Comment by mw888
15 hours ago
There seems to be wild speculation about freedom of speech rights or hacking Signal.
The FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff.
15 hours ago
There seems to be wild speculation about freedom of speech rights or hacking Signal.
The FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff.
Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that.
If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.
The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point. A particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago.
As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.
>particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago.
iirc that was something more than infiltration. The FBI found an extremist loser who lived in a basement, egged him on, helped him network & gave him resources. Without them, he probably would have been thinking really hard about it, not much more.
2 replies →
They've been doing it from day 1.
It's how they found about Martin Luther King's affairs and what led them to write him a letter telling him to kill himself.
> As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.
Given FBI Director Kash Patel is a Trump appointee, and I might even go so far as to say a Trump stooge, I think we have to assume that that is exactly what will happen.
1 reply →
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
1 reply →
> grassroots political opponents
Organised criminal activity.
Edit: I’m not complaining about moderation but it would be fascinating to know what part of this others believe is incorrect:
- Do you think the Anti ICE groups are not organised?
- Do you think obstructing federal officers is not criminal?
- Something else.
Organized as in they have meetings, serve cookies, and coffee? Most likely not. These anti-ice groups seem to be extemporaneous meetups.
Define obstruction. Everything reported, blowing whistles, encouraging businesses not provide service to ICE agents, and recording from a distance is not obstruction. It's a First Amendment right to keep government forces in check.
Preventing out-of-control federal officers from committing crimes is NOT criminal. Especially when you don't even know if they ARE federal officers, and won't show their faces, badges, or warrants.
I don’t like political power being used to go after an intimidate opponents at all, but we can’t pretend that it wasn’t a constant during the previous admin.
If I recall correctly, they actually set the precedent here by adding civil war era conspiracy charges to put an additional 10 years on women who protested in front of an abortion clinic.
AI summary…
> Six of the protesters (including Heather Idoni) were convicted in January 2024 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—a misdemeanor carrying up to one year in prison—and felony conspiracy against rights under 18 U.S.C. § 241, which carries a maximum of 10 years. The conspiracy charge stemmed from evidence that the group planned and coordinated the blockade in advance to interfere with clinic operations.
Here's one the members of that group: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tennessee-woman-sentenc...
> As a Health Center staff member ('Victim-1') attempted to open the door for the volunteer, WILLIAMS purposefully leaned against the door, crushing Victim-1’s hand. Victim-1 yelled, "She’s crushing my hand," but WILLIAMS remained against the door, trapping Victim-1’s hand and injuring it.
> On the livestream on June 19, 2020, WILLIAMS stood within inches of the Health Center’s chief administrative officer and threatened to “terrorize this place” and warned that “we’re gonna terrorize you so good, your business is gonna be over mama.” Similarly, WILLIAMS stood within inches of a Health Center security officer and threatened “war.” WILLIAMS also stated that she would act by “any means necessary.”
The reason they could prosecute to this degree? https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/18/anti-abortion-surgi-clinic...
A member of the conspiracy admitted to the planning; they have text messages and detail of deciding who will risk arrest, after going over the fact they'd be trespassing and violating the FACE act.
Do you think the administrative and medical staff present in 2020 would agree with you? That the group that blockaded, threatened and assaulted in one instance access to health services are in fact the victims here of government overreach?
'protested' by forcibly precenting individual civilians access to medical care? Sure, this seems the same.
3 replies →
> "An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents"
Are you referring to how a Democratic party AG's entire campaign was to "pursue Donald Trump". And then she found a victimless "crime", that every real estate developer is guilty of, in which nobody was harmed, and the banks were equally guilty, for which the statute of limitations has expired, to get her 34 felonies just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?
> just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?
Being convicted of a crime does not stop you from running for president. Being in prison also does not stop you from running for president -- one person has. The only qualifications necessary to run for president are to be a natural born citizen, have spent the last 14 years living in the country, and be at least 35 years of age.
Also, the criminal trial against him started after he assumed office for the second time. EDIT: Got my years mixed up. Ignore that last bit.
Maybe that was also bad. And maybe the current admin is still more brazen, less accountable, more selfish and more vindictive. Why even bring this up? Should we not care about this because other people did bad stuff?
Seems like there are hundreds of people in those groups.
Can't be hard to get into for some skilled undercover cops. TV shows have shown me they do these things all the time!
They had already been outed by internet sleuths possibly, but not necessarily, informed by leaks from the police. The FBI is making a press release about an investigation only to save face because the criminal conspiracy is already common knowledge among those interested. In the universe of a competent FBI, which I think is ours, they already know who is in the network. They have well-publicized, patently unlawful dragnet signals intelligence collection capabilities. The targets are people who organize openly on Zoom and Discord, and broadcast volumes of their ideology on bumper stickers, Mastodon, and Blue-Twitter. So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate? I feel like ICE is Floyd/BLM repeated as farce.
> In the universe of a competent FBI, which I think is ours, they already know who is in the network.
Certainly they know the handles of those people, and what they've said and what documents they've exchanged.
Connecting Signal accounts to real-world identity... well, that's definitely the FBI's wheelhouse, but some might make it easier or harder than others.
But there are a few cases where even the Internet sleuths are pretty confident about identity.
> So why does (if the press is to be believed) an authoritarian, fascist, ultra-right-wing regime allow them to operate?
Rationality requires treating behaviour inconsistent with a quality as evidence against that quality.
It would help if they stopped holding demonstrations in front of facilities with huge amounts of facial recognition technology.
Protesting is not something you should do "casually."
Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity. It was enshrined in the First Amendment as a fundamental check on the federal government in order to recognize the natural right of a self-governing people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.
What is not something that should be gone casually – or really at all – is an attempt to engage in insurrection with black bloc or globalized intifada insurgency tactics to prevent the enforcement of law.
25 replies →
Protesting is a fundamental human right and obligation. It is something that you should do as casually as you would voting, volunteering, and taking out the garbage: something you do from time to time when the moment demands it.
See also: https://enwp.org/Chilling_effect
31 replies →
[flagged]
> Protesting is not something you should do "casually”
Neither is violently undermining our Constitutional order.
These folks should be on notice that they will be prosecuted. If we played by Trump’s book, we’d charge them with treason and then let them appeal against the death penalty for the rest of their lives.
10 replies →
Funny how HN discussions about the development of encrypted messaging apps often include remarks from commenters about the need for a "group chat" feature
In some cases, popular messaging apps that initially did not provide "group chat" have since added this "feature", apparently in response to "user demand"
The so-called "tech" companies that control these apps from Silicon Valley and Redmond have aligned with one political party, generally whichever party is in power, for "business" reasons, e.g., doing whatever is necessary to ensure their continued profits free from regulation
Surveillance is their core business
Or just got control of 1 person’s phone/account.
Yea, I just assume any easily joinable movement like this is a honeypot of sorts.
Most of these groups are centered around a neighborhood, or a school, or a church. For anything school related, people are very suspicious of outsiders trying to join. Churches and neighborhood groups might be more open, I suspect, but still gotta get somebody who lives there or goes to the church to vouch for you.
But the worst case for an outsider joining is not very bad; they get to see what's going on, but the entire point of the endeavor is to bring everything to light and make everything more visible. And if an outsider joins and starts providing bad information or is a bad actor, typical moderation efforts are pretty easy.
Most people are not professional conspiracists and know how to handle secret meetings, communication etc.
But the more the whole thing shifts towards that, the closer civil war is.
In other words, if you think any easily joinable movement is a honeypot you already seem to think along the lines of resistance movement in a dictatorship. (If it is .. I will not judge, I am not in the US)
That seems like quite a stretch from reality. I just know the glowies enjoy lurking websites where people openly post how to use Tor.
"FBI simply joined groupchats and read them. This is trivial stuff."
Isn't the simply inserting an agent into the secret circle the most time honored way to crack security.
People downvoting don't know security.
Technology often fails around the human factor.
You have a private chat? Ok? and you let people in? So sorry your encryption didn't help with who you let in.
More specifically, right-wing agitators joined the chats and posted screenshots online.
In what way are they "agitators"?
Here's some good examples:
Nick Sortor - went to a protest, vandalised his own truck. How do we know? There's footage of him fleeing the protest with a fully intact back window; but by the time he posted to twitter and flogged the story to fox news; the back window was smashed. Who's in the jeep with him? Cam Higby. You can look for yourself: https://www.facebook.com/LynnwoodTimes/posts/happening-now-m... - oddly matching graffiti in two colors, intact window
The media they produced and gave to fox? https://www.foxnews.com/us/anti-ice-agitators-swarm-vehicle-...
Why's Cam Higby's name familiar? Oh; he's the one making the claims here about the signal chats.
Who else is in this pantheon?
Jake Lang - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/18/minneapolis-...
> Conservative influencer Jake Lang organized an anti-Islam, anti-Somali and pro-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstration, saying on social media beforehand that he intended to “burn a Quran” on the steps of City Hall.
Unsurprisingly, this was not well received by the citizens of Minnesota. You can see in the article him being covered in silly string, he was pelted with snowballs and left the event bruised, bleeding slightly. Before you go feeling too sorry for him, remember he brought a baseball bat and a riot shield to the Jan 6 party; and there's a nice little image of him using it on the cops:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/senate-flori...
Do you see at all how these people go into a situation, broadcast an adverserial stance ahead of time or make the situation worse, selectively curate a narrative and package it up as propaganda?
Edit: I have subsequently googled who I am interacting with, given their high participation in comments here. They appear to have at least one controversy associated with them; and a pattern of sealioning on topics of race. So; shame on me for taking the bait - this person knows exactly what an agitator is.
[flagged]
6 replies →
>The FBI simply
i don't think an investigation by FBI has ever been "simply" to the subjects of such an investigation. And to show bang-for-the-buck the "simply reading chat" officers would have to bring at least some fish, i.e. federal charges, from such a reading expedition.
In general it sounds very familiar - any opposition is a crime of impeding and obstruction. Just like in Russia where any opposition is a crime of discreditation at best or even worse - a crime of extremism/terrorism/treason.
> any opposition is a crime of impeding and obstruction
No; conspiracy to impede and obstruct is a crime.
If you are about to do something I don't want you to do, but which is lawful for you to do, 1A covers me saying "hey, don't do that". It does not cover me physically positioning myself in a way that prevents you from doing it. And if you happen to be an LEO and the thing you're about to do is a law enforcement action, it would be unlawful for me to adopt such positioning. It is unlawful even if I only significantly impede you.
And ICE are federal LEO.
Portland Ave at 32nd St E is a one-way two-lane road with a bike/bus lane. It was formerly a three-lane one-way road.
One of the victims was blocking half the low traffic road and intending for people to pass freely on the other half. The other was filming from a distance.
1 reply →
Conspiracy to impede and obstruct criminal behaviour is not a crime, it's legitimate self-defence.
The fact that federal agents are breaking the law doesn't change that. At all.
In spite of what you've been told federal LEO are bound by the law.
Executing random bystanders on a whim, operating without visible ID, failing to allow congressional oversight of facilities, failing to give those captured access to a lawyer - among many, many others - all put this operation far outside of any reasonable claim to proportionality or legality.
3 replies →
Don’t be disingenuous. The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
These groups are also documented to have harassed people who are _not_ federal officers under the mistaken impression that they are. That’s just assault. Probably stalking too. Anyone who participates in these groups will be committing crimes, and should be prosecuted for it.
If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.
>The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs.
To observe them, and prevent them from committing crimes. Which if it isn't legal, is moral as all get out.
"Jobs" Nurmberg lol. Not an argument.
3 replies →
These groups exist to observe and document the actions of federal agents and share that information with their communities. That is constitutionally protected activity.
2 replies →
> to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
Filming officiers performing their jobs is not obstruction, even if it does make them uncomfortable. If it makes their jobs harder that's only because they know what they're doing is unpopular and don't want to be known to have done it.
> If you don’t like the job that an officer is doing then the right thing to do is to talk to your Congress–critter about changing the law. Keep in mind that ICE is executing a law that was passed in 1995 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. No attempt has been made to modify that law in the last 30 years. If Democrats didn’t like it, they had several majorities during that time when they could have forced through changes. They didn’t even bother.
Yeah, there's a massive disconnect between politicians and their voters. This is pretty strong evidence of that disconnect. Even now Democrats refuse to support abolishing ICE, despite majority support among their constituency. Who are voters who want immigration reform supposed to cast their ballots for? There hasn't been such a candidate since ICE was created in the wake of 9/11. Conservatives got to let out their pent up frustration with an unresponsive government by electing Trump. Liberals have no such champion, only community organizing.
13 replies →
[flagged]
25 replies →
[flagged]
> The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.
If that's the case, then why has no one been prosecuted on those grounds?
5 replies →