FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
(nbcnews.com)947 points by duxup 5 days ago
947 points by duxup 5 days ago
I haven't tried it, but Signal supports not sharing your phone number/just communicating with usernames: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
> You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.
Which defeats the whole point. What if the FBI politely asks Signal about a phone number?
All they'd learn that way is that that phone number has a Signal account, when it was registered, and when it was last active. In other words, it doesn't tell them whether it's part of a given Signal group. (See https://signal.org/bigbrother/.)
They publicly publish these requests. You can see how little information is provided — just a phone number and two unix timestamps IIRC. https://signal.org/bigbrother/
I might be misremembering or mixing memories but i remember something about them only storing the hash of the number.
So the FBI cant ask what phone number is tied to an account, but if a specific phone number was tied to the specific account? (As in, Signal gets the number, runs it through their hash algorythm and compares that hash to the saved one)
But my memory is very very bad, so like i said, i might be wrong
If the Signal Messaging LLC is compromised, then "updates", e.g., spyware, can be remotely installed on every Signal user's computer, assuming every Signal user allows "automatic updates". I don't think Signal has a setting to turn off updates
Not only does one have to worry about other Signal users being compromised, one also has to worry about a third party being compromised: the Signal Messaaging LLC
Signal Messaging LLC is US-based and needs to follow CALEA[1] by law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
They aren't allowed to tell you by law, and courts work with prosecution to keep implementation details away from the public, and investigators will engage in parallel construction to obfuscate the sources of evidence. That's just on the normal law enforcement side.
Once you get into the national security side, the secrecy is even higher.
"Carrying this speculation a step further, it is possible that the available tools have been compromised either in individual instances or en masse. Even where security products are open-source, adequate security evaluations are difficult to conduct initially and difficult to maintain as the products evolve. Typical users upgrade their software when upgrades or packages are offered, without even thinking of the possibility that they may have been targeted for a Trojan horse."
Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2007), 372
Italics are mine
Using any mobile phone connected to mobile network is breach of OPSEC, period. Even more in countries, where you cannot get anonymous SIM card.
Not using phone numbers in chat app doesn't protect you against someone locating you.
When phone is turned on, even without SIM, your location is saved, in inches. Thanks to 5G.
And some phone turns itself on automatically, lol.
Using laptop (without any wifi card) -> Wifi card (rotating fake MAC) -> wifi network/LTE modem with IMEI spoofing
Agreed, but people are going to people and will use phones, anyway. Might as well not include identifying information during registration.
Signal is a desktop app, as well. Even if you wanted to run it on Qubes in a Faraday cage, you'll need a phone number to register to use the app.
In the ideal situation, no one would be using Signal, phones or computers, the design of the internet is inherently identifying and non-anonymizing.
Hiding your phone number is a setting now. Has been for well over a year.
You can't sign up without one, and it being an option means people who are in danger won't do it.
Also, if someone's phone is confiscated, and you're in their Signal chats and their address book, it doesn't matter if you're hiding your number on Signal.
It's better to just not require such identifying information at all.
That's true for any system where you have contacts linked. Same thing happens when you have names and avatars.
If you don't want to link your contacts... don't link your contacts...
But this doesn't have the result that the GP claimed. The whole network doesn't unravel because in big groups like these one number doesn't have all the other contacts in their system.
For people that need it:
| Settings
|- Chat
| |- Share Contacts with iOS/Android <--- (Turn off)
|- Privacy
| |- Phone Number
| | |- Who Can See My Number
| | | |- Everybody
| | | |- Nobody <----
| | |- Who Can Find Me By Number
| | | |- Everybody
| | | |- Nobody <----
| |- App Security
| | |- Hide Screen in App Switcher <---- Turn on
| | |- Screen Lock <---- Turn on
| |- Advanced
| | |- Always Relay Calls <-----
Some of these settings are already set btw
Session is a low-privacy fork of Signal.
source:
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
hn discussion:
Physical keys are the real path. Sign every message with your Yubikey.
Bots can authenticate just as well as human users. Both bots and trolls are completely different set of issues that cannot easily be solved, regardless of your approach.
Zangi does this. No idea on their overall security posture compared to Signal, however.
> it's crucial that the next set of secure messaging systems does away with tying real phone numbers to accounts.
Keep in mind that with secure messaging, if the other side gets compromised, your chats with them are compromised. This seems obvious, but with signal groups of a large size, they're effectively public groups. Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
Don't use Signal for organizing anything of this sort, I promise you'll regret it. I've heard people having better luck with Briar, but there might be others too. I only know that Signal and Whatsapp are what you want to avoid. Unless your concern is strictly cryptographic attacks of your chat's network-traffic and nothing more.
> Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.
For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.
It doesn't mean much if it isn't the default, even then people who got it prior to that use phone numbers, you can protect yourself maybe, but not other people in the group. But it's good they're doing this now.
Not traitor, but compromised user. Given enough targets, one of them will have their device compromised. Of course the FBI has access to things more powerful than pegasus I'm sure (Just guessing).
Apparently, one member of the group uploaded a personal photo as an avatar.
I've also heard of side-channel attacks on Signal that could allow for profiling a user's location, which with the FBI's resources could presumably eventually result in identification.
source:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2026/jan/28/footag...
What I can tell is ICE starts to open a door, and a clerk immediately stops them and ICE shut the door a second later. The clerk opens the door to further tell them they are not allowed to enter. The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building. ICE then leaves.
I'm not ok with what ICE has been doing. But, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call this threatening staff, to me. Saying what will happen if the other party escalates feels like a different axis than threatening. Def taken as another data point in a sea of overreach however.
> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.
I'm not sure what the agent has to do to qualify as a threat to you, but at the very least this is thuggish behavior. The embassy is Ecuadorean sovereign territory where the staff have immunity from US laws, threatening to yank someone out of there is like extracting someone from Ecuador by force. It's highly offensive.
If you tried that at a US embassy you'd probably be shot, but it's generally impossible because they are all heavily secured and fortified.
I don't think that it's reasonable to see this behavior as anything but threatening given the location and the ample context provided by ICE's behavior up to this point.
> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.
Does that not amount to a threat?
It sounds as though most of these agents are poorly trained at best. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-unloads
> “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me.
> The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”
> Does that not amount to a threat?
"If you touch me, I'll break your jaw" has been ruled by courts to not be a threat.
Reading the comments on this is the first time I've hoped that most HN comments are made by bots.
I think it's important to assess the quality of the comments - they aren't bringing facts, just stating opinions; doing so quickly and agreeing with each other. You can test this out - pick a few names on the comments that disagree, ctrl+f, and you'll quickly find one individual with 29 comments at the time of writing all over the thread; with a handful of others with 1-4 responses.
This is not actually what the majority of people think and feel.
IE; from recent polling > 55%+ of Americans have “very little” confidence in ICE, while 16 percent only have "some".
That's ~71% of ordinary US folks; and I would wager many international folks are very clear eyed about the situation.
But why don't you see a ratio of 7/10 of top level comments critical? It's reasonable to assume that about half of those people are just keeping to themselves or part of the political middle that feel something is a "bit wrong"; but not quite enough to go yell into the internet about it. For the others, arguing is tiring and doesn't seem to change much. Watching the situation induces feelings of dread, despair or helplessness.
On the opposing side, that 29% of people are faced with the fact that they might actually be the "baddies" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY), and a good number of them are flooding conversations to prove they are in fact "not"... because admitting otherwise would mean they are actually doing something quite morally or ethically wrong by their own or their community standards. Since that would be unthinkable! the only logical reaction is to post frequently in shrill defense.
If you keep that in mind - the relative psychology of each group - it's much easier not to despair if "everyone" seems to be saying the opposite of what you would expect.
In my comments, I add opinions after the facts. Nor have I been donwvoted to oblivion. IMO, the people who I reply to aren't really acquainted with the facts.
I on the other hand happen to be a "bootlicker", while their opinion seems to be that it's ok to interfere with police work, and that the person that got shot did nothing wrong..
One model for this type of behaviour/response in reaction to feelings of shame is known as the "Compass of Shame" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233600755_Investiga...)
Here's a 3 minute explainer from the researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ1fSW7zevE
This model defines a few different categories of how people respond - "Withdrawal","Attack-Self" and "Avoidance", "Attack-Other".
If you were to look at your comments through the threads here, would you be able to classify your responses as matching any of the categories above?
As a hint, you may be surprised to learn the person with multiple comments in question I was referring to isn't you. Yet you've sought this out and decided the most suitable response to why are two groups posting responses at different rates is to attempt to relitigate an imagined argument.
I don't live in the US and do agree that Trump is hectic at times. I don't really argue for ICE because of some emotional reason.
Trump had deportions of illegals on his agenda, they were creating trouble at certain locations (perhaps a tiny minority on US map), people voted Trump, he is keeping his promises. The protesters probably don't even know who is being currently captured..
They are protesting against the democratic outcome. But don't understand that when you're the minority, you can't have both the (1) "what you want", and (2) democracy.
ICE isn't doing police work (police are somewhat accountable to their local populace for keeping people safe), they're ostensibly (selectively) enforcing federal immigration regulation.
But please for the love of god explain how "not following orders" is grounds for immediate extrajudicial execution? because your
"their opinion seems to be ... that the person that got shot did nothing wrong"
Lethal force wielded by unmasked, uniformed, badge-wearing, and bodycam'd police officers is already fraught with enough issues as it is... And at least they occasionally face investigation and punitive measures when they fuck up on the (admittedly very difficult) job and harm civilians unlawfully.
A woman not getting out of the car when being ordered to by unknown masked men bearing weapons is reasonable.
Shooting an unarmed civilian who poses no threat to you is not reasonable. It only serves to undermine the entire apparatus of civil governance as well as the bill of rights that the US government was founded upon. It's shameful and disgusting.
And yes, you're accurately labled a bootlicker if you make excuses to the contrary about how it's _ackshually ok_ to shoot and kill people who don't listen to you because boohoo they made your job harder.
If instead you decide you don't actually want to make such an indefensible stand, and instead motte and bailey your way around the issue by trying to talk about obstruction of enforcement of laws, and fall all the way back to "well ICE is allowed to invade places to get the dirty immigrants, so really all the law-abiding citizens would be fine if they just got out of the way", then you're a coward who wont accept the consequences of their own line of argumentation.
Murdering people (Renee Good) who pose no threat to you is wrong. Full stop. Whether that person did something worthy of a misdemeanor, or arrest, or some other LAWFUL CONSEQUENCE is a different matter entirely.
ICE's continued and flagrant misconduct is a breakdown of the Rule of Law, which literally only works if the populace maintains enough trust in those entrusted to enforce and uphold the law. Destroying that (precious little remaining) trust in a politically motivated boondoggle to "own the libs" is a colossal fuckup.
With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced, it won't take more than a few minutes for FBI to start taking actions, IF they had anything tangible.
This is just an intimidation tactic to stop people talking (chatting)
I'm never sure why people assume that Palantir is magically unlike the overwhelming majority of tech startups/companies I've worked at: vastly over promising what is possible to create hype and value while offering things engineering knows will never really quite work like they're advertised.
To your point, but on a larger scale, over hyping Palantir has the added benefit of providing a chilling effect on public resistance.
As a former government employee I had the same reaction to the Snowden leaks: sure the government might be collecting all of this (which I don't support), but I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
Incompetence might be the greatest safety we have against a true dystopia.
Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.
It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible.
Until we learned that they were.
Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.
Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.
> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.
pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.
the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.
Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.
Incompetence could also be incredibly dangerous given enough destructive willpower.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-...
They're not trying to use the data to act efficiently (or in the public good for that matter), and they sure as fuck don't want you to see it. They're trying to make sure that they have dirt on anyone who becomes their enemy in the future.
I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous.
As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw
[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
>I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.
> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.
The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!
There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.
It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
Secrecy enables several things, including:
- abuse
- incompetence
- getting away with breaking rules and laws
Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons.
For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere!
Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit.
In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially).
Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).
I see palntir as a techno whitewashing Mckinsey consultant. But the tech is there to make a much bigger problem than prior art, halucinations et al.
They are still dangerous even if theyre over promising because even placebos are dangerous when the displace real medical interventions.
doing Bad Things poorly is still doing Bad Things.
If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected.
That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.
I honestly tempt fate for fun to see how good police surveillance tech is the last few years.
I let one of my cars expire the registration a few months Everytime, because I'm lazy and because I want to see if I get flagged by a popup system Everytime a police officer passes near me. My commute car is out of registration 3 months right now. And old cop friend told me they basically never tow unless it's 6 months. I pay the $50 late fee once a year and keep doing my experiment for the last 6-7 years. Still no real signs they care.
My fun car has out of state plates for 10 years now. Ive been pulled over once for speeding, and told the officer I just bought it. I've never registered it since I bought it from a friend a decade ago. They let me go. It makes me wonder if one day they'll say "sir, we have plate scanners of this vehicle driving around this state for a year straight.. pay a fine." Not yet.
Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when.
In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest.
Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.
> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.
It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin.
A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.
One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough".
IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8
- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.
- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm
- push to human operators
You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!
But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?
When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.
To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Debt calculations were flat out wrong
The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover)
It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions.
It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it.
No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this
Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions.
If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.
No, incompetence is terrifying. No one wants to get caught in a machine driven by imbeciles who don't care about truth or honoring the Constitution.
Competence is also terrifying, but for different reasons.
It sure would be convenient if they were always ineffective. Sadly there have been periods in history where governments have set themselves to brutality with incredible effectiveness.
It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
Maybe now is exactly the right time to publicly call out the apparent uselessness of Palantir before they fully deploy their high altitude loitering blimps and drones for pervasive surveillance and tracking protestors to their homes.
(My greater theory is that the slide into authoritarianism is not linear, but rather has a hump in the middle where government speech and actions are necessarily opposite, and that they expect the contradiction to slide. Calling out the contradiction is one of the most important things to do for people to see what is going on.)
I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.
>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).
Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.
Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.
> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
Generally speaking, that is a tactic of oppression, creating a general sense of fear for everyone. Anyone can be arrested or shot.
> And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.
If the end goal is that the broad, general public are intimidated, then they're not necessarily "finding the wrong people." With the current "semi random" enforcement with many false positives, nobody feels safe, regardless of their legal status. This looks to be the goal: Intimidate everyone.
If they had a 100% true positive rate and a 0% false positive rate, the general population would not feel terrorized.
That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.
What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.
Maybe the wrong people are, in reality, precisely the people they intended to target.
> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people
There is a difference between what you are seeing and what is actually happening.
99.9% of the time they are finding the right people, but "illegal alien was deported" is as interesting a news story as "water is wet".
They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.
They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.
The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.
The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/
I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)
How does Palantir defeat Signal's crypto? I suppose it could be done by pwning everybody's phones, but Palantir mostly does surveillance AFAIK, I haven't heard of them getting into the phone hacking business. I think Israeli corps have that market covered.
My guess is that Signal has been compromised by the state for a very long time. The dead canary is their steadfast refusal to update their privacy policy which opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." even though they started keeping user's name, phone number, photo, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud years ago. Even more recently they started keeping message content itself in the cloud in some cases and have still refused to update their policy.
All the data signal keeps in the cloud is protected by a pin and SGX. Pins are easy to brute force or collect, SGX could be backdoored, but in any case it's leaky and there have already been published attacks on it (and on signal). see https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice.... and https://community.signalusers.org/t/sgx-cacheout-sgaxe-attac...
It doesn't, they're infiltrating the groups and/or gaining access to peoples' phones in other ways.
I can easily think of reasons why an intelligence agency might not want to act immediately against members of a group they're interested in, simply because they've managed to identify those members.
I'm sure that people who actually work in intelligence agencies could think of more reasons.
I'm far too lazy to go to a big protest or do anything terribly interesting, but at this point I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid publicly criticizing this administration. Palantir is weird and creepy and has infinite resources to aggregate anything that the government wants, and they could be building a registry of people who they're going to deem as "terrorist-leaning" or some such nonsense.
It's not hard to find long posts of me calling the people in the Trump administration "profoundly stupid", with both my "tombert" alias and my real name [1]. I'm not that worried because if Palantir has any value they would also be able to tell that I'm deeply unambitious with these things, but it's still something that concerns me a bit.
[1] Not that hard to find but I do ask you do not post it here publicly.
How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse.
My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.
While we’re getting rid of the first amendment maybe we should also get rid of the fourth and fifth amendment too since they make law enforcement harder? I’m sure cops in North Korea have a much easier and safer job.
So are you saying that the first amendment should protect government insiders leaking personal employee info to the public for the purposes of endangering those government employees, and to cause harm to their families? based on subjective opinions on whether the people think the actions of said employees are just or unjust?
That's wild if so. That's quite the precedent to set.
Note: I don't support ice or their actions. nor do i support vigilante justice.
Seems like citizens are the ones who need protection from law and immigration enforcement, considering the public executions we've all witnessed in the past week or so.
If ICE agents were actually in danger or subject to "vigilante justice", the administration would be CROWING about it SO LOUDLY we'd never hear the end of it. They're spending their entire working days searching for evidence of it. They can't hardly wait!
That's not what is happening here.
s/searching for/manufacturing
Remember, they're accusing the people they killed of heinous motives for their narrative. They can't find it, so they make it up. Keep filming, y'all.
The whole premise of the second amendment is about citizens being armed in order to resist/overthrow a government
Of course, if you're taking up arms to resist/overthrow a government, then you should be entirely anticipating that the government will shoot back. Or shoot first.
If protest is approaching/crossing the line into insurgency, people need to seriously consider that they may be putting their life on the line. It's not a game.
In which case it's no longer relevant because nobody is going to overthrow a government that has nukes, tanks, drones, and chemical weapons using a hunting rifle or a handgun. The idea was cute enough back when the firepower the government had to use against the people was limited to muskets and cannons, but currently the idea of guns being used to overthrow a government with a military like the US is a complete joke.
Today you'll still find a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters insisting against common sense regulations because they need their guns to stop government oppression and tyranny yet you can open youtube right now and find countless examples of government oppression and tyranny and to no surprise those guys aren't using their guns to do a damn thing about any of it. In fact they're usually the ones making excuses for the government and their abuses.
There are reasonable arguments for supporting 2nd amendment and gun ownership but resisting/overthrowing the government is not one of them. That's nothing more than a comforting power fantasy.
The text of the second amendment, as written, would seem to indicate that the premise of the second amendment is to arm "a well-regulated militia" (which was relevant to the government that adopted the second amendment, as it had no standing army).
It was basically crowdsourcing the military. We've been running through all the various problems with that idea ever since, including:
- oops, turns out not enough people volunteer and our whole army got nearly wiped out; maybe we need to pay people to be an army for a living (ca. 1791)
- oops, turns out allowing the public to arm themselves and be their own militia can lead people being their own separate militia factions against the government, I guess we don't want that (e.g. Shay's Rebellion, John Brown and various slave rebellions fighting for freedom)
- oops, turns out part of the army can just decide they're a whole new country's army now, guess we don't want that (the civil war)
- oops, turns out actually everyone having guns means any given individual can just shoot whomever they like (like in hundreds of school shootings and mass shootings)
- oops, turns out we gotta give our police force even bigger guns and tanks and stuff so they won't be scared of random normal people on the street having guns (and look where that's gotten us)
Honestly, the whole thing should've been heavily amended to something more sane back in 1791 when the Legion of the United States (the first standing army) was formed, as they were already punting on the mistaken notion that "a well-regulated militia" was the answer instead of "a professional standing army".
No it isn't -- that's an ignorant myth. Madison was the last person in the world who would have endorsed overthrowing his new government ... the Constitution is quite explicit that that is treason and the penalty is death. The first use of the 2A was Washington putting down the Whiskeytown Rebellion.
Meh. Palintir is optimized to sell data to the government. Said governments usually don't care about the quality of data about any one individual. Wear sunglasses when you go out and stay off facebook and it's amazing how little palintir signal you send up. Bonus points if you created an LLC to pay your utility bills. But... Palintir is not as good as you seem to be implying.
Oh, you don't need to have Facebook account to have a very comprehensive and accurate profile: https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
>With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced
Palantir is SAP with a hollywood marketing department. I talked to a Palantir guy five or six years ago and he said he was happy every time someone portrayed them as a bond villain in the news because the stock went up the next day.
So much of tech abuse is enabled by this, and it's somewhat more pronounced in America, juvenile attitude toward technology, tech companies and CEOs. These people are laughing on their way to the bank because they convinced both critics and evangelists that their SAAS products are some inevitable genius invention
You don't need sophisticated tech to cause damage, you just need access to data. Palantir is dangerous not because it has some amazing technology that no one else has, it's that they aggregate many data sources of what would be considered private data and expose it with malicious intent (c.f. any interview with the Palantir CEO). Reading my email doesn't require amazing programming, it just requires access.
This is one of the reasons it's crucial that the next set of secure messaging systems does away with tying real phone numbers to accounts.
One phone gets compromised and the whole network is identified with their phone numbers.