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.
Despite all its other warts, the FISA court is (A) an actual judicial-branch court (B) created by legislation and (C) the justices cannot be removed on direct Presidential whim.
In contrast, "administrative warrants" are more like an executive-branch manager writing a memo, where an unscrupulous President could get them removed in a day for not writing the "right" memos.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. These administrative warrants are very limited in scope. They are closer to the subpoenas that even ordinary civilian lawyers can send third parties in the course of litigation. They don’t give the government the power to bust into Google’s data center. The target has to respond or else challenge the warrant in court, but ordinary civilian subpoenas function the same way.
That's not at all what I've been hearing from reports of people getting these. They find that they're not at all targeted. They frequently don't even know who the target is. The officers get asked for a warrant and they might produce a bullshit piece of paper which is really just a memo.
Anyway, it's not "me" comparing these alleged apples and oranges, I am replying deep in a thread of other people making these comparisons.
That’s the same as the subpoena I could send you if you had information relevant to a litigation. And you have to give it to me or else go to court to quash the subpoena. But the key difference with judicial warrants is that judicial warrants can be enforced immediately while subpoenas and administrative warrants require the cooperation of the target or else going to court to enforce the subpoena.
Sorry, it's pretty clear that you like what ICE does and you're working backwards with what you think is a legal argument that justifies it. What ICE is reportedly doing has absolutely nothing in common with a lawful subpoena.
I do like ICE, but this point about administrative warrants is a rant I’ve been doing since the Obama administration. The only thing new is that these tactics are now being used for immigration enforcement.
Ah, you must not be American. At least over here--the subject of the news post--that belief would be considered pro-dictatorship nonsense.
The US Federal government has different branches, and only certain branches have certain powers. This is widely known because we teach this to US children before they are 14 years old, sometimes aided by literal cartoons.
These "warrants" are not at all equivalent, the same way that a President cannot dream up and declare a "law" (even if he calls it that) because only Congress may make those.
The constitution does not give the judicial branch the exclusive power of issuing warrants. Having certain exclusive powers doing mean every action can only be exclusively done by them. Each branch has an obligation to adhere to the constitution.
The president only nominates them. The Senate confirms. Until the obama administration, judges required a supermajority of the senate to confirm, but a gop minority were filibustering all his nominees. So he asked the senate to remove the filibuster for judges. It was really the only use of the filibuster that made sense. Most democracies have independent commissions. Perhaps they all do now...
In a two party system, no one wants to get rid of the loopholes. Those currently in power don't think their opponents will have the opportunity to use it, and those not in power want to use it later when they finally get to be in power.
Check out the two parties wanting the Line Item Veto thinking only their side would be able to use it yet horrified to see the other side use it.
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.
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.
Because it distracts from the point I'm making. Our founding fathers setup this country a certain way, and along the way we left the different branches of government to assume new powers without any amendments, and now we're surprised that they're walking all over the constitution? This problem extends beyond the current administration. It will only get worse before it gets better.
Remember, someone FAR WORSE can run for president, someone far worse can absolutely win. Don't make the assumption that your current least favorite administration will be as worse as it gets, because that is how you wind up giving that future administration the keys to the kingdom.
No it doesn't. If you're saying Obama did <bad thing> then explaining how the things Trump is doing are related is helpful. In this case, I don't see how them going after Snowden for stealing classified info (to be clear I support what he did) is the same as DHS going after meanies on Reddit for speaking out against ICE. One is using the intelligence apparatus for a plausible national security threat and the other is using them to crush dissent. Very big difference.
Did I ever said it was helpful or are you just putting words in my mouth? When I was 18 I emptied my bank account to fly my cousins to the US from Venezuela. I was making scraps per hour at the time mind you. But by all means put words in my mouth.
All this goes back before Obama, but my point was that literally the president in charge is irrelevant, they should not have this type of power to bypass the other branches of government, neither should other branches.
Nobody remembers Bush doing anything specific the way we all here remember Lavabit. Lavabit and Snowden were very deeply discussed here on HN.
> Did I ever said it was helpful or are you just putting words in my mouth?
No, I think you're misreading. I said it would be helpful instead of distracting.
> Nobody remembers Bush doing anything specific the way we all here remember Lavabit
Yes, that's what I'm saying: you're extremely biased and it shows. In one stroke, you simultaneously say that unchecked intelligence apparatus is too powerful (true) and that Obama, specifically, did a bad thing that the goverment (hand wavey deflection) is merely taking advantage of now with no criticism of the current admin. It comes across like you're just a partisan hack who wants to dunk on Obama. There's no substance here. At least this time you mentioned Bush who started all of this, but still no mention of he who shall not be named.
> When I was 18 I emptied my bank account to fly my cousins to the US from Venezuela
What does that have to do with anything we're talking about now?
You're freeing this administration from any blame. No system of governance can resist a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push. If the Democratic Party is to share part of the blame, it's in the fact that it is completely bought by special interests and thus unwilling to push pack against the Republicans. But don't be mistaken, this is entirely on Republicans, both their corrupt politicians and stupid voter base who cheer on their rights being trodden upon, as long as the other side suffers more.
You are putting words in my mouth and taking away from my point. I equally blame the previous administration for leaving a privacy invasive apparatus, as stated by others here this goes back to the Patriot Act.
> I equally blame the previous administration for leaving a privacy invasive apparatus, as stated by others here this goes back to the Patriot Act.
I was talking about Bush administration. I don't know a lot about that time period since I was just a teenager during that administration and didn't care about politics back then, but I vividly remember Obama because I've always been passionate about not having the government spying on citizens, and a free and open web. Everything wrong with social media we set ourselves up for.
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.
To be fair, those sensitive secrets included secret, unconstitutional, dragnet surveillance programs targeting american citizens, and the fact that the director of national intelligence had perjured himself during congressional hearings on those programs.
Less than 1% of what Snowden took and leaked pertained to domestic surveillance programs, The rest was intelligence capabilities and sources and methods.
But that's besides the point. There is a real argument that the U.S. government, in trying to catch Snowden, was protecting national security. There is no such argument with Trump.
No, it was retribution. The info was already out there when they were going after him. Even if he stayed in the US and was captured, it still wouldn't have "stopped" anything.
> The info was already out there when they were going after him.
This was of course not known at the time. The only thing that was known is that a single individual was responsible for the greatest breach of classified secrets in the nation's history, and that individual was still at large.
If Snowden hasn't moved quickly, he wouldn't have been able to leak any of it.
What he did, grab it all, then give it to reputable journalists, was the correct option to be able to inform the public of massive intelligence dragnets targeting civilians that the government was lying about.
What they did to snowden was illegitimate but at least they had the cover that he was an insider that had signed a contract with the government. They are going after random ass people expressing a 1A opinion now. Legally very different ballgames even though both dissenters are correct to voice their opinions and knowledge and should not have been pursued for objecting to extravagant government wrongdoing.
> I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.
Snowden sacrificed a comfortable life, his friends, and family to tell the American people they were being lied to. He exposed things that people SHOULD HAVE gone to prison for. Snowden is a hero, period.
Friend, if you followed Snowden's saga at all, you would know that those events don't need to be similar to be relevant to the discussion at hand. In other words, just because you have a problem with Trump, does not mean the two issues are not connected.
It's the standard we're discussing. It's what Donald Trump's DHS is doing right now and the Snowden comparisons are irrelevant and imo a bad faith attempt at trying to muddy the waters.
Stop both sides-ing everything the Trump administration does to give them more oxygen to operate.
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.
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.
Because for all of the issues I take with Obama over Snowden, there were also attempts to keep promises and maintain stability and order within the country. Say what you will but there were no literal masked thugs kidnapping people at gunpoint under Obama. With many things you have to weigh a person’s actions in balance, and in balance Trump is way way way way way way worse than Obama.
I lost faith that the government would respect my right to privacy with Binney, Klein, and Snowden. I then lost faith that the government wouldn't go out of its way to openly attack and subjugate me with Turmp. A pattern of escalation is still escalation.
But to anybody only just waking up to this unaccountable surveillance-industrial complex now: Welcome! While I wish you had been with us after Snowden, I am glad you are here now.
Wrong. Stop both sides-ing this. What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans: Nixon, Regan, Bush, and now Trump.
Wrong. Stop being so brainwashed by party politics.
Corporate dems - which are all of them in the last two decades - doing little for the average citizen, protecting megacorps, accelerating wealth concentration, protecting the billionaires, have also played a big role in maling the average citizen distrust their government.
Do you really think not a single one of them knew about the Epstein files? You can't be taken seriously if you do. And if you don't, their participation in keeping it hidden too builds distrust, even if 20 times more reps were involved. The dem candidate of only 10 years ago must have known. The chance she didn't is so small.
Snowden's revelations built distrust. Everything he revealed was absolutely "both sides". You can say "one side has been much worse", and sure, that's fair. But pretending that the other has been squeaky clean and that their own actions haven't played a huge role in the current situation is just sticking your hand in the sand.
People are tired of having to choose between "awful A" and "even worse B". If the dems stopped nominating "awful A" and replaced then with "decent A" then it'd be a landslide. But they won't. They haven't changed one bit. Mamdani, finally an example of "decent A", was hindered. They didn't want to see him win at all, and only started cheering for him when he finally did. By a huge margin, because he's a "decent A".
Until this changes, until the day that decent candidates of Mamdani are universally cheered on and given the full first choice backing by that party, not a single thing will get better, and it will only get worse, because it means the inevitable next rep winner will be even worse.
I'm not sure how you got this mindset, but it's not great, and I'm sure deep down you're smarter than this. These aren't football teams to cheer for.
Corporate dems has suck. They are slightly better than the corporate republicans of the 90s and early 2000s.
Why? Because they knew that stability and economic prosperity were things people wanted. They of course never went far enough and didn’t ever want to rock the boat.
But, importantly, what you’re trying to do is wrong. Trump is not like corporate dems. It’s significantly worse. There’s not a single redeeming thing about this regime.
And all republicans are 100% behind trump. That means the entire Republican Party is guilty and responsible for what trump does.
So yes, it is appropriate to paint the entire group with one broad stroke. They’re all guilty of enabling a criminal to shred the constitution and destroy the entire fabric of US society for the next few generations. (The US has backslid to the late 1800s - blatant corruption everywhere).
The concept of "both-sidesism" is a thought-terminating cliché that attempts to be a more reasonable sounding way of saying that one side is holy and the other is sinful that was invented on social media platforms for propaganda purposes.
> What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans
Many examples have been given in this post's comments alone and are already well-known by the average HN user, such as:
1. The Snowden Leaks (Obama)
2. The Pentagon Papers (exposed under Nixon, describes actions under Kennedy and Johnson administration)
No, it’s an attempt to weigh the actions of either side in aggregate. What you’re doing is trying to argue that everything is awful and so why bother. I’ve seen numerous examples of one group acting well-meaning and sincere, and numerous examples of the other group taking advantage and sewing chaos. If you think they’re both the same you’re either not paying attention to everything or you only care about a very few things. Either way it’s going to be impossible for me to find common ground with you as long as you refuse to try to work with what you’ve got.
Number 1 was Bush. The republicans crated the NSA surveillance machine.
Number 2 — know your US history. The democratic and republican parties flipped philosophies in 68. Their dems went pro integration and the southern dems went to the Republican Party, which remained segregationist. Nixon was closer to Kennedy and LBJ than Humphrey.
Number 3 is nothing - it wasn’t active targeting. They implemented rules to check all organizations. The republican affiliates ones were skirting the rules. They looked at orgs with certain things in their name, but it was an investigation. No government action came of it. It was not abuse. This is another lie by the republicans.
1. If I give you a loaded gun you're still responsible for shooting somebody.
2. It is an oversimplified view to suggest that Democratic and Republican parties completely flipped during the late 60s but they certainly did reverse views on race.
3. They put extra scrutiny organizations with "Tea Party" or "patriots" in their names and admitted as much. Unless the Obama administration was secretly Republican and put out this "lie" to negatively impact themselves as part of some grand reptilian conspiracy.
When Europeans wonder why the U.S. is so backwards and barbaric about not implementing a National ID scheme. Look no further, ladies and gents, because at least once every 200 years, the population has a day of supreme brain off and puts someone like Trump in office. Once that happens, you too will appreciate why it should be hard for the government to do things.
The issue is with the US is that ID is not free. I just had to pay 50 bucks to renew my driver's license. renewing a passport was 150 dollars the last time I checked (which was 2021). So any more costs just to function in society is a major impact to quite a few rights. The most hot topic being voter eligibility.
this is foreign to EU because, to my knowledge, getting an ID is free.
europeans are well versed in the consequences of autocratic takeover of their governments, why they pretend to not know even recent history of the 20th century, I'll never understand.
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.
The ACLU released a report on these camps in August of 2024 called "Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention".
Here's some of the issues it highlighted:
- forced labor in order to afford to eat. The $1/day "Voluntary Work Program" is the only way you're gonna get enough food to live. And if you refuse to work or try to protest, ICE doesn't have to give an excuse to send you into solitary confinement. CoreCivic sells this labor to companies
- extensive use of solitary confinement often for "minor disciplinary infractions or as a form of retaliation for participating in hunger strikes or for submitting complaints"
- dozens of documented deaths from forced labor and medical neglect
No doubt these issues have only gotten worse since the publication of this report.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
Those three examples all implemented some kind of austerity, which reduced safety nets and increased economic insecurity.
Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.
The idea that there's been meaningful austerity isn't borne out by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... There was a dip after the financial crisis and a blip that returned to normal after COVID. But Germany, Italy, and the UK all spend a slightly greater share of their GDP on social welfare now than they did in 2000.
And while the U.S. has less social spending overall, the trend shows the opposite of your story. In 2000, when the U.S. elected pro-immigration George W. Bush, social spending was 14.1%. In 2024, when people voted for "mass deportations" Trump, social spending was 19.8% of GDP. The U.S. was spending more of its economy on social welfare in 2024 than Australia, Canada, and the U.K. were spending back in the early 2000s--but the far right is much stronger today than it was back then.
That graph is really deceptive. Eg the Greece curve is going up (!!), which can make you think there was no austerity. Probably the GDP in the denominator shrunk faster than the govt could cut pensions.
Well how much have the countries aged? In that case you should expect it to go up, maybe it's still a lot less than it should be.
I'm a statistician. That (first) graph is a case study in how to lie with statistics. They should teach it in class.
I'm out, I recommend you spend some time reading about this issue. Inequality and welfare cuts leading to the rise in the far right is fairly well established. One (misleading) graph doesn't disprove it. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
Taking in immigrants is a short term solution. Within one generation their fertility rate drops to match the local one. Which means you have to keep bringing in new ones. That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor. And unless you are pulling from Africa or a couple middle eastern countries, the source of immigration is also declining in population at this point so it isn't a permanent fix.
That said, the fix doesn't need to be permanent. The deceleration of fertility rates is the problem, not the velocity simply being negative. Japan is almost through their problem, as they started it first. Soon they will be on a constant downward slope. Which can be handled by productivity gains. Trying to use unlimited immigration to handle the deceleration bump will create more issues than it solves. Unless maybe if you are China... Their deceleration looks like a sharp edged cliff instead of a hill. Their productivity gains are also very non linear, so maybe that will make it less horrible.
> That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor.
That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The problem is the safety nets broke down, eg minimum wage hasn't kept up with anything. Or housing/college/healthcare pricing has gone up much faster than income. When people feel insecure they have a tendency to go racist and blame outsiders. If we fixed those, nobody would care about 1 or 2 Somalis in their high school.
It is a far right talking point, or just right now I guess? But it also is a reasonable one. Not from the blood and soil only Europeans are American standpoint, but from the standpoint of having an increasing percentage of first generation immigrants. Japan has seen issues with this at the same time they have benefitted from it. It isn't a matter of blaming the immigrants, it is a disservice to them too. We can't welcome them properly at the rates that would be necessary to fully offset fertility decline. That doesn't mean we shouldn't allow any immigration at all. We should do it as quickly as we can do it correctly. And that would be true even without the demographic problem. Having one or two immigrants in a school is probably too low, we can go faster than that. Having half the class be new from varying places doesn't work. It is also a problem for the donating countries. South America can't afford for all their working age people to head to Spain, they are already hitting their own demographic decline. Africa is on the other side still. They have too many children relative to the working age population. Taking only working age men and not their children harms Africa in a similar way.
I'm not saying allowing immigration in a steady controlled fashion won't help, just that it won't be enough, and that the levels that would be enough aren't possible without impacts on the immigrants, their new countries, and their originating countries being severe enough they don't balance.
Right now the US has 4.1% of its population residing unlawfully. That is 8-20x any European nation. It is largely due to the federated system and a suspicion of national identity systems, but just being able to bring in the rate we have been, but correctly through the system would be a start.
> That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The last time the foreign born population was at the level it is today, the U.S. enacted restrictive immigration policies for 45 years and instituted aggressive measures to assimilate immigrants.
I’m citing a fact that’s plain in the data. Germany, the UK, and Italy spend slightly more of a larger economy on social welfare than they did in 2000. If you have a contrary case based on different data, then make it. We’re intelligent people here, we don’t need to resort to appeals to authority, especially in a subject like political sentiment that isn’t amenable to expert analysis. This stuff isn’t rocket science.
I'm not having this conversation. It's like creationism or anti-vaccine. You can solve this YOURSELF in 10 seconds by googling "UK austerity" or "Germany austerity" but instead you just want to argue from ignorance. Get informed first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Word of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.
Every single one of these has been effectively used to organize at geographic scale within this most recent century before "non-technical" even existed as a possible descriptor of a human being.
Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.
Imagine electicity in the home is made availiable but the deal is you can have it only if you don't use said electricity to exercise freedom of speech against the government, e.g. use a lamp to help you write the speech. And they have a way to track you if you do. And the alternative is no electrcity.
Online services like email and social media even are utilities.
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.
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.
Some couldn't vote then broskie. In particular because of things like age, and school, and parents being spoonfed propaganda and having the desire for vengeance stoked for dat Middle East invasion and things. So since that couldn't happen, it seems the next best time to address the issue is now.
Not with the assholes we have running the tech industry right now trying to groom every nation state into letting them help them morph into a technocratic hellhole, no.
> Until all of these things are addressed, I certainly won't support the freedom of speech for people that won't support mine.
That means you don’t support freedom of speech. But we already knew that because you already explained your authoritarian views.
What I don’t understand is why authoritarians such as yourself (as well as many of the what I call “blue MAGA” authoritarian counterparts on the left) still pay lip service to concepts such as free speech and the rule of law. These concepts fundamentally encapsulate that they are applied equally. If you don’t support them for your enemies (and criminals, and immigrants, and trans people, etc), then you simply don’t support them, period. “Free speech for my side” simply isn’t. “The rule of law (but only for citizens)” isn’t support for the rule of law.
I find all forms of government censorship to be abhorrent, regardless of which party is in power. I support free speech and freedom from government interference for the MAGA crowd as I do for everyone else, despite their active and continued efforts to curtail my legal rights to same (as Trump has repeatedly said out loud).
Republican propagandists were quite successful at spinning the emergent corporate infringement of natural rights as a bona fide illegal government action led by "the left", to fool enough useful idiots into supporting their "alternative" of a wannabe-dictator planning a full scale governmental assault on our rights.
>How about when Amazon engineers colluded with the federal government to shutdown Parler? It would be like Trump working with hosting servers for Blue sky and getting it shutdown.
Private companies can't choose their customers anymore? Interesting.
>Twitter and Facebook were caught colluding with the Biden administration to censor Americans. There weren't 10 posts a day on HN about it, and it was pretty quickly ignored and forgotten.
The laptop? They didn't. FBI warned facebook etc about possible russian fake stories and they decided to suppress it own their own until it was fact checked. Biden did ask Twitter to take down nudes of his son as it was against twitters revenge porn rules.
You are deluded if you think this is anywhere close to what trump is doing.
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.
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?
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.
Plus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,
And, try to talk to people who don't agree with you. Have an open mind, listen, avoid being judgmental and critical. It's not easy, but you can change minds.
Won't matter. Donny put the epstein files out, redacted, to remind every single influential person in the blast radius that unless he keeps holding the redaction pen, all their lives will be over.
One thing to consider: it’s clear he was very widely connected in American elite circles. It’s likely that almost all prominent people (in finance, business, the arts, science, government, etc) all came across him. We know he worked pretty hard to get intertwined with everyone he could.
And yet, although the list of his connections is large, it’s very far from most of these people. It seems plenty of people saw him for who he was and steered clear.
Not sure what that means. Mostly ordinary citizens go to protests. Not aware of any group paying felons to protest. Speaking of, is Trump allowed to vote?
Attending public (peaceful) protest is valuable. It shows that people with that view point (whatever it is) are not alone. It encourages more people to get involved.
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).
Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.
It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.
> popular hotbed of political activism
First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.
Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.
And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.
unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism
That's the thing about AI and scale. You don't have to only target the big fish. You can cast a wide net and scoop up data on people in every nook and cranny of the internet.
The concentration camps were loaded with people who thought their town was too small for the Nazis to bother with.
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.
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.
There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.
That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.
Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.
Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.
There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.
Yes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.
Pretty sure they only change the username to something anonymous though, and remove any PII in comments you've written, right? They won't delete the comments themselves AFAIK.
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.
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.
Fearing the consequences doesn't make you a complicit but a victim. Sure there will be people who will take a more brave/difficult stance, but can't blame others for not doing so, we don't know they'd put at stake.
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.
3,500,000 pages[1] have been released, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
If this was only "2%" of the files, you're alleging there's 175,000,000 pages of documents. Absolute nonsense. That's not even realistic. Not to mention nobody but the government knows how many pages are in "the files" - anything else you see is just made up.
> Im not a conspiracy theorist at all... murder of hundreds or thousands of girls and 1 year old babies
this is one example mentioning babies. There are hundreds of other pictures and emails re young girls. If you bother to look into this, you will see. you would rather feel superior nitpicking a minor detail while missing the fucking point. Good job. Heres another crumb, a tiny sliver of evidence:
You're interpreting that email to mean they've killed thousands of one year old babies? Or perhaps it was a joke about a party that had a bunch of babies at it... I dare say, you're so deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole you don't know which way is up.
Some of these claims don't have bulletproof video evidence and DNA, and i suspect you would call those fake too even if they did but they are not unbelievable when considered in the context of everything that's been shown. I can't do that for you.
Anyways, if that's not enough for you to even spend some time reading the news, then I don't know what is. Enjoy being stupid and smug.
This guy gets it, and isn't falling for the distractions.
Also, what is going on with this thread? Everyone here sounds like they're from Reddit, which has one of the most hysterical and heavily-propagandized userbases in existence.
One person here even said that Reddit is "free from MAGA influences". Like lol, Reddit is nothing but bot accounts and activist moderators who will insta-ban you for wrong-think. The whole site is nothing but astroturfing, and you have to be an NPC to believe any political post on its frontpage.
HN's has been one of my fav sites to lurk on for at least a decade, but I can't tell it apart from Reddit sometimes.
HN has taken a very sharp turn over the past 2-3 years. Putting aside politics, they are reflexively cynical, misinformed and confident in their ignorance even about technology. Missing the boat on AI as well for years as its evolved from cool chatbot that hallucinates to can write serious code with few errors and solve unsolved research problems with some assistance.
It's the smugness and complete lack of curiosity that gets me, which I am seeing even in this thread.
Any idea why the culture's been shifting here? I've always loved the deep & insightful back-and-fourths we've had on HN, but now a lot of that nuance is lost, and it's mostly just kneejerk reactions ("thing is the way it is because GREED, simple as that") and the endless nit-picking of unimportant details.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Yes, and I said 'of hostile origin' - the law still prohibits foreign nationals and foreign organizations spending in US elections. I want to know if they are at work here, and the reason why our media does not represent the people (who overwhelmingly voted for Trump).
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.
I spent ten years on reddit looking closely at the evolution of manipulation patterns from its early days to what it has become. The current anti-Trump admin positions are maintained far beyond the subtle techniques, the moderators on mainstream subreddits like /r/news will permanently ban you for not towing the line on left positions in your commenting.
I don't assume it's astro-turfed, I assess it is, and I want answers to confirm or refute it.
I was talking to a long time coworker the other day and they said straight faced basically you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. There are those who genuinely believe even at this point everything being done is justified.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...
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