I know some of the individuals in this leak. There are people whose responsibilities are far removed from ICE’s activities. One department – who I will not name to avoid drawing attention to – focuses on investigating imports to ensure importers are not trying to get around tariffs as well as prevent foreign countries from “dumping.” (Intentionally flooding a market with underpriced products to bankrupt domestic suppliers and later raise prices.) Their work also helps to uncover the use of child labor by domestic companies who outsource production, like Nike and Underarmor.
I’m not against employee names and contact info being made public. That’s no different than someone’s business card being passed around. What I worry about is that all DHS employees get lumped together indifferently by disgruntled individuals and harassed using the information made available.
People who are (rightfully) angry by ICE’s activities in recent deportations, wrongful detaining of US citizens, and misuse of force are going to begin harassing these employees indiscriminately. I’ll admit that I don’t care if they do it to anyone listed as employed under ICE, but some departments elsewhere in CBP have actual positive purposes. Customs agents who scan incoming goods for invasive species, for example, help prevent the destruction of domestic plants.
I guess we just have to see how this info is used and what the effects will be.
AlotOfReading 8 hours ago [-]
I get where you're coming from, but I find it pretty difficult to sympathize with privacy issues faced by the innocent employees of an agency that routinely violates my privacy rights to get the same info.
orthogonal_cube 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t blame you. Anything strictly ICE-related gets a “sad trombone” reaction from me. And that extends to certain portions of CBP as well.
chaps 6 hours ago [-]
I appreciate you reflecting on it, but please try to continue reflecting -- saying you get a "sad trombone" reaction is incredibly frustrating to read. You're making light humor around very horrific things as if it's some comedy. These are our friends and families being taken away from us.
chaps 8 hours ago [-]
Once sat in a coffee shop in downtown Chicago and overheard two ICE attorneys chatting about why they joined ICE. The gist of it was that they were both very, very aware of the appearances of their work. But they both agreed that it was worth it for their careers to work there for long enough to build a reputation and then move on.
They know that they're working for an evil org and they don't care because it gives them nourishment. If my friends were doing that, I'd have an intervention with them. I hope you do too.
throwAway30303 2 hours ago [-]
For context, I often hang out with self-identifying Mexicans. I eat at their clandestine trailer-park restaurants. I’ve helped friends navigate car crashes while on another legal friend’s insurance.
I think the locale matters. I’m in a rural small town on the outskirts of a small metro.
ICE has only ever been involved when my impoverished, close friend was repeatedly beaten by her boyfriend. Fuck that guy all the way back to Mexico.
chaps 2 hours ago [-]
Is your unspoken suggestion that the ends justify the means, fullstop?
1 hours ago [-]
orthogonal_cube 7 hours ago [-]
For ICE I certainly would. I don’t know anybody at HSI but I’d be torn given the recent revelations of spying on left-leaning citizen groups. If you’re relying on violating citizen’s rights to accomplish your job then you really need to rethink your position.
2 hours ago [-]
knottn 10 hours ago [-]
Taxpayers have a right to scrutinize how their tax dollars are getting spent. When the government acts like it doesn’t derive its power from the citizens, people will revolt. It’s what DOGE was all about, the resistance.
NuSkooler 8 hours ago [-]
I think if I worked in the back offices of modern ICE, I'd quit vs "Just doing my job". Not a great excuse.
Bluescreenbuddy 6 hours ago [-]
Nah. I don't care if you're a sysadmin for ICE. You're supporting the apparatus. You get no sympathy.
saintfire 1 hours ago [-]
I almost feel people are being willfully blind to what the comment actually said.
Not ICE admins.
Admins who are dealing with shipping/customs. That is not ICE, it doesn't relate to ICE, and its important.
NuSkooler 5 hours ago [-]
Seriously. It's like the back office SS workers "just doing paperwork" on the people they slaughter. Congrats, you're just as bad as those pulling the trigger.
everforward 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree there are people doing good things, but they’re doing them for bad people. Doing good things for an evil dictator doesn’t remove that they were done for an evil dictator.
Also, practically and sadly, they’re precisely the people you’d lean on when you want change because they’re more likely to funnel that pressure upwards in the form of quitting or demanding raises. The ICE folks are “true believers” and I suspect their faculties are immune to the power of logic.
2 hours ago [-]
ricksunny 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder why this comments page isn’t anywhere close to the HN front page (couldnt find it at all through four pages in), in favor of the Reuters article comment page that is on page 2 at time of posting this.
apercu 10 hours ago [-]
All articles that expose the Trump crime family and its cronies get pushed to irrelevance on HN.
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
I flag all political submissions because reddit already exists.
notfed 3 hours ago [-]
This is hacker news, and this is Hacker News.
ikeashark 3 hours ago [-]
lion activities
red-iron-pine 6 hours ago [-]
bots rule everything around me BREAM get the money dolla dolla bill yall
bronlund 20 hours ago [-]
I approve. The problem isn’t surveillance, the problem is that everybody doesn’t have access to the data :D
started clicking through random employee ladder. literally 11 managers to the top.
jazzyjackson 23 hours ago [-]
Just enough tax dollar grift with deportations as a side effect
animal_spirits 8 hours ago [-]
Can't view this site, looks like it was brought down?
23 hours ago [-]
camel_gopher 1 days ago [-]
Local agents want to meet you.
bigwheels 1 days ago [-]
And they already know your location. They're 3 minutes away.
venusenvy47 22 hours ago [-]
I clicked on various names in the database, and all of them showed "record created 2022-xx-xx" for every single one. (It was an actual date and time in that year that I can't remember.). I'm curious if this dump is for people that were employed there back in 2022, and would exclude the ones that joined after 2025. Or if there is something about the data format that makes that creation date inaccurate.
7 hours ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
liveoneggs 1 days ago [-]
what was the okta config error?
eastbound 1 days ago [-]
Just upvoting to emphasize that Okta, SSO and MDM services in general are an extremely major single point of failure. From the point of view of a non-expert in security, it would seem like segmenting the authentication services of companies should be a security requirement.
bcvvvy 24 hours ago [-]
Dunno why you’re downvoted. You’re not wrong.
Trusting an SSO system, or anything with security sensitive data on the public internet presents an attack surface with untenable risk when your adversary is thousands of people with LLM tools.
It’s going to take a lot of this before people realise using someone else’s computer is a pretty fucking stupid idea.
I mean Entra and Okta got popped. That should have been the point companies looked at this risk and went nope.
shimman 22 hours ago [-]
Didn't Okta had several major hacking incidents over the last decade as well?
JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago [-]
> Didn't Okta had several major hacking incidents over the last decade as well?
First, SSO is often non-negotiable. Otherwise employees spend a huge chunk of their working day just logging into different services.
Second, too complicated security setups often result in trivially hackable global passwords and shit like that because turns out, there are very few people willing to daily rotate and remember 30 different cryptographically random 256-bit arrays.
Third, no matter how robust your security setup is, there will always be someone who finds a flaw in it, so a much better solution is to just do bare minimum and get insurance.
It's strange to be that so many security experts are completely detached from how humans actually act.
SAI_Peregrinus 9 hours ago [-]
> Otherwise employees spend a huge chunk of their working day just logging into different services.
Instead they spend a huge chunk of their day logging into different services through a redirect via an SSO site. They don't have to have their password manager fill in new passwords each time. IME it doesn't actually save any time.
The advantage of SSO is the organization can ensure everyone is using the same security config. They can enforce a minimum password length for SSO. They can enforce 2FA for the SSO provider. Etc.
bcvvvy 16 hours ago [-]
That's a new thing. And it's worse now than it ever has been.
When we had local, properly integrated AD no one had to log into anything other than their computer.
The whole SSO / SAML thing is a huge regression in usability.
RachelF 19 hours ago [-]
Both are true, it is a single point of failure and a single point of convenience.
What always puzzles me about this stuff and critical infrastructure like nuclear powerplants, is why is an internal network connected to the public Internet at all?
If you have to connect it to the Internet, then why is it talking to unknown devices?
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
What an interesting times, a hack the “exposes” people who are supposedly and should be publicly known to start with.
dbg31415 1 days ago [-]
Right? Let's just keep this list as a list of people who should never hold office, or work in law enforcement ever again once Trump goes.
"Leaks" like this should just be a FoIA request. Anyone enforcing the law should have their face, and badge number, prominently shown at all times.
That's how we show that we aren't ashamed of our laws. Any time it takes a mask to do your job... you know you're doing something you ought not be doing.
xvxvx 1 days ago [-]
In a note with the files, the hackers wrote, “They have our information, so it's only fair that we have theirs.”
I mean, they’re not wrong…
MrVandemar 22 hours ago [-]
Lie to us, and we'll lie to you.
Spy on us, and we'll spy on you.
Poison us, and we'll poison you.
-- The East
12 hours ago [-]
spl757 23 hours ago [-]
Woe is the one that must wear The Scarlet T
red-iron-pine 6 hours ago [-]
presumably the T is for Traitor?
morkalork 1 days ago [-]
So who's going to cross-reference the list with the J6 peeps?
Not sure how I feel about this but I am sure about one thing
There should never ever be a masked police force in this country, it's disgusting
Think about all the things we've written off in the past two years and faded from the news
Like military helicopters landing on a city building and them blowing the doors off all the apartments dragging everyone from their apartments
And all bets are off for the next two years, looks like Dems will get the Senate but even then they can't stop the scorched-earth that is coming
rc5150 6 minutes ago [-]
No identity: no authority.
drop_star 1 days ago [-]
Remember when these people had issues wearing masks (Covid). Now all of a sudden its not a problem.
ck2 1 days ago [-]
I am not so sure people started saying "this is fine"
more like he started 1000 other fires, several each week if not a new one each day to make far worse problems
It's not just the most corrupt administration, it's the most chaos and definitely by design
btw all investigations dropped for the execution of two citizens, I mean that's definitely not fine with anyone, just way too many other problems going on now at the same time
well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
> well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days
This assumes The Other Side will do anything if they do get into power. My prediction: A milquetoast moderate leads the (D)'s and declares: "In the interest of unity and moving forward, we will not go after anyone in the previous administration. Let us all hold hands and get past this with minimal drama... They have pinkey promised they will never behave this way again when they get to power, and we believe them."
KerrAvon 1 days ago [-]
The Democratic base is way too angry for that to fly this time. If Jeffries tries it he'll be removed as speaker.
spencerflem 24 hours ago [-]
Democratic politicians are the ones that could remove the speaker, not voters.
dabinat 1 days ago [-]
Part of the problem is that the justice system is as slow as molasses. They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough.
JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago [-]
> They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough
This was mostly Merrick Garland being a muppet.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
Eh, owning the supreme court helps a lot. It moves pretty quickly when it needs to protect trump.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
It's wrong when they feel like it infringes on them, it's okay when it empowers and emboldens them to cause harm to others without repercussions.
pixelatedindex 1 days ago [-]
It feels more like a reverse psyop, like “look we are wearing masks now, isn’t this what you wanted”?
As long as the sides keep reducing common ground, the farther away from government for the people, by the people we go.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
Tell me more about how "the sides" are reducing "common ground"?
bediger4000 1 days ago [-]
Again, let's think of two children fighting over their shares of a cookie. Child A says he should get all of the cookie. Child B says that wouldn't be fair, the cookie should be split evenly, half and half.
The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.
denkmoon 1 days ago [-]
who exactly is the adult in the room supposed to be in this analogy? There _is_ no adult in the room, just the two children.
20 hours ago [-]
thrance 1 days ago [-]
The adult in the room here is the moralizing "enlightened centrist" that puts bothsideism in every conversation about politics.
DeluluDon 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
This appears to be a complete non sequitur. Did you reply to the wrong comment by mistake?
thrance 15 hours ago [-]
Haha, they did! I posted a quote from 1984 on another thread. And they're completely wrong in their simplistic reading of the book, there's much more to it than "authoritarianism bad".
There's going to be massive trials over the next few years. So many people are going to have accountability catch back up to them. Maybe not the ultra rich but all these ICE goons shooting people on the street will be held accountable.
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 1 days ago [-]
I Want to Believe
analognoise 21 hours ago [-]
They’re already starting state level charges against some of them. There’s definitely accountability coming.
SchemaLoad 2 hours ago [-]
The big politicians and ultra rich will probably flee the country, but the random no name DOGE and ICE criminals won't have that luxury.
Bluescreenbuddy 6 hours ago [-]
They're all going to eat each other's faces.
NDlurker 21 hours ago [-]
>Like military helicopters landing on a city building and them blowing the doors off all the apartments dragging everyone from their apartments
"On Friday, agents dispersed tear gas in the middle of a busy city street. Chicagoans were hit with chemical agents while walking their children home from school. A couple ran from tear gas with a 2-year-old child in their care," Johnson told reporters Monday.
sheepscreek 1 days ago [-]
Anytime I see one I can’t shake off the feeling I got when I first saw Watchmen. I thought “this is so dystopian and bizarre; so out there”. Didn’t have this in my bingo card for the decade.
havnagiggle 1 days ago [-]
The Senate can hold people in contempt with a 50% vote. So they could do something to reign in the fascists starting January, but I'm not holding my breath. And that's still a long road.
1 days ago [-]
ck2 1 days ago [-]
Senate has no mechanism to prosecute contempt charges
That goes to the DOJ, which of course means nothing happens, at least for next 800 days
taylorfinley 1 days ago [-]
It's my understanding they can detain under the inherent contempt power, it's been reported [0] that the House has a jail that can be readied if needed.
They would need to lure them into the building. They don’t have people to send out all over the country to find and grab someone.
jfengel 1 days ago [-]
That opens a can of worms that you're never going to close.
Maybe this is such an emergency that it's worth the risk. But the risk is extremely high; if you do it to them, even with the best of reasons, they are going to do it back to you for any reason they can think of.
anon84873628 1 days ago [-]
Hence why it is important to be thorough.
Plus they will do it anyway. There is no shame or honor regulating their behavior.
Accountability is what was missed last time and is the only way forward.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
God I am tired of this argument.
What you're saying is that "we" shouldn't enforce the law because "they" will break the law in response.
Aside from being inherently morally bankrupt, they'rw already breaking the law.
nilamo 1 days ago [-]
Good! Both sides should be prosecuting each other over violating the constitution.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
Hey remember when we had a 2 (plus?) Year trial over whether or not the president had sex with someone other than his wife? Something about family values or morality or whatever they said at the time?
fn-mote 22 hours ago [-]
What’s your point?
SpicyLemonZest 20 hours ago [-]
"They" are currently trying to deport Ilhan Omar, a sitting Democratic senator. Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he's illegally running in the 2028 Presidential election. How much more open can a can of worms be?
ImPostingOnHN 7 hours ago [-]
They also tried to indict several democratic US senators for reiterating that it is okay to refuse illegal orders.
mitxela 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ihsw 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
Many will say that they wouldn’t need to protect their safety and privacy if they werent doing something wrong.
But in terms of if its ever appropriate for law enforcement to wear masks, isnt the question if its ever possible to threaten a law enforcement officers safety who isnt doing something wrong?
The FEDs wear masks in cartel operations all the time and that seems fine.
ethin 1 days ago [-]
I'm not really sure what your getting at. The entire reason that masked LEs are opposed is because (1) it makes it impossible to hold them to account and (2) it makes it trivial to impersonate any LE (ICE hasn't exactly tried all that hard to make special gear for themselves, just buying what's on EBay and similar, so literally anyone could just buy the same gear they're using and impersonate an ICE officer, and since ICE doesn't like identifying themselves, you would have no immediate way of distinguishing between a random citizen who wants to ruff you up or murder you versus a LEO)
KerrAvon 1 days ago [-]
Yup. This is not okay. It should be illegal. Maybe it is, IANAL. This person didn't know whether she was getting arrested or kidnapped or why. On top of which this is unnecessary brutality on the face of it. This needs to stop.
> As she hits the sidewalk, Tan hears what she describes as “a godawful crack” come from her foot, and then realizes she’s being cuffed behind her back. “I’m being kidnapped and I have no idea who these men are,” Tan writes. She’s dragged to an unmarked SUV, thrown in the back, and claims to have heard one of the men say, “This could all have been avoided if you’d just come quietly.”
dabinat 1 days ago [-]
They don’t have a right to privacy when they’re at work. The Supreme Court has said it is legal to film officers, including their faces, while carrying out their duties.
righthand 1 days ago [-]
This should already be public information imo.
derac 1 days ago [-]
Yes, why do we have undercover domestic spies and enforcers? Is that something we want? Vote!
mitxela 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
AlexErrant 1 days ago [-]
It still blows my mind he won the popular vote.
This timeline is fucking _wild_.
edoceo 1 days ago [-]
The most popular candidate was "I didn't vote"
prophesi 24 hours ago [-]
DNC did a great job endorsing that candidate.
shimman 22 hours ago [-]
Downvoted but absolutely correct. This is what happens when you neglect working people's needs, they will always side with the authoritarian that promises a better future. Neoliberals need to be purged from the DNC if they ever want actual power like the New Deal Coalition held onto (controlled both Houses of Congress for 60 years, won 10/12 Presidential elections with their candidates too).
Nixon literally won his election by promising national price controls. The people love economic relief, even just the promise is enough to win elections.
edoceo 21 hours ago [-]
Read my lips: No new taxes - remember that one?
shimman 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah and they won the election based on it. This is why it's extremely important to not just say what people want to hear but actually do it too.
1 days ago [-]
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
That's definitely why Trump is -27 net approval.
shipman05 1 days ago [-]
That's just buyers remorse. He told us how he intended to govern. His opponent told us how he intended to govern. The voters were not mislead.
(and his approval would be the same mid 40s it always was if gas prices were reasonable)
fnordpiglet 1 days ago [-]
He’s never achieved a majority vote in any election, FWIW. His claim of a mandate was just as brazen as all the other litany of lies - he’s a lame duck lame duck. The true shame is on the congressional republicans for letting him sully them so deeply and follow him in his self immolation of the entire government and America in the world. The rebuilding will be a major test of the successor, and it’ll be fascinating to see if the Goldwater republicans can become the party of reason again rather than this reality TV idiocracy.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
> The true shame is on the congressional republicans for letting him sully them so deeply and follow him in his self immolation of the entire government and America
This is the problem when your entire identity and principles boil down to "doing what the social superior tells you to".
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
His party knows the system and focuses on getting elected instead of focusing on getting the popular vote, because the popular vote doesn't elect you...
JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago [-]
> He’s never achieved a majority vote in any election
I assume they mean literally. He won a plurality, not a majority.
exe34 1 days ago [-]
This is not idiocracy. It's the prequel. In idiocracy, they understood that they were dumb and put the smart guy in charge.
evan_ 1 days ago [-]
for 20 minutes, and then they tried to kill him
kayamon 1 days ago [-]
Americans aren't angry because Trump was wrong, they're angry because it's not working.
tyromaniac 1 days ago [-]
After denying project 2025 and then carrying it out almost exactly? They were misled.b
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
What?
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
During the election Trump denied knowing anything about Project 2025 and he has enacted a lot of it. I dont know why voters trusted him on that but here we are.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
Trump is globally famous for lying. It's possibly his most well known attribute? What's the argument here?
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
The argument is that what he promised and what we got are very different. Saying people voted for this isn't genuine IMO.
blooalien 23 hours ago [-]
> Saying people voted for this isn't genuine IMO.
Those people voted for the lies, knowing full well that they were lies, and then are acting surprised that the lies are lies.
grg0 21 hours ago [-]
"The lies are lies" being a true proposition is too meta for the average human brain.
1 days ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
It’s not. It’s because he took inflation to the Moon. If he hadn’t had Hegseth at his side, and hadn’t gone into Iran, he’d probably still be treading water.
fn-mote 22 hours ago [-]
Covid spending took inflation to the moon. Just as economic theory predicts.
JumpCrisscross 21 hours ago [-]
> Covid spending took inflation to the moon
Yes. Then the party that did that got trounced. Then nobody learned any lessons.
mitxela 11 hours ago [-]
You know what was even worse for prices? 100% tariffs and blowing up the fuel supply. The government has just chosen to lie about inflation.
It wasn’t solely Biden that created that spike. Trump passed the CARES act that minted close to 3 trillion in his final year of his first term. Biden passed a trillion dollar bill too. I don’t blame them since it was to combat covid. I’m not jumping for joy because it’s half, I’m mad because it’s ticking back up.
JumpCrisscross 21 hours ago [-]
Biden absolutely signed a series of inflationary bills into law and then didn’t do anything to mitigate it. (The initial Covid relief kept us out o a depression.)
Biden’s inflation peaked worse than anything Trump has done. But telling voters you’re only slapping them after the other guy punched them is about as effective as you’d think. (There is zero sense of urgency from the White House around this either.)
JumpCrisscross 24 hours ago [-]
> Inflation under Trump is half that of when Biden was in
And how did that work out for Biden?
Voters don’t like inflation. Blowing up energy prices by launching a war of choice while shutting down domestic production because windmills isn’t smart policy.
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
Yep. For a lot of voters, it is literally as simple as high gas prices => vote for the other guy.
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
Actual or stated? The article lists a lot of things whose prices went up more under Trump 2 than Biden - regardless of what CPI data from the Trump government says.
assimpleaspossi 22 hours ago [-]
Uh, wouldn't that be the same? Let's say factually and statistically. In any case, I posted that to balance what the other guy said which was misleading at best
JumpCrisscross 21 hours ago [-]
> what the other guy said which was misleading at best
Current inflation is a fuckup [1]. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a fuckup. They aren’t unprecedented fuckups. But they are consistently punished.
Inflation is exceptionally high right now for a developed country. It’s feeding into cost-of-living issues that are animating voters.
> Which has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm pointing out
You had no hard numbers. I’m providing them. How aren’t you following that connection?
assimpleaspossi 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
No. Actual numbers and numbers stated by an unreliable biased entity are not the same.
assimpleaspossi 21 hours ago [-]
You can Google for the same information as I did over the past year. I won't do it for you.
fnordpiglet 1 days ago [-]
And won via a plurality after losing the popular vote in the last election. The least popular president in history can’t win a majority of popular vote. It’s not shocking he’s deeply unpopular, he never was popular. He’s a won twice on a technicality of the republic created to ensure the rural states wouldn’t be dominated by Virginia in the original establishment of the union.
He’s a pariah everywhere on earth, most especially at home. The sad part is the democrats couldn’t mount a successful campaign against someone so unfit to lead. Now there’s nothing left to do but clean up the mess and undo the terrible harm he has caused and repair what can be once he’s finally out of our hair.
hnfudman 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
1 days ago [-]
_AzMoo 1 days ago [-]
Eligible voter turnout in 2024 was <50% for 18-24 year olds, and <65% for 25-44 year olds in the US.
deadbunny 1 days ago [-]
Unless 100% of people vote it doesnt count as voting?
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
People who don't vote don't oppose the winner.
_AzMoo 19 hours ago [-]
No?
"We did vote". Except that an extraordinary number of people that could vote, didn't. So when somebody says "vote, people", they're obviously talking to those people that chose not to vote.
asanineassasin 1 days ago [-]
Any idea is worth entertaining, to avoid the realization the purity spiraling ideology is just as reviled by 90 % of the people as is racism.
IgorPartola 1 days ago [-]
I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast. If there is no clear winner the seat is vacant, but a new election is scheduled for two weeks later. Districts and states that don’t care to vote simply don’t get a say.
docdeek 16 hours ago [-]
> I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast.
This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.
IgorPartola 12 hours ago [-]
Yes and the idea would be to change both politician and voter behavior. To me these arguments are like saying that because we have always put water into round glasses it would never fit in a square one.
docdeek 11 hours ago [-]
Understood and appreciate the reply. It’s a very high bar to clear, though.
In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.
In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.
Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.
Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.
I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
What if people keep not voting? Surely you'd also have to compel voting to make this work.
And what if there are, say, ten candidates?
IgorPartola 12 hours ago [-]
Scored approval voting takes care of ten candidates. And sure let’s say after 3 elections with no winner fines could be imposed too, Australia style. But I would hope that having no representation while having the opportunity to have representation would be motivation enough.
cowlevel 8 hours ago [-]
Who would be fined for nobody winning an election? The voters?
1 days ago [-]
_DeadFred_ 1 days ago [-]
Because people in safe demographics (non minority, no care about reproductive rights) love to broadcast 'both sides are the same'.
NoidFonsense 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
airstrike 1 days ago [-]
It was more like Obama was so cool and had so much panache he won despite having an extremely incompetent team...and then both he and his team believed he won because of them and proceeded to self-sabotage the DNC from within.
To be clear, I'm not excusing him. I think he was very cool indeed but ultimately a weak president that lacked in leadership before and after his term
user- 1 days ago [-]
>NoidFonsense.
This is a dogwhistling incel username.
cluckindan 1 days ago [-]
What do you think makes a person left-wing or left-leaning?
NoidFonsense 8 hours ago [-]
It depends on the context, but I think the heart of leftism/rightism is described by the idea of slave/master morality described by nietzsche and others.
In our nation it's a bit different, because the right wing is also seen as christian while the left-wing is more athiest. I would chalk that down to a certain duality that exists within each wing, which I think is desirable.
KerrAvon 1 days ago [-]
oh yeah? which attitudes do you take issue with?
airstrike 1 days ago [-]
Feels like you're trying to bait them instead of engaging in good faith.
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
Baiting them into... revealing what their argument is?
airstrike 8 hours ago [-]
Baiting them into a bad faith discussion
cowlevel 8 hours ago [-]
By... revealing what their argument is?
airstrike 8 hours ago [-]
No, and I'm not sure why you're purposefully being obtuse.
To be clear, they're baiting because their reply starts with "oh yeah?" which is a clear indication they are not truly willing to hear a different argument.
NoidFonsense 9 hours ago [-]
I think that leftists are motivated by some animosity for winners that makes them worship losers. So whatever strategy they develop tends to be ineffective in the long run. Whenever some figure breaks out and becomes effective at accomplishing some purported goal, leftists have to dis-associate with them.
Elon musk is an example. I don't think elon ever had an allegiance to the right wing, but he was basicially forced into some right wing alliance after far-left became critical of him for being a successful industrialist. It was breakup that basicially didn't need to happen if the left was more unified and diplomatic in their relations. Compare that to how right wingers dealt with their disagreements with him over immigration: it's not like the whole right wing shattered due to purity tests. Elon's worldview is essentially that of 2010s neoliberal reddit, same of Joe Rogan and whatever other figures that have supposedly "turned to the dark side".
Like for example, I think you could solve environmental problems more effectively by tricking the right wing into believing they were always environmentalists then by supporting leftist-environmental causes which have a tendency to devolve into grievance politics about natives and biodiversity and such. I think intersectionality is probably one of the worst memes spawned from leftist academia, it just feeds into attention seeking behavior and basicially prevents leftists from holding any reasonable goals within their own group.
But mostly I think the problem is like I said earlier, the emergence of control freaks. Like they try too hard to control the discussion and enact censorship, and most people see through that. It's like people who think they are smart by conciously moving the overton window to the left, but it actually invites a disproportinate response away from them. Thats how I would describe the current socio-political situation.
Blackthorn 1 days ago [-]
The New England Patriots lost the 2026 Superbowl, and that list of losers includes all the second and third stringers who didn't play.
Revanche1367 1 days ago [-]
If this was in another country that is not predominantly inhabited by people of western/central European heritage, US mainstream media would've been calling these "undercover" agents the "secret police" or "stasi" or some other term heavily connotated with tyranny and oppression.
resters 1 days ago [-]
At first I hoped that fears about ICE abuses were overblown, but then I saw video after video of masked, badge-free agents manhandling and throwing grandmas and elderly/weak people to the ground and generally acting like thugs, stalking immigration courts for people trying to comply, doing nazi salutes, etc. It quickly became clear that ICE is largely made up of KKK or proud boy thugs who see it as a chance to brutalize a vulnerable population that they despise.
Now that this data has been leaked, identities can be correlated with facial recognition, gait analysis, and other biometrics to conclusively identify the agents who committed crimes. Much of the video footage shows agents flagrantly breaking the law, abusing power, violating the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.
Now that his leak has occurred, criminal ICE agents will be brought to justice for many of the crimes committed already, and the data will also inform the prosecution of crimes they will likely commit during the rest of Trump's term in office. Many of the crimes are violations of state law, so there is nothing the executive branch can do to stop the prosecutions.
blacklion 1 days ago [-]
Do you really believe in this?
You can see fate of Guantamo's officers and their chain of command. As far as I remember, nobody was really punished, several people were dismissed, but with full pension.
JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago [-]
> Do you really believe in this?
I do. Guantanamo wasn't killing American citizens.
petre 2 hours ago [-]
But that guy who saw people beong tortured there did. The one who's execution was going to be live streamed. Violence only breeds more violence.
wyre 23 hours ago [-]
Are you really asking if OP believes that ICE agents should face justice for the crimes and abuse they have committed?
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
I think they're asking if GGP believes they will face justice. GGP used the word "will".
blacklion 12 hours ago [-]
I'm asking, if OP believes that they WILL face real consequences.
florkbork 9 hours ago [-]
And why are you asking?
You can reasonably assume it will be demoralising to do so. Will the answer change anything material in the world aside from that?
some_furry 9 hours ago [-]
Because it's not guaranteed, and anyone who shrugs and thinks, "Oh who cares? This will sort itself out. Why bother myself over it?" contributes to them not being held accountable for their crimes.
reallydoingthis 23 hours ago [-]
Link the videos?
wigster 1 days ago [-]
oh dear
mnd999 1 days ago [-]
Boo hoo
bradthebeaverfa 1 days ago [-]
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monomania 23 hours ago [-]
It'd be a shame if people started checking potential hires, tenants, dates, and business transactions against this info, cutting off ICE from large segments of the economy and society. I bet they'd feel really dehumanized.
dana-s 7 hours ago [-]
As individual as dating is, I agree with checking for this, I'd rather not spend my time with someone whom had such past
CurbStomper4 22 hours ago [-]
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Computer0 22 hours ago [-]
Interesting to note that this would be illegal if said person decided to serve in a war you oppose. I think this law is unjust and you should be able to discriminate when hiring for occupational history.
xphos 21 hours ago [-]
I think you only come out with this type of thinking if you've never really spent much time with people who served in the armed forces. Wars are declared by politicans not soldiers. Soldiers are enlisted to serve (at least in the US and most western nations) at the behest of the democratic body that employs them.
I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.
genocidicbunny 21 hours ago [-]
> They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"
Computer0 19 hours ago [-]
So we should ignore the atrocities of people who sold their soul for cash because they sold their soul?
croon 13 hours ago [-]
While I'm some degree of a pacifist, it's tough to argue against the concept of a defense army, in the face of human nature. Defense in the larger sense also has to mean (preventative) intervention, for example world war 2 might have ended very differently unless the US joined.
I also recognize that the US has perverted this concept countless times since with blatant imperialistic motives, it does however still not break the concept of a just responsive military force.
TL;DR: They're not selling their souls if they (mistakenly) trust elected officials to work for the will of the people and only deploy for just causes.
couchand 10 hours ago [-]
How can anyone look at hundreds of years of US imperialism with rose-colored glasses anymore? Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature? You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
Fortunately the Nuremberg principles rescue us here. Following orders is no excuse for abdicating a moral responsibility.
croon 8 hours ago [-]
> How can anyone look at hundreds of years of US imperialism with rose-colored glasses anymore?
I quite explicitly did the opposite of that.
> Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature?
Let me put it this way:
* Had Ukraine not had an army, it would not exist right now.
* Had Ukraine had a bigger army, it might not have been invaded at all.
* Had Ukraine had the biggest army in the world, it might or might not have abused it for nefarious reasons.
The argument I made is that the US (and any country) needs it for case 1 and 2 (can also be solved through defensive alliances, though Ukraine had assurances that were broken), but the US has gone the wrong way for case 3.
This however does not invalidate case 1 and 2.
> You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
I'm unsure how to respond to this other than state that it's ironic.
xphos 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly I couldn't say this better. I would just go one step further participating in the Miltary does not equal your doing atrocities as a natural conclusion. We want people of sound morals to be in the Miltary because they will make I hope moral decisions when it comes to the conduct of war.
I highly recommend reading On War by carl von clausewitz. He gives a pragmetic opinion on War and being read for it. Along with being ready for general conflict both non-violent and violent
infamouscow 7 hours ago [-]
The answer is you can't. They did not reason themselves into their position, and you can't reason them out of it. It's irrational to have rational discussion with the irrational.
This is why derision is a valid philosophical debate strategy if a person refuses to engage in rational discussion. To label GP as an R-word is a social signal and warning to others not to behave similarly. Derision also promotes healthy skepticism of new arguments you hear, lest risk falling into the same trap and have oneself become a laughingstock.
ImPostingOnHN 7 hours ago [-]
Please consider posting comments more in line with the YC posting guidelines, with fewer shallow dismissals and insults.
You're not going to have a good conversation like this, and you aren't going to be "winning" anything for your troubles, either.
zinodaur 20 hours ago [-]
If you take their cookie for dropping their bombs - it seems like you’ve earned whatever blame comes your way for the people you kill. It never seems like much blame makes it back anyways
Computer0 19 hours ago [-]
The military is for killing. I am fundamentally opposed to that. Anyone who signs up to be a soldier I have a moral qualm with.
justinhj 19 hours ago [-]
Don't you feel grateful you likely have peace and security because of these people?
vrganj 17 hours ago [-]
In the case of the US, this view is pure propaganda.
Peace from who? Mexico? Canada? Which country is going to invade you?
All the American military does is bomb Middle Eastern countries and leave a huge mess. I do not believe US security is helped by bombing weddings and schools. I would even argue that it worsens it, by creating a bunch of people that lost their loved ones to those acts and that then turn to terrorism as a means of revenge.
justinhj 9 hours ago [-]
"we don't need military because we live surrounded by peaceful neighbours"
yes and the world was once nonstop warfare among tribes. it's child like to think peace just arose magically and does not need to be protected
vrganj 8 hours ago [-]
You know what protects peace? Cooperation.
The countries of Western Europe used to be at a state of continuous war for literal centuries, horrible atrocities inflicted on one another.
They all had their fancy armies, and they were all tempted to use them. Gotta get your money's worth, y'know?
Then they founded the world's most successful peace project, the European Union.
No wars between members since.
This adolescent behavior of threatening gestures is counterproductive and only leads to more conflict.
More mature societies have figured that out already.
rdiddly 7 hours ago [-]
Why stop there? Include Russia in the EU. Surely they'll be impressed by your maturity and cooperation and be inspired to maturely cooperate. Then you can rely on them to protect you from the US, instead of the opposite situation that you've enjoyed for 80 years.
vrganj 7 hours ago [-]
I agree. The most painful mistake of European foreign policy in the last decades was not swooping up Russia in the 90s.
Again, the idea of "military protection" is overly primitive and simplistic. If we had integrated them in our system, we could've given them rule of law as we have done with many an applicant state (think other post-Soviet countries!) and nurtured peace through fostering mutual dependence.
We failed to spread the values of enlightenment and now we are paying the price.
The whole protection racket thing that's now exploding in our face would've been unnecessary and could've been avoided.
Violence is the language of the weak.
We've seen time and time again how ineffective it is, most recently when y'all tore up the deal the EU negotiated with Iran and instead went back to more primitive ways, with predictable results. Before that, in Afghanistan, where after countless dead the same group is in power again. When even is the last time your approach worked? WW2? Might be time to move with the times.
rdiddly 6 hours ago [-]
The times today are built upon yesterday's times. You can't arrive where you are without passing through where you were. Could the EU have even formed if it hadn't had a nuclear power protecting it from 1945 to 1993 and beyond? We'll never know. But I'm sure you would've had to waste money on an arms race with the Soviets, as the US did.
I'm explicitly not talking about all the Middle-Eastern misadventures here, I find those as baffling and unjust as you do. I'm only referring to defensive and deterrent effects of having a military, which as I said, is the true portion of the propaganda you pointed out. (Good propaganda is always partly true.) The assertion that it doesn't exist and that the US military is only for war crimes is demonstrably false, and to prove it you need only (as I said to someone else) try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself.
Is it primitive and juvenile? Absolutely! It comports with those particular traits of homo sapiens, an ape species. Any country big enough, or rich enough, or strategic enough for some other reason, is a target for invasion by the immature and non-cooperative. Furthermore if all the countries of the world were to join in one big cooperative union (which they already do in the realm of trade and commerce to some degree), I sadly don't think it would take long for someone to betray it, the way Trump (Russian asset) is betraying it now.
rdiddly 16 hours ago [-]
It's propaganda, but also true. If the US or any other country had no military, ANY country could invade it. This is why they all tend to have militaries. Also it doesn't have to be Canada and Mexico, this is not a Risk board. The army men have big army boats, toot toot goes the horn on the big army boat! And they have big army planes too, zoom zoom go the army planes!
tremon 8 hours ago [-]
> If the US or any other country had no military, ANY country could invade it
Please explain what would happen if the US had no military and Andorra decided to invade?
rdiddly 7 hours ago [-]
Then Andorra would not meet any military resistance. If you're saying Andorra can't do anything because their military is small or non-existent, you're just proving the point that armies that exist are the ones that do things. But is Andorra defenseless? No, it's protected by all the military force of the EU, and, ironically, allies like the US.
vrganj 15 hours ago [-]
You think somebody is going to storm the beaches of Miami? C'mon, don't be ridiculous.
Nobody's gonna invade the US, what a preposterous idea. This is precisely the fear based propaganda I'm talking about.
croon 12 hours ago [-]
It's a preposterous idea with the size of the military forces of US currently. It would not be preposterous with 0 military force.
And to be clear, the US has abused the army for half a century for unjust causes, and I'm not defending that, but the concept of an army can be moral in the context of rivalling aggressive nations.
regretsresin 9 hours ago [-]
You are defending that. Because the US military does those awful things and has done forever.
There is no US military that's a defensive force. It is a war crimes machine.
You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist. So we all read your posts as if they were talking about the US military that exists.
croon 8 hours ago [-]
> You are defending that. Because the US military does those awful things and has done forever.
I both acknowledged and specified the difference.
> You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist.
Let me ask you this instead: What do you see as an alternative? Abolishing the entirety of all military force, or electing officials that do not abuse the existing or reduced scale military force for unjust causes? Or some third option?
rdiddly 6 hours ago [-]
To assert that the US military has no defensive or deterrent effect whatsoever is at odds with reality, and to prove it to yourself you should try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself, and see what happens.
xphos 2 hours ago [-]
Should we have let the Nazi's win because the risk of the US killing 1 German civilians was greater than 0? I just find it very fake and mind broken to conclude the only evil empire is the US and that we need to beat them over the head endlessly without also calling out the other genocidal wars and empires that the US found itself existing among. The US army and its troops do have a deep shame for when they kill civilians. But don't act like the the US is some unique civilian killing machine. We infact are pretty good at not killing civilians as a ratio civilian per combatant than basically any army we've ever fought against or with. Certainly since WW2. Vietnam being particularly poor ratio but still far better than Viet Congs civilian to enemy combant ratio.
The matter of fact is that war is messy especially guerrilla warfare which is the only war that basically exists today and in that context what's an acceptable ratio? 0 means surrendering or being stepped on ask Ukraine but is it 1/5, 1/10? Ideally you have zero but to have total disregard of the service members life doesn't cause there to be less war or civilian death. Just more onesided brutal wars. These are hard questions but to paint the people that fight in wars in democratic societies as just souless sellouts is reductive and its the type of thinking that leads to mass murder by political groups. Souless people don't feel PTSD for what they did they are souless. PTSD is incredibly common in the services because we don't want empathless murder machines. Because when it comes to wining wars (wining a political objective ultimately) generally speaking civilian deaths don't help political goals which is what the elected officals ask the miltary to do. But most importantly the elected bodies are the ones asking for invasion.
I think these are hard questions that good solutions from the miltary side of things don't exist but most importantly I really think we as a society need to have more serious talks and rational conceptions of how war and conflict works. I can't recommend On War by Clauswitz enough, but acoup also has a great primer on it [1]
Nobody invades because they know they'll meet an army. Same reason nobody invades France.
vrganj 6 hours ago [-]
Why does nobody invade Ireland?
rdiddly 5 hours ago [-]
If you invade Ireland or France, you are invading the EU, which has military capability, and has other allies like the US that also have military capability. Ireland is probably not big/rich/strategic enough to warrant taking on those costs. An invasion doesn't pass a narrow cost-benefit analysis. Throw in the diplomatic costs and it looks even worse.
Edit: I suppose I've stumbled on some kind of economic or game-theory angle here - Militaries exist to impose costs. They tip the balance of potential invaders' cost-benefit analyses. They also impose costs on their owners though. But I guess the idea is that the benefits (avoiding the costs of being invaded) are supposed to be greater than the costs of the defense force.
infamouscow 7 hours ago [-]
Some people are evil, e.g., Hitler. All the moral grandstanding in the world isn't going to help if you're invaded and they slaughter you and everyone with your morality out of existence.
I'm not being condescending or rude or otherwise out of line here saying your position is genuinely stupid.
kelipso 9 hours ago [-]
You are saying that killing people is justified if you want to make money. What kind of disgusting argument is this?
dantillberg 7 hours ago [-]
> decided to serve in a war you oppose
In the United States, citizens may decide to join the armed forces. Politicians decide whether and when they serve in a war.
The exception would be if a person volunteered directly in a foreign war, eg a US civilian volunteering to fight in Ukraine.
whatshisface 22 hours ago [-]
Of all the things our troops have to be to go on deployment, persuaded is not.
nilamo 19 hours ago [-]
Luckily we haven't been in war for decades.
LightBug1 24 hours ago [-]
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Arubis 1 days ago [-]
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dools 1 days ago [-]
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SaaSPocalypse 1 days ago [-]
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matt3210 1 days ago [-]
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slowin 1 days ago [-]
Why would this be tragic? The public absolutely has a right to know who these people are. No one is forcing them to join these organizations.
elonsmusk 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pixelatedindex 1 days ago [-]
> antifa supporters on HN
Come again? If you have umbrage against antifa, surely you’re pro fascist?
> Most Americans remember how we couldn't even question COVID, DEI or kneeling for blacks and support law enforcement efforts
What do they even have anything to do with each other, except for them being right-wing talking points?
1 days ago [-]
DaSHacka 1 days ago [-]
> Come again? If you have umbrage against antifa, surely you’re pro fascist?
Just because they call themselves "antifa" doesn't mean its accurate. If the nazis referred to themselves as the "free puppies for everyone and world peace organization", it would not change anything about the morality of their party or the acts committed by them, despite the name.
cowlevel 23 hours ago [-]
as a matter of fact the Nazis did refer to themselves as the "national socialist German worker's party" even though they weren't any of that.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
> obtained from a group calling itself the Department of Peace.
phs318u 1 days ago [-]
The data is said to have been “vetted and cleaned up” and the front end is designed to navigate the hierarchy.
The leak was via a compromised Okta SSO login (why anyone still uses them is a complete mystery to me).
Per dang in many previous comments, it's not a dupe. Multiple submissions of the same topic are fine, it's only (maybe) a dupe when a discussion starts or it's actually the same submission. You linked to a submission with 0 comments submitted a whopping 15 minutes earlier. This one is the one that got traction, neither is a dupe. If someone submits it again, now that there is a discussion, or submits the same Wired article, then those would be dupes.
paaloeye 1 days ago [-]
wired vs something I've personally never heard before
article vs a few paragraphs + image
Not really.
1 days ago [-]
phs318u 21 hours ago [-]
Not sure whether your or my having heard of a site before necessarily discounts it, especially given the closeness (or at least fear) of many larger media outlets with this administration.
Having said that, I couldn’t see the full article on Wired. I don’t have an account and I suspect many don’t. I could see it via archive.is.
nvr219 1 days ago [-]
Maybe really.
TacticalCoder 1 days ago [-]
At this rate soon it's going to be very suspicious if someone is not part of any leak ; )
morkalork 1 days ago [-]
Awfully convenient happening days before the midterm elections. Is this the precursor to a declaration of emergency? Perhaps after an act violence that was enabled by the leak?
3 hours ago [-]
ehwa37 22 hours ago [-]
No this is not.
morkalork 22 hours ago [-]
You don't know that.
ehwa37 6 hours ago [-]
Neither do you.
24 hours ago [-]
paaloeye 1 days ago [-]
So cool, terrorist Karen can now easily email/LinkedIn/whatever escalate to a skip-level manager if an officer is misbehaving.
florkbork 9 hours ago [-]
Or a trail of documentation can add to a future criminal prosecution.
Hypothetically if you were running an organisation that was corrupt and the political winds turned against you, would you carefully preserve accurate records that documented crimes you or your underlings performed and provide an accurate handover?
Or would you shred, obfuscate and destroy as much information as possible on the way out?
If the latter, would detailed map of your command and control structure as understood by your IT department / HR be a risk to you?
dlahoda 24 hours ago [-]
I can now without leak. 5 top out of 11 levels of managers in leak seems tend to have LinkedIn anyway.
sailfast 1 days ago [-]
Whatever your feelings about ICE and this administration, there are probably some undercover folks in real danger at the moment. Probably doing some real work to stop some real abuses that you’d want them to stop. (Not saying all - but likely some / many to be in that program)
So - while I might agree that secretive domestic organizations like MI5 should not exist and sunlight is good for government, I feel for the families of the folks that might catch a bullet because of this.
simoncion 24 hours ago [-]
> Whatever your feelings about ICE and this administration, there are probably some undercover folks in real danger at the moment.
I'll say the same thing that no one with access to a microphone said during the 2013 NSA data leaks:
What makes you think that the Bad Guys didn't already have access to this information? The folks that should have detected this clearly didn't. [0] Given that the Good Guys didn't learn about this until it was made public, neither they nor we have any idea of knowing how many Bad Guys have been siphoning off this data and for how long.
[0] In this specific incident, Okta appears to be claiming that there has been no breach despite claims that it is the source of the information. Back in 2013 -given that the NSA would often claim something that would be quickly countered by the publication of yet another leaked document- it was pretty clear that the NSA had little idea of what data had been released to the press.
sailfast 24 hours ago [-]
I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely suggesting that there’s potential that non-state actors like a local human smuggling ring, drug ring, or human trafficking operation may now be able to easily type in some name and figure out they have been infiltrated.
Of course it’s possible some bad guys had this. But probably not all of them.
EDIT: I would also not equate these leaks to the NSA leaks in terms of resources and sophistication required to know about the NSA programs vs potential public access on the open internet with this one. Resources and intelligence required seems quite a higher bar, but that’s just me being an armchair quarterback.
simoncion 23 hours ago [-]
> I’m merely suggesting that there’s potential that non-state actors like a local human smuggling ring, drug ring, or human trafficking operation may now be able to easily type in some name and figure out they have been infiltrated.
...what exactly do you imagine the Bad Guys would do with the information that they've likely been siphoning off of the systems of ICE and -in the past- the NSA? Do you imagine that they'd be exclusively distributing it via Sneakernet? Just like the Good Guys, the Bad Guys also have access to IT guys who know how to set up a login portal... and the well-resourced ones are totally capable of setting up things akin to SIPRNet.
sailfast 22 hours ago [-]
I’ll update my threat model to include sophisticated non-state human traffickers or smugglers that are all sharing intel with each other if that’s what you’re suggesting? Or perhaps just selling in the dark to whomever is buying? Sounds like you know this is happening?
I’m not making a good guy / bad guy judgment here FWIW. I do, however, find it less likely a smaller scale non-state operation would bother hacking a government agency or buying info on the open market. Sounds like it’s a higher priority than I thought.
Makes sense for larger orgs at higher levels - but I admit my mental model didn’t think about parallel private attempts to exploit, sell, use and otherwise secure comms. It was a blind spot. Seemed too leaky and obvious given the incentives to leak information - but I clearly don’t understand bad guys very well.
22 hours ago [-]
chneu 1 days ago [-]
Hell nah. They signed up for this. They knew exactly what their mission was. Stop defending people who were recruited to deport, and in many cases assault, innocent people.
Making lame excuses for "the good guys" reinforces that these people are doing good. They arent.
Your excuse will be used against you as soon as it's convenient to them.
reallydoingthis 24 hours ago [-]
And who's going to make them pay? You? What do you have planned? Can you take the heat after?
florkbork 9 hours ago [-]
You are going out on a limb there to pretend the justice system cannot prosecute, jail people engaged in criminal activity.
Bluescreenbuddy 6 hours ago [-]
Stop being an obtuse bozo
sailfast 24 hours ago [-]
I don’t personally believe that everyone at ICE is specifically focused on this administration’s efforts (most are of course and many have quit in protest). In the past, the agency has done work that you’d probably want done around human smuggling and trafficking, anti-terrorism (actual terrorism) etc, and I wouldn’t paint all agents with such a broad brush. People stick around in the hopes they can do a good job again when the next guy lands. Sometimes!
Anyway - I just wanted to point out that these things can have consequences in the real world for people that aren’t necessarily the evil people you paint a picture of in your head. This isn’t a “oh just a few bad apples” thing - on the contrary that agency is quite rotten and should be disbanded.
Not a value judgment. Just sayin’ that this dump is 53+ certified undercover legal names out in the open.
spl757 23 hours ago [-]
ICE, today, is an illegal militia that appears to have killed at least 3 citizens in cold blood. Bad actors get away with it when good actors look the other way and do nothing. If you work for ICE right now, you know just how unpopular they have become. You have to bend the knee to be in this administration, so FAFO I guess.
sailfast 19 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately it’s very much a legal militia until proven otherwise.
Know that you don’t have to bend the knee to work for the government. You still have your oath, your union, and the knowledge that this ends in two years. Many have left, but not all. Those who stayed don’t necessarily agree or like what is happening.
reallydoingthis 23 hours ago [-]
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whoanoway 23 hours ago [-]
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aliasxneo 23 hours ago [-]
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jacquesm 9 hours ago [-]
You can leave if you want to. We'll miss you, of course.
Yeah, it's funny people think upvotes mean anything on this website. It's so easy to farm so long as you say the "correct" thing.
aliasxneo 7 hours ago [-]
Nah, I like HN. Doesn't mean I can't be saddened by the redditors that are trying to make it worse.
Besides, continually engaging with people who literally believe the complete opposite of me is healthy. It's just harder nowadays because people refuse to engage on the basis I'm a Nazi or something.
Also, a ton of interesting articles never make it because it goes against the grain. Like this recent one I found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291006. Stunning journalism. Will absolutely go nowhere here because it says "Democrat" instead of "Conservative." Tis the way of HN these days. But, doesn't mean the marginalized crowd shouldn't keep trying :)
jacquesm 7 hours ago [-]
> Besides, continually engaging with people who literally believe the complete opposite of me is healthy.
For you.
aliasxneo 7 hours ago [-]
I mean I don't know what else that sentence means. Are you confused?
I’m not against employee names and contact info being made public. That’s no different than someone’s business card being passed around. What I worry about is that all DHS employees get lumped together indifferently by disgruntled individuals and harassed using the information made available.
People who are (rightfully) angry by ICE’s activities in recent deportations, wrongful detaining of US citizens, and misuse of force are going to begin harassing these employees indiscriminately. I’ll admit that I don’t care if they do it to anyone listed as employed under ICE, but some departments elsewhere in CBP have actual positive purposes. Customs agents who scan incoming goods for invasive species, for example, help prevent the destruction of domestic plants.
I guess we just have to see how this info is used and what the effects will be.
They know that they're working for an evil org and they don't care because it gives them nourishment. If my friends were doing that, I'd have an intervention with them. I hope you do too.
I think the locale matters. I’m in a rural small town on the outskirts of a small metro.
ICE has only ever been involved when my impoverished, close friend was repeatedly beaten by her boyfriend. Fuck that guy all the way back to Mexico.
Not ICE admins.
Admins who are dealing with shipping/customs. That is not ICE, it doesn't relate to ICE, and its important.
Also, practically and sadly, they’re precisely the people you’d lean on when you want change because they’re more likely to funnel that pressure upwards in the form of quitting or demanding raises. The ICE folks are “true believers” and I suspect their faculties are immune to the power of logic.
Trusting an SSO system, or anything with security sensitive data on the public internet presents an attack surface with untenable risk when your adversary is thousands of people with LLM tools.
It’s going to take a lot of this before people realise using someone else’s computer is a pretty fucking stupid idea.
I mean Entra and Okta got popped. That should have been the point companies looked at this risk and went nope.
Yes [1].
[1] https://www.flyingpenguin.com/a-simple-list-of-the-many-okta...
Second, too complicated security setups often result in trivially hackable global passwords and shit like that because turns out, there are very few people willing to daily rotate and remember 30 different cryptographically random 256-bit arrays.
Third, no matter how robust your security setup is, there will always be someone who finds a flaw in it, so a much better solution is to just do bare minimum and get insurance.
It's strange to be that so many security experts are completely detached from how humans actually act.
Instead they spend a huge chunk of their day logging into different services through a redirect via an SSO site. They don't have to have their password manager fill in new passwords each time. IME it doesn't actually save any time.
The advantage of SSO is the organization can ensure everyone is using the same security config. They can enforce a minimum password length for SSO. They can enforce 2FA for the SSO provider. Etc.
When we had local, properly integrated AD no one had to log into anything other than their computer.
The whole SSO / SAML thing is a huge regression in usability.
What always puzzles me about this stuff and critical infrastructure like nuclear powerplants, is why is an internal network connected to the public Internet at all?
If you have to connect it to the Internet, then why is it talking to unknown devices?
"Leaks" like this should just be a FoIA request. Anyone enforcing the law should have their face, and badge number, prominently shown at all times.
That's how we show that we aren't ashamed of our laws. Any time it takes a mask to do your job... you know you're doing something you ought not be doing.
I mean, they’re not wrong…
Spy on us, and we'll spy on you.
Poison us, and we'll poison you.
-- The East
Opus should make quick work of it. Also cross reference with police misconduct and use of force databases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49927034
https://policedata.org/
There should never ever be a masked police force in this country, it's disgusting
Think about all the things we've written off in the past two years and faded from the news
Like military helicopters landing on a city building and them blowing the doors off all the apartments dragging everyone from their apartments
And all bets are off for the next two years, looks like Dems will get the Senate but even then they can't stop the scorched-earth that is coming
more like he started 1000 other fires, several each week if not a new one each day to make far worse problems
It's not just the most corrupt administration, it's the most chaos and definitely by design
btw all investigations dropped for the execution of two citizens, I mean that's definitely not fine with anyone, just way too many other problems going on now at the same time
well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days
This assumes The Other Side will do anything if they do get into power. My prediction: A milquetoast moderate leads the (D)'s and declares: "In the interest of unity and moving forward, we will not go after anyone in the previous administration. Let us all hold hands and get past this with minimal drama... They have pinkey promised they will never behave this way again when they get to power, and we believe them."
This was mostly Merrick Garland being a muppet.
As long as the sides keep reducing common ground, the farther away from government for the people, by the people we go.
The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.
Quote in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267521
I don't know what this is referencing
Edit: what the fuck https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/helicopters-tear-gas-b...
That goes to the DOJ, which of course means nothing happens, at least for next 800 days
[0] https://rollcall.com/2019/05/08/just-where-is-this-secret-ho...
Maybe this is such an emergency that it's worth the risk. But the risk is extremely high; if you do it to them, even with the best of reasons, they are going to do it back to you for any reason they can think of.
Plus they will do it anyway. There is no shame or honor regulating their behavior.
Accountability is what was missed last time and is the only way forward.
What you're saying is that "we" shouldn't enforce the law because "they" will break the law in response.
Aside from being inherently morally bankrupt, they'rw already breaking the law.
But in terms of if its ever appropriate for law enforcement to wear masks, isnt the question if its ever possible to threaten a law enforcement officers safety who isnt doing something wrong?
The FEDs wear masks in cartel operations all the time and that seems fine.
https://kotaku.com/umamusume-pretty-derby-cosplay-clara-tan-...
> As she hits the sidewalk, Tan hears what she describes as “a godawful crack” come from her foot, and then realizes she’s being cuffed behind her back. “I’m being kidnapped and I have no idea who these men are,” Tan writes. She’s dragged to an unmarked SUV, thrown in the back, and claims to have heard one of the men say, “This could all have been avoided if you’d just come quietly.”
This timeline is fucking _wild_.
Nixon literally won his election by promising national price controls. The people love economic relief, even just the promise is enough to win elections.
(and his approval would be the same mid 40s it always was if gas prices were reasonable)
This is the problem when your entire identity and principles boil down to "doing what the social superior tells you to".
Trump won the popular vote in 2024 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Those people voted for the lies, knowing full well that they were lies, and then are acting surprised that the lies are lies.
Yes. Then the party that did that got trounced. Then nobody learned any lessons.
Biden’s inflation peaked worse than anything Trump has done. But telling voters you’re only slapping them after the other guy punched them is about as effective as you’d think. (There is zero sense of urgency from the White House around this either.)
And how did that work out for Biden?
Voters don’t like inflation. Blowing up energy prices by launching a war of choice while shutting down domestic production because windmills isn’t smart policy.
Current inflation is a fuckup [1]. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a fuckup. They aren’t unprecedented fuckups. But they are consistently punished.
Inflation is exceptionally high right now for a developed country. It’s feeding into cost-of-living issues that are animating voters.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ 7.2 annualized in September
You had no hard numbers. I’m providing them. How aren’t you following that connection?
He’s a pariah everywhere on earth, most especially at home. The sad part is the democrats couldn’t mount a successful campaign against someone so unfit to lead. Now there’s nothing left to do but clean up the mess and undo the terrible harm he has caused and repair what can be once he’s finally out of our hair.
"We did vote". Except that an extraordinary number of people that could vote, didn't. So when somebody says "vote, people", they're obviously talking to those people that chose not to vote.
This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.
In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.
In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.
Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.
Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.
I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.
And what if there are, say, ten candidates?
To be clear, I'm not excusing him. I think he was very cool indeed but ultimately a weak president that lacked in leadership before and after his term
This is a dogwhistling incel username.
In our nation it's a bit different, because the right wing is also seen as christian while the left-wing is more athiest. I would chalk that down to a certain duality that exists within each wing, which I think is desirable.
To be clear, they're baiting because their reply starts with "oh yeah?" which is a clear indication they are not truly willing to hear a different argument.
Elon musk is an example. I don't think elon ever had an allegiance to the right wing, but he was basicially forced into some right wing alliance after far-left became critical of him for being a successful industrialist. It was breakup that basicially didn't need to happen if the left was more unified and diplomatic in their relations. Compare that to how right wingers dealt with their disagreements with him over immigration: it's not like the whole right wing shattered due to purity tests. Elon's worldview is essentially that of 2010s neoliberal reddit, same of Joe Rogan and whatever other figures that have supposedly "turned to the dark side".
Like for example, I think you could solve environmental problems more effectively by tricking the right wing into believing they were always environmentalists then by supporting leftist-environmental causes which have a tendency to devolve into grievance politics about natives and biodiversity and such. I think intersectionality is probably one of the worst memes spawned from leftist academia, it just feeds into attention seeking behavior and basicially prevents leftists from holding any reasonable goals within their own group.
But mostly I think the problem is like I said earlier, the emergence of control freaks. Like they try too hard to control the discussion and enact censorship, and most people see through that. It's like people who think they are smart by conciously moving the overton window to the left, but it actually invites a disproportinate response away from them. Thats how I would describe the current socio-political situation.
Now that this data has been leaked, identities can be correlated with facial recognition, gait analysis, and other biometrics to conclusively identify the agents who committed crimes. Much of the video footage shows agents flagrantly breaking the law, abusing power, violating the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.
Now that his leak has occurred, criminal ICE agents will be brought to justice for many of the crimes committed already, and the data will also inform the prosecution of crimes they will likely commit during the rest of Trump's term in office. Many of the crimes are violations of state law, so there is nothing the executive branch can do to stop the prosecutions.
You can see fate of Guantamo's officers and their chain of command. As far as I remember, nobody was really punished, several people were dismissed, but with full pension.
I do. Guantanamo wasn't killing American citizens.
You can reasonably assume it will be demoralising to do so. Will the answer change anything material in the world aside from that?
I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.
Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"
I also recognize that the US has perverted this concept countless times since with blatant imperialistic motives, it does however still not break the concept of a just responsive military force.
TL;DR: They're not selling their souls if they (mistakenly) trust elected officials to work for the will of the people and only deploy for just causes.
Fortunately the Nuremberg principles rescue us here. Following orders is no excuse for abdicating a moral responsibility.
I quite explicitly did the opposite of that.
> Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature?
Let me put it this way:
* Had Ukraine not had an army, it would not exist right now.
* Had Ukraine had a bigger army, it might not have been invaded at all.
* Had Ukraine had the biggest army in the world, it might or might not have abused it for nefarious reasons.
The argument I made is that the US (and any country) needs it for case 1 and 2 (can also be solved through defensive alliances, though Ukraine had assurances that were broken), but the US has gone the wrong way for case 3.
This however does not invalidate case 1 and 2.
> You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
I'm unsure how to respond to this other than state that it's ironic.
I highly recommend reading On War by carl von clausewitz. He gives a pragmetic opinion on War and being read for it. Along with being ready for general conflict both non-violent and violent
This is why derision is a valid philosophical debate strategy if a person refuses to engage in rational discussion. To label GP as an R-word is a social signal and warning to others not to behave similarly. Derision also promotes healthy skepticism of new arguments you hear, lest risk falling into the same trap and have oneself become a laughingstock.
You're not going to have a good conversation like this, and you aren't going to be "winning" anything for your troubles, either.
Peace from who? Mexico? Canada? Which country is going to invade you?
All the American military does is bomb Middle Eastern countries and leave a huge mess. I do not believe US security is helped by bombing weddings and schools. I would even argue that it worsens it, by creating a bunch of people that lost their loved ones to those acts and that then turn to terrorism as a means of revenge.
The countries of Western Europe used to be at a state of continuous war for literal centuries, horrible atrocities inflicted on one another.
They all had their fancy armies, and they were all tempted to use them. Gotta get your money's worth, y'know?
Then they founded the world's most successful peace project, the European Union.
No wars between members since.
This adolescent behavior of threatening gestures is counterproductive and only leads to more conflict.
More mature societies have figured that out already.
Again, the idea of "military protection" is overly primitive and simplistic. If we had integrated them in our system, we could've given them rule of law as we have done with many an applicant state (think other post-Soviet countries!) and nurtured peace through fostering mutual dependence.
We failed to spread the values of enlightenment and now we are paying the price.
The whole protection racket thing that's now exploding in our face would've been unnecessary and could've been avoided.
Violence is the language of the weak.
We've seen time and time again how ineffective it is, most recently when y'all tore up the deal the EU negotiated with Iran and instead went back to more primitive ways, with predictable results. Before that, in Afghanistan, where after countless dead the same group is in power again. When even is the last time your approach worked? WW2? Might be time to move with the times.
I'm explicitly not talking about all the Middle-Eastern misadventures here, I find those as baffling and unjust as you do. I'm only referring to defensive and deterrent effects of having a military, which as I said, is the true portion of the propaganda you pointed out. (Good propaganda is always partly true.) The assertion that it doesn't exist and that the US military is only for war crimes is demonstrably false, and to prove it you need only (as I said to someone else) try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself.
Is it primitive and juvenile? Absolutely! It comports with those particular traits of homo sapiens, an ape species. Any country big enough, or rich enough, or strategic enough for some other reason, is a target for invasion by the immature and non-cooperative. Furthermore if all the countries of the world were to join in one big cooperative union (which they already do in the realm of trade and commerce to some degree), I sadly don't think it would take long for someone to betray it, the way Trump (Russian asset) is betraying it now.
Please explain what would happen if the US had no military and Andorra decided to invade?
Nobody's gonna invade the US, what a preposterous idea. This is precisely the fear based propaganda I'm talking about.
And to be clear, the US has abused the army for half a century for unjust causes, and I'm not defending that, but the concept of an army can be moral in the context of rivalling aggressive nations.
There is no US military that's a defensive force. It is a war crimes machine.
You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist. So we all read your posts as if they were talking about the US military that exists.
I both acknowledged and specified the difference.
> You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist.
Let me ask you this instead: What do you see as an alternative? Abolishing the entirety of all military force, or electing officials that do not abuse the existing or reduced scale military force for unjust causes? Or some third option?
The matter of fact is that war is messy especially guerrilla warfare which is the only war that basically exists today and in that context what's an acceptable ratio? 0 means surrendering or being stepped on ask Ukraine but is it 1/5, 1/10? Ideally you have zero but to have total disregard of the service members life doesn't cause there to be less war or civilian death. Just more onesided brutal wars. These are hard questions but to paint the people that fight in wars in democratic societies as just souless sellouts is reductive and its the type of thinking that leads to mass murder by political groups. Souless people don't feel PTSD for what they did they are souless. PTSD is incredibly common in the services because we don't want empathless murder machines. Because when it comes to wining wars (wining a political objective ultimately) generally speaking civilian deaths don't help political goals which is what the elected officals ask the miltary to do. But most importantly the elected bodies are the ones asking for invasion.
I think these are hard questions that good solutions from the miltary side of things don't exist but most importantly I really think we as a society need to have more serious talks and rational conceptions of how war and conflict works. I can't recommend On War by Clauswitz enough, but acoup also has a great primer on it [1]
[1]https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...
Edit: I suppose I've stumbled on some kind of economic or game-theory angle here - Militaries exist to impose costs. They tip the balance of potential invaders' cost-benefit analyses. They also impose costs on their owners though. But I guess the idea is that the benefits (avoiding the costs of being invaded) are supposed to be greater than the costs of the defense force.
I'm not being condescending or rude or otherwise out of line here saying your position is genuinely stupid.
In the United States, citizens may decide to join the armed forces. Politicians decide whether and when they serve in a war.
The exception would be if a person volunteered directly in a foreign war, eg a US civilian volunteering to fight in Ukraine.
Come again? If you have umbrage against antifa, surely you’re pro fascist?
> Most Americans remember how we couldn't even question COVID, DEI or kneeling for blacks and support law enforcement efforts
What do they even have anything to do with each other, except for them being right-wing talking points?
Just because they call themselves "antifa" doesn't mean its accurate. If the nazis referred to themselves as the "free puppies for everyone and world peace organization", it would not change anything about the morality of their party or the acts committed by them, despite the name.
The leak was via a compromised Okta SSO login (why anyone still uses them is a complete mystery to me).
The Techdirt article also links to the searchable front end to the dump.
https://icepi.cx/
Not really.
Having said that, I couldn’t see the full article on Wired. I don’t have an account and I suspect many don’t. I could see it via archive.is.
Hypothetically if you were running an organisation that was corrupt and the political winds turned against you, would you carefully preserve accurate records that documented crimes you or your underlings performed and provide an accurate handover? Or would you shred, obfuscate and destroy as much information as possible on the way out?
If the latter, would detailed map of your command and control structure as understood by your IT department / HR be a risk to you?
So - while I might agree that secretive domestic organizations like MI5 should not exist and sunlight is good for government, I feel for the families of the folks that might catch a bullet because of this.
I'll say the same thing that no one with access to a microphone said during the 2013 NSA data leaks:
What makes you think that the Bad Guys didn't already have access to this information? The folks that should have detected this clearly didn't. [0] Given that the Good Guys didn't learn about this until it was made public, neither they nor we have any idea of knowing how many Bad Guys have been siphoning off this data and for how long.
[0] In this specific incident, Okta appears to be claiming that there has been no breach despite claims that it is the source of the information. Back in 2013 -given that the NSA would often claim something that would be quickly countered by the publication of yet another leaked document- it was pretty clear that the NSA had little idea of what data had been released to the press.
Of course it’s possible some bad guys had this. But probably not all of them.
EDIT: I would also not equate these leaks to the NSA leaks in terms of resources and sophistication required to know about the NSA programs vs potential public access on the open internet with this one. Resources and intelligence required seems quite a higher bar, but that’s just me being an armchair quarterback.
...what exactly do you imagine the Bad Guys would do with the information that they've likely been siphoning off of the systems of ICE and -in the past- the NSA? Do you imagine that they'd be exclusively distributing it via Sneakernet? Just like the Good Guys, the Bad Guys also have access to IT guys who know how to set up a login portal... and the well-resourced ones are totally capable of setting up things akin to SIPRNet.
I’m not making a good guy / bad guy judgment here FWIW. I do, however, find it less likely a smaller scale non-state operation would bother hacking a government agency or buying info on the open market. Sounds like it’s a higher priority than I thought.
Makes sense for larger orgs at higher levels - but I admit my mental model didn’t think about parallel private attempts to exploit, sell, use and otherwise secure comms. It was a blind spot. Seemed too leaky and obvious given the incentives to leak information - but I clearly don’t understand bad guys very well.
Making lame excuses for "the good guys" reinforces that these people are doing good. They arent.
Your excuse will be used against you as soon as it's convenient to them.
Anyway - I just wanted to point out that these things can have consequences in the real world for people that aren’t necessarily the evil people you paint a picture of in your head. This isn’t a “oh just a few bad apples” thing - on the contrary that agency is quite rotten and should be disbanded.
Not a value judgment. Just sayin’ that this dump is 53+ certified undercover legal names out in the open.
Know that you don’t have to bend the knee to work for the government. You still have your oath, your union, and the knowledge that this ends in two years. Many have left, but not all. Those who stayed don’t necessarily agree or like what is happening.
Besides, continually engaging with people who literally believe the complete opposite of me is healthy. It's just harder nowadays because people refuse to engage on the basis I'm a Nazi or something.
Also, a ton of interesting articles never make it because it goes against the grain. Like this recent one I found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291006. Stunning journalism. Will absolutely go nowhere here because it says "Democrat" instead of "Conservative." Tis the way of HN these days. But, doesn't mean the marginalized crowd shouldn't keep trying :)
For you.