Since there's quite a few people here working at US companies with access to lots of user data, but they may not have decision making capacity, I just thought I'll link the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, out of context and for no reason at all https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
If some data is shared with an external entity, it likely needs to be included in a few usual disclaimers, with at least a few meetings to clarify the exact wording and verification of the legal implications with the right dept and double check how it complies with others data protection rules, and don't forget the audit, and I think this contains a mistake so maybe let's investigate this issue first, and ...
We should be able to agree that no entity is authorized to violate the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments of the constitution. Whatever immigration laws you want to see enforced, they do not supersede the constitution.
Is that the 'police don't need to identify themselves and should wear face masks' or the 'you aren't allowed to film the police because it interferes with our trying to be a secret police force' laws?
Or the 'you aren't doing anything illegal but the masked government agents don't like it so they are going to use your biometrics to harass you in whatever ways the feds can make your life more difficult' laws?
i want to comment something violently hateful towards you. but at this point I feel bad for people like you. indeed you are already living out some twisted arc of the karmic cycle which results in your life and making this comment. i hope you find help eventually and i wish peace for you.
Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for? Especially when they’re an industry that knows itself well?
They will find out. And act accordingly. And your career will end, with the mess cleaned up and billable to you.
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.
Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.
Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.
Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.
The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law (like hearing, lawyer, etc).
Edit: to the commenter below:
>I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them
do you really want your children to work in strawberry fields in CA in 100+ degrees weather? That is the opportunities which mostly get open when you remove the migrants, legal or illegal, that ICE is targeting.
Enforcing racial purity laws is abuse? Why are you impeding the Gestapo, a federal law enforcement agency? Why do you hate law and order, dirty anarchist?
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.
This has bean a long time coming. This is a stark reminder that you should consider who the future stewards of whatever you are building might be.
We built a vast surveillance network under the guise of servings ads and making money, and lost track of how this power could be abused by an entity not aligned with our own values.
Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
Well I guess I mean the pubic in general. I also don’t necessarily mean willfully creating technology that can be abused.
For example, we all stood by when we let Twitter and other US-based social media become the main way politicians communicate with the public. This has, in my opinion, had disastrous consequences on how they communicate and actively blocks politicians from achieving consensus.
This is to say that you don’t need to have actively worked on something.
From day one everyone who worked on these ad-tech surveillance systems knew they had the capability for abuse. They were built to come as close as possible to the legal limits of surveillance and in several notable cases crossed that line. This isn't a surprise to anyone
There was a narrative here earlier that I'd rather trust Google/Apple with my data than any other company or any government. The end result is the same in the end. When it comes to privacy, the only thing that works is zero trust.
> Against that backdrop, ICE’s assertion that it is considering privacy expectations appears designed to reassure both policymakers and potential vendors that the agency is aware of the controversy surrounding commercial surveillance data.
We can't seriously believe that this agency has any sense of respect for privacy right? They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants. I mean nobody's going to stop them using the purchased data however they want, but don't lie and say you'll be good with the privacy and care of the data.
>They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants.
Noem at the Senate hearing : "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to ..."
While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
Please do not stop using our product. Download this proprietary app. You can't (legally) know what it does. Please download and execute it. Please don't google the FSF or EFF. Please.
I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..
This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
> Intellexa also uses malicious ads on third-party platforms to fingerprint visitors and redirect those who match its target profiles to its exploit delivery servers.
What is "extremist" about "sabotage"? These are private companies and private individuals, they can choose whether to or not to interact with ICE. Unless its a part of some formal investigation there is nothing criminal or extreme about providing whatever data or response or lack thereof to them. Or do you not believe in freedom of association and free speech?
I heard the new division of ICE that is implementing these investigations is called
Government Ethics, Security & Transparency Agency for Public Operations, with some kind of acronym I couldn't quite hear.
ICE got additional $80B over next 4 years in addition to the standard appropriations resulting in $28B budget for example in this year. That definitely gonna buy a lot of “market research”.
To whom? To the country losing people or to the country getting people? Like, what is the cost of Elon Musk immigration? And who bears that cost? And who enjoys the benefits of it?
I love this. All these years I've been a privacy enthusiast lunatic, because ofc no-one has anything to hide. Now ad trackers are being potentially weaponised by the govt, and ofc no-one could have foreseen that. This is absolute gold. Will be patiently waiting for recall install's to start sending screenshots to ice of your private documents and comm's.
In a way Im glad its happening because its going to be a wake up call for many, on the other hand, there is going to be a lot of suffering as a result of this..
It is really hard to understand that this is a country that our nation’s media and KOLs have vigorously whitewashed for decades. They say the United States protects private property, that America is free and democratic, and that everyone owns guns, so they can guarantee their own freedom.
All of our people should feel ashamed of this—being deceived by the media day after day for decades. Too stupid. Even today, there are still many people who firmly believe it.
Don't forget - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc are all proud partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE. When the NSA asked these companies to participate in an unconstitutional and unlawful program (as ruled by a federal judge) called PRISM, they didn't fight, they eagerly complied. They kept their compliance secret. They lied about it to citizens, to their users, to their customers, and even to congress. These are fundamentally untrustworthy entities, and there's no reason to believe they've changed and won't comply with secret DHS and ICE requests just like they did with secret NSA requests.
Every dollar spent on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, iPhones, Macbooks, Windows, Office, etc supports the widespread violation of rights committed against the innocent of all political and demographic backgrounds in the name of "national security".
Know what doesn't? Open source operating systems, open source software, and self-hosting. Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.
I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.
At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.
(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)
GrapheneOS is the only phone that Cellebrite admits they can't hack. And the only phone that if you bring it to Catalonia, they'll assume you're a drug dealer.
Although this is quite a dark time, I hope ICE may finally (accidentally) do some good by making it super obvious to people how much online platforms track them.
If anyone else finds this stuff interesting I've off and on worked on an open source MMP to try and keep the functionality of ad tracking but move the data collection off of centralized hubs like AppsFlyer. I'd love to pick it back up if some people are interested in working together.
In a way, this is a good thing. Hopefully it will draw the attention of other countries and make them realize how important it is to prevent such data hoards, and hopefully once the US has recovered they'll learn from it like the Germans did from the Stasi.
Maybe California will even take it as an incentive to make proper privacy laws and impose it on anyone doing business in California in any way.
> ICE says it is attempting to better understand how commercial big data providers and advertising technology firms might directly support investigative activities, while remaining sensitive to “regulatory constraints and privacy expectations.”
That's rich and i'll believe it when they respect the written law.
To be clear, I fully expect other departments have been investigating these sorts of things in past and present, but ice have conducted themselves differently now and should be treated accordingly.
This must be a real conundrum for the surveillance capitalist weekend 'resisters' who created this technology in the first place. "Oh, but it's not evil when we use it."
But why though? Why shouldn't they be restricted to only using the tools they're legally entitled to? And why shouldn't they be held in account when they act like the SA just because they're "enforcing immigration law"?
i suppose with this idea, they only homin in on illegals that use smartphones who willingly offer their realtime location to their app providers and is already sold, ICE could just buy it off them like others. they doin nothing illegal while illegals are illegally in the country bro.
Is it though? Or is it attacking and killing American citizens in the street, trafficking legal residents to the notorious prisons, starving and killing the captured in the concentration camps.
Not sure how much of the heavy lifting is your "if" and the qualifier does, but I hope it's just sarcasm.
ICE is normalizing police hiding behind masks. ICE is normalizing violating people's (hard fought and won in the Supreme Court) 1st amendment right to film the police, so that ICE can do their work in secret.
ICE is using biometrics on people who have not broken any law, then saying the federal government will be doing whatever it can in its power to penalize those people now that they have been identified as doing... absolutely nothing illegal but stuff the impedes ICE's ability to operate in secret (among other things a violate of those people's due process rights).
We don't do the whole 'secret police' thing in the USA, and we tend to get angry when the Government violates our Constitutional rights.
The stormtroopers in Star Wars look like they do to be some kind of extreme in anonymous abuse of power. Their squeaky clean white exterior is literally a whitewash of that abuse. That's the one trick that ICE could still pull to complete the transition.
I don't think there is really anything "woke" about wanting to sell products to people who speak Spanish but what do I know. What does this even have to do with the article?
The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal.
I don't see people protesting en masse to take Clinton, Trump, Gates etc. accountable. Maxwell Ghislaine is alive and well, and they can't get a incrementing confession.
But somehow people loose their shit when some MS-13 gang members get arrested.
Since there's quite a few people here working at US companies with access to lots of user data, but they may not have decision making capacity, I just thought I'll link the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, out of context and for no reason at all https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
If some data is shared with an external entity, it likely needs to be included in a few usual disclaimers, with at least a few meetings to clarify the exact wording and verification of the legal implications with the right dept and double check how it complies with others data protection rules, and don't forget the audit, and I think this contains a mistake so maybe let's investigate this issue first, and ...
Might I suggest to instead reflect on why you are working in an industry that collects all this data.
Money!
To conduct field sabotage
[flagged]
We should be able to agree that no entity is authorized to violate the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments of the constitution. Whatever immigration laws you want to see enforced, they do not supersede the constitution.
Please, enlighten me a non-American, what laws allow shooting and killing civilians on broad light on the USA?
53 replies →
It’s so hard to believe people posting in support of ICE aren’t trolls or bots. Are you watching them commit obscene crimes in broad daylight?
1 reply →
Is that the 'police don't need to identify themselves and should wear face masks' or the 'you aren't allowed to film the police because it interferes with our trying to be a secret police force' laws?
Or the 'you aren't doing anything illegal but the masked government agents don't like it so they are going to use your biometrics to harass you in whatever ways the feds can make your life more difficult' laws?
9 replies →
i want to comment something violently hateful towards you. but at this point I feel bad for people like you. indeed you are already living out some twisted arc of the karmic cycle which results in your life and making this comment. i hope you find help eventually and i wish peace for you.
2 replies →
If you think enforcing the laws is the problem you are ignorant.
And yet many more of us care about the centuries-old laws that ICE is violating.
Hurrah for the Blackshirts
Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for? Especially when they’re an industry that knows itself well?
They will find out. And act accordingly. And your career will end, with the mess cleaned up and billable to you.
> Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for?
I worked for a big corp. None of this is out of ordinary.
But yeah, if you need to survive and worry about being fired, you make your own decisions that you'll be able to live with.
You've obviously never worked in big corpo.
People unwittingly deploy this whole handbook back to front throughout the entire process of the sdlc.
It's impressive that anything ever gets done ever.
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.
Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
> you support what’s happening.
I don’t know that things are that black and white.
Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
18 replies →
With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
28 replies →
Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.
1 reply →
But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
Quite the high horse you got there
25 replies →
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick.
In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."
>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies
No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry
Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.
1 reply →
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.
Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.
Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.
The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
A focus on preserving order is a far liberal/far centrist thing, not fascist. Fascists would ban to achieve political goals and not to maintain order.
Major political groups:
Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs
Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size
Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs
Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there
Conservatives - return to monke
2 replies →
[flagged]
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
1 reply →
ICE doesn't follow the law. It breaks it.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law (like hearing, lawyer, etc).
Edit: to the commenter below:
>I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them
do you really want your children to work in strawberry fields in CA in 100+ degrees weather? That is the opportunities which mostly get open when you remove the migrants, legal or illegal, that ICE is targeting.
9 replies →
Enforcing racial purity laws is abuse? Why are you impeding the Gestapo, a federal law enforcement agency? Why do you hate law and order, dirty anarchist?
1 reply →
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
3 replies →
[flagged]
Get a warrant. The federal government should not be "soliciting vendors" for my location.
I love how the accounts defending ICE are always brand new.
31 replies →
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.
3 replies →
You seem to be a bit scared of doing this all under your own name, comrade. But don't worry, we know exactly who you are.
19 replies →
This has bean a long time coming. This is a stark reminder that you should consider who the future stewards of whatever you are building might be.
We built a vast surveillance network under the guise of servings ads and making money, and lost track of how this power could be abused by an entity not aligned with our own values.
Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
Well I guess I mean the pubic in general. I also don’t necessarily mean willfully creating technology that can be abused.
For example, we all stood by when we let Twitter and other US-based social media become the main way politicians communicate with the public. This has, in my opinion, had disastrous consequences on how they communicate and actively blocks politicians from achieving consensus.
This is to say that you don’t need to have actively worked on something.
4 replies →
We are all very impressed, I assure you.
5 replies →
Good for you
What are you doing to organize around that?
Or is it just “I decided to leave so my hands are clean” self adoration?
5 replies →
From day one everyone who worked on these ad-tech surveillance systems knew they had the capability for abuse. They were built to come as close as possible to the legal limits of surveillance and in several notable cases crossed that line. This isn't a surprise to anyone
The way I understand it, which may be dated: is that if it's automated or robotic it doesn't qualify as an "unreasonable search or seizure".
2 replies →
There was a narrative here earlier that I'd rather trust Google/Apple with my data than any other company or any government. The end result is the same in the end. When it comes to privacy, the only thing that works is zero trust.
[dead]
It was always intended to be used that way, the programmatic advertising industry is a product of US Nat Sec.
> Against that backdrop, ICE’s assertion that it is considering privacy expectations appears designed to reassure both policymakers and potential vendors that the agency is aware of the controversy surrounding commercial surveillance data.
We can't seriously believe that this agency has any sense of respect for privacy right? They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants. I mean nobody's going to stop them using the purchased data however they want, but don't lie and say you'll be good with the privacy and care of the data.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...
>They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants.
Noem at the Senate hearing : "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to ..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832512
It’s quite obvious that all of these seemingly paranoid about privacy, were not that paranoid after all.
For the software builders the conclusion is that we should not store ANY identifiable data.
Exactly.
While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
"what's wrong? Oh, it literally paints a target on your face that can be shot at if you happen to be brown".
Maybe the answers must be blunt and unpleasant.
1 reply →
Please do not stop using our product. Download this proprietary app. You can't (legally) know what it does. Please download and execute it. Please don't google the FSF or EFF. Please.
This is why you must block all ads always. No exceptions.
I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..
This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
OS security was in the previous step:
> Intellexa also uses malicious ads on third-party platforms to fingerprint visitors and redirect those who match its target profiles to its exploit delivery servers.
-- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/12/leaks-show-in...
Not blocking ads is bordering a self-destructive behaviour now.
>This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
Finally. There are a lot of high profile YouTubers who have been saying this like LinusTechTips.
It's not about blocking ads, but blocking tracking. If you connect to internet you are being tracked even though you block known tracking URLs.
e.g. Hacker news uses no tracking url but uses Cloudflare which tracks the user across sites for things like bot detection.
You are not powerless.
https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare
2 replies →
Not sure that blocks device ID tracking through timing metrics for example. You can turn off java but then you become a beacon of suspicious activity.
Do one better, block ads and give them false data on your profile using a solution like Ad Nauseam.
Ad Nauseam unironically gives ad networks massively more information and data points to track you than if you just straight up blocked the ads.
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Why do all the discussion posts about ICE’s biometric app get taken down? Although they may invite politicing, they are very relevant to HN.
e.g [flagged] Target director's Global Entry was revoked after ICE used app to scan her face [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833871]
Digital brownshirts, using moderation tools as weapon to stifle discussion critical of the regime.
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What is "extremist" about "sabotage"? These are private companies and private individuals, they can choose whether to or not to interact with ICE. Unless its a part of some formal investigation there is nothing criminal or extreme about providing whatever data or response or lack thereof to them. Or do you not believe in freedom of association and free speech?
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I heard the new division of ICE that is implementing these investigations is called Government Ethics, Security & Transparency Agency for Public Operations, with some kind of acronym I couldn't quite hear.
You know when you have corrupt organizations calling themselves exactly what they are not, we are in an authoritarian state. And its moving fast.
ICE got additional $80B over next 4 years in addition to the standard appropriations resulting in $28B budget for example in this year. That definitely gonna buy a lot of “market research”.
For comparison, what is the cost of immigration?
Negative cost. It brings more money.
To whom? To the country losing people or to the country getting people? Like, what is the cost of Elon Musk immigration? And who bears that cost? And who enjoys the benefits of it?
ICE will need to hit up Israel for that data.
Israeli companies are constantly working on spyware and advertising technologies.
Take a look at abominations such as the product Sherlock produced by Insanet:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/
https://cyberjustice.blog/2024/01/22/sherlock-the-terrifying...
There are loads of others.
It sounds like you’re just looking for another opportunity to bash a group of people that you hate.
Spyware is produced in many countries - although the Israeli ones are very good, because Israelis are very good at what they do.
I love this. All these years I've been a privacy enthusiast lunatic, because ofc no-one has anything to hide. Now ad trackers are being potentially weaponised by the govt, and ofc no-one could have foreseen that. This is absolute gold. Will be patiently waiting for recall install's to start sending screenshots to ice of your private documents and comm's.
Someone please hint ICE that they can get a lot more data from AI companies. Asking what your rights are? Straight to jail.
In a way Im glad its happening because its going to be a wake up call for many, on the other hand, there is going to be a lot of suffering as a result of this..
It is really hard to understand that this is a country that our nation’s media and KOLs have vigorously whitewashed for decades. They say the United States protects private property, that America is free and democratic, and that everyone owns guns, so they can guarantee their own freedom.
All of our people should feel ashamed of this—being deceived by the media day after day for decades. Too stupid. Even today, there are still many people who firmly believe it.
Ah yes the famous Constitutional freedom to gun down tyrants. It turns out nobody can agree on who the tyrant is!
If you want to target a demographic, ask the experts.
I am all for government and private industry working together to keep the country safe and ensure our laws our efficiently enforced.
Don't forget - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc are all proud partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE. When the NSA asked these companies to participate in an unconstitutional and unlawful program (as ruled by a federal judge) called PRISM, they didn't fight, they eagerly complied. They kept their compliance secret. They lied about it to citizens, to their users, to their customers, and even to congress. These are fundamentally untrustworthy entities, and there's no reason to believe they've changed and won't comply with secret DHS and ICE requests just like they did with secret NSA requests.
Every dollar spent on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, iPhones, Macbooks, Windows, Office, etc supports the widespread violation of rights committed against the innocent of all political and demographic backgrounds in the name of "national security".
Know what doesn't? Open source operating systems, open source software, and self-hosting. Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.
I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.
At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.
(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)
And for Europeans: Germany France and UK do the same thing
What phone do you use?
GrapheneOS is the only phone that Cellebrite admits they can't hack. And the only phone that if you bring it to Catalonia, they'll assume you're a drug dealer.
AND YET YOU PARTICIPATE IN SOCIETY
Pixel 8 Pro with Graphene.
Although this is quite a dark time, I hope ICE may finally (accidentally) do some good by making it super obvious to people how much online platforms track them.
If anyone else finds this stuff interesting I've off and on worked on an open source MMP to try and keep the functionality of ad tracking but move the data collection off of centralized hubs like AppsFlyer. I'd love to pick it back up if some people are interested in working together.
https://github.com/openattribution
In a way, this is a good thing. Hopefully it will draw the attention of other countries and make them realize how important it is to prevent such data hoards, and hopefully once the US has recovered they'll learn from it like the Germans did from the Stasi.
Maybe California will even take it as an incentive to make proper privacy laws and impose it on anyone doing business in California in any way.
Unlikely. Other countries will watch and realise how important it is to collect their own data hoards so they can do it too.
Hey but who cares about cookies anyway right?
Here is another example of ICE directly working with Israeli Spyware companies.
"What Is ICE Doing With This Israeli Spyware Firm?"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/software/what-is-ice-do...
The abuse to us normal people has to stop before we really organize and fix things.
> ICE says it is attempting to better understand how commercial big data providers and advertising technology firms might directly support investigative activities, while remaining sensitive to “regulatory constraints and privacy expectations.”
That's rich and i'll believe it when they respect the written law.
To be clear, I fully expect other departments have been investigating these sorts of things in past and present, but ice have conducted themselves differently now and should be treated accordingly.
This must be a real conundrum for the surveillance capitalist weekend 'resisters' who created this technology in the first place. "Oh, but it's not evil when we use it."
"It's my job - I just followed orders"
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But why though? Why shouldn't they be restricted to only using the tools they're legally entitled to? And why shouldn't they be held in account when they act like the SA just because they're "enforcing immigration law"?
i suppose with this idea, they only homin in on illegals that use smartphones who willingly offer their realtime location to their app providers and is already sold, ICE could just buy it off them like others. they doin nothing illegal while illegals are illegally in the country bro.
Of course, I propose ICE should have total view of all computers, phones and devices to aid them in their job. Begin by making yours public.
Is it though? Or is it attacking and killing American citizens in the street, trafficking legal residents to the notorious prisons, starving and killing the captured in the concentration camps.
Not sure how much of the heavy lifting is your "if" and the qualifier does, but I hope it's just sarcasm.
ICE is normalizing police hiding behind masks. ICE is normalizing violating people's (hard fought and won in the Supreme Court) 1st amendment right to film the police, so that ICE can do their work in secret.
ICE is using biometrics on people who have not broken any law, then saying the federal government will be doing whatever it can in its power to penalize those people now that they have been identified as doing... absolutely nothing illegal but stuff the impedes ICE's ability to operate in secret (among other things a violate of those people's due process rights).
We don't do the whole 'secret police' thing in the USA, and we tend to get angry when the Government violates our Constitutional rights.
The stormtroopers in Star Wars look like they do to be some kind of extreme in anonymous abuse of power. Their squeaky clean white exterior is literally a whitewash of that abuse. That's the one trick that ICE could still pull to complete the transition.
But that's not what they're doing and you and I both know it.
They're murdering political dissidents, they're kidnapping and torturing US citizens, they're terrorizing the streets.
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I don't think there is really anything "woke" about wanting to sell products to people who speak Spanish but what do I know. What does this even have to do with the article?
First it's your nationality, then your language. Next maybe you're church or your music.
Data is a liability, it's omnipresent. Permeating.
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I'm against this type of surveillance everywhere, but seeing the holier than thou attitude of some of the comments rubs me the wrong way.
Doing basically the same for people who are on the Epstein list was OK, but now it's wrong?
Uh yeah, it's ok to track and arrest confirmed pedophiles, but not normal people at random
The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal.
I don't see people protesting en masse to take Clinton, Trump, Gates etc. accountable. Maxwell Ghislaine is alive and well, and they can't get a incrementing confession.
But somehow people loose their shit when some MS-13 gang members get arrested.
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Auschwiiiiitz
Sorry I sneezed
They’re going from Brownshirt to Gestap to Stasi overnight.