've always desired. I don't even need privacy, but I hate losing things when I inevitably lose my phone number.

karlzt · 5 months ago

No. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454478

godelski · 5 months ago

That's true for any system where you have contacts linked. Same thing happens when you have names and avatars.

If you don't want to link your contacts... don't link your contacts...

But this doesn't have the result that the GP claimed. The whole network doesn't unravel because in big groups like these one number doesn't have all the other contacts in their system.

For people that need it:

  | Settings 
  |- Chat
  | |- Share Contacts with iOS/Android <--- (Turn off)
  |- Privacy
  | |- Phone Number
  | | |- Who Can See My Number
  | | | |- Everybody
  | | | |- Nobody <----
  | | |- Who Can Find Me By Number
  | | | |- Everybody
  | | | |- Nobody <----
  | |- App Security
  | | |- Hide Screen in App Switcher <---- Turn on
  | | |- Screen Lock <---- Turn on
  | |- Advanced
  | | |- Always Relay Calls <-----

Some of these settings are already set btw

krunck · 5 months ago

But does it? In what way?

electromech · 5 months ago

They publicly publish these requests. You can see how little information is provided — just a phone number and two unix timestamps IIRC. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Grisu_FTP · 5 months ago

I might be misremembering or mixing memories but i remember something about them only storing the hash of the number.

So the FBI cant ask what phone number is tied to an account, but if a specific phone number was tied to the specific account? (As in, Signal gets the number, runs it through their hash algorythm and compares that hash to the saved one)

But my memory is very very bad, so like i said, i might be wrong

Vinnl · 5 months ago

All they'd learn that way is that that phone number has a Signal account, when it was registered, and when it was last active. In other words, it doesn't tell them whether it's part of a given Signal group. (See https://signal.org/bigbrother/.)

DecoySalamander · 5 months ago

Bots can authenticate just as well as human users. Both bots and trolls are completely different set of issues that cannot easily be solved, regardless of your approach.

eleventyseven · 5 months ago

Protesting is a fundamental human right and obligation. It is something that you should do as casually as you would voting, volunteering, and taking out the garbage: something you do from time to time when the moment demands it.

See also: https://enwp.org/Chilling_effect

Perceval · 5 months ago

Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity. It was enshrined in the First Amendment as a fundamental check on the federal government in order to recognize the natural right of a self-governing people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What is not something that should be gone casually – or really at all – is an attempt to engage in insurrection with black bloc or globalized intifada insurgency tactics to prevent the enforcement of law.

JumpCrisscross · 5 months ago

> Protesting is not something you should do "casually”

Neither is violently undermining our Constitutional order.

These folks should be on notice that they will be prosecuted. If we played by Trump’s book, we’d charge them with treason and then let them appeal against the death penalty for the rest of their lives.

zahlman · 5 months ago

> In the universe of a competent FBI, which I think is ours, they already know who is in the network.

Certainly they know the handles of those people, and what they've said and what documents they've exchanged.

Connecting Signal accounts to real-world identity... well, that's definitely the FBI's wheelhouse, but some might make it easier or harder than others.

But there are a few cases where even the Internet sleuths are pretty confident about identity.

> So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate?

Rationality requires treating behaviour inconsistent with a quality as evidence against that quality.

mindslight · 5 months ago

> So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate?

So why does (if the service manual is to be believed) not changing my car's oil still allow my car to keep operating?

(does this kind of ignore-any-sort-of-abstract-model "insight" sway anybody who is not extremely stoned?)

jakelazaroff · 5 months ago

> The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.

If that's the case, then why has no one been prosecuted on those grounds?

istjohn · 5 months ago

These groups exist to observe and document the actions of federal agents and share that information with their communities. That is constitutionally protected activity.

protocolture · 5 months ago

>The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs.

To observe them, and prevent them from committing crimes. Which if it isn't legal, is moral as all get out.

"Jobs" Nurmberg lol. Not an argument.

idle_zealot · 5 months ago

> to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.

Filming officiers performing their jobs is not obstruction, even if it does make them uncomfortable. If it makes their jobs harder that's only because they know what they're doing is unpopular and don't want to be known to have done it.

> If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.

Yeah, there's a massive disconnect between politicians and their voters. This is pretty strong evidence of that disconnect. Even now Democrats refuse to support abolishing ICE, despite majority support among their constituency. Who are voters who want immigration reform supposed to cast their ballots for? There hasn't been such a candidate since ICE was created in the wake of 9/11. Conservatives got to let out their pent up frustration with an unresponsive government by electing Trump. Liberals have no such champion, only community organizing.

TheOtherHobbes · 5 months ago

Conspiracy to impede and obstruct criminal behaviour is not a crime, it's legitimate self-defence.

The fact that federal agents are breaking the law doesn't change that. At all.

In spite of what you've been told federal LEO are bound by the law.

Executing random bystanders on a whim, operating without visible ID, failing to allow congressional oversight of facilities, failing to give those captured access to a lawyer - among many, many others - all put this operation far outside of any reasonable claim to proportionality or legality.

direwolf20 · 5 months ago

One of the victims was blocking half the low traffic road and intending for people to pass freely on the other half. The other was filming from a distance.

quickthrowman · 5 months ago

Portland Ave at 32nd St E is a one-way two-lane road with a bike/bus lane. It was formerly a three-lane one-way road.

boppo1 · 5 months ago

>particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago.

iirc that was something more than infiltration. The FBI found an extremist loser who lived in a basement, egged him on, helped him network & gave him resources. Without them, he probably would have been thinking really hard about it, not much more.

pydry · 5 months ago

They've been doing it from day 1.

It's how they found about Martin Luther King's affairs and what led them to write him a letter telling him to kill himself.

bartread · 5 months ago

> As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.

Given FBI Director Kash Patel is a Trump appointee, and I might even go so far as to say a Trump stooge, I think we have to assume that that is exactly what will happen.

0928374082 · 5 months ago

> The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point.

That (US domestic political groups, anyway) is their job, after all?

idiotsecant · 5 months ago

'protested' by forcibly precenting individual civilians access to medical care? Sure, this seems the same.

florkbork · 5 months ago

Here's one the members of that group: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tennessee-woman-sentenc...

> As a Health Center staff member ('Victim-1') attempted to open the door for the volunteer, WILLIAMS purposefully leaned against the door, crushing Victim-1’s hand. Victim-1 yelled, "She’s crushing my hand," but WILLIAMS remained against the door, trapping Victim-1’s hand and injuring it.

> On the livestream on June 19, 2020, WILLIAMS stood within inches of the Health Center’s chief administrative officer and threatened to “terrorize this place” and warned that “we’re gonna terrorize you so good, your business is gonna be over mama.” Similarly, WILLIAMS stood within inches of a Health Center security officer and threatened “war.” WILLIAMS also stated that she would act by “any means necessary.”

The reason they could prosecute to this degree? https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/18/anti-abortion-surgi-clinic...

A member of the conspiracy admitted to the planning; they have text messages and detail of deciding who will risk arrest, after going over the fact they'd be trespassing and violating the FACE act.

Do you think the administrative and medical staff present in 2020 would agree with you? That the group that blockaded, threatened and assaulted in one instance access to health services are in fact the victims here of government overreach?

QuercusMax · 5 months ago

Preventing out-of-control federal officers from committing crimes is NOT criminal. Especially when you don't even know if they ARE federal officers, and won't show their faces, badges, or warrants.

rickydroll · 5 months ago

Organized as in they have meetings, serve cookies, and coffee? Most likely not. These anti-ice groups seem to be extemporaneous meetups.

Define obstruction. Everything reported, blowing whistles, encouraging businesses not provide service to ICE agents, and recording from a distance is not obstruction. It's a First Amendment right to keep government forces in check.

aaronmdjones · 5 months ago

> just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?

Being convicted of a crime does not stop you from running for president. Being in prison also does not stop you from running for president -- one person has. The only qualifications necessary to run for president are to be a natural born citizen, have spent the last 14 years living in the country, and be at least 35 years of age.

Also, the criminal trial against him started after he assumed office for the second time. EDIT: Got my years mixed up. Ignore that last bit.

infinitezest · 5 months ago

Maybe that was also bad. And maybe the current admin is still more brazen, less accountable, more selfish and more vindictive. Why even bring this up? Should we not care about this because other people did bad stuff?

AuthAuth · 5 months ago

That is more proof that the democratic party isnt corrupt and do care about fair elections(in the eyes of the public). He SHOULD have been thrown in jail and he IS a criminal.

RobRivera · 5 months ago

That seems like quite a stretch from reality. I just know the glowies enjoy lurking websites where people openly post how to use Tor.

abhinai · 5 months ago

Yeah it’s a slightly blurry line. What metric are you using? I’d say Seattle is way ahead of Minneapolis in terms of economic influence.

vintermann · 5 months ago

Interesting, that was a work I wasn't familiar with.

directevolve · 5 months ago

The point is that the overwhelming majority of the country isn’t facing down ICE brutality right now, not the way Minneapolis is. So yes, most are much less immediately and violently affected by Trump. Hence, calm.

The question I was getting at is why those of us disgusted by Trump are protesting less vigorously, despite his government being much worse this time around. It’s a phenomenon widely noted.

For me, that largely comes down to the fact Trump not only won 2024 fair and square, Biden really was manifestly not up to the task of governing. Biden, and careerist Democrats hoping to ride on Biden’s coattails to another term in the White House failed utterly at the critical moment.

A democracy or republic isn’t guaranteed to deliver good governance. The primary goal is to enable peaceful transitions of power.

Trump is threatening that, explicitly. But how to actually address that threat is less clear.

In 2016, we were outraged to see a turd like Trump win. But at that time, the story wasn’t about electoral threats and fascism, it was his disgusting personal character.

The election threat only really manifested on Jan 6. It failed, he exited office, and was facing prosecution. It looked potentially done and dusted, and like the Democrats in federal government were successfully dealing with the problem, as is their role. We were ridin’ with Biden.

Then they slow walked the prosecution that mattered. Biden got on stage to debate Trump and we were absolutely horrified. Then we noticed how vacant he was at other public appearances. It was “my god, he’s not just sleepy, he is incapacitated, and they’ve been lying about it to us for who knows how long?”

Then there was the last ditch effort to field Kamala instead, another weak candidate who wasn’t even liked in the Biden admin. That was pathetic.

So we got Trump. And it wasn’t “we could have had ultra-qualified Hillary, but we got this POS from out of nowhere” like in 2016. It was “holy shit, I am extremely disappointed in my own party.” Nothing added up. We lost trust in our own party and leadership, and it hasn’t come back. Nobody’s excited for any Democrat. We all just know Trump’s gotta go and we’ll line up for Any Democrat (TM). But that doesn’t mean we are proud to do so. It’s a bitter, demoralizing pill to swallow.

Of course fundamentally, we are dealing with all the normal politics problems. Bad voting system, fake news, social media brainwashing, economic illiteracy, checked out voters. American presidential history (and its history as a whole) is full of depressing candidates and terrible shit, political violence, and disenfranchisement we’ve only even approximated eliminating for the last 61 years, since the Voting Rights Act.

So I am hopeful that in the grand sweep of things, we will pull through and keep finding ways to make progress. I think the main thing right now is to keep your energy, hope and belief in the future. They’d like to take that away, and I just won’t let them.

youarentrightjr · 5 months ago

> The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy. This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?

If it's that easy, why did we spend 20 years in Afghanistan only to suffer defeat by goat herders holding AK-47s?

A quick review of the last 100 years will educate you on the viability of asymmetric warfare.

DecoySalamander · 5 months ago

USA is not Russia. I don't think an order could ever be made to level a "rebellious" city, and even if it were, it would never be followed.

tastyfreeze · 5 months ago

There are examples of 2A being used against tyrants in the US. Just not the federal level. The higher up you are rebelling against the more people you need to support you. The point of 2A is that you don't need to continue to suffer under tyrants because they have guns and you don't. If you decide it is 2A time before everybody else you are just an idiot. Actual rebellion requires support of the people and planning.