FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
theguardian.comTo clarify why it’s aggressive: federal employees have a legal duty to secure classified information, but everyone else does not.
Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
> "So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have."
That's unequivocally a lawful basis for a court-ordered search warrant. They must have probable cause that the person being searched has evidence of a crime; not necessarily that the search target and the criminal suspect are one and the same. Search is investigative; not punitive.
The newsworthy part of this is it's a journalist they raided, and to go after their journalistic sources at that. It's previously been a DoJ policy not to go after the media for things related to their reporting work. But that policy wasn't a legal or constitutional requirement. It's merely something the DoJ voluntarily pledged to stop doing, after the public reaction to President Obama's wiretapping of journalists in 2013,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inv... ("2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters")
> Search is investigative; not punitive.
Let's be real, it can be both. A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain. Raiding in the middle of the night instead of when they step out their door in the morning, ripping open walls when all they're really looking for is a laptop, flipping and trashing the place in a excessive manner, breaking things in the process, pointing guns at children, shooting the family retriever, etc. I don't know if they took this raid too far in any of these ways, but it wouldn't surprise me.
> A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain.
See "three felonies a day" - if everyone will casually and unknowingly break some law daily, selective enforcement can be used maliciously.
What recourse would an American have against a punitive search? And what if something turns up which would retroactively justify it?
> "And what if something turns up which would retroactively justify it?"
US constitutional law prohibits the introduction of evidence obtained illegally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule ("Exclusionary rule")
There's no "retroactive" exception. The core point of this rule is to deter police from intentionally violating people's rights, under the expectation that what they find will, "retroactively", vindicate them. Won't work.
> Won’t work.
How would you know when it did? You can’t “retroactively” justify an arbitrary search under the exclusionary rule, but this doesn’t exclude evidence tangential to a legally-executed warrant during the execution of that warrant. For example, suppose someone is suspected of illegally possessing wildlife. A search warrant is issued on the residence. No wildlife is found, and in fact no wildlife was ever on the premises. If officers find large quantities of cocaine during the search, they aren’t precluded from making an arrest, because the warrant used to gain entry and conduct the search was legal.
Only if it falls under the "plain view" doctrine, which is not unlimited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine
> In Arizona v. Hicks, police officers were in an apartment investigating a shooting and suspected that a record player in the apartment was stolen. The officers could not see the serial number, which was on the bottom of the record player, so they lifted the player and confirmed that its serial number matched that of one that had been reported stolen. However, the Supreme Court ruled that lifting the record player constituted an additional search (although a relatively nonintrusive one) because the serial number was not in plain view.
Constitutional law doesn't mean anything when the authorities don't respect it. Constitutional law won't stop you from being arrested or killed if you don't fully submit to an authoritarian government.
There were laws in Germany to prevent what Hitler did. It still happened.
Depends what you mean by "the authorities." It's a demonstrable fact there are many small local PDs that don't give a shit about the first, fourth, or fifth amendments to name a few. That doesn't mean the Constitution "doesn't mean anything" in those places.
See also: parallel construction, which has come up (rightfully so) in HN threads about dragnet surveillance.
> What recourse would an American have against a punitive search?
None. The endless videos, from better-years-gone-by of people refusing to answer questions at the border then having drug dogs run all over their car to scratch it up was my first exposure to federal agents acting maliciously.
You can attempt to sue for damages, but the suit is likely to be dismissed because law enforcement and legal adjudication are tightly coupled and very friendly in ways that subvert the proper functioning of justice. More likely you'd just invite more harassment for daring to attempt recourse at all.
How can you sue for damages when a search is done within the bounds of the law?
You can sue for anything, whether or not you win is another matter. Civil and criminal court also don't have the same rules or standards for evidence and culpability. Whether or not actions were legal is not really what is being adjudicated there.
Well the first half of the sentence you're replying to is "a legal, valid and justified search." So if your question is "what recourse does an American have against a legal, valid and justified search" the answer is obviously and correctly "none."
You might be able to argue harassment or malicious prosecution if it's just one part of an ongoing campaign but even that is going to be hard to argue if everything is within the bounds of the law.
Anyone who has had their home searched AKA ransacked by law enforcement knows that searches are effectively punitive.
I agree that's what GP wrote, but I think GP's point is that it's not illegal for journalists to have classified documents, so it does not qualify as probable cause.
Try reading the comment you replied to again. A valid reason for a search is the collection of evidence of a crime. Which orthogonal to whether the person or premisses committed a crime.
> it's not illegal for journalists to have classified documents, so it does not qualify as probable cause
It's amazing how many people offer free internet advice off of ideological groupthink rather than actual laws.
This raid was authorized by a warrant. Do you really think a judge doesn't know the law, but you do?
If a crime happens in your neighborhood, and you have a camera, the cops could get a warrant to search your footage. It doesn't mean you committed a crime, it just means you can be compelled to provide information pertaining to an investigation.
Yes, but to continue the comparison, it would be weird/aggressive/intimidating if the cops raided the neighbor's home and took the device and all hard drives on the premises to get the footage instead of the normal methods of compelling someone to provide the footage.
Especially, if as is the case here, the criminal was already behind bars.
This is not a comment about if journalists homes should be more sacred than other people. Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
To my understanding, a US search warrant authorize law enforcement officers to search a particular location and seize specific items. The requirements are:
1# filled in good faith by a law enforcement officer 2# Have probable cause to search 3# issued by a neutral and detached magistrate 4# the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized.
There is nothing about the owner of the location. It can be a car, a parking lot, a home, a work place, a container, a safe, a deposit box in a bank, and so on.
The significant question here is about probable cause. Why were those items interesting for the FBI to collect? Are they looking to secure evidence against the leaker, and if so, what was the specifics of the search warrant? The article states: "The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation".
Probable cause should not be about preventing journalists access to documents they already got, as that would be like going after Barton Gellman.
Most likely securing information/evidence about the leaker, who likely did break the law or connected to someone who did... the first party leaking classified materials broke the law, while other intermediaries may not have. In an investigative process, this isn't at all inappropriate... Journalists aren't sacrosanct, though policies may have varied as to the level investigations will go.
> Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
Something worth noting at least for pedantic purposes, since practice is quite different; technically speaking every person has the same rights and laws to follow as a journalist. Fundamentally, there are really no differences between a journalist and a regular person engaging in the same activities.
It's an indication of the unique system architecture that differentiates the USA from all other societies on the planet.
It has been attacked, infiltrated, poison pilled, and really rather devastated in especially the last 100 years, but it is still standing, for better or worse, whether it can be restored or it just needs to die in order to give others a chance to rebuild something improved on the core characteristics of the Constitution.
#1 and #3 are the problems it works out to a trust us bro situation.
>So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
I appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
As long as there's probable cause for some crime, the subjective motivations of the officer are almost never going to enter the legal analysis. Whren v. United States[1] was a case about a pretextual traffic stop, but the core reasoning (unanimously) was about what the Fourth Amendment requires/allow. For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to run a stop sign or something and then pull you over and see if you left something in plain view, or if you act nervous, or try to get consent to search. At that point, the fact that the initial reason they started focusing on you was a mere hunch doesn't matter legally speaking. If this sounds like it can be used to make life hard for people that law enforcement doesn't like, you're not wrong. In my job we really didn't see how challenges to search warrants turned out, but as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has never said "Whren only applies to traffic stops and not search warrant affidavits."
> For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to ...
Whren doesn't seem to track in this case or am I missing something? In the example provided, the hunch directly ties the target to the crime ("drug selling"), which matches the stop's pretext. Natanson isn't accused of any crime, she's essentially writing about the "selling of drugs", not organizing or committing it.
Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?
Then extrapolating this to the implications on freedom of press... This doesn't sit well with me.
> Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?
If the police can convince a judge to give them a warrant for it, sure, but if they were targeting you specifically they probably wouldn't bother with the indirect route of your drug-dealing friend and would just harass you for j walking and not using your blinkers properly until you raised your voice at a cop and charge you with assaulting an officer.
I believe you have the hypothetical confused.
> if they were targeting you specifically
They are not targeting Natanson at all from what I can tell. They're targeting a source she's writing from (to what extent isn't clear to me). This is precisely why I'm positing Whren doesn't apply here.
I get the idea of being 'papered' out of a system, but I'm trying to distinguish a pretext that can be justified (objective probable cause) from one that can't (abuse of process). My boss can easily provide reason relating me to fire me, however fantastic the reality, but those would be refused, for good reason, if they surfaced them through private channels outside the organization.
In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence. The journalist is reasonably likely to be in contact with the leaker and so the cops have a somewhat valid pretext to seize things they thought contained evidence of the crime. Whether or not the cops should be able to do that is another thing, but the precedents have been long set.
The really strange thing here is the massive raid in the middle of the night rather than a more proportional response. That suggests that the journalist was being targeted specifically.
> In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence.
To keep with the analogy: If I had a public history of contact with the dealer (and was a prolific writer on the inner workings of drug trafficking), police could claim "reasonable suspicion" that I have communications/evidence related to them. That would justify seizing my devices for investigation under the same logic.
I agree there's more context to evaluate, but even Bondi's provided framing troubles me. It seems broad enough to target any journalist with relevant sources to a provided crime.
You'd have to be able to read minds if you want to establish a pretext. There are perfectly valid reasons, such as evidence collection against the accused party, to perform the search/raid.
I do wish that the law provided for concepts of minimal damage and repair should there be actual damage (not just creating a mess) that doesn't result in evidence. ie: if you tear open drywall, there better be something behind drywall that was collected as evidence.
However, that's not the case, and even civilly it's hard to collect damages even when it's the "wrong house"... though thatt's one of the few exceptions I've seen... also, iirc, there's been some 4th amendment arguments to construe having to pay for use/damages, not sure where that has landed.
IANAL.
...they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
Could you litigate to recover the costs and repair any damage done? Is there case law around what is a reasonable level of dishevelment?
You can file a civil suit against the police department, but results are far from certain. Unless it was a case of the cops raiding the wrong home entirely and you managed to make the news the success rate is not great.
And even then . . . https://ij.org/if-you-break-it-you-buy-it-unless-youre-the-p...
Let's call it "extremely difficult" - https://ij.org/if-you-break-it-you-buy-it-unless-youre-the-p...
Unlikely. Similarly, if the fire department has to use an axe to chop your door open to respond to a fire call, it’s your responsibility to replace the door.
Sure, though the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
The issue here is the American tradition of a free press and the legitimate role of leaks in a free country. The PBS article is a bit better on context:
> The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
> In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
> The moves rescinded a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fbi-searched-home-of-w...
My understanding is that searches of journalists still must be signed off on by the AG personally.
> the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Well, "routinely" should have been interpreted to mean "routinely, after showing probable cause and obtaining a warrant". Law enforcement obtains warrants for that routinely, that is, it's not an exceptional case for them to do so.
That includes an explicit carve-out for reasonable searches. And given "innocent until proven guilty" any search is technically targeting innocent people in hopes of yielding information about a suspect. Sometimes that's a reasonable thing to do.
there are some places where no one should go skulking around, no matter what the problem might be.
if someone goes snooping around my 1000yd backstop without signing in at the range house, they are suicidal.
there is a lot of signage, and curtailage, and a darwin prize
They get a warrant
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia.
CNN tells viewers its illegal to read Wikileaks emails (2016)
“Also interesting is—remember—it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
Thank you, this is really useful context!
Some added context for this raid. It allegedly is about a govt contractor
> The search came as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
So, wait, the administration cares about people illegally retaining classified information now?
When you're a star, they let you do it
Ooooph, brother :(
An anecdote: someone close to me had written some of the diplomatic cables Snowden leaked. After the leak they (and others) received stern warnings to not access stories about the leaks on their unclassified systems, because those systems were not authorized to access the classified information (in the New York Times).
On the face of it this sounds silly and futile, but there is a good reason for this approach.
The classification system only works if the handling requirements for information that it covers are unambiguous.
Yet others just invite journalists to signal groups accieentally and don't face any repercussions. Strange.
Explain why they pursued Julian Assange then.
Based on your own logic then Assange did not have any requirement to protect classified information yet he was Public Enemy number one.
I know people who personally sat on the Edward Snowden board and spent years of their life trying to create a case within the intelligence community against this guy
> Explain why they pursued Julian Assange then.
There is a difference between someone essentially just handing you a pile of classified documents and you going around soliciting and encouraging people to break the law and mishandle the documents to give to you.
> mishandle the documents
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2011-09-28/the-dangerous-cult-...
> The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian.
> This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behavior – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable.
> His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use.
> [The Guardian] made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger.
Jonathan Cook does a good job of telling this story.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-07-29/the-assassination-o...
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-05-04/persecution-julian-...
> To clarify why it’s aggressive: federal employees have a legal duty to secure classified information […]
Does that include (former) presidents as well?
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65775163
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
(Asking for a friend.)
They have duty to not take documents with them when they leave office. And they have duty to protect the documents while in the office.
Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).
> The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
Former administrations, to their credit, exhibited some degree of restraint that the current administration lacks. However, they indicted Julian Assange and plenty of people back then have warned precisely about the kind of things happening today.
- The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653012
- Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639165
From the EFF back then:
> Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/governments-indictment...
> it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast
'Could'? Its because you people are acting as if its not already ugly that it got this ugly.
They had a warrant and need the evidence to convict the person who failed to protect the information. They did not arrest the reporter did they?
What if you had the hard copies of the classified files or the original USB drive used in exfiltrate the classified data, not a digital copy.
Didn’t they persecute (or tried to, I don’t remember anymore) Assange for the same reason though? Or is there some clear difference here?
They had a flimsy argument that Assange actively conspired with Manning to hack government machines based on some chat logs.
Sending the FBI after journalists is not new. They did it in 2010 and 2013 on a much bigger scale.
Not to belittle good framing, but we are /waaaaay/ past the ugly point of law and order.
We are - but it's important to not allow our standards to be shifted. This is unacceptable and while there is plenty of stuff happening today that's unacceptable it's still important to call it out. The past year has been a test of our endurance as illegal actions are piled up (in imo an intentional effort to overwhelm) and our minds must ping pong from foreign leaders being kidnapped to murders to threats against our closest allies all while legal demands from congress specifically passed against the administration are blatantly and illegally ignored.
It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.
Calling out does nothing. Everyone is aware of the issues.
The problem is nobody is willing to use their constitutional right to fight for justice, because everyone is deathly afraid of losing even a little bit of their comfortable life.
If people were more willing to use the rights given to them by a specific amendment, none of this would happen.
A lot of people are doing that. Every protester against ICE is doing exactly what you described. Some have been murdered for it.
wrong amendment
If we need to fall back on that one it's going to suck. It isn't going to be glorious or something to celebrate being a part of - it's going to absolutely suck to live through and where we end up at the far end is very much up to chance @see myanmar.
>that one it's going to suck.
Absolutely, but you can't make someone believe that things like trans athletes, DEI, multi race populations, and whatever else are all extremely minor things compared to how good your life is, until that good life goes away. Its exactly the same thing as with all the anti vaxxers who were dying on respirators saying that they were wrong and begging people to take the vaccine. Everyone needs a reality check.
And on the other side of the isle, people need to realize that is not just political opinions, some people are truly just evil.
We are already there.
The middle class of America has got to be the most spoiled, pathetic group in all of history.
Maybe this is too idealistic, but Waltz the IR Realist, frames this as 2 types of situations.
You have your anarchic situations, International Relations, non-law breaking situations like having a conversation with a friend/stranger, and everything not covered in (signed) (legal) writing.
You have your hierarchy. When the police get involved, when your boss can fire you, legal, etc.. In this case, you still need 4 things to happen: There needs to be a legal basis(Legislature), they need to be caught(Executive), they need to be found guilty (Judicial), it needs to be enforced (Executive).
I wouldn't give up in hierarchy yet. But know the limitations.
That's nothing, there was the time the FBI raided James O'Keefe's house to find Ashley Biden's diary. I feel weird writing any of that out, because its sounds batshit, but they did that. Some people may not like James for any given number of reasons (NPR did a hit peace saying he doesn't qualify for journalism protections - which to me is a matter of opinion not necessarily fact), but since when do federal agents raid peoples homes for diaries? Were there nuclear launch codes in there or something? I would imagine there's way more important things they could have been doing at the time.
I wouldn't say "that's nothing." And the O'Keefe thing is certainly problematic, but it's worth noting that the investigation was for purchasing stolen goods/information.
Obviously not many <$20 stolen objects would warrant an FBI raid, but also if it were actually worth <$20 then Veritas wouldn't have paid $40,000 for it.
AFAICT their journalistic immunity basically got them out of charges for buying goods they knew to be stolen at time of purchase, which is federally illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2315 and separately illegal in all 50 states.
Kind of a key point in that – the whole purchasing stolen information thing.
Yes that was also bad. I don't know why you say "that's nothing" though, this is just an additional example of a bad thing. We don't have to pick which one is worse and then minimize every other example.
The FBI working to recover stolen property on behalf of a private citizen who was the victim of a crime is something different. Harder to defend a reporter holding stolen property just because the victim is related to a public official. Would actually feel better about defending O'Keefe if the diary did have launch codes.
Wasn't the diary stolen, and thus the property was stolen? If you have proof or reasonable suspicion that someone has possession of a stolen property, shouldn't law enforcement be able to retrieve that?
Yes, and also Project Veritas hadn’t published it. The two events are completely different things.
O'Keefe had already returned it, as I recall.
Right. It wasn't to recover the diary, it was an investigation into how they acquired it (which appears to have been clearly illegal given that you can't buy stolen goods, even if you're a journalist).
I would not say that Project Veritas acted illegally in this case, although I have absolutely no love for them and I think they have acted illegally and immorally in other cases. In the end the Justice Department did not bring charges.
You absolutely can't offer someone money to steal documents. That's clear. Even providing advice on acquiring documents is probably going to be unlawful. And if possession of the document itself is otherwise illegal (i.e., CSAM) there's no protection there.
It isn't necessarily illegal to offer money for a document, particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired. I'm not familiar enough with this case to have a strong opinion other than knowing the DoJ elected not to bring charges.
And, yes, it was Trump's DoJ. In this case I'm unaware of any evidence that the decision was politically motived and I still have some confidence that whistleblowers would speak out, particularly given the recent wave of resignations due to directives in Minneapolis. I think people of good will could disagree with me there for sure.
It is unambiguously illegal to pay for goods you know to be stolen. In all 50 states and federally.
Most courts would assume someone who purchased a private diary of a living person would know that it was stolen.
"particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired."
Correct, and there's no way that the private diary of a still-living daughter of a politician was acquired by any method other than theft.
Prosecutors don't need to prove the buyer actually dispositively knew the document was stolen, only that reasonable person would have known it to be such.
Which would be obvious in this case.
"No way" is an awfully strong statement. For example, people abandon personal material in storage units which are subsequently auctioned off fairly often.
But I appreciate you iterating on this -- I understand your position and while I disagree with you on the question of what "reasonable" would be in this case, I absolutely think that if I could read minds I would find that Project Veritas staffers at the very least knew the diary was stolen.
I feel like you're starting this with a sympathetic eye towards O'Keefe, who is not now nor has he ever been a good-faith actor. You're also obscuring that the diary was stolen property, which law enforcement absolutely does "raid" homes to recover.
The O'Keefe thing might have been bad, but raiding and searching a reporter's house is incredibly bad. Do we not get to object to the incredibly bad thing, because what might have been a small bad thing took place? You seem to be falling prey to a logical fallacy of some sort.
> Were there nuclear launch codes in there or something?
It's funny you say that because that'd be just the same, classified information that leaked. They'd just change the codes and try to find who leaked them. The codes themselves would be inconsequential (once changed).
It's way too far into the Trump administration for people to still be responding to authoritarian moves by Trump by finding Biden administration actions that sound vaguely similar if you don't think too hard and then pretending nothing new is going on here. (Even if it wasn't, "that's nothing" would be a pretty weird inference to draw with a comparison to something that clearly upsets you, and an article is a "piece", not a "peace".)
Um no.
Along with the diary, tax records, cellphone and family photos were stolen from someone's home, then sold for $40,000 to a far-right activist / centrist paragon of journalism James O'Keefe (whichever you prefer). Said paragon was alleged to have paid these (eventually convicted so I'm allowed to say) criminals more money to steal more stuff from this home.
While the warrant's probable cause section was redacted (maybe inappropriately), the facts of the case are still that the person being raided was alleged to have actually participated in an ongoing conspiracy to commit theft and transporting stolen property across state lines.
This is just Hunter Bidens laptop 2.0 equating two non-similar things. The whole point of this post is that the journalist didn't steal anything - Ashley Bidens property was stolen. Burying the lede here.
Sorry to be a pedant, but not exactly. They raided James O'Keefe's house to seize his cell phones as part of an investigation into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods (the diary) across state lines. Journalists (which is a very broad term, and in this context I think O'Keefe qualifies) are certainly allowed to receive stolen or classified material, which also applies to the raid on the WaPo reporter. They are not allowed to induce others to break the law on their behalf, and that's what was at question in the Biden diary case.
I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.
So what happened with project veritas and the Biden diary?
How does this apply to Trump and mar-a-lago, then? Genuine question.
Trump was requested to return the classified documents several times. He said he returned them all, then said he didn't need to return them all, then said he actually declassified them with his mind.
And yeah, it's not a great situation with terrible optics. It would've been better for everyone if he just didn't steal the classified documents to begin with or, once requested, he returned them.
I guess my question, given the GP's assertion that private citizens holding classified information isn't a crime, how does the law apply to Trump here?
Is there another law saying that government officials need to return all classified documents that would apply to him and not to the reporter?
Thank you! Cost me three points, but I really wanted this information and was having trouble finding it. :)
It doesn't. Different rules de facto for the ruling class and the peons. That's one of the failures in American society Trump has been exploiting his whole life.
To my naive brain, the rules seem to be:
- it's okay when Side A goes after Assange (a journalist) for possessing classified material. Also, Side A encourages journalists in certain countries to do exactly what Assange did.
- it's not okay when Side B goes after journalists aligned with Side A
It's possible (and in fact the law) that the journalist against whom a search warrant is issued is suspected of aiding in the leak or committing a crime, though. I don't think we yet know that she's not in that category; only that she claims that she was told that she wasn't the focus of the probe and was not currently formally accused of a crime.
While you do not have a legal duty to secure classified information it is illegal for you to possess it. It is illegal for a reporter to have and discuss classified information under strict interpretation of the espionage act, however the supreme court ruled that they can as long as they didn't participate in acquiring it or induce someone to acquire it. They will prosecute a reporter if they have a clear indication they participated in the theft of the classified information.
Regarding Gellman, he could have been prosecuted. Under strict interpretation he admitted to retaining classified information. The government is then in a catch 22 situation where they have to verify, publicly, the information he held creating a Snowden like situation where it is no longer secret. It is a very messy area of law and a zealous DOJ can exert tremendous pressure on individual journalists even though they are better shielded than non-journalists. Essentially, by prosecuting someone they have to prove it is national defense information and in so doing they will end up disclosing the information themselves making it dubious a jury would ever convict.
It is the same reason we can freely discuss Snowden-leaked information now. It is not a secret. Even if it is classified it has lost its legal protection.
In short, if this journalist even vaguely induced anyone to leak information to her she can be prosecuted and the precedent there is much less in her favor.
> So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
When you phrase it that way though, it doesn't actually sound that bad. If a crime was committed, and some uninvolved person possesses evidence about that crime, the authorities need to be able to access it.
To give another scenario: if someone gets shot in front of my parked car, but the bullet passes through them and gets lodged in my car, the police should have the power to compel me to hand over the bullet even if I don't want to (which is important evidence that only I have).
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
But if Barton Gellman was the only person in possession of the full collection, and the police needed it to help find the perpetrator of the crime, it would be legitimate for them to compel Gellman to hand over a copy.
However, it wouldn't be legitimate for them to go after you or me if we download the information from some public website, because that would serve no legitimate investigative purpose.
"Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her."
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
In India we have been going through this the last 14 years or so.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/stan-swamy-h...
One country that produces so much misery and suffering in the world.
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
Well yes, but you can't tell a judge "yes, I broke the law, but it's OK because the government broke the law first."
It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
This government brought sham charges against the Fed president, what are they going to do to a run of the mill federal employee?
> It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
It is not illegal to talk to a reporter, it is illegal to share classified intel with someone who doesn't have a clearance and a need-to-know.
Do I think they should have raided this persons house? Absolutely not. Is it illegal to share classified information, absolutely.
"For my friends everything, for everyone else, the law" or whatever the saying is, applies here. In this case, the reporter did nothing wrong, but the raid on the home of the reporter can be justified according to the law, so it isn't illegal. Should it be? Probably.
Legislation is good, rules are good, the classified rules seems to make sense if you subscribe to Hanlons Razor at the least. Sometimes though, laws just don't make sense and shouldn't be codified.
For example:
MCL 750.335 - "Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00."
This shouldn't be a law.
You've misunderstood the parent. They're saying watch out what happens to anyone in the Journalist's book who did not share classified information.
You seriously think this administration is going to get a list of 1,200 government employees who are (legally) informing reporters of the goings-on and just... Let it go? Those people are about to get punished.
And since we're at the point of an unaccountable, unidentifiable Gestapo going door-to-door and arresting / murdering citizens openly in the streets...
its pretty clear, even from the journalist's quote, that some of the things they informed her about was not done legally (classified information).
Now is overclassification a problem too, yes but that's bureaucracy.
You are responding to a thread with the exact quotes:
> But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well.
...
> so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
So we, in this thread, are talking about what happens to the majority of her sources that are NOT sharing confidential information or committing any crime.
No, but you can tell it to a jury.
Aren't you arguing against a straw man here? It seems that you can't address the concerns of the comment and are instead saying obvious truths as if that is somehow counter to the person you replied to.
I didn't intend to. When he said "But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well." I read this as "the government is breaking the law"
I think instead what that poster meant is was "people who didn't share classified information will be targeted and prosecuted as well."
So, apologies for misunderstanding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617645
comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
Soap box > ballot box > jury box > ammo box
We are on step 3
I think you (the country, not you the writer) has been on the ammo box for a good number of years.
The number of police and public based killing is much higher than comparable countries elsewhere.
I fear over the past week we've hit 3.99
i keep tabs on posts roughly along the lines of "maybe we need guns after all."
imo they're usually too late, as guns without training and a group aren't very useful. but i can tell you the number has went up about 4x the baseline in the holiday season. and thats after its doubling after November's elections.
this country is a powderkeg and what's worse is i think these provocations are international. the admin seems to want to start a civil war.
The other side is already using box 4.
Yes, this is my problem with references to the ammo box. That exact rhetoric has been with us for decades now, and has in fact helped to get us to the point we're at.
Sure, maybe some ICE home invaders will be shot in self-defense while committing their crimes, but we already know how that plays out legally and even in the court of public opinion sadly (Walker/Taylor). So instances of self-defense won't change the big picture, regardless of such self defense options perhaps being pragmatic for those who are likely to be attacked right now or in the near future.
So that brings us back to the question of the large scale situation, which IME rests entirely on there being so many people Hell-bent on using the ammo box to "save" the country with the net effect of trashing it. We've essentially got flash mobs of brownshirts, understandably frustrated at how they've been disenfranchised and their liberties taken away, but having their frustration channeled into being part of the problem. Which I'd say comes back to filter bubbles, social media, pervasive and personalized propaganda, etc.
Of course freeing people from those filter bubbles is much harder than if we had managed to avoid the corporate consumer surveillance industry from taking hold and strongly facilitating them in the first place.
The ballot has always been a proxy for the bayonet.
I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
That's all well and good, but the law stands because the administration has more firepower than you.
I certainly don't agree that quantity of firepower determines what laws do or don't stand. Ask the federal agents who tried, and failed, to convict a guy for throwing a sandwich at them (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/dc-sandw...).
Turns out perceived threats like Assange and Dotcom are more interesting than sandwich guy.
The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders, they sure as fuck can't handle the most armed country in history.
The question is how many people will side with them vs reality.
> The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders…
The American military at the time cared - at least somewhat - about the international reputation of the United States. That may not always be a thing. It may not be a thing now.
The American military is designed to operate away from its shores. One hunting rifle round into the transformer outside of the bases and they're trucking in fuel for generators, a few rounds into the fuel trucks and they have no power. They would have to mobilize massive resources to secure Lockheed and Raytheon facilities from sabotage...
Keep thinking along these lines and you realize the situation for them is actually quite dire.
Not sure why the comment from kapone was killed so quickly. I was looking forward to a back and forth discussion.
The American military would have zero problems massacring an unlimited number of rice farmers and goat herders.
They absolutely did, and yet still lost both wars horribly.
> The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders
Where can I read more about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
Yeah, but... the quoted phrase should not be taken literally as a statement about battlefield capability.
It was a political struggle for legitimacy, not just territory, and the enemy did not have to win any battles, just avoid losing until the political will collapsed.
The thing is, military power does not automatically translate to political success, and guerrilla fighters do not need to defeat tanks and jets, they just need to survive, persist, undermine legitimacy, and exhaust the opponent's political will.
So, in this sense, the US was not beaten by farmers, it was beaten by a strategy that made military superiority irrelevant.
Absolutely, and I think the domestic opposition strategy here makes military superiority irrelevant. The US government doesn't want to, and would collapse if they tried to, shoot everyone who says that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president and any prosecution he wants to succeed should fail.
I agree.
>The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders
Eh, they killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and were not even trying to genocide them. If the current regime decided to actually just exterminate people our level of technology would make what the Nazis did look like babies playtime.
>The question is how many people will side with them vs reality
At least 40% of the population given what we've seen so far.
We'll find out I suppose, the Iranian government is currently seeking the answer to that question experimentally.
I hope Washington Post does a better job of training their reporters than my friend’s former employer did.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
> Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS
It was the mid 2010s yes.
And they’re not going to abduct and torture and American citizen out of the blue. The more “intensive” methods are higher cost, the intention is just to increase the friction involved with engaging in the routine and scalable, ordinary forms of snooping.
Shouldn't this be basic knowledge for journalist?
Why would it be if nobody trains them on it?
There are several groups out there that train journalists (and others) about digital security.
https://freedom.press/digisec/
That doesn't obviate the practical reality that "nobody trains them on it". Someone can be available to train them but, if that resource is not utilized, then the fact remains that they weren't trained.
People train to become journalists, wouldn't these practices be part of the curriculum?
Usually you would only communicate through secure drop. Looks like the Washington post uses it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/securedrop/
There’s a subreddit dedicated to fed employee opinions so I assume they already identified all active posters by now and the direct contacts are being correlated.
> The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?".
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech
You are severely misreading why people flag posts about that discuss the administration (whether for or against): they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
IE Flock being a ycombinator startup, Ring cameras giving free access to police and others[1], AI systems being used for targeting dissent, ad-services and the data they vacuum up being bought by agencies to build up profiles for dissenting citizens[2]. We've watched this type of technology even be used to target the families of people in warzones to explicitly perform war crimes[3].
This is a forum of people who have effectively built the panopticon but don't enjoy hearing about how the panopticon is being used. Politics is now interwoven into our careers whether we like it or not. There is no pure technology, everything we work on effects the world for better or worse. Pulling the wool over our eyes to pretend there's a pure non-political form of talking about these topics is childish and naive.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/home/security/amazons-ring-cameras-push... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i... [3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/questions-and-answers-is...
> There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
Possibly true. Just irrelevant.
I already have far too much exposure to Trump, and I'm not even American. I'd like it not to come up here. You may disagree, and that's fine, but the original question was - why are stories about him flagged. I maintain that the answer, for many people if not nearly all, is simple: ugh, not again.
The "hide" button is right next to the "flag" button.
I understand the instinct to remove "politics" from HN but it's fuzzier than that. There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc. There was a fascinating discussion about COBOL and what DOGE didn't understand and it immediately got flagged off the front page. Same thing recently with Grok and non-consensual adult content. Folks on HN are well placed to speak knowledgeably about it yet it is instantly voted off the front page.
Difficult not to see it as folks plugging their fingers in their ears. And there are folks on here that are flagging things because they paint the administration in a bad light. There are DOGE folks here, there are Palantir folks, etc. etc., I don't think you can dismiss those motivations even if they aren't true for you personally. I think the core problem is that flagging system is too powerful and too anonymous.
The no politics rule on HN is the equivalent of "the suspect smelled like marijuana so I had probable cause to search his car." -- it gives the moderators a plausible reason to remove content they don't want on here while maintaining an air of legitimacy around the removable because thems the rules.
Donald Trump has threatened to annex my country. Are posts about that political? Sure doesn't seem like it to me. From my persective this subject seems more like an existential threat then a discussion about policy. But I suppose to Americans it is just a matter of policy and politcs.
The incessent posts about Bay Area housing regulations -- political or not? Seems pretty political to me but apparently it isn't?
Sorry, your country potentially being annexed just doesn't spark curious discussion. We've seen this with the other 5 countries that were annexed: just a lot of tiresome complaints and people flagging each other in the comments.
When I'm hiding in my basement from the Patriot Press Gangs, I want to read about the difference between TCP Reno and TCP Tahoe, not about some boring politics.
If you want to talk about a country being annexed, you can go to literally any other website. That's not true if you want to talk about TCP.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve
Were there? I just saw people blindly advocating and excusing their incompetence. The discussions were very polarized, not well thought out or supported with evidence, and not remotely productive. At least from what I saw.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc
I have a very different impression of those discussions, with more or less half of the comments being flagged and downvoted into oblivion, and the overall mood being very heavy in negativity and hostility.
I would like to see great HN-related conversations. Maybe if they disabled donwvotes and flagging, and did some heavy handed moderation against negativity and hostility. A great conversation depend on a safe environment where people feel free to express their genuine views and opinions.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I sympathize, relate, and I'm not about to lecture you like some corners of the internet about "the privilege" to try and ignore stuff like this, but it is important to keep stuff like this at the forefront. We continue to experience unprecedented life events.
On the contrary, there's no need whatsoever to even deal with this since it already happens everywhere else, it's not some niche, subtle matter, it's probably the most talked about subject in the last decade.
That doesn't really resonate with me because you could make that argument about anything, _especially since_ most of the items that are posted here are links to other websites. There's no need to talk about it here - you could just talk about it at the relevant site(s) comment section.
No. I'm not saying "There's is some other place", I'm saying "This is everywhere already", and for that reason there is no need for it to be explicitly here. There is by no means whatsoever any shortage of places in which those discussions could take place.
The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
> The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
The argument is that it should be here, and that is a very reasonable stance. There is no shortage of places where anything can be discussed; that's not the point. "Here", there is a certain expectation around how to comment which makes this place a more interesting discussion forum, no matter the topic. That some topics bring out the worst in some people is not a good reason to make the topic verboten, but instead a reason to be more critical of the commentary under those topics.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
That doesn't say "no divisive topics" for a reason. The topics are not what make this place interesting, but instead the rules of engagement are.
By that logic we shouldn't talk about AI or video games either.
I find the political discussions on here interesting and generally of decent+ caliber. Plus so much of what’s happening is tech related / enabled.
There’s 30 posts on the front page. If someone doesn’t care about politics why can’t they just ignore that 1 post instead of flagging it into oblivion?
I agree that it is slightly better than Reddit but often it just turns into a mess that doesn't touch on tech.
They are plenty of places for political discussions. HN is a rare great place for tech so personally I'd rather keep it that way.
I agree that HN tends to have better discussion, but I'd argue it tends to have better discussion precisely because it's not the norm, so there's input from the type of people that loathe the current state of Reddit on the matter, and also the type of people that do like yapping about it 24/7 are absent from it.
First, there's no way you could even know that.
Second, that justification doesn't make sense because you could just not read the post. There's even a feature to hide it for yourself.
Third, that's not what flagging is for. Per the HN guidelines, posts should be flagged if they're spam or off topic, not if you personally find them tiresome.
There are many topics discussed on HN that I find tiresome to read about. For example, diet and fitness topics. You could swap the comments from one article to another and not even notice.
That's why I stopped reading them.
It's never once occurred to me that I should rather open them up, dive into the comments section, and tell the participants that I'm trying to get away from boring discussions about diet and fitness.
Some people do that, yes.
Others do what the parent post described.
HN is certainly not a monolith, and we've got our share of loons on all extremes of the political spectrum.
This is just conjecture
Yeah, because "AI is so great guys!!" is any better.
Maybe we'll be able to flag more than 1 type of post someday :/
Flagging off news about current events (whether you support the regime or not) is counterproductive to a forum nominally for the startup community. Startup founders need to be aware of the environment they are operating in, so if the current environment is a corrupt fascist authoritarian one then you need to be prepared to operate in that type of business environment. If you now need to bribe certain officials in the regime in order for your startup to succeed, for example, flagging posts about how that's necessary is counterproductive.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
Whilst I sympathise, it's a bit hard to avoid politics on here, when the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are actively supporting a corrupt administration to line their own pockets.
A statement of fact that will no doubt earn the ire of many tech-bro's.
> they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I don't agree. Crypto scams get discussed at length here for days, but when it's a Trump crypto scam, it gets flagged and disappears.
Is this thread not about the administration? The FBI currently acts at the will of the White House / GOP / Trump. Stick your head in the sand all you want, but don't betray the people who are standing up against oppression.
It's pretty shocking how many people on HN are ok with government officials killing citizens in the streets, but writing diversity statements is just too far.
Well it really depends on what was leaked.
It's flagged because its historically not Hacker News. Many of the newer accounts seem to bias towards using this forum as a "reddit" to discuss how much they hate the current administration or their mental issues. The technical "hacker" content is getting less and less -- thank God for https://lobste.rs/. So that's all fine and maybe hackers should just change be a reddit forum, but don't take it personally or be surprised if 15 old accounts are flagging your posts. I say this noting that the account you posted from is only 9 months old.
We historically haven't had an administration like this either. People need to get over politics creeping into their every day life because that's what it's actually doing. We're at the point where the government is using tech to police and surveil the public and many of the CEOs of tech companies are openly coordinating with the President. Tech is politics at this point.
Sadly politics in the US has reached the point where it is impossible to separate, particularly if you're involved in any kind of business.
Hating the current administration is one of the top technical issues on my mind. There is a substantial chance that all US-EU software collaboration is going to get blown up in the next few months if Trump makes good on his threats to invade Greenland, just as international trade has been reoriented around his illegal tariffs and responses to them.
When Trump decides to destroy your life, as he's destroyed so many others, I hope you'll find supporters who aren't so determined to ignore the inconvenience as you.
Wow, thanks for this! I normally don't login to HN and comment anymore due to all the reddit-style comments - especially the constant hate for the US and the President. Thanks for giving me another outlet to review tech-related stuff.
<logging off now>
Sadly, a lot of people in Silicon Valley now subscribe to this "dark enlightenment" nonsense.
I fear the answer, but what the fuck is "dark enlightenment" ?
Or they'll have ICE take them and they'll be deported or made to disappear. Some might even end up dying.
That's how the US is right now.
They also lie to local police. There was a case here where they drove erratically to try and make it look like a legal observer rammed their vehicle. They hit him twice, called the local police, lied to the police and then said observer provided his dash cam footage and was released. Will ICE face any repercussions? Nope.
That only works if they aren't U.S citizens... Which if they're working for the gov means they are. This administration is creative they will find other more 'legal' ways for retribution so the punishment sticks.
> That only works if they aren't U.S citizens
Ice has already summarily executed two US citizens. one literally on camera and broadcasted to the world.
I think you're talking about Renee Good - who is the other person?
His name was Keith Porter. [1]
Relatedly, here's a fuller list of recent shootings by immigration agents. [2]
1. https://www.foxla.com/news/ice-shooting-keith-porter-northri...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi...
I'm not quite sure why this is being voted down.
But as an outsider, its really not normal for agents of the state to detain people without legal basis. much less deliberatly make sure they can't be found. (citizen or not.)
You as a US citizen are not required to carry ID, so being arrested on the spot for not having proof of citizenship is grossly authoritarian.
Not to mention shooting someone in the street.
ICE just summarily executed a US citizen in the street with the full support of the administration.
Don't be so gullible.
There are quite a few examples where they did detain US citizens, even claiming that the papers they had weren't good enough.
The president has also multiple times said that he will strip people of citizenship. Yes, it's not exactly legal but they're doing illegal shit all the time and nobody's stopping them.
There are many documented cases of them detaining natural born US citizens for close to a month.
Nah, ICE is snatching and robbing US citizens too, even when they have ID on them. My (US citizen) friend got taken last month and driven hundreds of miles to another state simply for speaking spanish in public.
This clearly struck a nerve. What I was trying to say is I doubt they will use ICE for retribution here... My bet is they will use the FBI and simply arrest the sources. I'm aware ICE has detained U.S citizens and also killed citizens on the street.
What difference does it make whether they are US citizens or not?
At least DHS is not interested in finding out. And there has been plenty US citizens deported under DHS.
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118180/documents/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
> And there has been plenty US citizens deported under DHS.
Are you sure? Do you mind linking to information / reporting about that? I have not seen any.
How about starting on the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
Then you can read the congressional report:
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118180/documents/...
At this point this is not an accident it's an intentional policy to spread fear and suppress dissent
It's easy to not see anything if you willingly close your eyes
Or what Upton Sinclair said.
Sure, since you haven't heard of Wikipedia, or internet in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
Thanks. It (US citizens deported) hadn’t crossed my radar before, so it is helpful to have this reference.
My pleasure.
This would only be true if ICE cared to obey the law, which they do not. They are not observing even the most basic facsimile of due process or probable cause. Protesting them is being treated as grounds for brutalization or arrest. They are actively flaunting their contempt for the Constitution while "conservatives" cheer from the sidelines.
Instead of calling them "conservatives" we should be calling them reactionaries. They want to erase the progress of the 20th century.
Practically, what is stopping them from black-bagging and deporting citizens? Congress? The courts?
That's just it. In theory Congress watches the watchers.
But half of Congress sucks Trump's cock and the other half is literally denied the right to do their job.
Nonsense. You are seriously mistaken if you think mere legality will stop them.
This regime has already illegally stopped, assaulted, arested, jailed, and/or deported multiple US citizens. They now stop people and demand they show citizenship papers, and the AsstDirFBI has said people must carry proof of citizenship at all times, and if not, ICE are free to abuse you under the presumption you are an illegal.
We are already under a "May I see your papers, please?" Nazi-like system.
Except without the superficial politeness of the "May..." and "...Please" and seeing the face of your accusers who hide behind masks.
ICE is now close to being Trump's private police, funded by tax payer's money and beyond accountability.
Close? That's been the case since ICE started rocking face masks and getting deployed only to "blue" cities.
It seems our down-voters disagree.
Quite an interesting phenomena though, how affiliations color some unarguable facts. Many clearly believe that ICE agents are doing the right thing, they got what they voted for.
oh how naive you are... do you not watch the news / go outside?
Don't be ridiculous. Charging someone can be fraught. They will simply and quietly disappear.
But I would think they'd like to publicly make an example of them. So, disappear most, publicly flog the rest.
If you've got a way for us to not just passively sit by and watch it happen, well, we'd all love to see the plan.
Denaturalize and deport?
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...
Ironic that the orange man is telling Iranians to risk their lives.
His policy is very consistent and clear. He does not care about the form of government, how they treat the population etc, only that they show deference to him (personally).
Charging with a crime is so last decade. Nowadays they just shoot people they don't like.
That's always the country we've lived in.
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.
I don’t have to accept any assertion in the absence of evidence directly supporting it.
I don't think that PRISM involved root access to any devices and this link does not claim that it did.
I was expecting this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
still doesn’t really prove much
It actually proves that they _don't_ (or didn't) have that kind of access because they first publicly asked for the access and then rescinded that request when they, not officially but widely accepted, acquired access through some kind of hack/bug/exploit given to them by, probably, the IDF or an Israeli private company.
Counterpoint - if they have full root access to any phone, why did they need to do the raid?
To intimidate other reporters
So they don't burn their 0day
The same reason federal agents wear GoPros. Security theater, and to send the message that journalists should not pursue stories like this that put the federal government in a less-than-favorable light.
This isn't hyperbole. They literally went to the king with gold in hands. There's no WAY they didn't open up their platforms to him.
Appeasing a moron with a shiny, valuable object is low effort. Covering up and adding a backdoor to Apple's widely used iOS is not in the same ballpark.
They don't need a backdoor. They can push whatever update to the OS they want. They have a front door.
> They literally went to the king with gold in hands.
Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.
I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.
IDK, the FIFA world peace prize was completely unsurprising to me. It’s a massively corrupt institution and has been for decades. It’s out of the norm in a US context, for sure, but that kind of thing is penny ante for an organization whose Wikipedia article has multiple subsections on corruption
And don't forget the $400 million airplane that is probably filled with listening devices that will feed info to all of our enemies.
What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.
Magical end to end protection in Meta and Apple (chat) software to protect you from… whom exactly?
MAYBE non US governments? They probably have deals with all the big governments allowing them to spy on their own people at least.
"End to end" protection/encryption has lost all functional meaning when the masses accepted corporations as the arbiters of "ends". No one can even respond to the argument based on technical merit, because all that remains is hollow marketing bullshit.
I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.
Keep your eyes on protecting the midterms from interference... re ICE / militias etc. I encourage governors to call up their State's National Guards to protect their State's electoral systems from Federal intrusion and extremist militia groups. This move is founded in the most republican of urges: State Sovereignty. (btw, I'd even consider that as a move in Minneapolis, right now).
I don’t think National Guard around polling places would be good for turnout. Voting in advance, from home, is a solution already in place for most.
"Oops, sorry, your postal votes were kept in this warehouse over there. Yeah, the one that went on fire.". There's even a documentary about it called "Succession".
Yes, I hope things similar to this don't happen in this years midterms, like they did in 2020.
Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so? What do you expect the legal fallout of that situation to be?
I think that is becoming a less and less ridiculous scenario over time and I hope blue state governors have had long conversations with their national guard leadership about it.
> Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so?
As curretly constituted, no. But it doesn't hurt to start contingency planning to build a force that is eventually loyal to its state and the Constitution over the men who hold the office at that time.
There is a lot of room before that. Rather that the Guard would intervene illegal searches etc, and the inevitable tense ICE - National Guard interaction would change the dynamic, temper ICE's behavior. Moreover, the expected outcome would actually be Trump trying to nationalize that guard, then a constitutional crisis/emergency supreme Court intervention. The most power move that Democrats could make right now is the Republican one: state's rights/ sovereignty
I think your assessment is accurate and realistic.
But ICE is behaving pretty sloppy. I'm not sure it could get to that point without (just due to risk multiplied by sheer number of interactions) ICE accidentally escalating something via sloppiness, crossing something that they don't value but is a hard line to their local PD security detail, refusing to stop and getting smoked that way, either by their own security or by a passer by while their security shrugs.
A fed might not care about literally doing a George Floyd, but your security force might just walk off rather than be party to that.
I think the Minnesota National Guard might be willing to fire on masked goons trying to abduct voters from polling stations, regardless of what agency they claim to be from. Even if they're not, their presence might deter the goons from showing up, which I think is a significant risk in the status quo.
I'm very much present in "right wing circles", and I've seen exactly zero mention of "militias" being involved in anything whatsoever. They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been.
Where are you getting this?
> They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been
J6ers attacking cops is currently being celebrated. That's an ad hoc militia. (Tarrio built an actual one.)
Dude, the Capitol Police are the ones that let them ("J6ers") in to begin with. The whole thing was a set up from the get go.
> the Capitol Police are the ones that let them ("J6ers") in to begin with
This is nonsense. The numerous videos of the insurgents violently assaulting said police not giving its proponents pause indicates the standard of evidence its propoents are using.
When the militias can earn big dollars by joining ICE to do what they already want to do, the difference is meaningless.
Or as some 'uknown' VP would say: We will protect freedom of speech until the last journalist is behind the bars. That is the price we are willing to pay.
Are you referencing something? I can’t find any utterances of this phrase or something similar to it. Sounds juicy though.
No and yes. The first sentence paraphrases certain someone blabbering about the lack of freedom of speech in the EU. The second is from Shrek :-)
This country is turning into a meme
Journalists are the backbone of a healthy democracy.
FU USA FU
And just to be clear: The biggest military force of the world threatens denmark, scrambles the economy around the world due to sudden politic changes (tarifs) and destroys its own integrity as an ally
Oh, we're clear.
We're just powerless to do anything, as the (probably) legally elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge into ... everything in sight.
Our Checks refuse to speak up in Congress, and our Balances keep voting to make the (current) POTUS immune to the law.
Frankly, both parties feel like the "elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge" when they're out of power.
If you don't like that, the only solution is to push for limited government next time you're in power.
Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day. This is a deliberate design feature of the US political system. It's the only way to get people to wake up for the need to limit government power.
A good start would be ending selective prosecution by restoring the original role of grand juries: to decide whether or not to hire a contract prosecutor for a single case. Public Prosecutors can be just like Public Defenders -- contractors of the court, with no discretionary powers.
> Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day.
Only if there's a functioning system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, there is not. This Court is willing to use motivated reasoning to achieve its preferred outcomes; to slow-walking favorable rulings for Democrats while expediting favorable rulings for Republicans (often without explanation via the "shadow docket"); and to throw out decades of precedent in the process by ignoring stare decisis, a bedrock legal principle which ensures stability of the judicial process.
Just to give an example, consider the ban on universal (national) injunctions. One might be surprised to learn that it was the Biden administration that initially petitioned the Court for the ban. However, the Court found such a ban unnecessary then (i.e., when lower Courts were blocking the Biden administration's agenda), but conveniently found it necessary during the second Trump administration (when lower courts started blocking the Trump administration's agenda). And just as another kick in the balls, they used the birthright citizen case as a vehicle to bring the matter to Court, strengthening the President without even deigning to address the Trump administration's obviously illegal executive order.
The result of this mess is that, if the Trump administration is eventually voted out, it is highly unlikely that an incoming Democratic administration would be able to capitalize on the expansion of executive powers that this Court has given to this President. We see a similar situation in Poland. After ~a decade in power the Law & Justice party was voted out, but the new coalition government has not inherited the same ability to government, with its agenda constantly curtailed by Law & Justice appointees embedded throughout the government (including the highest court).
Thats def not the same though.
Trump doesn't take the normal route as any other president did.
Of course with his second term, at least people can't complain how he interacts with your ex allies like us germany. Thats fair to do, shitty and short viewed but hey.
But certain things like his fraud coins etc. this is bluntly illegal and he did not do this shit in his first term.
Not really. In the West, they are just parrots for the wealthy.
Also the US has always kind of been the biggest threat to world peace, with the exception of Nazi Germany. It only feels outrageous now because White people are being attacked too instead of the usual targets
The good journalists are not and they are the ones getting raided...
I'd say it's not that unusual in totalitarian dictatorships actually.
This is Nathanson's recent article (gift link) describing her work and the story that likely triggered the FBI's interest. Her reporting tells the stories of federal workers, she's not involved in any investigative work beyond interviewing current or former civil servants who feel helpless and lost now that the career that gave them purpose is no longer the same: wapo.st/49BQBrh
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”Steps before self-ending:
1. Feed cat, ensure that friend will adopt cat.
2. Talk to any family members.
3. Uninstall Signal
4. Take too many Ambien.
Or:
“I’m sending this to you confidentially so please don’t respond since metadata will show I contacted you.”
Reporter: responds anyway
> since metadata will show I contacted you
What's the point of the reporter not responding?
The metadata was or probably still is being collected from the notifications on the phone. So while Signal itself didn’t leak data the notification popup was. The sender wouldn’t have a popup, but the receiver might. Thus sending to the reporter vs receiving from the reporter would matter.
I should have worded that part more clearly.
[flagged]
Apparently. If you're scared of the government, this would be an entirely rational thing to do to safeguard the privacy of other people you know on Signal.
mentally unstable people can hold down jobs sometimes, too. Like, those under treatment, but a stressor can cause "relapse" and now you got a predicament at work.
Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
“When populists get into power, the rhetorical discourse frames tend to be used to implement successive autocratic measures, such as limiting opposition through electoral manipulation, thwarting the free press, changing the constitution in their own favor, and circumscribing minority, civil, political, and economic rights. Populists are usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Since they believe they represent the ‘true people,’ other people’s votes do not really count as legitimate. Consequently, they are hostile to the underlying values and principles of constitutionalism, pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances.”
-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.
So how does the cycle work? I’m not being sarcastic I actually find this a relevant and on-point summation. I happen to be very interested in the systemic consequences and results in Western history as much as is applicable in present USA. I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
One final resolution is the guillotine, dangling upside down on a meat hook, or a bunker fire. Those are extreme but we have to wonder what will stop a specific leader from pushing so far that they meet such a fate. This personality type does not stop unless they have to.
> One final resolution is the guillotine
Did you miss the lesson from the actual guillotine? It’s just another escalation in the cycle. The parties switch from raiding to guillotining each other. The guillotine doesn’t solve the problem, it just raises the stakes.
Sure. Final resolution for that leader, in any case. But in the cycles of history, those events are almost always inflection points where something new happens. For the Terror, that lasted a while, but then we got Napoleon, which was definitely a new chapter.
> in the cycles of history, those events are almost always inflection points where something new happens
Guillotines have historically been a time for the elites to consolidate wealth and power (with some shuffling among them). The poor and middle class eat shit.
(The only exceptions to the first part to my knowledge being the o.g., and only the o.g., communist revolutions in Russia and China. Still shit for the poor and middle class. But the elites fully rotated.)
> For the Terror, that lasted a while, but then we got Napoleon, which was definitely a new chapter
Sure. One which involved shuffling between Bourbons and an imperial Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna brought peace to Europe until WWI. But to the extent the French Revolution benefited ordinary people, it was in Britain and America.
Being temporally proximate to a guillotining is precedentedly fine. Being physically proximate to it is pretty much shit unless you're already powerful (or lucky enough to land a seat in the new oligarchy).
Human society is prone to convulsions, though. Just like the often body requires a shock to become stronger, healthier, societies need to be a push to avoid stagnation and decay. Though its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far.
> its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far
Guillotining–and violence as a tool of politics more broadly–is pretty much a one-way signal in the historical record (outside civil wars). More concentration of wealth and power. Or anarchy. Either way, the poor and middle class end up worse.
As for my civil-war caveat, even that's starting to look one way in the age of information and globally-mobilised proxy-war assets.
Hitler did not come to power out of a Jacobin movement, he came to power during a time just like our own, when a moderate government was convinced that there was no better alternative to their style of rule. It is dangerous to argue in favor of a stable middle class when history would prove that such forms of society are often fleeting when they do occur. Waves inevitably crash along the shore, which doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful while they roll along it.
So what is 2A for? What is price of shooting children in schools for?
Just to add to this, it still blows my mind how quickly this happened. The French went from overthrowing the royals to guillotining their neighbours within 5 years, and in the same short timespan Robespierre went madder than any Sun King had ever been. "La Terreur" was total madness.
On top of that he was a tremendous speaker. Tyrants don’t usually bother to justify their actions much beyond “because I can and I want to.” (Cf. current US administration’s discourse over Greenland.)
But Robespierre was a believer in capital-R Reason, and he had to face the National Assembly all the time. So his speeches are a fascinating gradual slippery slope from “it would be good if Jews and actors would get to vote too” to “only Terror will purify the world.”
I’ve got a little book of them, aptly titled “Les plus beaux discours de Robespierre” — his most beautiful speeches. It would be an odd adjective to use about almost any other political monster’s output (excepting Antiquity and the distance we have to them).
> French went from overthrowing the royals to guillotining their neighbours
The irony being the elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
My country went from 1000 years of Christian hegemony to atheist in a span of approximately 20 years. Don't underestimate the capacity for humans to change.
It’s somewhat hopeful to assume that it is a cycle.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
I find your explanation of free markets outperforming authoritarian regimes wanting. How should a stable and sealed dictatorship like north korea be impacted let alone destabilized by anything outside privateers do? Can you give an example?
Also, since many people bring up the french revolution. Peak weapons tech back then was front loading muskets and the fights in paris were desparation driven bloodbaths, where such weapons were eventually captured by the revolution. Today, the power gap to be outperformed by free markets is much bigger.
Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
"Liberal Democracy" is such a charged word.
It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
Only because its been attacked and dragged through the mud by its enemies on either side.
How so?
This strengthens my belief that all governments, mafias, urban gangs, and even cliques, are literally all just ancient tribalism manifested in modernity; may the biggest rocks win.
> impair public interest reporting in general.
Some administrations may see this as a feature not bug…
This shit needs to stop. If you have any Republican representatives right now, you might consider writing them every day.
We can disagree on tax policy, immigration policy, even very strong issues, and I'm happy to fight about those issues and respect disagreement. But in the last month, the president has invaded a foreign country without even notifying congress, has used literal thug tactics to try to get lower interest rates, and now he's obviously illegally entering the home of a reporter to take information which is clear violation of the first and fourth amendments.
This is unamerican. It's a violation of the clear principles of the constitution. It's against the law. It's trivially deserving of impeachment.
Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
>Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
Your assertion isn't supported by, well, anything. The problem is that constituents think they can't affect their representatives' positions. They can.[0][1] Especially if there's a concerted effort to do so.
For every constituent who writes/calls/emails, there are at least a half-dozen more who feel the same way.
The problem isn't that contacting your representatives isn't effective, it's that by not doing so, you're ceding power to those that do.
[0] https://act.represent.us/sign/does-calling-congress-really-w...
[1] https://americansofconscience.com/calling-congress-still-mat...
> “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
That's what the government said when Pentagon Papers were released. Guess what happened.
But I guess time is different now, and today's supreme court isn't the same as the one in those days.
Yeah cases like this have already been settled years ago. Reporters and news agencies have the right to this information and to publish it if it is in the public interest.
The current Supreme Court has shown itself to be extremely comfortable overturning precedent from that era.
Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and gave a boatload of money to Trump's campaign. Democracy dies in darkness.
Don’t ever forget what Bezos chooses to do or not to do here, whenever his name comes up in any context in future.
Looks like even Jeff's wealth and bribery couldn't stop this from happening.
Jeff is actively abetting this.
Wouldn't it be easier to just fire the journalist, like what he did with the editorial?
Define “easier”? I see no opposition to this action that would punish or prevent future similar actions. Now you don’t have to play whack-a-mole with other ideological dissenters because they’ll fear for their safety.
Journalists have always shown great tenacity when it comes to reporting news even if it jeopardizes their employment, but if it jeopardizes their safety… that’s perhaps one level too far for many journalists.
It's honestly hilarious how fragile all those checks and balances you keep hearing about are. Americans are the first people to criticise other regimes for being authoritarian but I guess the turns have tabled!
amazing how so many people in the comment section defend this.
"reporter early on Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” "
See: james o'keefe
"that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense."
uh oh sounds like the Guardian is asking for a raid too
The Guardian is not an American newspaper.
I don't think Nicolas Maduro is American either.
And the UK is not Venezuela.
Not sure why they call the name ("Department of War") informal. Seems pretty formal to me. It's displayed on the building.
It takes an act of Congress to change the name. Trump just made one of his dictatorial proclamations.
It was originally named the department of war, and changing it to defence was just newspeak anyway.
Of all the things trump has done, I actually like this one. At least he’s being honest about his intentions for what this department does.
I'm of two minds on this. As you say, renaming from War to Defense was a lie to tell Americans a more palatable story. However, renaming from Defense to War is actually the same thing in the current political context but for populace with different values. It is honest in a way but that was not the intention, nor is it the effective result. It's just a different lie.
I mean, they’re doing their best to start new wars right now, so I’d say it’s not a lie at all.
That's irrelevant. the point is that Congress is the body with authority to decide, not the executive branch.
it's not just newspeak though. names matter. an advanced civilization, which USA being the richest country on Earth is, should not strive to get into offensive wars...
Richest, clearly.
Advanced? No free healthcare, no paid maternity leave, two weeks paid leave, no free higher education, etc etc.
i dislike every action by a president that blatantly breaks the law, and yes that includes ignoring the tiktok ban
Without paywall: https://archive.is/1haDB
Not really surprised at this point. After Bush allowed, and Obama pardoned the collateral murder pilots, whistleblowers and journalists in the U.S. have been continually threatened, hazed, jailed and killed at the pleasure of whomever the current president is. This isn't party politics, Bush through Trump, are guilty. This is fascism at its finest...
I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.
Most of which is downstream of 9/11 and the War on Terror. That provided lots of bipartisan support for state sponsored killings.
It's been going since Reagan. Justice John Roberts is in the "unitary executive" camp and has been working to expand presidential power his whole career.
Not sure why this is being downvoted when it's quite an obvious trend in American politics. The executive has been getting stronger and Congress has been getting weaker and more dysfunctional for many years.
We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.
Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.
They raided Trump's wife's underwear drawer too so Trump is a victim of this FBI overreach as well.
Its not really overreach if they get a warrant and find the things they were looking for.
Indeed, don't blame the individual (all thought the individual has plenty of individual blame going their way, rightfully so), blame the system.
Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.
I have an ongoing debate (argument? fight?) with my father about this. He recalls a time when it felt as if there were 'good guys' in politics, and can't understand why it is that I'm so hard on the democrats (this has begun to shift in recent months as Chucklefuck and Aipac Shakur have consistently disappointed him). Besides the obvious issue of republicans being a lost cause, it's policies like too big to fail and dodd-frank and nafta that created the conditions for our current mess, all the while expanding and allowing basic, obvious bad policy to persist (presidential pardons, executive order powers, life terms in the supreme court).
A five year old can see the problems with a lot of this stuff, which once upon a time you'd defend with vague notions of a self-policing culture or the ghost of ethics in governance. Those kinds of non-safeguards can work fine in a stable system, but they inherently rely on foreknowledge of future conditions not changing in unpredictable ways.
The self-reinforcing recursive loop underlying all this is that the systems of governance can only be changed by the governors. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that democracy will fail so long as it's representative - the incentives to fix the system itself are simply not there because any inefficiency is exploitable for personal gain (so why fix it?) The doomsday proposition that comes out of that though is that the system cannot be changed - only replaced once it decisively breaks. Maybe that's what all this is. I would hate to find another bottom but I fear there's more to go before we get there.
Government is of course the quintessential multi-agent coordination problem.
It has big problems when the people running it don't embody the values that it depends on.
I absolutely blame the individual.
Who is responsible for the system if not the individual - and the collective thereof?
The fundamental problem is the citizen not being educated or caring enough about their own independence and state of being in the framework of a global economy and sovereign nation state
I would highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you are looking to understand how the populace got to the point where truth is irrelevant and nothing really matters.
It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.
I’m extremely aware of amusing ourselves to death
I think we came away with very different conclusions
To me it is abject proof that individuals do not have the mental emotional or other capacity to actually behave in the modern world such that they retain their mental independence and develop a sense of personal epistemology
Humans are way too dumb and prone to propaganda to actually have a coherent society at the scale needed so that we don’t collectively kill each other through poorly identified and attributed externalities
Unfortunately I think we actually agree on this and did come away with the same conclusions.
I believe, but cannot prove, that our malleability was an evolutionary advantage. It enabled homo sapiens to gather in ever larger social groups.
Media, from obelisks to tiktok, enables exploitation of our evolutionary quirk.
Similar to how we investigate and figure out airplane crashes, the system should not allow you to get into those situations in the first place, that's the solution that works across time, instead of for just individual situations.
For example, how is someone who led/incited an insurrection against the government able to become head of said government? Already there, something is gravely wrong. You don't let undemocratic leaders lead a democratic society. So the system is broken, and the current administration is proof of that.
Otherwise what other commentators said will happen, someone who might even be worse than Trump will eventually lead the country.
So then again my question is who ultimately audits and holds the system accountable such that if the system needs to be fixed it gets fixed?
The only answer to that is the people who form the citizenry.
If the citizens cannot influence the system such that they can actually affect change on the system then they are irrelevant in it and the system needs to be replaced
As long as they continue to fail to organize then they will continue to be dominated by it
That’s just reality
There is no alternative organization that can counter the global capitalist system currently
We must blame the system and the individual, otherwise the system will never change.
It'd be real cool if all the second amendment (guns) people cared as much about the first amendment (free speech and freedom of press).
"They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens.
But people are being targeted for what they say, for disagreeing publicly. That's real. And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
The guns haven't been taken away only because people do care so much about the 2nd amendment. Those people understand that the 2nd amendment is the only ultimate defense for the people against the government.
I too wish people also cared as much about the 1st amendment, but sadly I think the tide is turning on that. Too many on both the right and left seem okay with censorship and harassment.
Kind of ironic that there's a big overlap in the venn diagram between 2nd amendment enthusiasts and the crowd that is cheering on the government's authoritarian actions.
Because the visible 2A enthusiasts essentially trace a lineage to the KKK. Of course, they don't actually care about upholding the Constitution or fighting tyranny. That was just a convenient cover tactic and accusation to use against political opponents.
There isn't, it just appears that way. There is a subset of people that are cheering on the government in this situation and they are 2nd amendment supporters but the 2nd amendment supporters are much larger than that overlap.
Things like this is just another way of trying to drive a wedge.
With the government harassing, attacking, and now killing innocent American citizens, I'm not so sure if the second amendment is working out so well.
With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.
Not civil war, but a revolution. The 2nd amendment isn't worth much except as a very last resort, when the vast majority of people are willing to die to overthrow a government, as we're seeing in Iran.
The people claiming that having guns won't save you against the weight of the army are only partly correct. Having a few guns won't save me personally. I would certainly be killed on my own. But no government can kill everyone, either as a practical matter, or simply because you still need folks to produce the food. When everybody is armed, the government simply cannot oppress them to the same degree.
Imagine every protestor you see on video was instead standing rank and file in the street with a rifle on their shoulder. I.e. a well regulated militia. That would sure send a very different message, wouldn't it?
Message that "yes these are thugs and it is ok to kill them".
Police can kill you if they feel fear or pretend to feel fear. And having a gun was already ruled valid legal reasom for police to kill people.
If protesters carried guns, ICE could legally murder them. Not just J.D.Vance legaly, but legaly per how courts interpret such situations.
Well then that will be something for the courts to sort out, especially in the open carry states.
But I think you are underestimating the effect it will have on individual federal agents, who might decide the pay isn't good enough anymore.
These scenes are also put on for the benefit of the politicians watching.
> Well then that will be something for the courts to sort out, especially in the open carry states.
They already sorted it out - in open carry states. In the above situation, the court in open carry state sides with cops.
It is really simple. Sentencing cop for on duty murder is extraordinary hard even in clear cut cases. Guns presence means a cop can say he was afraid. And afraid cop is entitled to kill.
> But I think you are underestimating the effect it will have on individual federal agents, who might decide the pay isn't good enough anymore.
You are over estimating it. They would just shoot and feel good about it.
Even if they left, the state would send better trained troop the next time.
During BLM protests there were anti-protesters doing exactly what I described, and they were not automatically shot at by police. Of course the political roles are reversed, but I don't believe it is as guaranteed as you suggest. And the legality is of course much more complicated than you portray as well.
The courts decided exactly like I said when cops shot. That the cops shown more restraint in BLM case is good.
The political roles being different is key factor - ICE wants to kill and this administration wants them to kill. It makes them feel manly.
Frankly, the theory that armed forces would step back is absurd. They are cowards, but they are not afraid to kill. They are so afraid of everything that they are more likely to kill
And other side are people with moral limits. People who are not afraid and are showimg courage every day, but not murderers. And ICE knows that.
No one in ICE fears life ... they fear being emasculated.
> And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
They notice. They care. They just love it.
The "free speech absolutist" folks never were.
The “don’t tread on me” folks converted to “comply or die” shockingly quickly.
"Don't tread on me, tread on them"
it's a universal thing I think. in self-defense, when your life is at risk, you can use those guns, what do you have to lose. But in every other case, you have more to lose so guns are useless outside of use by aggressors.
They don't need to take your gun away, they just need to give you enough reasons to not use them. And even in 1779, it required lots of planning and coordination, and lots of loss to life and property to achieve change that way.
The focus should be more on elected politicians, and voters themselves and how they vote/not vote. If the mid-terms were being held today, how many people would vote? It's scary, who wants to risk their lives for a vote? not many.
I fear the governors of states will have to intervene, and the way that goes might lead to a conflict with the federal gov.
It feels like all of the "patriots" joined ICE.
>It feels like all of the "patriots" joined ICE.
That's certainly possible. Maybe even likely. Fortunately, we now have more information[0] to correlate whether or not that's true.
Perhaps soon we'll see a "Show HN" with a searchable database of those folks with links to known "patriot" groups. That would be interesting.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whistleblower-leaks-person...
The link is interesting.
> the dataset includes names, work emails, phone numbers, job roles, and other employment details for frontline agents and support staff—a level of detail that has alarmed officials concerned about the safety and privacy of federal employees and their families
Worth noting that all of the information specified is public information and the people it concerns are public officials.
You articulated it: "They're gonna take MY ___ away!" It's not about taking guns or free speech, it's about taking THEIR guns or free speech.
I don't think they're bad people, just think sometimes we humans seem stuck in a very us vs them mindset and it becomes more about my team vs your team than anything else.
People care more about their guns because, in their minds, that's the last thing that stands between them and complete helplessness. They have fantasies of starting up an Idaho or Montana-style militia to protect themselves from the liberal and immigrant hoards.
It was never principled opposition to anything, just a power fantasy that the current admin lets them live even more viscerally.
The second amendment people are quite fine with the current administration. All you're learning is what real power means and sadly what performative opposition does (nothing).
> "They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens
That never happens because the parties vested in that right resist every single time. Effectively. With real numbers. Not media campaigns or propaganda social media mechanisms. Largely without protesting, with no need to get into degrees of legality in doing so.
You don’t get to say “that never happens” as if it isn’t the explicit goal of an entire political party. You get to realize “we don’t let that happen”.
As to current events… the mass deportation guy won elections, why is it you expect armed resistance to federal officers carrying out the exact thing the majority of voters wanted?
You can disagree on anything you like, but, I find the “why aren’t people shooting federal officers who are enforcing immigration law!?” posts to be extreme affirmations of echo chamber. If you don’t like it, get your reps to change the laws, not suggest murdering people who you don’t like.
Not asking adversarially at all here: what do you mean by resisting with "real numbers" without media campaigns, social media, or protesting? What do the vested parties actually do to secure their second amendment rights? Do you just mean having large voting blocs?
No matter how many people vote for something, congress and the president do not have the right to infringe upon peoples’ fourth (searches & seizures) and 14th amendment (due process) rights. Federal agents are systematically violating those rights and not being held accountable due to a blatantly partisan supreme court. With no other alternative, it will be up to everyday citizens to stop those offenses and seek justice.
Take it for whats its worth but I been good friends with someone who works in Newsom camp, and constantly goes for a bite with his team. They talk alot. The main theme now is how to use illegal immigration situation to their benefit. If Newsom is elected President, he wants to go door to door in search for illegal guns that illegals are harboring. Of course all this is BS, or in such insignificant amount that its rather irrelevant. But they want to use Republican's hate for immigrants to help them catalog all serials numbers and ownership of us-owned guns. To some degree it will be fun to watch the "all she had to do is comply with Federal law not to get killed while running away in her car" people rounded up and having their guns cataloged in the name of fight with illegal immigration, and in accordance with Federal law :)
Huh? Are you saying that if Gavin Newsom is elected, rather than turning down the rhetoric, restoring the rule of law, and taking the pressure off of the immigrants and brown people who are scapegoats of the current administration, he instead wants to commit violations of the 4th amendment under the color of searching for immigrants but _actually_ in order to find firearms that are legally owned by US citizens? Presumably in preparation for a mass violation of the 2nd amendment (aka "round 'em up boys")? And your source for this is ... you're friends with someone who works "in the Newsom camp" and you go out for lunch with them?
I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.
He's saying his friend and his friend's coworkers who somehow work for Newsom wants Newsom to do that. Not that Newsome wants to do that.
>If Newsom is elected President, he wants to go door to door in search for illegal guns that illegals are harboring.
Of course the actual implementation is much easier. Just repeal the laws that prevent digitizing the existing records and building a database. That will cover the majority of individuals even if there is a long tail of untracked firearms.
In your “it would be fun to see people I don’t like being killed” you have conflated legal gun ownership that you don’t like to illegally crossing the remaining the borders of a country… and you can’t see it huh?
You're misquoting them. They said "it would be fun to see [people I don't like] have their guns cataloged."
Between this and Minneapolis I guess the water temperature just keeps on being turned up, and us frogs are just chilling out in our warm baths.
There were over 1000 protests over the weekend. The one I went to in Surprise, AZ had almost 1000 people, in a fairly conservative area with mostly older, white demographics. I think the tide is turning.
Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
If you're talking age, the US just had a 60 year old run in the last election and the party that complained to no end about the elderly running for office still voted for the 80 year old. Next election, the other frontrunner is currently 58. We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
> We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
That 38 year old, along with the rest of the center left candidates, all dropped out to ensure the 70 year old candidate could beat the other 70 year old candidate. "The South" had nothing to do with it.
Incorrect. Buttigieg won #1 and #2 delegates in the first two primaries of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was only at the fourth primary, South Carolina, when Biden won 6x the votes, that the Buttigieg campaign dropped realizing they had no chance because of underperformance in only the South.
Only 54% in SC say homosexuality should be accepted by society. 42% in Arkansas. In 2025! https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1lxzznb/acceptance...
Did Biden win either of those states?
How many EC votes do the states with a 70+ rating add to?
> One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians?
Down ballot. There are very few elections where nothing on the ballot is of stake.
US elections happen in two stages, a "primary" where each party decides their candidate and then the "general" where the final winner is decided. It sounds like you may only be getting news about general elections (and may have missed the news where the 83 year old ended up getting swapped out).
The 83 year old wasn’t the candidate.
The 83 year old dropped out before the election took place. Kamala Harris is 61. No spring chicken, but at least not old enough that she should've retired years ago.
The two-party system will always leave you with suboptimal choices when it comes to casting your vote, but the alternative to Trump was two decades younger.
Yes, the system sucks and there should be more and better candidates.
But when one side represents fascism and the other doesn't the choice is still easy.
There are plenty of young politicians. Their parties deliberately keep them out of power. Political power in the united states gets strangely concentrated by our 2 party system in a way that tends to ossify policy and promote more ring-wing versions of both parties.
(also a Brit)
Biden was no longer a candidate even by the time the last election happened.
Look to Mamdani. Note that the real election there was in the primary. If you squint a bit, the US electoral system looks like the French one. There's two rounds of voting, and in the first one you get to pick who is the crook that will be put up against the fascist in the final round.
It's going to be boring and time consuming, but people have to use the levers they do have available to do internal Democrat party politics if they want to improve the situation.
If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party because that's effectively voting for the other major candidate. So the problem of not having more than 2 choices perpetuates indefinitely.
> If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party
Actually, both major parties (not always at the same time) have a long track record of working very hard to promote voting for third-party candidates, doing things like funneling funds covertly (or simply nudging donors) to fund their efforts, assigning party activists to support third-party efforts, etc.
Of course, they exclusively do this for third parties whose appeal is, or is expected to be, mainly to people whos preference, if choices were limited to the major parties, would be for the other major party.
Because it's not just rhetoric, as long as the electoral system isn't reformed to change this, getting people to vote for a minor party instead of your opponent like demoralizing them and getting them to stay home, or disenfranchising them (two other things the major parties have been known to try to do to populations likely to vote for their opponents otherwise) is a lot easier and exactly half as useful, per voter, as getting them to switch to you from the other major party.
That only works if the message of the third party is more appealing to those voters. And so the major party also pays attention to which third party messages from those who would support them are getting through and changes.
It is also helped because many of the people who are insiders in the major party are secretly voting for the third party when the majority of primary voters (who are rarely well informed) force someone they don't like on the party. They can't do anything this time, but they can send a message to each other where they failed.
> That only works if the message of the third party is more appealing to those voters.
It actually works just as well if the third party fails to attract the voters with its message but provides a reason not to vote for the targeted major party candidate that would not work as well if the messenger was the major party using the third party as a stalking horse. Because discouraging voters that would otherwise vote for the other party has the exact same effect on the outcome as moving them to a minor party.
Whichever choice has the least favour is malleable. Right now, by switching up their candidates and policies, the democrats can't do any worse than they're already doing, which is losing. If the democrats next time, then the republicans will have 4 years with nothing to lose.
> There were over 1000 protests OVER THE WEEKEND
At the risk of sounding sarky, you are going to have to do more than protest at the weekend (!) to stop what is happening to you.
It's worth noting that Renee Good was shot because she was protesting after she happened upon ICE operating in her city. More than just weekend protests are happening. Few people in any of the blue sanctuary cities ICE is terrorizing actually want ICE to be there and those who don't frequently make themselves heard, sometimes resulting in their tragic end.
Yes, some protests happen when it's convenient for the protesters. That does not invalidate their protests, nor any others with a similar message. It does not weaken the message nor the movement.
If you compare this to what is happening in Iran, US citizens are docile. A "peaceful protest" is an oxymoron.
> If you compare this to what is happening in Iran, US citizens are docile.
This is still moot. Even if they appear such (even if they are such) it does not diminish the validity nor righteousness of their message.
> A "peaceful protest" is an oxymoron.
This is false by a plain understanding of the words. A "protest" is an expression against something. "Peaceful" means nonviolent. Obviously expressions can be nonviolent.
Your understanding of the word peaceful is wrong.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/peaceful
> adjective Not involving violence or employing force.
It clearly encapsulates a lot more than non-violence. You can't protest without disturbance.
>Undisturbed by strife, turmoil, or disagreement
I think the problem is just how big the US is. People outside of the US really don't understand this. For instance, I'm about 2300 miles from DC, also known as 3700 km. It just not logistically possible for me to march on the capital. I do what I can locally, a lot of us do, but with everything so spread out, it is hard to make an impact.
That was one of the main plot points in Andor.
The rebellion had to raise the temperature faster, more dramatically, in order to wake people up. To make the frogs realize it was hot and jump out.
Lonni Jung: "You realize what you've set in motion? People will suffer."
Luthen Rael: "That's the plan."
Luthen believes that to succeed, they need to anger the Empire and make them come down hard on the citizens, which in turn will fuel the rebellion.
Reminds me of the West Wing:
C.J. Cregg: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy, or is this not a job for the U. S. House of Representatives?
Leo McGarry: Well, they'll get around to it sooner or later.
C.J. Cregg: So let's make it sooner - let's make it now.
We have left wing accelerationists in the US too.
Perhaps that is the real problem.
The Rebels were 'accelerationists', but the Empire was also wanting it to escalate. They played into each others hands.
Both sides wanted escalation, so it is positive feedback loop.
When societies get to the point where everyone is escalating, there isn't much to stop it. The cool heads are drowned out.
Did people not like Andor? Or the same Russian Bots that downvote any anti-right-wing/brown-shirt sentiment.
Woah woah woah! I still haven't watched this. (I know, I know...)
Watch it. Best TV show I can think of, ever. By that I mean that the writing and acting and production values are top notch; it's entertaining throughout - some of the other greats are not (The Wire falls down here, sometimes; Keislowski's Dekalog, likewise - though its best moments are better than anything else); and Andor nails its cultural moment, by being directly about, well, all of the Important Stuff we're talking about in this thread. Also, it's a tragedy; it's about sacrifice and loss, and the human consequences of following your convictions - regardless of the side you choose. (That last note's a personal taste, but I'd stand by the former points as being reasonably objective.)
I sat through it going, "how the hell did they manage to make a work of art out of a Star Wars series?", which even makes it better. You don't have to care about Star Wars AT ALL to appreciate Andor, but if you do, watching Andor -> Rogue One -> Originals back to back makes the earlier stuff better.
You'll think I'm over-selling it. Please watch it, then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
"makes the earlier stuff better."
This is an amazing feat.
if only every prequel could accomplish this.
Not everyone is chilling. Some of us are protesting and/or moving our families out of the country.
I don't know if it's fair to say we're chilling - there have been fairly organized (although admittedly not very large) protests around the nation related to the killing of Nicole Renee Good. I live in southern California and there were at least 6 within easy driving distance this past weekend.
Whenever ICE goes into a new city, they're meeting more and more community resistance. The protestors have mostly been very smart about remaining civil, which continues making ICE look worse and worse as they tear gas and arrest peaceful protestors.
The supreme court has ruled (somewhat surprisingly) that Trump can't deploy the National Guard into cities any longer.
Trump's approval rating has continued steadily declining since he took office, and the midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath.
I'm mid-40s and this is the best-organized and most successful demonstration movement I've witnessed in my lifetime. Occupy got close, but that felt like something that the more 'extreme' ones were actively participating in, with more passive support from the populace. Now it feels like everyone is getting directly involved in one way or another.
I understand protesting ICE for better accountability, they certainly need to be held accountable. But I don't understand those who protest the presence of ICE as a concept. Are there any countries that don't enforce their immigration laws?
ICE as an agency was created in 2003. Most of the posters here are older than it by a significant factor. We can live without it and create another agency to enforce immigration laws that isn't thoroughly rotted and filled with criminals.
Yes, but it's essentially just a re-branded INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). They were conducting raids to catch undocumented immigrants (often at workplaces) for as long as I can remember (i.e. back into the early 1980's). IIRC, spanish speakers called them "la migra".
You can enforce immigration laws without shooting people in the face, ramming into their vehicles, ripping them out and putting them in illegal chokeholds, shipping them to prisons in El Salvador, firing tear gas at legal observers and on and on.
It also wasn't an agency prior to 9/11. It should be dissolved. All ERO agents should be prosecuted and or barred from all future public service.
Oh interesting, i didn't know it was a post 9/11 agency.
It was born out of INS but it and DHS have its roots in the security apparatus that developed thereafter. It's become progressively worse leading up to the weaponization we're seeing now.
> Are there any countries that don't enforce their immigration laws?
I don't think there are many developed countries where their immigration officers are routinely tear gassing students and bystanders, no. I don't think there are many developed countries where their immigration officers are detaining indigenous peoples in private, for-profit detention centers without charging them with any kind of crime.
Feel free to point out other developed countries where this is now just a routine occurrence though.
Hm, you seem to be replying to an argument that I did not make. this seems to fall under:
> I understand protesting ICE for better accountability, they certainly need to be held accountable
The argument about getting rid of ICE isn't about having zero enforcement of immigration laws. It is about getting rid of this entire stack of management and agents. I guess that's what you're not understanding.
ICE is recent. We don't need ICE, the organization and people that are currently doing what they're doing, to continue to be a part of the government. If the whole organization is behaving badly, the whole organization should be scrapped and a new organization with different people and a different plan and enforcement style should be created.
ICE was created in 2003. We had immigration enforcement actions happen well before 2003. Getting rid of ICE does not mean "no longer enforce immigration laws".
I see, I can understand the argument better now, thanks!
Looking it up, it seems that ICE used to be part of INS, which was broken up into: -USCIS: Handles services (green cards, citizenship). -CBP: Handles the borders (Border Patrol and ports of entry). -ICE: Handles interior enforcement (raids, investigations, and deportations).
So I'm not really sure I follow. If we get rid of ICE, who handles Handles interior enforcement (raids, investigations, and deportations)? Another org?
This feels like people who argue to get rid of the police, and replace it with "Community Security Forces", or something of the likes.
> If we get rid of ICE, who handles Handles interior enforcement (raids, investigations, and deportations)? Another org?
Yes, a different org, back under the Department of Justice, staffed by very different people and with a different way of going about enforcement of immigration law. I'd argue there have been a lot of issues with the Department of Homeland Security and that massive parts of the organization should probably be reworked.
The DHS' mission is supposedly all about protecting people from terrorist attacks, go read the arguments on why it was a good thing right after it was created to see that kind of connection[0]. Why do we have an organization designed to fight terrorists in charge of handling civil infractions? Its no wonder we have agents treating everyone as a terrorist; its what the department is supposed to focus on, fighting terrorists! Its almost like maybe we should have a different group of agents equipped to handle potential terrorist threats to the agents making sure foreigners aren't overstaying visas or working while not authorized to work.
In another direction but related to this, we should also pretty much scrap and redo all of our immigration laws as well. They really don't work well and are generally pretty bad. Note I'm not saying we should have no immigration laws at all, but the systems we have today are largely dumb, ineffective, and just end up hurting a lot of people while not really doing much good for the American people.
> This feels like people who argue to get rid of the police, and replace it with "Community Security Forces", or something of the likes.
A lot of what the police do these days probably should be re-tasked to different, potentially new agencies with different trainings and different focuses. Police these days are expected to handle such a wide range of community issues, many of which probably don't need the same kind of people who respond to violent threats and what not. When someone is experiencing a mental health crisis we probably shouldn't send people who spend their days training to perceive every action as a threat to be handled with a gun as the first line responder. When there's someone on the street strung out on drugs having the police respond and put them in jail/prison probably isn't helping the situation.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071114000911/http://www.dhs.go...
A protest movement can't be very subtle. A clear and short message like "No ICE" or "ICE Out" is much preferable to "We would like an immigrations and and custom enforcement agency that respects people and the law, efficiently inspects imports, checks in on visa overstayers, pursues charges against business owners that have a business practice of not checking work eligibility of new hires, and works with competent, trained agencies to perform traffic stops and home/office raids or trains their own officers for such"
but it's directionally wrong. It's like the BLM protests that had main messages of abolishing the police - those had terrible consequences [1]. "Reform" would be a better direction.
[1] In 2020, during the height of the protests and the pandemic, low-income communities of color experienced the sharpest increases in firearm violence and homicides https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/firearm-deaths/index.html [2] Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Black (52%), Latino (66%), and Asian (61%) Americans oppose defunding the police. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/what-communities-of-color-want...
> but it's directionally wrong.
A time honored protest chant is "hey hey, ho ho, [target of protest] has got to go." That's just how protests work --- don't like what someone or an agency is doing, march to get rid of them. Getting rid of them may not be achievable or desirable, but it resonates.
Given the number of high profile shootings related to totally unnecessary situations the agency has put its agents into with apparently zero preparation and training, it's not surprising that people want it to go. I don't remember this kind of thing when INS was doing activities with the same kinds of reported goals.
ICE didn't exist prior to 9/11. There's no reason it can't be dissolved.
that's a fair point
Original concept is dead when they are used as militia against states that did not vote for current administration.
ICE has been turned into a secret police force. If you'd like a history of the border patrol in the US, then here is an excellent introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdStIvC8WeE
Years ago, this book provided me with a useful introduction to the history of immigration to the United States and various crackdowns (vigilante and official) against it.
It's not a difficult read, but its authors are leftists and the language may sometimes be difficult for readers with sensitivities related to the goodness of Democrats or Republicans or whatever.
(I think maybe I'll re-read it today as well; it's been a long time.)
My libertarian philosophy is not compatible with immigration laws in general. I'm not quite let everyone in - but I require strong reason to not let someone in. People should have the right to move, only restricted in the worst cases.
"I don't understand why people protest the Gestapo as a concept. Are there any countries that don't have undercover police?"
> "Are there any countries that don't have undercover police?"
In what countries do undercover police drive marked vehicles and wear insignia of their agency?
> In what countries do undercover police drive marked vehicles and wear insignia of their agency?
Tons of these ICE agents are in unmarked vehicles and wear no official insignia. The guy who shot Renee Good did not, on any part of his body or exposed gear, actually have ICE insignia on him.
It saddens me that your rather innocuous comment has been down-voted so aggressively. Immigration enforcement is required. Illegal immigration should be discouraged. ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically. But immigration laws should still be enforced. I imagine you'd agree that if ICE agents/supervisors act beyond the scope of their duties or with excessive force, they should be disciplined/prosecuted. I also have a hard time understanding people who don't agree with what I just wrote. I can only imagine those that want to disagree think I'm writing with some sort of underlying agenda and in code to push some broader political narrative (I'm not).
> rather innocuous comment
It may appear innocuous yet it normalizes ICE's actions as mere "immigration enforcement". Their actions are far more and far worse than that, as you note:
> ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically.
It is not an issue of immigration laws being enforced, it is an issue of rights being infringed. The "overly aggressive" tactics being "used politically" is exactly the problem.
>It saddens me that your rather innocuous comment has been down-voted so aggressively.
Despite the ridiculous narrative that Obama and Biden were "bringing in illegals en masse to vote for Democrats," if you look at the actual numbers, it's not surprising that folks are down-voting that comment.
Mostly because those previous administrations (Obama and Biden) managed to deport many more undocumented folks than either this or the previous Trump administration, without the thuggery, violence and murder we're seeing now.
I'd note that even without the gratuitous violence and intimidation, folks were also protesting Obama's and Biden's ICE activities.
Because the real issue around immigration in the US is that our system is broken and we haven't constructively addressed those problems for nearly 40 years.
So no. I'm not surprised by the down-votes because there's nuance that's being glossed over and, while doing so, giving violent thugs a pass by claiming that they're "enforcing the law," even though they're doing a crap job while harming our citizens, legal residents and helping to destroy what's left of our civil society.
I'm not pushing any "broader political narrative" either. Just pointing out a few things not mentioned in your or GP's comments.
It's like you didn't see where I agree that current enforcement is too aggressive. Why are you writing in a tone that implies we disagree when we agree? This is the sort of thing that confuses me.
>It's like you didn't see where I agree that current enforcement is too aggressive. Why are you writing in a tone that implies we disagree when we agree? This is the sort of thing that confuses me.
I combined my response to your comment[0] and its parent[1], as I mentioned:
Rather than disagreeing with you, I was attempting to add nuance and additional substance. As the site guidelines[2] recommend:I'm not pushing any "broader political narrative" either. Just pointing out a few things not mentioned in your or GP's comments.
You appear to have assumed bad faith on my part. Why is that? Was I not clear enough? What could I have added to the above to be clearer?Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620707
> ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically. But immigration laws should still be enforced.
Yeah, it's strange that this take is so polarizing.
> I imagine you'd agree that if ICE agents/supervisors act beyond the scope of their duties or with excessive force, they should be disciplined/prosecuted. Yes of course, it's hard to disagree with that.
I live in Seattle and I've seen multiple large protests around the ICE murder of Renee Good. Part of the problem is that the US is too large as the people responsible for the jackbooted thugs kicking in doors and killing citizens are on the other side of the country. Business in Minneapolis is practically grinding to a halt as stores and businesses close their door out of fear.
I think we're one or two bad incidents away from wide-scale rioting.
We have the tech elite to thank for this disaster
Why has this analogy been repeated so much lately? Did someone famous use it or something?
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not denying it's appropriate; it just seems remarkable to me that it's being used so often lately.
> Why has this analogy been repeated so much lately?
Probably because a country that was famous for trying to spread their idea of "freedom" all across the world, seemingly can't notice themselves that the country is rapidly declining into full on authoritarian dictatorship, with a very skewed perspective of "freedom", and the people who are opposing it, aren't rioting (yet at least).
The judicial arm of the government aren't even enforcing the laws of the country anymore! Not sure how, but it'll get worse before it gets better. Quite literally a fitting analogy in this case.
It's a 100+ years old metaphor widely used at virtually any point in time since then to describe all kind of situations
Have fun seeing "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" everywhere.
Because it's appropriate and descriptive?
We're actually dumber than the frogs. The original 19th century experiment involving frogs that didn't jump out of heated water was using frogs who had had their brains destroyed. The question being asked was whether the escape reaction to hot water was caused by the brain or by something further down in the nervous system. With an intact brain, the frogs would jump out. Without one, they wouldn't. Question answered.
It's just a simple analogy that quickly breaks down.
The frogs have it easy. All they have to do is jump out. One individual action and they're safe. (Until the scientist catches them and uses them in more experiments, anyway.)
The situation for people living under governments becoming gradually more oppressive is much more complicated. You don't know for sure that the water will keep heating up. Escape is extremely difficult and costly. Turning off the heat takes massive collective action. A third of the frogs actively want the water to boil, and another third don't really care.
Relevant Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_a...
Exorbitant education costs and free flow of thought extinguishing media means Americans are the brainless frogs.
Maybe that's a strong element, but I think we are simply too addicted to comfort and our way of life. We've been encouraged to "just vote" for so long we've lost all political muscle.
Baader-Meinhof effect.
To think that this administration makes Nixon look principled.
They should have gone to Mar Lago to find their missing classified documents. Do they not watch the news? /s
In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
> In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
In what way is what she was doing similar to Snowden? Snowden was a huge bombshell, with droves of material, proving what a lot of people suspected was happening, but had no proof.
This journalist seems to have been receiving a ton of "small leaks", of improper firings and a lot of other federal misbehavior, but all within the US, and all with things we already knew was happening.
So rather than "one big sea of bad", she was investigating "a thousand small cuts of bad" across thousands of people who had evidence.
Snowden leaks had global implications that changed relationships between countries, while this seems mostly internal to the US.
Agreed. Snowden also wasn't a journalist but the source himself. Having over 1000 individual sources of information is not at all the same thing.
Or intimidate a member of the press that isn't "bending the knee" to them.
>In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
I bet it's the recipe for the military-grade copium some people are on
fuck this -- how is this not on the front page of HN?
It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/ . Another user pointed me to it in the past when I was also frustrated that an obviously engaged story was somehow being buried for reasons I didn't understand.
>It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/active
“ Agents searched Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home and seized devices in inquiry tied to a classified materials case”
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
No, this is absolutely not normal as the article clearly states. Reporters are very rarely raided in the US under circumstances like these.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
Here’s a less sensational article. The journalist is not even a target of the investigation, the target is a contractor leaking documents.
“ Natanson was told that she is not a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Instead, it appears to be related to an ongoing probe of a government contractor in Maryland.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-was...
Please don’t be so naive as to think that this administration is above creating a pretext for raiding the home of their real target while claiming it’s about something else. It’s the same thing (minus the raid, plus an indictment) they’re doing to Jerome Powell.
oh you sweet summer child... to see the world with your simple star-spangled eyes...
In some ways this is just desserts after American journalists decided that Julian Assange was not worth defending[1]. Still disheartening to see, since we need robust journalism to keep companies/politicians honest.
Trump keeps that kind of stuff in their guest bathroom, cool. Reporter, raid and straight to jail. What a timeline to witness. Elected officials glut preventing them from doing their duty.
Not only that, the word going around is some of the stuff found in the bathroom were far above top secret, including some Q-Clearance level stuff from the DoE.
As in, the US's full knowledge of the technical capacity of Israel's nuclear weapons program, including how we obtained that information. That's now in the hands of the Saudis, Iran, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. And it was found in a fucking bathroom.
Yet nobody seems to care that a Trump-appointed lackey magically (whose husband has credibly been linked to organized crime) found themselves on the case "by chance" and issued a whole bunch of bullshit non-appealable verbal rulings on how and why Donald Trump is innocent.
Q clearance isn’t “far above top secret.” It’s TS plus Nuclear Weapons Information. The background investigation is exactly the same as TS and almost everyone that works at a DOE lab gets one: almost 100,000 people have access. It requires no polygraph like SCI and higher clearances.
>, this is absolutely not normal
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
Not all bad things are the same. Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
>Not all bad things are the same.
Who said they were?
>Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
Only by invoking the most numerical slight of hand sort of "a DV is abnormal because we hand out a thousand traffic tickets a day and make only one or two DV arrests" logic is it abnormal.
For the past 5+yr the FBI has raided the home of about one journalist per year. Every time the allegation has been about investigating the source of some leak.
They didn't do one in 2024/2025 I don't think. Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind. I'm not gonna say they get a pass, but this is "the normal amount" for them.
Once again, that doesn't make it right and I shouldn't have to say this but this comment should not be construed as an endorsement of the FBI or any specific activities they engage in.
> Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind
Those were for computer fraud, possession of stolen property, and possession of child pornography, respectively. The first amendment allows journalists to publish classified material, it does not give them free license to commit crimes.
Right. Lincoln arrested hostile journalists without warrant or trial. FDR sent the FBI to shake down his critics. Going after the press isn’t unprecedented at all. I worry this is another sign that the people behind the administration are moving to a war-time footing and life is going to get a whole lot worse.
Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks? If not, it's hard to make a compelling case that this is "normal"
>Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks?
James Burke, the Veritas guy, the ABC News guy, etc.
I think James O’Keeffe was the Project Veritas guy. He had a legally obtained the original of Ashley Biden’s diary. Joe Biden’s daughter. Where in it a page she wrote while in therapy said she had inappropriate showers with her father.
Legally obtained is dubious in this context. He likely knew it was stolen
No one, including the FBI has ever made a statement that it was stolen and then charged O’Keefe for that. It was a raid to further “investigation” to determine for stolen.
But don’t you think it’s more interesting you care less about a journalist being raided, then you do the outcome of a diary that explains that Biden according to his daughter sexually abused her?
> No one, including the FBI has ever made a statement that it was stolen and then charged O’Keefe for that
This is blatantly false two people were charged in connection with interstate transport of stolen goods, and the raid was part of the investigation. The diary was taken because it was the stolen good in question and important for the FBI's case on prosecuting the individuals charged.
>then you do the outcome of a diary that explains that Biden according to his daughter sexually abused her?
The diary was never published, verified or entered into evidence VS the current POTUS has had multiple credible allegations with affidavits and testimony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
As others pointed out, the problem with this is that you end up with a government that can target any reporter by claiming they have "classified materials". No need to prove what those materials are (because they are classified). This is how third world countries choke journalists.
In the USA, the claim has to be convincing to a judge, so it’s not quite as arbitrary as you indicate.
In order for ICE to raid homes they need to have a valid warrant signed by a judge, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them in Minneapolis doing warrantless raids.
They're supposed to. They've been breaking into homes without them.
The current administration is utterly lawless.
That is relatively minor compared to ICE shooting protestors and then stopping people from giving them medical attention.
Clearly, the bar for it to be convincing seems quite low here
How do you know what papers the judge saw when issuing the warrant?
I was not aware that the filings were public.
Journalism has been choked by a decreasing number of owners and sources (usually press agencies and releases).
Of course they had a search warrant.
ICE has been knocking down doors and ripping folks from their homes without warrants. Why would the FBI under this administration behave differently?