In other words, [0] somebody in Apple declared that ICE agents, on duty, operating in public, executing federally-authorized violence, have somehow qualified as a "targeted group" just like transgender people.
> Pressure on the tech platforms seemed to come from the Trump Administration; after a deadly shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas in late September, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that ICEBlock “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.”
It makes for an extra-ridiculous backdrop, since absolutely nobody needed any kind of app to determine that ICE agents will be present at... the big building near the highway with a huge concrete sign on the lawn proclaiming "US Immigration and Custom Enforcement."
... I mean, what're the odds?
> Like other forms of self expression, digital-communication technology has become dangerously circumscribed under Trump; only the tools that exist independent of Big Tech seem like safe bets for dissent.
As these platforms start banning software written by private individuals, we'll have to see what kind of incident tracker some Democrats have promised to arrange. [1] I would expect the niche to be long-term documentation like the banned Eyes Up app, rather than real-time notification of, er, road conditions.
Either way, it highlights a different problem with Apple and Google working to prohibit us (users) from freely installing software we onto hardware we own.
___________
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/10/apple-decides-ice-agents...
[1] https://gizmodo.com/democrats-will-launch-a-master-ice-track...
Pray you never have to flee your country to escape violence or persecution. Most of these people are just desperate.
Most of these apps are akin to filming police; protected speech in my book. I won't say anything bad about surveillance in the streets/online, but it's upsetting that they abuse their power to prevent monitoring and reporting their abuse of power
If they simply obtained warrants, arrested people, treated them with dignity, let them have a trial, and then deport them, then the only objection would be why $50B is being wasted on rounding up non-violent migrants, or why the business owners that hire them aren't in prison as well.
You can't claim that your goal is to enforce the law, and then find pesky little things like due process, and warrants inconvenient.
It’s only a dangerous precedent if you believe your opponents will ever gain power. If you believe your political opponents will never have power again, then who cares about precedent?
/s
The problem is that those tools will never be easy for the general public to use, and the big data problem requires the genpop to be onboard. I honestly don't see a good way out of this. At a certain point in the evolution of any authoritarian state, those apps or devices which run them will just be banned and punishable to possess. In America, we're just running up against the outskirts of what hard power can do to silence and intimidate people.
Comparing ICE agents to transgender people might be the most inflammatory thing you could say to them or their masters.
This was written re: IP law, but applies to your comment as well.
1. People are not harassing traffic enforcement, like they are harassing immigration enforcement.
2. Waze's information incentivizes people to follow traffic laws more deligently than they would which results in safer driving conditions for other people driving. ICEBlock did not have the benefit of making people follow immigration law better, or turn themselves in faster.
In other words, a "well regulated Militia" in the Second Amendment is more important than "bear arms".
But no one talks about creating a Militia (yet) for some reason.
What examples are you drawing from when making this conclusion?
> In other words, a "well regulated Militia" in the Second Amendment is more important than "bear arms".
Originally standing armies were not allowed. Each state was expected to perform it's own defense. The governor could create and disband a militia to defend the state. It was expected they would appear with their own arms.
> But no one talks about creating a Militia (yet) for some reason.
Subservient to what power?
The line between "private militia" and "terrorism" isn't very well defined. If the people are unsuccessful, they will be labeled as terrorists and potentially put to death. Most people don't want to be executed, and as far as I am aware there's only been one successful violent insurrection in the US [1], so the odds are very much not in your favor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_massacre#Aftermath
I bet that one could refactor it into a PWA.
so you’re saying a governor could declare their state to be under attack and organize a militia maybe even using state funds?
I don't want to be too harsh on people who made these apps but I am pretty peeved. They completely wasted the opportunity as now any new apps they'll get banned before they get onto the stores. I think all of us on HN could've told them this was inevitable ages ago and especially since they're engaged enough to be making these apps surely they knew themselves. If they from day 1 also hosted it as a webapp (as an alternative), that would be the immediate migration path. Heck, they could've advertised/linked it in the app itself. This is allowed and doesn't get one blocked from the stores unless there's payment options involved which is explicitly not the case here.
>The FBI in 2023 sought and obtained data about the senators’ phone use from January 4 through January 7, 2021. That data shows when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call. The data does not include the content of the call.
What you need is a gapless panopticon so that every suspect feels like being at the verge of getting caught, to enforce eg. traffic laws.
ICE does not target criminal behavior though. They literally disappear people based on appearance and any criminal record. Such a panopticon is an entirely different beast.
Also, "come and enforce it" is not undermining democracy. A law is only a piece of paper until a court upholds it. Even the federal government can write whatever it wants, if it's then ruled unconstitutional that's the end of that.
The problem going on right now is that so much is being broken that the already slow court system just cannot keep up.
They may not be a historically marginalized group, a vulnerable group, a protected class, or a group worthy of protection, but they certainly are targeted.
When you use proprietary software, you are kissing the ring of someone else's power. It's like voluntarily submitting to a big, bad, mean dude in prison. He's going to violate you. You voluntarily and willingly entered into the arrangement.
Either live with the predictable consequences of your decisions without complaining or make better decisions.
Whining about Apple or Google being tyrants after buying their proprietary crap and accepting the ToS is like complaining that we should have better gun control laws after you went to a gun store, legally purchased a firearm, and then shot yourself in the foot with it.
The free or nonfree nature of software (as in freedom, not beer) fundamentally boils down to power, control, and autonomy. Either you have it, or you're ruled by it. If you prefer shiny UIs and good UX over your dignity, autonomy, and freedom, that's your choice to make, just understand what your voluntary consent to the bad guys actually represents here, don't delude yourself about the arrangement or allow yourself to exist in a state of ignorance about the terms of the arrangement.
The obvious truth to anyone paying attention is that Stallman has been right all along, and everyone who looked at the free software movement the same way the popular kids looked at the misfits in secondary school is getting exactly what they were fairly warned about and dismissed condescendingly. The risks being highlighted by the FSF for decades wasn't paranoia, it was foresight, and the dismissal of that wisdom wasn't common sense, it was jumping off a cliff because all of your friends were jumping off cliffs, too.
You don't need to apologize for making the wrong choice, but you do need to put down the proprietary crap and reclaim your dignity. Or don't, if you prefer the slide into fascist authoritarianism. Stated preferences whisper, revealed preferences shout.
Welcome to real-world consequences coming bundled with your real-world decisions. You can't undo past mistakes but you can change your future course of action. Choose wisely. I recommend choosing freedom and encouraging everyone around you to choose freedom, too.
Are you making the argument here that there is a free software alternative to ICEblock that is suitable for novice technology users - the wider public - and offered the same guarantees of anonymity that Apple’s notification system offered ?
You are not entitled to the first class pre-made internet infrastructure that the tyrants lured you in with and that you've taken for granted.
You are entitled to understand how the world really works, opt out of the broken, corrupt, existing systems, and opt into ones you can meaningfully control, but nobody's going to do the hard work for you, and you are not inherently entitled to the fruits of that hard work, either.
Literally all of recorded human knowledge is available to pretty much everyone in the US at zero marginal cost 24/7, and it's never been easier to access all of it than it is right now.
The honest excuse agaisnt this isn't "that's too hard" or "that's not realistic", it's "I'm too lazy".
It's not turnkey for novices, true, but if you see that as a problem, if you see turnkey solutions for the technically illiterate as the starting point you're entitled to and refuse alternatives for lacking, then you're really just reinforcing my point about revealed preferences for a slide into totalitarian fascism over stated preferences to not slide into totalitarian fascism.
Rejecting this because it's not turnkey is like declaring through action "I prefer sliding into fascist totalitarianism, because the alternative requires more effort than I care to put in to avoid fascism. The convenience and comfort of not having to learn anything is more important to me than the human rights of the marginalized and vulnerable."
So the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of US gun owners, especially if you look at who owns "tactical" guns and gear (a 3-round hunting rifle is one thing, an AR with a full 7-mag loadout in a plate carrier is a very different one) are people who actively support the present government, or castigate them for not going far enough. So the relatively small groups of armed lefties - mostly hard left, anarchists, SRA, some Black groups like NAAGA etc; but very few liberals and mainstream progressives - are largely inconsequential.
Which is the main - or perhaps the only reason - why some countries have due process in the first place.
It is not that social elites just decide to extend it on everyone out of grace
It is that those in power want to extend it on themselves, so that they could not be killed, jailed or exiled extrajudicially, just out of political expediency
This is the most tone deaf answer I've read in quite a while. Learning to code, and everything you listed isn't available or possible by most people in a timely manner.
The question was what can be done now, by novice people. Not by people who must first acquire years of tech knowledge.
It's not reinforcing your point to say that. Not everyone can do it. And it shouldn't preclude them from being safe.
This is equivalent to pointing at some ivory tower of safety and say: "git gud."
Which predates Trump and was happening under the Obama presidency. The real lesson there is that the application of the Jack Bauer principle ("good guys" are allowed to freely torture and murder "bad guys" without legal process) would eventually leak back into the mainland US. The same excuse - the concept that foreigners do not have rights - enables ICE to be incredibly abusive. And of course citizenship then becomes something that can be taken away by such a trivial matter as a cop deciding to throw away your ID. You might be able to prove you're a citizen if you had due process, but now you're a noncitizen you're not entitled to that.
The underlying principle is not complicated; Apple can and will ban any app they don't like.
ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308...
Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...
We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...
This is not "immigration enforcement".
It's paramilitary thugs beating up and disappearing political opponents. The closest equivalent would be the SA.
It's a staircase, not a cliff.
Companies can enforce their terms of service as they see fit, including enforcing them selectively or not at all, with very few limitations. They're not bound by precedent as courts would be, nor do they need to be fair.
And that kind of thinking in years past is EXACTLY why we're here annoyed by dozens of organizations having and using power they probably ought not to.
Historically, visa overstays accounted for about half of illegal immigrants.
This is a naive surface level conclusion. Ask yourself why. The answer is because the nobles, or whoever matters in your example society, isn't gonna have much allegiance to a system then are basically disposable to and will be disposed of at the drop of a hat and so their allegiance will be just about the same.
A system where nobody really supports anything beyond the degree to which it keeps their head on their shoulders and everyone is looking over said shoulder is gonna have a lot of disruptive power transitions (in a "you go bankrupt slowly, then suddenly" sort of way as people all throw their weight behind the new thing as it starts to gain the upper hand) and engage in a lot less long term productive activity than societies with due process or some other way to keep people from losing everything at the drop of the hat. And it will get out competed by those societies.
Those scheming up evil ways to levy ruinous fines for failing to use one's blinker or get people kicked out of industries for having odious opinions on unrelated subjects ought to take note.
[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/filming-the-police/
[2] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/recording-police-publ...
Just wait until it's an end you don't like.
Just wait until it's a bad means to an end you don't like.
Just wait until it's a bad means to an end you don't like.
One could even argue that repeated application of that shit over the past 20 (or 120) years is why we're here now having this discussion.
I don't know the answer, but I hope (although I'm not sanguine about it) the answer is zero.
That said, if DHS is prioritizing hiring such folks for ICE/CBP (as a paramilitary force bent on domination of the US controlled only by Trump and his minions), we're going to have serious problems getting the current administration to vacate on 20 January 2029, especially since these folks have a budget larger than most military forces around the world.
Is that alarmist? I don't know. Then again, so many unprecedented, authoritarian and outright illegal things have been done by the current administration.
As such, it wouldn't surprise me to see right-wing militia thugs on the ICE/CBP payroll. I hope I'm wrong. I fear I'm not.
[0] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/?meta_ex...
Edit: Maybe I'm paranoid, but so many of this administration's actions seem to come right out of the fascist/authoritarian playbook (cf. https://archive.ph/xbm1E although there are many other expositions of this as well).
Can we force you into a career?
Can we force you to right a book?
What if you work with a few people? Can we compel you to right a book then?
What if you work with a lot of people, a few thousand? Can we make you write a book in that case?
EU folk, we really need a 3rd platform. Let's go.
Well, you can pick your friends. And you can pick your nose.
But you can't pick your friend's nose. In a democratic society, that is.
Why were 30ish kids naked in an apartment building illegally? That sure sounds a whole lot like human trafficking, especially if the men arrested all had criminal records and gang affiliation.
Wow intentionally blocking a federal vehicle transporting a prisoner sure shoulds like interfering with law enforcement.
And in getting 30,000+ illegal immigrants into ICE custody, they've only detained 170 people? 130 of those were with criminal charges? That seems like a very low number.
This sounds exactly like immigration enforcement. Who are the politicians being rounded up? Who are the "political opponents" here? Not the 30,000 illegal immigrants who can't vote. Not the 130 citizens who committed a felony against agents.
Children sleeping in their beds, turned into something incriminating. So twisted.
The Nazi's killed, through bulk extermination, 13,000,000 people. Literally bulk gas chamber stuff.
That enforcing a land border is equivalent to you is insane.
They didn't start with that. They started by framing it as immigration enforcement.
"We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country of a strange people which was capable of snatching for itself all the leading positions in the land, and to oust it." - Adolf Hitler, 1939
You know what the euphemism for that bulk extermination was? "Resettlement to the East".
Or any other number of ways to disrupt an election. Maybe not open Congress at all?
edit: They wouldn't arrest citizens you say?
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
I think the small percentage of the far left that feels like it is ok to have immigrants here that are not following the rules of immigration and the small percentage of the right that feel it is ok to violate our constitution to stop these immigrants have taken over while the big middle just watches with their jaws open at what is happening.
Who said that? Not me. In fact, they've been doing so for a while. And beating them, even shooting[0] them -- because they can -- with impunity.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/04/ice-shooting-chica...
Sure, sure, people are just being deported. Where did I hear that story before?
Oh, thats right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
It's not like anyone's talking about rounding them up in camps where they would be killed, right?
Oh, wait, what was that? https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-joke-alligato...
Huh.
How many dollars did these "non-violent" (economic) "migrants" expend in emergency room resources?
How many productive citizens died (and how much financial loss was incurred) because of their (mis)use of these finite systems?
Why are so many farmers relying on illegal immigrants? why are so many employers depending on them? You don't really think 11 million people are using emergency rooms while at the same time being criminals do you now? why are local pd's not concerned about this? why are cities with illegal migrants not worried about them? You don't really think people in cities would rather be victims of crime than deport illegal migrants do you? How are mayors being re-elected if they're not hard on illegal migrants but those migrants are causing crime?
Show me the economical analysis that shows they're a net-negative on the economy? Show me the hospitals complaining about emergency rooms packed with illegal migrants constantly needing ER care, because they're so clumsy? What is the crime and murder rate with illegal migrants compared to natural born citizens? Despite crime rates going down over the years, and the top causes of violent crime not involving illegal migration, why is $50B, a larger budget than the US marines! being focused on this?
I bet you'd have cheered for the rounding up of jews and slavs in europe ~80yrs ago lol.
I think your prejudice has won the battle against your critical thinking skills.
After decades of being conservative and having their politicians sell them out, Republicans got really angry and gave up on conservatism in favor of radical destructionism instead. Rather than finding better politicians to represent them, focusing on workable policy (go after the employers), generally being less gullible, and so on, they decided the appropriate response was to throw the whole idea of Constitutionally-limited government in the trash in favor of a strongman con artist promising to magically solve it all. And they've convinced themselves they're on the right path because it makes "liberals" mad. Where of course a "liberal" is anyone concerned by throwing our Constitution in the trash.
It was a criticism of your character, not a argument in a debate, so Godwin's law doesn't apply here.
> $1 is too much.
$1 is too much because they're migrants, so spend $50B? but billions by natural born citizens isn't too much, so who cares about crime? The mental gymnastics! lol
> Comparing rounding up illegal economic migrants who are actively breaking long-standing (enacted decades before they were born) federal law for the purpose of economic gain to law-abiding Jews being taken from their homes during an act of genocide is unconscionable.
Not a good argument. there are no arrest warrants, trials, due process,etc.. afforded to these supposedly illegal migrants. plenty of cases where US citizens are being rounded up, beaten and disappeared as well.
There is a case in "aligator alcatraz" where 1200 people are missing without a trace for example. these are concentration camps.
I'm not disagreeing with deporting illegal migrants, so don't waste your breath on that. Justify to me why $50B is worth the investment. why is $1 too much when it is an illegal immigrant, but if your own child/family/friend was raped by crackhead it isn't worth $50B, because they were born in the US?
If you care about the law so much, why not spend that money in opening lots of immigration courts and training ICE to follow the law and do things lawfully instead? You're not for the law, you're for wasting money and racially profiling americans. In your view, american citizens being detained because of their phsyical appearance is ok. Children being treated in hospitals being deported is ok.
You crave the cruelty. You have abandoned your humanity in pursuit of cruelty towards your fellow man. I'm agreeing with you that deporting illegal migrants is fine, sanctuary cities shouldn't be a thing. lawfully removing illegal migrants is fine, yet your argument is to deprive people of due process (which all humans on US soil are afforded), and beyond that, committing of acts that no law can absolve your conscious of is still the way to go. And not only that, this brutality is worth spending more money on that even a military branch whose entire job is invading other countries. You're fine with masked soldiers kidnapping US citizens. You have betrayed your people.
I remember during the Fanny-whatever-her-name-was thing that went through the courts prior to Trump's election they pulled up cell location records from 10yr ago as if they were nothing special whatsoever and introduced them as evidince. Sure, all of that was done according to laws and process, but having decades old location records exist at all to be subject to government inquiry is probably something that's bad on its face and we should not be doing even if it lets us nab a few people who did wrong.
Something a lot of people aren't considering is that a dictator ship might become a reality and these people will succeed, the US will decline but still remain a powerful country but with constant internal strife and divisions. The real goal seems to be curbing American influence overseas, and containing the US, just like the US tried to contain Russia and China for decades prior.
The US military/intel community literally used sitcoms to influence the middle east in the 2000's. What goes around...
By "good guys got the bad guys" what I am referring to is that the arctic frost stuff resulted in federal prosecutions. First off, you can't really use conviction as a bellwether for whether serious wrong was actually done. Federal prosecution is intentionally ruinous for anyone without huge, huge resources and even if you beat the flagship charge the laws are such that if they want you they'll still get you and they're only really constrained by political optics. Martha is probably the best example of this. And second, even if the prosecution is being done in pursuit of people who have legitimately done wrong (note I did not say "violated the law" because the laws are so broad), I'm not sure that prosecuting sitting politicians is a door that ought to be opened because due to the ruinous nature of of having the feds after you it basically hands a ton of power to the executive to harass politicians to get what they want.
This ties us back to 24 and the CIA because they were theoretically torturing people to "save american lives" and "prevent terrorism" which, while noble goals, are still not justification for going from "torture is never acceptable" to "torture is acceptable sometimes".
I think this is the real outcome of having so much debt owed to foreign countries. The political kayfabe all focuses on it like it's some mortgage where other countries will foreclose or whatever. But there is no mechanism for that to actually occur. What it does allow those foreign countries to do is to buy up significant chunks of the US, and then exert the control that customarily comes along with ownership.
[0] this is also why they'd constantly rage-farm about immigration, but then turn around and facilitate the supply of cheap illegal labor
I am skeptical that doing so would result in greater concentration of executive power constrained only by political optics—given that that's what we're seeing now—and it is hard to envision a scenario of executive harassment of the legislature more obvious than what we've already seen² happen.
¹ to be clear, we're talking about things which actually happened in real life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
² Senate Chamber, January 6 2021 https://share.google/kJois0ZmHS7j6XMAU
Believing that the solution to ICEblock being banned by Apple is for the affected proletariat to rise up and run their own software and government-proof cryptography systems is fanciful, to put it mildly.
Most of the public don’t even know this is possible, let alone where to start with it, and even if they did you’re judging other people’s technical abilities as on-par with your own.
The solution I’m hoping for here is for Apple, a gigantic company with a reasonable track record in defending privacy and fending off government overreach, to stand up to the crooked old bully and stop giving him their lunch money.
They were just made to shut up for a little while, but they still wanted what they wanted. They openly say that they are glad Trump makes them feel like they don't have to shut up anymore.
They never stopped voting. They were incensed that they were stopped from being systemically racist.
Is that what they did first? Or did they strip the citizenship away from their undesirables so they were illegal immigrants in their own homes, and used that as pretense to deport them to camps?
I believe due process is important in every case, and I want to believe that having a mixed system eventually results in due process being skipped more and more, but the example from the end of the article goes against that: England and France diverged, so it’s possible for a mixed system to go either way?
Also when a force commits terror acts against other force (e.g. Russian military maiming captured PoWs) -- that's a war crime, not a terrorism either.
And why we so quick to jump to "attack"? There is a huge area the Militia can do without "attack"s. Sabotage, road blocks, building blocks, detention. Detention is violence, but it's not attack.
PS: of course the other side may call it "terror", that's for sure.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. I do think you could consider some of it terrorism in the classical definition of the word in that it would be ideologically motivated and it would be done by a comparatively small set of people. I don't think an attack on a big institution is a disqualifier either, considering that some people consider Guy Fawkes a terrorist [1], and he was trying to blow up British Parliament. If you have a small group of people using armed force in order to coerce politicians to act in a certain way, I don't think it's necessarily a stretch to call it terrorism.
Regardless, even if it doesn't fit into the classical definition of "terrorism" (though I really think we're splitting hairs on this and it's getting into "distinction without a difference" territory), there is no doubt that the Trump administration would classify all these people as terrorists and try and impose any and all "anti terrorism" legislation possible.
To be clear, I'm not assigning a value judgement to this, I don't think definitions like "good" or "bad" really work here.
[1] https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-education/depar...