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ICE and the Smartphone Panopticon

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217 points fortran77 | 4 comments | 31 Oct 25 01:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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_ZeD_ ◴[31 Oct 25 03:56 UTC] No.45768260[source]▶
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deepsun ◴[31 Oct 25 04:26 UTC] No.45768430[source]▶
As a person from an authoritarian country, I should say that firearms mean much less than coordination. Organized group of 100 with no guns is stronger than 10000 armed but poorly coordinated people.

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.

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tombert ◴[31 Oct 25 04:37 UTC] No.45768478[source]▶
> But no one talks about creating a Militia (yet) for some reason.

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

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1. deepsun ◴[31 Oct 25 17:57 UTC] No.45774816[source]▶
You probably meant "insurrection" instead of "terrorism". Terrorism is trying to achieve some goals by means of terror.

E.g. separatism (like Texan or Californian) can be named insurrection.

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2. tombert ◴[31 Oct 25 23:09 UTC] No.45777725[source]▶
No I meant terrorism. If you were doing a violent attack on the federal government in order to try and get them to stop policies you don't like, I do not see a fundamental difference between that and terrorism.
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3. deepsun ◴[01 Nov 25 01:54 UTC] No.45778643[source]▶
No, attack on _forces_ (army, national guard, police etc) will not be recognized terrorism, most likely. Those forces are assumed to not get afraid. Of course, I can imagine something like that that might be considered terrorism, but it's a long stretch, don't remember any cases. Terrorism is almost always directed towards civilians.

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.

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4. tombert ◴[01 Nov 25 02:46 UTC] No.45778857{3}[source]▶
> 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...