Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

[giancarlostoro]

I'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...

[softwaredoug]

One difference, this was in response to an actual search warrant granted by a judge.

What DHS is doing are administrative warrants, with no judicial overview (unless you sue to stop them).

[helterskelter]

I had an account at the time! He gave the govt the key, handwritten on paper, to stall for time so he could delete everything. I wish every admin had that sort of integrity.

He had a followup project, magma (https://github.com/lavabit/magma), that was supposed to be a secure email alternative. It's a shame it never took off.

[dymk]

Sounds like a whole bunch of “both sides!!”

This ain’t the same

[barfiure]

Old enough is right. People forget the HN thread on the last day of Obama’s presidency and the bill he signed to expand the drone program.

We should have given him another peace prize after that.

[jimbo808]

> until it's too late.

I'm afraid it's far too late.

[hypeatei]

> It doesn't matter who the president is

It clearly does as your comment was very pointed towards Obama but fails to mention Trump once. I'm curious as to why that would be? Are you ignoring the massive amount of funding that ICE/DHS has received to invade cities of the President's opponents to crush dissent? Or maybe the threats of face scanning to be put on a "domestic terrorist" list? I don't recall Obama doing those things. A common pattern I'm seeing during this admin is: good things are attributed directly to Trump, but bad things are the government having too much power that his predecessors can be blamed for.

"Good tsar, bad boyars"

[throwawayq3423]

Edward Snowden had stolen the most sensitive classified secrets from The United States Intelligence Community and Donald Trump is looking to squash dissent of his attempts to nullify the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.

I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.

[softwaredoug]

Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.

Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.

[rtkwe]

I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.

[beej71]

> Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.

It is, after all, currently the best way to improve the bottom line.

[Aeolun]

I just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.

[PearlRiver]

I played Deus Ex and the FEMA camps are now ICE camps.

Empires do not fall with dignity or grace I suppose.

[jjwiseman]

This went from #2 on the front page to the bottom of page 2 very quickly. It's unfortunate.

[notepad0x90]

twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.

What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.

I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.

[whynotmaybe]

The good old choice between plague or cholera.

[tsoukase]

During the past months I have written enough online and now I am sure I will be unwanted at the US borders. I wait for the Dem POTUS to revert the situation and welcome the now "criminals" as heroes. I will miss the coming Olympic Games though.

[everdrive]

Extraordinarily troubling. This recent case was especially dystopian.

https://newrepublic.com/post/206088/homeland-security-67-yea...

The letter written by Jon was about as benign and constructive as possible. There was not even the possibility of pretense in this case, but nonetheless his gmail got subpoenaed. The privacy community seems extraordinarily bad at dealing with nuance, so I want to lay this out specifically. This is a new threshold which has been crossed. No matter what angry commenters online will tell you, it was never previously so easy to to subpoena this sort of information.

If you have not already started cleaning up your online presence and thinking critically about your online OPSEC, the hour is getting very late.

[praptak]

I'm in EU and I'm 100% okay with being blacklisted from ever entering US. Just as I'd be okay with being blacklisted by 1933 Germany. To be honest I don't even think it's ethical to work for a US company anymore. (This is admittedly easy for me to say because I left Google some time ago for unrelated reasons. Call this "virtue signalling" if you want - I still believe it is good to discuss virtues and vices).

[bmitch3020]

http://archive.today/kqLpX

[Herring]

Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.

[mrtesthah]

I would counter that a majority of Americans are actually in favor of these things, but our supreme court has been corrupted by billionaires and is stymying any real progress along these lines. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...

[burnt-resistor]

Similar to plantation owners convincing poor white Southerners that the North was threatening their "way of life", billionaires used media to manufacture consent of a large subset of Americans that [insert scapegoats] are "the problem". Separating church and state and wealth and media are essential to having a functioning democratic flavor of government.

[idle_zealot]

Apparently something like 30% of Democrats (voters, not representatives) now identify as "Democratic Socialists." I assume this is because it's what Bernie and Mamdani call themselves while advocating for the above mentioned measures. The establishment Democrats will fight like hell to stem the tide, but there does seem to be increasing support for these populist policies among liberals.

[reaperducer]

It makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.

[nxobject]

I'll need to look this up, but IIRC HN is one of the sources included in a fairly popular LEO market "online media presence" aggregation tool.

[sneak]

You should assume that the IP address used for any online service (which for most people maps with timestamp to their home address and credit card for the cable bill) is not secret.

I use a VPN router that sends all of my traffic to a public VPN; if you don’t want HN having your location and identity, stop giving it to them.

[viraptor]

You know this is all public and almost every person here has zero opsec, right? There's no point even asking YC for the data, unless you want to target that one very specific person.

[Terr_]

Hmmm, how many of our past account email-settings are kept?

[wellf]

1st and 4th amendment are just wallpaper I guess.

[keernan]

The bigger issue is their purpose; how do they intend to use the names they are collecting.

[infotainment]

This is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS.

Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.

[throwawayq3423]

just to be clear trump administration is not using Patriot Act era standards. They're going far beyond what any previous administration has done and openly breaking the law.

I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.

[keernan]

The Trump administration has demanded fealty to Trump, the man, not the office holder. Any Executive Branch employee who refuses to issue a subpoena that the Trump administration wants issued will lose their job in seconds.

The subpoenas are intended as part of the database the Trump administration is building identifying American citizens with anti-Trump views.

There can be only one reason for such a database: to punish and terrorize the citizenry of this county.

[keernan]

Some further context: NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants

A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”

Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents...

[mahoivan]

Joinmastodon.org

[aa_is_op]

Imagine organizing an anti-government movement on the platform of a guy who sponsored said government.

[hackyhacky]

What are the alternatives for organizing large groups of regular (non-tech savvy) people? Carrier pigeon?

[hodgehog11]

This is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

The interesting thing is that the time to oppose it these encroachments was somewhere between 2001 and say.. 2015 ( some events, but nothing in particular other than general acceptance by general populace ). And now the masses are crying foul? Now is absolutely not the time to try to get online invisibility cloak.

[wellf]

7 deckchairs on the left, 456 on the right, that might help right the ship.

[phendrenad2]

MAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.

[tempodox]

Far too many criminals are being protected from prosecution by the Donald. He now has literal armies of criminals in whose best interests it is to keep him in office. Will they scoff at committing more crimes to make sure their protection doesn’t evaporate due to an election?

[pixl97]

Assuming Trump lets us have elections at the midterms. It's public knowledge he's been talking about stopping them or re-writing the rules so only his lackeys can win.

[barbazoo]

> this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.

I don’t get that vibe honestly but I might be in my own bubble.

[KnuthIsGod]

How long before they come for Hacker News ?

Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump.

A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.

[lokar]

Or, adjust your priorities and resist more. Authoritarians win when people let them.

[mikestew]

Let ‘em come. Even if I could delete my posts (you can’t, BTW), I’m not deleting shit. And I’m sure not obeying in advance.

[DavidSJ]

I don’t think we should preemptively surrender our free speech to the authoritarians.

[GaryBluto]

I hope that this is hyperbolic satire and not a genuine viewpoint because it is incredibly unrealistic to the point of being almost fantastical. The US government aren't going to "go after" or interfere with Hacker News at any time in the future unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism (which it shouldn't become anyway).

[marysminefnuf]

I want the government to know how i feel. I want them to see my posts and comments. If this anonymous surveilance without warrants is the only way to be acknowledged then thats a form of protest to me and it has made me want to be more outspoken knowing we are all being watched. Fuck ice.

[ynac]

To all the replies herein:

Dang - I haven't read that kind of hacker attitude anywhere, even here, in a long time ya'll. I ain't kiddin', I got a little weepy.

I don't know what the rally cry of hackers would be, but Atari 800, assembly code, and solder smoke for all!

[booleandilemma]

This is known as a "chilling effect".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

[comrade1234]

I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.

[asdff]

Let them come for us. If it comes to that, trolling social media to arrest american citizens en masse, people are going to be forming militias and I'll join up the local outfit. I don't care anymore. I'm ready to take a stand if it comes to it and take back our country and I'm sure I'm not alone on that either.

[metabagel]

ICE and CBP are building a lot of concentration camps. Clearly, they are planning to fill them.

[tehjoker]

They have a limited amount of power to suppress opinion even with their powerful tools and thugs. Their method is to go after big platforms and prominent individuals. If you keep speaking up anyway, it will overwhelm them.

[ryanmcbride]

Okay you go ahead and give in I'm gonna not though

[myvoiceismypass]

The HN owners have virtually unlimited funds to pay tribute to dear leader and zero morals, so this is not a real possibility.

[viraptor]

> Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here

It's too late. Multiple copies of all the posts exist already.

[madaxe_again]

Man, they can fucking blow me.

If you start censoring yourself because of potential consequences, you’re complicit.

Sooner a dead lion than some kind of shabby boot-donkey.

[LightBug1]

For the record: FUCK ICE, bunch of pseudo-fascist thugs, or paid off mercenaries. Wankers, the lot of em.

[add-sub-mul-div]

You can't delete comments here. It's why I've only ever made anonymous throwaway posts or comments.

But in this specific case I do not agree with complying with this bullshit in advance.

[nozzlegear]

If Trump's going to throw me in his El Salvador gulag for being a deep state Soros-backed neoliberal globalist shill on HN, I'm going to make sure somebody in his regime at least has to read my bullshit first.

[SubiculumCode]

Sorry. No. I'm not going to get pushed around by a bunch of bootlickers.

[krautburglar]

One day redhat is going to grease Trump's pole with enough cash, and King Donald is going to send a member of his tribal-tattooed, part-time MAGA influencer burgerwaffen to pull-up the black van and take you under cover of night for posting wrongthink about wayland & systemd.

[pojntfx]

For the non-US-American part, that's the Fediverse, the only network that isn't developed and used primarily by US-Americans. As for "wont turn over our data" - it's push-based, that helps to make it a bit harder to crawl, but it's public social media, and by definition the data will be out there as a result of that.

[baby_souffle]

If you're a participant in one of the federated platforms and your native home server is in European territory but your content is federated to a server in the US, can the US server do anything to reveal your identity other than point to the home server?

[mpyne]

> It's fine for citizens to voice positions, beliefs etc. It's not fine for organizations of hostile origins to astro-sturf and manipulate people into positions they wouldn't normally take.

As the Supreme Court has already apted noted, organizations enjoy free speech rights in the U.S. as well, including the right to advocate for positions you or others wouldn't normally take.

[nxobject]

Why would you assume that this was astro-turfed? I'd argue that, like other domestic surveillance that require FISA judicial approval, justifications for acts like these require a very high level of proof.

[crummy]

Do you think Americans have to be paid or manipulated into making anti-ICE statements on social media?

[PpEY4fu85hkQpn]

Is this satire?

[malcolmgreaves]

Reddit isn’t extreme left.

You’re regurgitating lies from the Republican party’s impressive propaganda machine.

Trump is as anti free speech as you can get. There’s no debating this fact. The evidence is overwhelming. Anyone that is regurgitating the lines you are is doing so in bad faith: at best, you’re being willfully ignorant.

[phainopepla2]

Some of us were against it then and are against it now

[ryanmcbride]

No I wasn't?

[yanhangyhy]

oh boy, ICE will mess up with the mid-term selection and make sure Trump get another 4 years.

[bediger4000]

It's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"?

And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.