To clarify why it’s aggressive: federal employees have a legal duty to secure classified information, but everyone else does not.
Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
> "So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have."
That's unequivocally a lawful basis for a court-ordered search warrant. They must have probable cause that the person being searched has evidence of a crime; not necessarily that the search target and the criminal suspect are one and the same. Search is investigative; not punitive.
The newsworthy part of this is it's a journalist they raided, and to go after their journalistic sources at that. It's previously been a DoJ policy not to go after the media for things related to their reporting work. But that policy wasn't a legal or constitutional requirement. It's merely something the DoJ voluntarily pledged to stop doing, after the public reaction to President Obama's wiretapping of journalists in 2013,
Let's be real, it can be both. A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain. Raiding in the middle of the night instead of when they step out their door in the morning, ripping open walls when all they're really looking for is a laptop, flipping and trashing the place in a excessive manner, breaking things in the process, pointing guns at children, shooting the family retriever, etc. I don't know if they took this raid too far in any of these ways, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I agree that's what GP wrote, but I think GP's point is that it's not illegal for journalists to have classified documents, so it does not qualify as probable cause.
This is not a comment about if journalists homes should be more sacred than other people. Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
To my understanding, a US search warrant authorize law enforcement officers to search a particular location and seize specific items. The requirements are:
1# filled in good faith by a law enforcement officer
2# Have probable cause to search
3# issued by a neutral and detached magistrate
4# the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized.
There is nothing about the owner of the location. It can be a car, a parking lot, a home, a work place, a container, a safe, a deposit box in a bank, and so on.
The significant question here is about probable cause. Why were those items interesting for the FBI to collect? Are they looking to secure evidence against the leaker, and if so, what was the specifics of the search warrant? The article states: "The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation".
Probable cause should not be about preventing journalists access to documents they already got, as that would be like going after Barton Gellman.
Most likely securing information/evidence about the leaker, who likely did break the law or connected to someone who did... the first party leaking classified materials broke the law, while other intermediaries may not have. In an investigative process, this isn't at all inappropriate... Journalists aren't sacrosanct, though policies may have varied as to the level investigations will go.
> Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
Something worth noting at least for pedantic purposes, since practice is quite different; technically speaking every person has the same rights and laws to follow as a journalist. Fundamentally, there are really no differences between a journalist and a regular person engaging in the same activities.
It's an indication of the unique system architecture that differentiates the USA from all other societies on the planet.
It has been attacked, infiltrated, poison pilled, and really rather devastated in especially the last 100 years, but it is still standing, for better or worse, whether it can be restored or it just needs to die in order to give others a chance to rebuild something improved on the core characteristics of the Constitution.
>So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
I appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
Sure, though the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
The issue here is the American tradition of a free press and the legitimate role of leaks in a free country. The PBS article is a bit better on context:
> The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
> In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
> The moves rescinded a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
> the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia.
CNN tells viewers its illegal to read Wikileaks emails (2016)
“Also interesting is—remember—it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
> The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
Former administrations, to their credit, exhibited some degree of restraint that the current administration lacks. However, they indicted Julian Assange and plenty of people back then have warned precisely about the kind of things happening today.
They have duty to not take documents with them when they leave office. And they have duty to protect the documents while in the office.
Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).
It's possible (and in fact the law) that the journalist against whom a search warrant is issued is suspected of aiding in the leak or committing a crime, though. I don't think we yet know that she's not in that category; only that she claims that she was told that she wasn't the focus of the probe and was not currently formally accused of a crime.
Based on your own logic then Assange did not have any requirement to protect classified information yet he was Public Enemy number one.
I know people who personally sat on the Edward Snowden board and spent years of their life trying to create a case within the intelligence community against this guy
There is a difference between someone essentially just handing you a pile of classified documents and you going around soliciting and encouraging people to break the law and mishandle the documents to give to you.
Trump was requested to return the classified documents several times. He said he returned them all, then said he didn't need to return them all, then said he actually declassified them with his mind.
And yeah, it's not a great situation with terrible optics. It would've been better for everyone if he just didn't steal the classified documents to begin with or, once requested, he returned them.
It doesn't. Different rules de facto for the ruling class and the peons. That's one of the failures in American society Trump has been exploiting his whole life.
We are - but it's important to not allow our standards to be shifted. This is unacceptable and while there is plenty of stuff happening today that's unacceptable it's still important to call it out. The past year has been a test of our endurance as illegal actions are piled up (in imo an intentional effort to overwhelm) and our minds must ping pong from foreign leaders being kidnapped to murders to threats against our closest allies all while legal demands from congress specifically passed against the administration are blatantly and illegally ignored.
It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.
Maybe this is too idealistic, but Waltz the IR Realist, frames this as 2 types of situations.
You have your anarchic situations, International Relations, non-law breaking situations like having a conversation with a friend/stranger, and everything not covered in (signed) (legal) writing.
You have your hierarchy. When the police get involved, when your boss can fire you, legal, etc.. In this case, you still need 4 things to happen: There needs to be a legal basis(Legislature), they need to be caught(Executive), they need to be found guilty (Judicial), it needs to be enforced (Executive).
I wouldn't give up in hierarchy yet. But know the limitations.
I wouldn't say "that's nothing." And the O'Keefe thing is certainly problematic, but it's worth noting that the investigation was for purchasing stolen goods/information.
Obviously not many <$20 stolen objects would warrant an FBI raid, but also if it were actually worth <$20 then Veritas wouldn't have paid $40,000 for it.
AFAICT their journalistic immunity basically got them out of charges for buying goods they knew to be stolen at time of purchase, which is federally illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2315 and separately illegal in all 50 states.
Yes that was also bad. I don't know why you say "that's nothing" though, this is just an additional example of a bad thing. We don't have to pick which one is worse and then minimize every other example.
The FBI working to recover stolen property on behalf of a private citizen who was the victim of a crime is something different. Harder to defend a reporter holding stolen property just because the victim is related to a public official. Would actually feel better about defending O'Keefe if the diary did have launch codes.
Wasn't the diary stolen, and thus the property was stolen? If you have proof or reasonable suspicion that someone has possession of a stolen property, shouldn't law enforcement be able to retrieve that?
It's way too far into the Trump administration for people to still be responding to authoritarian moves by Trump by finding Biden administration actions that sound vaguely similar if you don't think too hard and then pretending nothing new is going on here. (Even if it wasn't, "that's nothing" would be a pretty weird inference to draw with a comparison to something that clearly upsets you, and an article is a "piece", not a "peace".)
Along with the diary, tax records, cellphone and family photos were stolen from someone's home, then sold for $40,000 to a far-right activist / centrist paragon of journalism James O'Keefe (whichever you prefer). Said paragon was alleged to have paid these (eventually convicted so I'm allowed to say) criminals more money to steal more stuff from this home.
While the warrant's probable cause section was redacted (maybe inappropriately), the facts of the case are still that the person being raided was alleged to have actually participated in an ongoing conspiracy to commit theft and transporting stolen property across state lines.
I feel like you're starting this with a sympathetic eye towards O'Keefe, who is not now nor has he ever been a good-faith actor. You're also obscuring that the diary was stolen property, which law enforcement absolutely does "raid" homes to recover.
> Were there nuclear launch codes in there or something?
It's funny you say that because that'd be just the same, classified information that leaked. They'd just change the codes and try to find who leaked them. The codes themselves would be inconsequential (once changed).
The O'Keefe thing might have been bad, but raiding and searching a reporter's house is incredibly bad. Do we not get to object to the incredibly bad thing, because what might have been a small bad thing took place? You seem to be falling prey to a logical fallacy of some sort.
Sorry to be a pedant, but not exactly. They raided James O'Keefe's house to seize his cell phones as part of an investigation into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods (the diary) across state lines. Journalists (which is a very broad term, and in this context I think O'Keefe qualifies) are certainly allowed to receive stolen or classified material, which also applies to the raid on the WaPo reporter. They are not allowed to induce others to break the law on their behalf, and that's what was at question in the Biden diary case.
I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.
This is just Hunter Bidens laptop 2.0 equating two non-similar things. The whole point of this post is that the journalist didn't steal anything - Ashley Bidens property was stolen. Burying the lede here.
- it's okay when Side A goes after Assange (a journalist) for possessing classified material. Also, Side A encourages journalists in certain countries to do exactly what Assange did.
- it's not okay when Side B goes after journalists aligned with Side A
While you do not have a legal duty to secure classified information it is illegal for you to possess it. It is illegal for a reporter to have and discuss classified information under strict interpretation of the espionage act, however the supreme court ruled that they can as long as they didn't participate in acquiring it or induce someone to acquire it. They will prosecute a reporter if they have a clear indication they participated in the theft of the classified information.
Regarding Gellman, he could have been prosecuted. Under strict interpretation he admitted to retaining classified information. The government is then in a catch 22 situation where they have to verify, publicly, the information he held creating a Snowden like situation where it is no longer secret. It is a very messy area of law and a zealous DOJ can exert tremendous pressure on individual journalists even though they are better shielded than non-journalists. Essentially, by prosecuting someone they have to prove it is national defense information and in so doing they will end up disclosing the information themselves making it dubious a jury would ever convict.
It is the same reason we can freely discuss Snowden-leaked information now. It is not a secret. Even if it is classified it has lost its legal protection.
In short, if this journalist even vaguely induced anyone to leak information to her she can be prosecuted and the precedent there is much less in her favor.
> So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
When you phrase it that way though, it doesn't actually sound that bad. If a crime was committed, and some uninvolved person possesses evidence about that crime, the authorities need to be able to access it.
To give another scenario: if someone gets shot in front of my parked car, but the bullet passes through them and gets lodged in my car, the police should have the power to compel me to hand over the bullet even if I don't want to (which is important evidence that only I have).
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
But if Barton Gellman was the only person in possession of the full collection, and the police needed it to help find the perpetrator of the crime, it would be legitimate for them to compel Gellman to hand over a copy.
However, it wouldn't be legitimate for them to go after you or me if we download the information from some public website, because that would serve no legitimate investigative purpose.
"Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her."
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
In India we have been going through this the last 14 years or so.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
There’s a subreddit dedicated to fed employee opinions so I assume they already identified all active posters by now and the direct contacts are being correlated.
I hope Washington Post does a better job of training their reporters than my friend’s former employer did.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
> The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?".
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.
I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.
Keep your eyes on protecting the midterms from interference... re ICE / militias etc.
I encourage governors to call up their State's National Guards to protect their State's electoral systems from Federal intrusion and extremist militia groups. This move is founded in the most republican of urges: State Sovereignty. (btw, I'd even consider that as a move in Minneapolis, right now).
"Oops, sorry, your postal votes were kept in this warehouse over there. Yeah, the one that went on fire.". There's even a documentary about it called "Succession".
Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so? What do you expect the legal fallout of that situation to be?
> Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so?
As curretly constituted, no. But it doesn't hurt to start contingency planning to build a force that is eventually loyal to its state and the Constitution over the men who hold the office at that time.
There is a lot of room before that. Rather that the Guard would intervene illegal searches etc, and the inevitable tense ICE - National Guard interaction would change the dynamic, temper ICE's behavior. Moreover, the expected outcome would actually be Trump trying to nationalize that guard, then a constitutional crisis/emergency supreme Court intervention. The most power move that Democrats could make right now is the Republican one: state's rights/ sovereignty
I think that is becoming a less and less ridiculous scenario over time and I hope blue state governors have had long conversations with their national guard leadership about it.
I think the Minnesota National Guard might be willing to fire on masked goons trying to abduct voters from polling stations, regardless of what agency they claim to be from. Even if they're not, their presence might deter the goons from showing up, which I think is a significant risk in the status quo.
I'm very much present in "right wing circles", and I've seen exactly zero mention of "militias" being involved in anything whatsoever. They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been.
Or as some 'uknown' VP would say: We will protect freedom of speech until the last journalist is behind the bars. That is the price we are willing to pay.
This is Nathanson's recent article (gift link) describing her work and the story that likely triggered the FBI's interest. Her reporting tells the stories of federal workers, she's not involved in any investigative work beyond interviewing current or former civil servants who feel helpless and lost now that the career that gave them purpose is no longer the same: wapo.st/49BQBrh
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”
Apparently. If you're scared of the government, this would be an entirely rational thing to do to safeguard the privacy of other people you know on Signal.
mentally unstable people can hold down jobs sometimes, too. Like, those under treatment, but a stressor can cause "relapse" and now you got a predicament at work.
Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
Journalists are the backbone of a healthy democracy.
FU USA FU
And just to be clear: The biggest military force of the world threatens denmark, scrambles the economy around the world due to sudden politic changes (tarifs) and destroys its own integrity as an ally
We're just powerless to do anything, as the (probably) legally elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge into ... everything in sight.
Our Checks refuse to speak up in Congress, and our Balances keep voting to make the (current) POTUS immune to the law.
“When populists get into power, the rhetorical discourse frames tend to be used to implement successive autocratic measures, such as limiting opposition through electoral manipulation, thwarting the free press, changing the constitution in their own favor, and circumscribing minority, civil, political, and economic rights. Populists are usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Since they believe they represent the ‘true people,’ other people’s votes do not really count as legitimate. Consequently, they are hostile to the underlying values and principles of constitutionalism, pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances.”
-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.
It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
So how does the cycle work? I’m not being sarcastic I actually find this a relevant and on-point summation. I happen to be very interested in the systemic consequences and results in Western history as much as is applicable in present USA. I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
One final resolution is the guillotine, dangling upside down on a meat hook, or a bunker fire. Those are extreme but we have to wonder what will stop a specific leader from pushing so far that they meet such a fate. This personality type does not stop unless they have to.
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
> “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
That's what the government said when Pentagon Papers were released. Guess what happened.
But I guess time is different now, and today's supreme court isn't the same as the one in those days.
This strengthens my belief that all governments, mafias, urban gangs, and even cliques, are literally all just ancient tribalism manifested in modernity; may the biggest rocks win.
This shit needs to stop. If you have any Republican representatives right now, you might consider writing them every day.
We can disagree on tax policy, immigration policy, even very strong issues, and I'm happy to fight about those issues and respect disagreement. But in the last month, the president has invaded a foreign country without even notifying congress, has used literal thug tactics to try to get lower interest rates, and now he's obviously illegally entering the home of a reporter to take information which is clear violation of the first and fourth amendments.
This is unamerican. It's a violation of the clear principles of the constitution. It's against the law. It's trivially deserving of impeachment.
Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
>Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
Your assertion isn't supported by, well, anything. The problem is that constituents think they can't affect their representatives' positions. They can.[0][1] Especially if there's a concerted effort to do so.
For every constituent who writes/calls/emails, there are at least a half-dozen more who feel the same way.
The problem isn't that contacting your representatives isn't effective, it's that by not doing so, you're ceding power to those that do.
It's honestly hilarious how fragile all those checks and balances you keep hearing about are. Americans are the first people to criticise other regimes for being authoritarian but I guess the turns have tabled!
It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/ . Another user pointed me to it in the past when I was also frustrated that an obviously engaged story was somehow being buried for reasons I didn't understand.
"that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense."
uh oh sounds like the Guardian is asking for a raid too
The guns haven't been taken away only because people do care so much about the 2nd amendment. Those people understand that the 2nd amendment is the only ultimate defense for the people against the government.
I too wish people also cared as much about the 1st amendment, but sadly I think the tide is turning on that. Too many on both the right and left seem okay with censorship and harassment.
Kind of ironic that there's a big overlap in the venn diagram between 2nd amendment enthusiasts and the crowd that is cheering on the government's authoritarian actions.
With the government harassing, attacking, and now killing innocent American citizens, I'm not so sure if the second amendment is working out so well.
With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.
it's a universal thing I think. in self-defense, when your life is at risk, you can use those guns, what do you have to lose. But in every other case, you have more to lose so guns are useless outside of use by aggressors.
They don't need to take your gun away, they just need to give you enough reasons to not use them. And even in 1779, it required lots of planning and coordination, and lots of loss to life and property to achieve change that way.
The focus should be more on elected politicians, and voters themselves and how they vote/not vote. If the mid-terms were being held today, how many people would vote? It's scary, who wants to risk their lives for a vote? not many.
I fear the governors of states will have to intervene, and the way that goes might lead to a conflict with the federal gov.
The second amendment people are quite fine with the current administration. All you're learning is what real power means and sadly what performative opposition does (nothing).
People care more about their guns because, in their minds, that's the last thing that stands between them and complete helplessness. They have fantasies of starting up an Idaho or Montana-style militia to protect themselves from the liberal and immigrant hoards.
> "They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens
That never happens because the parties vested in that right resist every single time. Effectively. With real numbers. Not media campaigns or propaganda social media mechanisms. Largely without protesting, with no need to get into degrees of legality in doing so.
You don’t get to say “that never happens” as if it isn’t the explicit goal of an entire political party. You get to realize “we don’t let that happen”.
As to current events… the mass deportation guy won elections, why is it you expect armed resistance to federal officers carrying out the exact thing the majority of voters wanted?
You can disagree on anything you like, but, I find the “why aren’t people shooting federal officers who are enforcing immigration law!?” posts to be extreme affirmations of echo chamber. If you don’t like it, get your reps to change the laws, not suggest murdering people who you don’t like.
Not asking adversarially at all here: what do you mean by resisting with "real numbers" without media campaigns, social media, or protesting? What do the vested parties actually do to secure their second amendment rights? Do you just mean having large voting blocs?
No matter how many people vote for something, congress and the president do not have the right to infringe upon peoples’ fourth (searches & seizures) and 14th amendment (due process) rights. Federal agents are systematically violating those rights and not being held accountable due to a blatantly partisan supreme court. With no other alternative, it will be up to everyday citizens to stop those offenses and seek justice.
Take it for whats its worth but I been good friends with someone who works in Newsom camp, and constantly goes for a bite with his team. They talk alot. The main theme now is how to use illegal immigration situation to their benefit. If Newsom is elected President, he wants to go door to door in search for illegal guns that illegals are harboring. Of course all this is BS, or in such insignificant amount that its rather irrelevant. But they want to use Republican's hate for immigrants to help them catalog all serials numbers and ownership of us-owned guns. To some degree it will be fun to watch the "all she had to do is comply with Federal law not to get killed while running away in her car" people rounded up and having their guns cataloged in the name of fight with illegal immigration, and in accordance with Federal law :)
Huh? Are you saying that if Gavin Newsom is elected, rather than turning down the rhetoric, restoring the rule of law, and taking the pressure off of the immigrants and brown people who are scapegoats of the current administration, he instead wants to commit violations of the 4th amendment under the color of searching for immigrants but _actually_ in order to find firearms that are legally owned by US citizens? Presumably in preparation for a mass violation of the 2nd amendment (aka "round 'em up boys")? And your source for this is ... you're friends with someone who works "in the Newsom camp" and you go out for lunch with them?
I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.
Of course the actual implementation is much easier. Just repeal the laws that prevent digitizing the existing records and building a database. That will cover the majority of individuals even if there is a long tail of untracked firearms.
In your “it would be fun to see people I don’t like being killed” you have conflated legal gun ownership that you don’t like to illegally crossing the remaining the borders of a country… and you can’t see it huh?
The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment, limiting firearms ownership, and portraying gun owners as paranoid losers. That would drive many on-the-fence gun owners away from supporting them.
Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
"A rifle behind every blade of grass only works if you've been watering the lawn"
I don't know whether you've noticed, but being armed is simply giving the Federales more reasons to kill you first. The woman shot in Minneapolis was shot on the pretext of using her car as a weapon.
How do people really expect this to work? In detail? You show up with an armed militia at a school and the ICE guys just drive on past (and then raid someone else)? Or are they expecting more of an Amerimaidan situation? Jan 6th situation?
>Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
One dude in his home with a gun or two versus a 50 billion dollar ICE force that has complete immunity and a massive media and political empire ready to spin any bad incident into an us-versus-them narrative.....
Yeah, it is a fantasy. Oh, and if anything really gets out of hand, that political empire also has nuclear weapons.
If you genuinely think we're at the point that we need to start shooting, the onus is on YOU to get armed, get trained, and take action. Don't expect anyone else to come and fight for you, especially those you perceive as your political enemies.
> Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
We may have the most armed citizenry in the world. If the second amendment advocates cared as much about our protected rights as they claim, they’d be all over this. All you’re saying is that our liberties only matter to them as regards people who agree with them politically. Which is absolutely true.
> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment, limiting firearms ownership, and portraying gun owners as paranoid losers. That would drive many on-the-fence gun owners away from supporting them.
No we didn't. Promoting safe and conscientious gun ownership is a good thing, and it's the right thing for society. It's actually a pretty common feeling among gun owners. But gun lobbies has polluted people's minds into believing that the "left hates guns." Which isn't really true.
For sure, there are people whose opinion is colored by the frequency of mass shootings and having their kids deal with active shooter drills, etc. But this isn't always a political issue - my hard right-wing grandma hated guns and forbade their ownership in her house.
I frequent a gun club with a bunch of the leftest, gayest, socialistest, DEIest people you could meet, and we always find like-minded people to chat with. We are a minority, sure, but not a small one.
> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
And I still believe this - more than ever. You'd have to be insane to stand up to the current government right now. They will disappear people to gulags or just shoot them in the face for practically no reason. Imagine what they do to people they genuinely believe are threats.
The American left is very much in favor of the second amendment. You seem to confusing it with liberal centrists, the sort of people who say 'violence is never the solution' and wrings their hands wondering why someone doesn't arrest bad actors in government.
> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment
That's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I know Republicans who unironically say shit like "We can't do background checks. What if I'm trying to buy a gun really quick for a hunting trip?" I would imagine your idea of "attacking" the second amendment is just common sense laws.
> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
In your heart of hearts, do you really believe this has anything to do with it? If we were to take your comment seriously, it just illustrates the right never actually cared about standing up to oppressive governments, they just wanted to be the oppressive government. That is actually pretty consistent with how the left clocked them.
But in reality, it has nothing to do with what you wrote. The biggest 2A fanatics, as someone related to quite a few of them, just have a fantasy of shooting people. They are openly celebrating the death of Renee Nicole Good because that's the kind of thing they want to do.
Not really surprised at this point. After Bush allowed, and Obama pardoned the collateral murder pilots, whistleblowers and journalists in the U.S. have been continually threatened, hazed, jailed and killed at the pleasure of whomever the current president is. This isn't party politics, Bush through Trump, are guilty. This is fascism at its finest...
I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.
Not sure why this is being downvoted when it's quite an obvious trend in American politics. The executive has been getting stronger and Congress has been getting weaker and more dysfunctional for many years.
We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.
Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.
Indeed, don't blame the individual (all thought the individual has plenty of individual blame going their way, rightfully so), blame the system.
Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.
There were over 1000 protests over the weekend. The one I went to in Surprise, AZ had almost 1000 people, in a fairly conservative area with mostly older, white demographics. I think the tide is turning.
Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
I don't know if it's fair to say we're chilling - there have been fairly organized (although admittedly not very large) protests around the nation related to the killing of Nicole Renee Good. I live in southern California and there were at least 6 within easy driving distance this past weekend.
Whenever ICE goes into a new city, they're meeting more and more community resistance. The protestors have mostly been very smart about remaining civil, which continues making ICE look worse and worse as they tear gas and arrest peaceful protestors.
The supreme court has ruled (somewhat surprisingly) that Trump can't deploy the National Guard into cities any longer.
Trump's approval rating has continued steadily declining since he took office, and the midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath.
I'm mid-40s and this is the best-organized and most successful demonstration movement I've witnessed in my lifetime. Occupy got close, but that felt like something that the more 'extreme' ones were actively participating in, with more passive support from the populace. Now it feels like everyone is getting directly involved in one way or another.
I understand protesting ICE for better accountability, they certainly need to be held accountable. But I don't understand those who protest the presence of ICE as a concept. Are there any countries that don't enforce their immigration laws?
C.J. Cregg: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy, or is this not a job for the U. S. House of Representatives?
Leo McGarry: Well, they'll get around to it sooner or later.
C.J. Cregg: So let's make it sooner - let's make it now.
I live in Seattle and I've seen multiple large protests around the ICE murder of Renee Good. Part of the problem is that the US is too large as the people responsible for the jackbooted thugs kicking in doors and killing citizens are on the other side of the country. Business in Minneapolis is practically grinding to a halt as stores and businesses close their door out of fear.
I think we're one or two bad incidents away from wide-scale rioting.
> Why has this analogy been repeated so much lately?
Probably because a country that was famous for trying to spread their idea of "freedom" all across the world, seemingly can't notice themselves that the country is rapidly declining into full on authoritarian dictatorship, with a very skewed perspective of "freedom", and the people who are opposing it, aren't rioting (yet at least).
The judicial arm of the government aren't even enforcing the laws of the country anymore! Not sure how, but it'll get worse before it gets better. Quite literally a fitting analogy in this case.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
> In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
In what way is what she was doing similar to Snowden? Snowden was a huge bombshell, with droves of material, proving what a lot of people suspected was happening, but had no proof.
This journalist seems to have been receiving a ton of "small leaks", of improper firings and a lot of other federal misbehavior, but all within the US, and all with things we already knew was happening.
So rather than "one big sea of bad", she was investigating "a thousand small cuts of bad" across thousands of people who had evidence.
Snowden leaks had global implications that changed relationships between countries, while this seems mostly internal to the US.
No, this is absolutely not normal as the article clearly states. Reporters are very rarely raided in the US under circumstances like these.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
Trump keeps that kind of stuff in their guest bathroom, cool. Reporter, raid and straight to jail. What a timeline to witness. Elected officials glut preventing them from doing their duty.
In some ways this is just desserts after American journalists decided that Julian Assange was not worth defending[1]. Still disheartening to see, since we need robust journalism to keep companies/politicians honest.
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks? If not, it's hard to make a compelling case that this is "normal"
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
As others pointed out, the problem with this is that you end up with a government that can target any reporter by claiming they have "classified materials". No need to prove what those materials are (because they are classified). This is how third world countries choke journalists.
To clarify why it’s aggressive: federal employees have a legal duty to secure classified information, but everyone else does not.
Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
> "So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have."
That's unequivocally a lawful basis for a court-ordered search warrant. They must have probable cause that the person being searched has evidence of a crime; not necessarily that the search target and the criminal suspect are one and the same. Search is investigative; not punitive.
The newsworthy part of this is it's a journalist they raided, and to go after their journalistic sources at that. It's previously been a DoJ policy not to go after the media for things related to their reporting work. But that policy wasn't a legal or constitutional requirement. It's merely something the DoJ voluntarily pledged to stop doing, after the public reaction to President Obama's wiretapping of journalists in 2013,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inv... ("2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters")
> Search is investigative; not punitive.
Let's be real, it can be both. A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain. Raiding in the middle of the night instead of when they step out their door in the morning, ripping open walls when all they're really looking for is a laptop, flipping and trashing the place in a excessive manner, breaking things in the process, pointing guns at children, shooting the family retriever, etc. I don't know if they took this raid too far in any of these ways, but it wouldn't surprise me.
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Anyone who has had their home searched AKA ransacked by law enforcement knows that searches are effectively punitive.
I agree that's what GP wrote, but I think GP's point is that it's not illegal for journalists to have classified documents, so it does not qualify as probable cause.
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This is not a comment about if journalists homes should be more sacred than other people. Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
To my understanding, a US search warrant authorize law enforcement officers to search a particular location and seize specific items. The requirements are:
1# filled in good faith by a law enforcement officer 2# Have probable cause to search 3# issued by a neutral and detached magistrate 4# the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized.
There is nothing about the owner of the location. It can be a car, a parking lot, a home, a work place, a container, a safe, a deposit box in a bank, and so on.
The significant question here is about probable cause. Why were those items interesting for the FBI to collect? Are they looking to secure evidence against the leaker, and if so, what was the specifics of the search warrant? The article states: "The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation".
Probable cause should not be about preventing journalists access to documents they already got, as that would be like going after Barton Gellman.
Most likely securing information/evidence about the leaker, who likely did break the law or connected to someone who did... the first party leaking classified materials broke the law, while other intermediaries may not have. In an investigative process, this isn't at all inappropriate... Journalists aren't sacrosanct, though policies may have varied as to the level investigations will go.
> Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.
Something worth noting at least for pedantic purposes, since practice is quite different; technically speaking every person has the same rights and laws to follow as a journalist. Fundamentally, there are really no differences between a journalist and a regular person engaging in the same activities.
It's an indication of the unique system architecture that differentiates the USA from all other societies on the planet.
It has been attacked, infiltrated, poison pilled, and really rather devastated in especially the last 100 years, but it is still standing, for better or worse, whether it can be restored or it just needs to die in order to give others a chance to rebuild something improved on the core characteristics of the Constitution.
#1 and #3 are the problems it works out to a trust us bro situation.
>So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
...they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
Could you litigate to recover the costs and repair any damage done? Is there case law around what is a reasonable level of dishevelment?
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I appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
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Sure, though the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
The issue here is the American tradition of a free press and the legitimate role of leaks in a free country. The PBS article is a bit better on context:
> The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
> In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
> The moves rescinded a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fbi-searched-home-of-w...
My understanding is that searches of journalists still must be signed off on by the AG personally.
> the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.
If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia.
CNN tells viewers its illegal to read Wikileaks emails (2016)
“Also interesting is—remember—it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRBppdC1h_Y
Thank you, this is really useful context!
Sending the FBI after journalists is not new. They did it in 2010 and 2013 on a much bigger scale.
Some added context for this raid. It allegedly is about a govt contractor
> The search came as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
So, wait, the administration cares about people illegally retaining classified information now?
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> The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
Former administrations, to their credit, exhibited some degree of restraint that the current administration lacks. However, they indicted Julian Assange and plenty of people back then have warned precisely about the kind of things happening today.
- The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism > Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role.wil421
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What if you had the hard copies of the classified files or the original USB drive used in exfiltrate the classified data, not a digital copy.
> To clarify why it’s aggressive: federal employees have a legal duty to secure classified information […]
Does that include (former) presidents as well?
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65775163
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
(Asking for a friend.)
They have duty to not take documents with them when they leave office. And they have duty to protect the documents while in the office.
Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).
It's possible (and in fact the law) that the journalist against whom a search warrant is issued is suspected of aiding in the leak or committing a crime, though. I don't think we yet know that she's not in that category; only that she claims that she was told that she wasn't the focus of the probe and was not currently formally accused of a crime.
Yet others just invite journalists to signal groups accieentally and don't face any repercussions. Strange.
Explain why they pursued Julian Assange then.
Based on your own logic then Assange did not have any requirement to protect classified information yet he was Public Enemy number one.
I know people who personally sat on the Edward Snowden board and spent years of their life trying to create a case within the intelligence community against this guy
> Explain why they pursued Julian Assange then.
There is a difference between someone essentially just handing you a pile of classified documents and you going around soliciting and encouraging people to break the law and mishandle the documents to give to you.
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Didn’t they persecute (or tried to, I don’t remember anymore) Assange for the same reason though? Or is there some clear difference here?
They had a flimsy argument that Assange actively conspired with Manning to hack government machines based on some chat logs.
How does this apply to Trump and mar-a-lago, then? Genuine question.
Trump was requested to return the classified documents several times. He said he returned them all, then said he didn't need to return them all, then said he actually declassified them with his mind.
And yeah, it's not a great situation with terrible optics. It would've been better for everyone if he just didn't steal the classified documents to begin with or, once requested, he returned them.
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It doesn't. Different rules de facto for the ruling class and the peons. That's one of the failures in American society Trump has been exploiting his whole life.
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Not to belittle good framing, but we are /waaaaay/ past the ugly point of law and order.
We are - but it's important to not allow our standards to be shifted. This is unacceptable and while there is plenty of stuff happening today that's unacceptable it's still important to call it out. The past year has been a test of our endurance as illegal actions are piled up (in imo an intentional effort to overwhelm) and our minds must ping pong from foreign leaders being kidnapped to murders to threats against our closest allies all while legal demands from congress specifically passed against the administration are blatantly and illegally ignored.
It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.
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Maybe this is too idealistic, but Waltz the IR Realist, frames this as 2 types of situations.
You have your anarchic situations, International Relations, non-law breaking situations like having a conversation with a friend/stranger, and everything not covered in (signed) (legal) writing.
You have your hierarchy. When the police get involved, when your boss can fire you, legal, etc.. In this case, you still need 4 things to happen: There needs to be a legal basis(Legislature), they need to be caught(Executive), they need to be found guilty (Judicial), it needs to be enforced (Executive).
I wouldn't give up in hierarchy yet. But know the limitations.
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I wouldn't say "that's nothing." And the O'Keefe thing is certainly problematic, but it's worth noting that the investigation was for purchasing stolen goods/information.
Obviously not many <$20 stolen objects would warrant an FBI raid, but also if it were actually worth <$20 then Veritas wouldn't have paid $40,000 for it.
AFAICT their journalistic immunity basically got them out of charges for buying goods they knew to be stolen at time of purchase, which is federally illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2315 and separately illegal in all 50 states.
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Yes that was also bad. I don't know why you say "that's nothing" though, this is just an additional example of a bad thing. We don't have to pick which one is worse and then minimize every other example.
The FBI working to recover stolen property on behalf of a private citizen who was the victim of a crime is something different. Harder to defend a reporter holding stolen property just because the victim is related to a public official. Would actually feel better about defending O'Keefe if the diary did have launch codes.
Wasn't the diary stolen, and thus the property was stolen? If you have proof or reasonable suspicion that someone has possession of a stolen property, shouldn't law enforcement be able to retrieve that?
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It's way too far into the Trump administration for people to still be responding to authoritarian moves by Trump by finding Biden administration actions that sound vaguely similar if you don't think too hard and then pretending nothing new is going on here. (Even if it wasn't, "that's nothing" would be a pretty weird inference to draw with a comparison to something that clearly upsets you, and an article is a "piece", not a "peace".)
Um no.
Along with the diary, tax records, cellphone and family photos were stolen from someone's home, then sold for $40,000 to a far-right activist / centrist paragon of journalism James O'Keefe (whichever you prefer). Said paragon was alleged to have paid these (eventually convicted so I'm allowed to say) criminals more money to steal more stuff from this home.
While the warrant's probable cause section was redacted (maybe inappropriately), the facts of the case are still that the person being raided was alleged to have actually participated in an ongoing conspiracy to commit theft and transporting stolen property across state lines.
I feel like you're starting this with a sympathetic eye towards O'Keefe, who is not now nor has he ever been a good-faith actor. You're also obscuring that the diary was stolen property, which law enforcement absolutely does "raid" homes to recover.
> Were there nuclear launch codes in there or something?
It's funny you say that because that'd be just the same, classified information that leaked. They'd just change the codes and try to find who leaked them. The codes themselves would be inconsequential (once changed).
The O'Keefe thing might have been bad, but raiding and searching a reporter's house is incredibly bad. Do we not get to object to the incredibly bad thing, because what might have been a small bad thing took place? You seem to be falling prey to a logical fallacy of some sort.
Sorry to be a pedant, but not exactly. They raided James O'Keefe's house to seize his cell phones as part of an investigation into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods (the diary) across state lines. Journalists (which is a very broad term, and in this context I think O'Keefe qualifies) are certainly allowed to receive stolen or classified material, which also applies to the raid on the WaPo reporter. They are not allowed to induce others to break the law on their behalf, and that's what was at question in the Biden diary case.
I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.
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This is just Hunter Bidens laptop 2.0 equating two non-similar things. The whole point of this post is that the journalist didn't steal anything - Ashley Bidens property was stolen. Burying the lede here.
To my naive brain, the rules seem to be:
- it's okay when Side A goes after Assange (a journalist) for possessing classified material. Also, Side A encourages journalists in certain countries to do exactly what Assange did.
- it's not okay when Side B goes after journalists aligned with Side A
While you do not have a legal duty to secure classified information it is illegal for you to possess it. It is illegal for a reporter to have and discuss classified information under strict interpretation of the espionage act, however the supreme court ruled that they can as long as they didn't participate in acquiring it or induce someone to acquire it. They will prosecute a reporter if they have a clear indication they participated in the theft of the classified information.
Regarding Gellman, he could have been prosecuted. Under strict interpretation he admitted to retaining classified information. The government is then in a catch 22 situation where they have to verify, publicly, the information he held creating a Snowden like situation where it is no longer secret. It is a very messy area of law and a zealous DOJ can exert tremendous pressure on individual journalists even though they are better shielded than non-journalists. Essentially, by prosecuting someone they have to prove it is national defense information and in so doing they will end up disclosing the information themselves making it dubious a jury would ever convict.
It is the same reason we can freely discuss Snowden-leaked information now. It is not a secret. Even if it is classified it has lost its legal protection.
In short, if this journalist even vaguely induced anyone to leak information to her she can be prosecuted and the precedent there is much less in her favor.
> So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
When you phrase it that way though, it doesn't actually sound that bad. If a crime was committed, and some uninvolved person possesses evidence about that crime, the authorities need to be able to access it.
To give another scenario: if someone gets shot in front of my parked car, but the bullet passes through them and gets lodged in my car, the police should have the power to compel me to hand over the bullet even if I don't want to (which is important evidence that only I have).
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
But if Barton Gellman was the only person in possession of the full collection, and the police needed it to help find the perpetrator of the crime, it would be legitimate for them to compel Gellman to hand over a copy.
However, it wouldn't be legitimate for them to go after you or me if we download the information from some public website, because that would serve no legitimate investigative purpose.
"Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her."
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
In India we have been going through this the last 14 years or so.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/stan-swamy-h...
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617645
comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
Soap box > ballot box > jury box > ammo box
We are on step 3
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I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
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Usually you would only communicate through secure drop. Looks like the Washington post uses it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/securedrop/
There’s a subreddit dedicated to fed employee opinions so I assume they already identified all active posters by now and the direct contacts are being correlated.
I hope Washington Post does a better job of training their reporters than my friend’s former employer did.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
Shouldn't this be basic knowledge for journalist?
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>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
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> The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?".
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech
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Don't be ridiculous. Charging someone can be fraught. They will simply and quietly disappear.
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Denaturalize and deport?
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...
Or they'll have ICE take them and they'll be deported or made to disappear. Some might even end up dying.
That's how the US is right now.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resign...
If you've got a way for us to not just passively sit by and watch it happen, well, we'd all love to see the plan.
Charging with a crime is so last decade. Nowadays they just shoot people they don't like.
Ironic that the orange man is telling Iranians to risk their lives.
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That's always the country we've lived in.
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.
I don’t have to accept any assertion in the absence of evidence directly supporting it.
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Counterpoint - if they have full root access to any phone, why did they need to do the raid?
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This isn't hyperbole. They literally went to the king with gold in hands. There's no WAY they didn't open up their platforms to him.
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I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.
Keep your eyes on protecting the midterms from interference... re ICE / militias etc. I encourage governors to call up their State's National Guards to protect their State's electoral systems from Federal intrusion and extremist militia groups. This move is founded in the most republican of urges: State Sovereignty. (btw, I'd even consider that as a move in Minneapolis, right now).
I don’t think National Guard around polling places would be good for turnout. Voting in advance, from home, is a solution already in place for most.
"Oops, sorry, your postal votes were kept in this warehouse over there. Yeah, the one that went on fire.". There's even a documentary about it called "Succession".
Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so? What do you expect the legal fallout of that situation to be?
> Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so?
As curretly constituted, no. But it doesn't hurt to start contingency planning to build a force that is eventually loyal to its state and the Constitution over the men who hold the office at that time.
There is a lot of room before that. Rather that the Guard would intervene illegal searches etc, and the inevitable tense ICE - National Guard interaction would change the dynamic, temper ICE's behavior. Moreover, the expected outcome would actually be Trump trying to nationalize that guard, then a constitutional crisis/emergency supreme Court intervention. The most power move that Democrats could make right now is the Republican one: state's rights/ sovereignty
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I think that is becoming a less and less ridiculous scenario over time and I hope blue state governors have had long conversations with their national guard leadership about it.
I think the Minnesota National Guard might be willing to fire on masked goons trying to abduct voters from polling stations, regardless of what agency they claim to be from. Even if they're not, their presence might deter the goons from showing up, which I think is a significant risk in the status quo.
I'm very much present in "right wing circles", and I've seen exactly zero mention of "militias" being involved in anything whatsoever. They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been.
Where are you getting this?
When the militias can earn big dollars with zero requirements doing what they already wanted to do by joining ICE, the differences is meaningless.
> They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been
J6ers attacking cops is currently being celebrated. That's an ad hoc militia. (Tarrio built an actual one.)
Or as some 'uknown' VP would say: We will protect freedom of speech until the last journalist is behind the bars. That is the price we are willing to pay.
Are you referencing something? I can’t find any utterances of this phrase or something similar to it. Sounds juicy though.
No and yes. The first sentence paraphrases certain someone blabbering about the lack of freedom of speech in the EU. The second is from Shrek :-)
This country is turning into a meme
This is Nathanson's recent article (gift link) describing her work and the story that likely triggered the FBI's interest. Her reporting tells the stories of federal workers, she's not involved in any investigative work beyond interviewing current or former civil servants who feel helpless and lost now that the career that gave them purpose is no longer the same: wapo.st/49BQBrh
Steps before self-ending:
1. Feed cat, ensure that friend will adopt cat.
2. Talk to any family members.
3. Uninstall Signal
4. Take too many Ambien.
Or:
“I’m sending this to you confidentially so please don’t respond since metadata will show I contacted you.”
Reporter: responds anyway
[flagged]
Apparently. If you're scared of the government, this would be an entirely rational thing to do to safeguard the privacy of other people you know on Signal.
mentally unstable people can hold down jobs sometimes, too. Like, those under treatment, but a stressor can cause "relapse" and now you got a predicament at work.
Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
I'd say it's not that unusual in totalitarian dictatorships actually.
Journalists are the backbone of a healthy democracy.
FU USA FU
And just to be clear: The biggest military force of the world threatens denmark, scrambles the economy around the world due to sudden politic changes (tarifs) and destroys its own integrity as an ally
Oh, we're clear.
We're just powerless to do anything, as the (probably) legally elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge into ... everything in sight.
Our Checks refuse to speak up in Congress, and our Balances keep voting to make the (current) POTUS immune to the law.
“When populists get into power, the rhetorical discourse frames tend to be used to implement successive autocratic measures, such as limiting opposition through electoral manipulation, thwarting the free press, changing the constitution in their own favor, and circumscribing minority, civil, political, and economic rights. Populists are usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Since they believe they represent the ‘true people,’ other people’s votes do not really count as legitimate. Consequently, they are hostile to the underlying values and principles of constitutionalism, pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances.”
-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.
"Liberal Democracy" is such a charged word.
It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
So how does the cycle work? I’m not being sarcastic I actually find this a relevant and on-point summation. I happen to be very interested in the systemic consequences and results in Western history as much as is applicable in present USA. I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
One final resolution is the guillotine, dangling upside down on a meat hook, or a bunker fire. Those are extreme but we have to wonder what will stop a specific leader from pushing so far that they meet such a fate. This personality type does not stop unless they have to.
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It’s somewhat hopeful to assume that it is a cycle.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
> “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
That's what the government said when Pentagon Papers were released. Guess what happened.
But I guess time is different now, and today's supreme court isn't the same as the one in those days.
This strengthens my belief that all governments, mafias, urban gangs, and even cliques, are literally all just ancient tribalism manifested in modernity; may the biggest rocks win.
> impair public interest reporting in general.
Some administrations may see this as a feature not bug…
This shit needs to stop. If you have any Republican representatives right now, you might consider writing them every day.
We can disagree on tax policy, immigration policy, even very strong issues, and I'm happy to fight about those issues and respect disagreement. But in the last month, the president has invaded a foreign country without even notifying congress, has used literal thug tactics to try to get lower interest rates, and now he's obviously illegally entering the home of a reporter to take information which is clear violation of the first and fourth amendments.
This is unamerican. It's a violation of the clear principles of the constitution. It's against the law. It's trivially deserving of impeachment.
Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
>Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
Your assertion isn't supported by, well, anything. The problem is that constituents think they can't affect their representatives' positions. They can.[0][1] Especially if there's a concerted effort to do so.
For every constituent who writes/calls/emails, there are at least a half-dozen more who feel the same way.
The problem isn't that contacting your representatives isn't effective, it's that by not doing so, you're ceding power to those that do.
[0] https://act.represent.us/sign/does-calling-congress-really-w...
[1] https://americansofconscience.com/calling-congress-still-mat...
Looks like even Jeff's wealth and bribery couldn't stop this from happening.
Jeff is actively abetting this.
Wouldn't it be easier to just fire the journalist, like what he did with the editorial?
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Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and gave a boatload of money to Trump's campaign. Democracy dies in darkness.
Don’t ever forget what Bezos chooses to do or not to do here, whenever his name comes up in any context in future.
It's honestly hilarious how fragile all those checks and balances you keep hearing about are. Americans are the first people to criticise other regimes for being authoritarian but I guess the turns have tabled!
Without paywall: https://archive.is/1haDB
fuck this -- how is this not on the front page of HN?
It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/ . Another user pointed me to it in the past when I was also frustrated that an obviously engaged story was somehow being buried for reasons I didn't understand.
>It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/active
"that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense."
uh oh sounds like the Guardian is asking for a raid too
The Guardian is not an American newspaper.
Not sure why they call the name ("Department of War") informal. Seems pretty formal to me. It's displayed on the building.
It takes an act of Congress to change the name. Trump just made one of his dictatorial proclamations.
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It'd be real cool if all the second amendment (guns) people cared as much about the first amendment (free speech and freedom of press).
"They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens.
But people are being targeted for what they say, for disagreeing publicly. That's real. And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
The guns haven't been taken away only because people do care so much about the 2nd amendment. Those people understand that the 2nd amendment is the only ultimate defense for the people against the government.
I too wish people also cared as much about the 1st amendment, but sadly I think the tide is turning on that. Too many on both the right and left seem okay with censorship and harassment.
Kind of ironic that there's a big overlap in the venn diagram between 2nd amendment enthusiasts and the crowd that is cheering on the government's authoritarian actions.
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With the government harassing, attacking, and now killing innocent American citizens, I'm not so sure if the second amendment is working out so well.
With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.
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> And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
They notice. They care. They just love it.
The "free speech absolutist" folks never were.
The “don’t tread on me” folks converted to “comply or die” shockingly quickly.
"Don't tread on me, tread on them"
it's a universal thing I think. in self-defense, when your life is at risk, you can use those guns, what do you have to lose. But in every other case, you have more to lose so guns are useless outside of use by aggressors.
They don't need to take your gun away, they just need to give you enough reasons to not use them. And even in 1779, it required lots of planning and coordination, and lots of loss to life and property to achieve change that way.
The focus should be more on elected politicians, and voters themselves and how they vote/not vote. If the mid-terms were being held today, how many people would vote? It's scary, who wants to risk their lives for a vote? not many.
I fear the governors of states will have to intervene, and the way that goes might lead to a conflict with the federal gov.
It feels like all of the "patriots" joined ICE.
>It feels like all of the "patriots" joined ICE.
That's certainly possible. Maybe even likely. Fortunately, we now have more information[0] to correlate whether or not that's true.
Perhaps soon we'll see a "Show HN" with a searchable database of those folks with links to known "patriot" groups. That would be interesting.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whistleblower-leaks-person...
The second amendment people are quite fine with the current administration. All you're learning is what real power means and sadly what performative opposition does (nothing).
People care more about their guns because, in their minds, that's the last thing that stands between them and complete helplessness. They have fantasies of starting up an Idaho or Montana-style militia to protect themselves from the liberal and immigrant hoards.
It was never principled opposition to anything, just a power fantasy that the current admin lets them live even more viscerally.
> "They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens
That never happens because the parties vested in that right resist every single time. Effectively. With real numbers. Not media campaigns or propaganda social media mechanisms. Largely without protesting, with no need to get into degrees of legality in doing so.
You don’t get to say “that never happens” as if it isn’t the explicit goal of an entire political party. You get to realize “we don’t let that happen”.
As to current events… the mass deportation guy won elections, why is it you expect armed resistance to federal officers carrying out the exact thing the majority of voters wanted?
You can disagree on anything you like, but, I find the “why aren’t people shooting federal officers who are enforcing immigration law!?” posts to be extreme affirmations of echo chamber. If you don’t like it, get your reps to change the laws, not suggest murdering people who you don’t like.
Not asking adversarially at all here: what do you mean by resisting with "real numbers" without media campaigns, social media, or protesting? What do the vested parties actually do to secure their second amendment rights? Do you just mean having large voting blocs?
No matter how many people vote for something, congress and the president do not have the right to infringe upon peoples’ fourth (searches & seizures) and 14th amendment (due process) rights. Federal agents are systematically violating those rights and not being held accountable due to a blatantly partisan supreme court. With no other alternative, it will be up to everyday citizens to stop those offenses and seek justice.
Take it for whats its worth but I been good friends with someone who works in Newsom camp, and constantly goes for a bite with his team. They talk alot. The main theme now is how to use illegal immigration situation to their benefit. If Newsom is elected President, he wants to go door to door in search for illegal guns that illegals are harboring. Of course all this is BS, or in such insignificant amount that its rather irrelevant. But they want to use Republican's hate for immigrants to help them catalog all serials numbers and ownership of us-owned guns. To some degree it will be fun to watch the "all she had to do is comply with Federal law not to get killed while running away in her car" people rounded up and having their guns cataloged in the name of fight with illegal immigration, and in accordance with Federal law :)
Huh? Are you saying that if Gavin Newsom is elected, rather than turning down the rhetoric, restoring the rule of law, and taking the pressure off of the immigrants and brown people who are scapegoats of the current administration, he instead wants to commit violations of the 4th amendment under the color of searching for immigrants but _actually_ in order to find firearms that are legally owned by US citizens? Presumably in preparation for a mass violation of the 2nd amendment (aka "round 'em up boys")? And your source for this is ... you're friends with someone who works "in the Newsom camp" and you go out for lunch with them?
I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.
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Of course the actual implementation is much easier. Just repeal the laws that prevent digitizing the existing records and building a database. That will cover the majority of individuals even if there is a long tail of untracked firearms.
In your “it would be fun to see people I don’t like being killed” you have conflated legal gun ownership that you don’t like to illegally crossing the remaining the borders of a country… and you can’t see it huh?
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The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment, limiting firearms ownership, and portraying gun owners as paranoid losers. That would drive many on-the-fence gun owners away from supporting them.
Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
"A rifle behind every blade of grass only works if you've been watering the lawn"
I don't know whether you've noticed, but being armed is simply giving the Federales more reasons to kill you first. The woman shot in Minneapolis was shot on the pretext of using her car as a weapon.
How do people really expect this to work? In detail? You show up with an armed militia at a school and the ICE guys just drive on past (and then raid someone else)? Or are they expecting more of an Amerimaidan situation? Jan 6th situation?
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>Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
One dude in his home with a gun or two versus a 50 billion dollar ICE force that has complete immunity and a massive media and political empire ready to spin any bad incident into an us-versus-them narrative.....
Yeah, it is a fantasy. Oh, and if anything really gets out of hand, that political empire also has nuclear weapons.
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It took me 15 minutes to buy an AR-15 and a pistol in 2025, how did the left do this?
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You'd have to be pretty insane to see opposing raids on journalists as supporting "The American Left".
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Adding this on as a separate thought:
If you genuinely think we're at the point that we need to start shooting, the onus is on YOU to get armed, get trained, and take action. Don't expect anyone else to come and fight for you, especially those you perceive as your political enemies.
> Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
We may have the most armed citizenry in the world. If the second amendment advocates cared as much about our protected rights as they claim, they’d be all over this. All you’re saying is that our liberties only matter to them as regards people who agree with them politically. Which is absolutely true.
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> Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
Forget the left. Why don't they stand up for themselves?
> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment, limiting firearms ownership, and portraying gun owners as paranoid losers. That would drive many on-the-fence gun owners away from supporting them.
No we didn't. Promoting safe and conscientious gun ownership is a good thing, and it's the right thing for society. It's actually a pretty common feeling among gun owners. But gun lobbies has polluted people's minds into believing that the "left hates guns." Which isn't really true.
For sure, there are people whose opinion is colored by the frequency of mass shootings and having their kids deal with active shooter drills, etc. But this isn't always a political issue - my hard right-wing grandma hated guns and forbade their ownership in her house.
I frequent a gun club with a bunch of the leftest, gayest, socialistest, DEIest people you could meet, and we always find like-minded people to chat with. We are a minority, sure, but not a small one.
> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
And I still believe this - more than ever. You'd have to be insane to stand up to the current government right now. They will disappear people to gulags or just shoot them in the face for practically no reason. Imagine what they do to people they genuinely believe are threats.
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You’re right, owning a hand gun will be effective means to rebel against the most militarized government in the world.
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The American left is very much in favor of the second amendment. You seem to confusing it with liberal centrists, the sort of people who say 'violence is never the solution' and wrings their hands wondering why someone doesn't arrest bad actors in government.
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> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment
That's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I know Republicans who unironically say shit like "We can't do background checks. What if I'm trying to buy a gun really quick for a hunting trip?" I would imagine your idea of "attacking" the second amendment is just common sense laws.
> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
In your heart of hearts, do you really believe this has anything to do with it? If we were to take your comment seriously, it just illustrates the right never actually cared about standing up to oppressive governments, they just wanted to be the oppressive government. That is actually pretty consistent with how the left clocked them.
But in reality, it has nothing to do with what you wrote. The biggest 2A fanatics, as someone related to quite a few of them, just have a fantasy of shooting people. They are openly celebrating the death of Renee Nicole Good because that's the kind of thing they want to do.
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Not really surprised at this point. After Bush allowed, and Obama pardoned the collateral murder pilots, whistleblowers and journalists in the U.S. have been continually threatened, hazed, jailed and killed at the pleasure of whomever the current president is. This isn't party politics, Bush through Trump, are guilty. This is fascism at its finest...
I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.
Most of which is downstream of 9/11 and the War on Terror. That provided lots of bipartisan support for state sponsored killings.
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Not sure why this is being downvoted when it's quite an obvious trend in American politics. The executive has been getting stronger and Congress has been getting weaker and more dysfunctional for many years.
We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.
Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.
They raided Trump's wife's underwear drawer too so Trump is a victim of this FBI overreach as well.
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Indeed, don't blame the individual (all thought the individual has plenty of individual blame going their way, rightfully so), blame the system.
Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.
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Between this and Minneapolis I guess the water temperature just keeps on being turned up, and us frogs are just chilling out in our warm baths.
There were over 1000 protests over the weekend. The one I went to in Surprise, AZ had almost 1000 people, in a fairly conservative area with mostly older, white demographics. I think the tide is turning.
Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
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> There were over 1000 protests OVER THE WEEKEND
At the risk of sounding sarky, you are going to have to do more than protest at the weekend (!) to stop what is happening to you.
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Not everyone is chilling. Some of us are protesting and/or moving our families out of the country.
I don't know if it's fair to say we're chilling - there have been fairly organized (although admittedly not very large) protests around the nation related to the killing of Nicole Renee Good. I live in southern California and there were at least 6 within easy driving distance this past weekend.
Whenever ICE goes into a new city, they're meeting more and more community resistance. The protestors have mostly been very smart about remaining civil, which continues making ICE look worse and worse as they tear gas and arrest peaceful protestors.
The supreme court has ruled (somewhat surprisingly) that Trump can't deploy the National Guard into cities any longer.
Trump's approval rating has continued steadily declining since he took office, and the midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath.
I'm mid-40s and this is the best-organized and most successful demonstration movement I've witnessed in my lifetime. Occupy got close, but that felt like something that the more 'extreme' ones were actively participating in, with more passive support from the populace. Now it feels like everyone is getting directly involved in one way or another.
I understand protesting ICE for better accountability, they certainly need to be held accountable. But I don't understand those who protest the presence of ICE as a concept. Are there any countries that don't enforce their immigration laws?
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That was one of the main plot points in Andor.
The rebellion had to raise the temperature faster, more dramatically, in order to wake people up. To make the frogs realize it was hot and jump out.
Lonni Jung: "You realize what you've set in motion? People will suffer."
Luthen Rael: "That's the plan."
Luthen believes that to succeed, they need to anger the Empire and make them come down hard on the citizens, which in turn will fuel the rebellion.
Reminds me of the West Wing:
C.J. Cregg: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy, or is this not a job for the U. S. House of Representatives?
Leo McGarry: Well, they'll get around to it sooner or later.
C.J. Cregg: So let's make it sooner - let's make it now.
We have left wing accelerationists in the US too.
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Did people not like Andor? Or the same Russian Bots that downvote any anti-right-wing/brown-shirt sentiment.
Woah woah woah! I still haven't watched this. (I know, I know...)
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I live in Seattle and I've seen multiple large protests around the ICE murder of Renee Good. Part of the problem is that the US is too large as the people responsible for the jackbooted thugs kicking in doors and killing citizens are on the other side of the country. Business in Minneapolis is practically grinding to a halt as stores and businesses close their door out of fear.
I think we're one or two bad incidents away from wide-scale rioting.
We have the tech elite to thank for this disaster
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Why has this analogy been repeated so much lately? Did someone famous use it or something?
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not denying it's appropriate; it just seems remarkable to me that it's being used so often lately.
> Why has this analogy been repeated so much lately?
Probably because a country that was famous for trying to spread their idea of "freedom" all across the world, seemingly can't notice themselves that the country is rapidly declining into full on authoritarian dictatorship, with a very skewed perspective of "freedom", and the people who are opposing it, aren't rioting (yet at least).
The judicial arm of the government aren't even enforcing the laws of the country anymore! Not sure how, but it'll get worse before it gets better. Quite literally a fitting analogy in this case.
It's a 100+ years old metaphor widely used at virtually any point in time since then to describe all kind of situations
Have fun seeing "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" everywhere.
Baader-Meinhof effect.
Because it's appropriate and descriptive?
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To think that this administration makes Nixon look principled.
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This dunk might work outside of the US, but inside raving about freedom has always been justification for a power grab
They should have gone to Mar Lago to find their missing classified documents. Do they not watch the news? /s
In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
> In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
In what way is what she was doing similar to Snowden? Snowden was a huge bombshell, with droves of material, proving what a lot of people suspected was happening, but had no proof.
This journalist seems to have been receiving a ton of "small leaks", of improper firings and a lot of other federal misbehavior, but all within the US, and all with things we already knew was happening.
So rather than "one big sea of bad", she was investigating "a thousand small cuts of bad" across thousands of people who had evidence.
Snowden leaks had global implications that changed relationships between countries, while this seems mostly internal to the US.
Agreed. Snowden also wasn't a journalist but the source himself. Having over 1000 individual sources of information is not at all the same thing.
Or intimidate a member of the press that isn't "bending the knee" to them.
>In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
I bet it's the recipe for the military-grade copium some people are on
“ Agents searched Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home and seized devices in inquiry tied to a classified materials case”
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
No, this is absolutely not normal as the article clearly states. Reporters are very rarely raided in the US under circumstances like these.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
Here’s a less sensational article. The journalist is not even a target of the investigation, the target is a contractor leaking documents.
“ Natanson was told that she is not a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Instead, it appears to be related to an ongoing probe of a government contractor in Maryland.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-was...
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Trump keeps that kind of stuff in their guest bathroom, cool. Reporter, raid and straight to jail. What a timeline to witness. Elected officials glut preventing them from doing their duty.
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In some ways this is just desserts after American journalists decided that Julian Assange was not worth defending[1]. Still disheartening to see, since we need robust journalism to keep companies/politicians honest.
[1] https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/1116371239705227265
>, this is absolutely not normal
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
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Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks? If not, it's hard to make a compelling case that this is "normal"
>Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks?
James Burke, the Veritas guy, the ABC News guy, etc.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
As others pointed out, the problem with this is that you end up with a government that can target any reporter by claiming they have "classified materials". No need to prove what those materials are (because they are classified). This is how third world countries choke journalists.
In the USA, the claim has to be convincing to a judge, so it’s not quite as arbitrary as you indicate.
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Of course they had a search warrant.
ICE has been knocking down doors and ripping folks from their homes without warrants. Why would the FBI under this administration behave differently?