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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

It's all terrible, but it pales in comparison to the fact that the government can now disappear people to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process. I know that comparative suffering isn't a good litmus test for one situation vs another, but I'll take my data being stolen over a life sentence in an offshore prison without a trial any day of the week.

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Unless the stolen data is being used to compile lists of enemies of the state to send to the gulag. Like are any of these troublesome trade unionists immigrants? Time to send them to the gulag, solves two problems at one - that’s efficiency!

Unfortunately close to a new lawsuit where a H1B employee at Tesla reported a serious safety issue and Musk allegedly threatened to deport her entire team..

> About a decade ago, engineer Cristina Balan called out a safety concern about a design flaw on a Tesla vehicle. Shortly after, Balan says she was forced to resign. Now, she's explaining the leverage Tesla allegedly used to get her signature.

> At Tesla CEO Elon Musk's own request, Balan went straight to the top to solve a problem in 2014, which involved floor mats in the Model S curling near the pedals, affecting braking. But instead of being granted a meeting with Musk, "HR and the legal department had another plan for me," Balan said in an interview with Times Radio over the weekend.

> "They told me that if I'm not resigning on the spot, they will deport my entire team…because the entire interior team was backing me up," said Balan, who is from Romania and has said many of her team members were waiting on green card applications. "And their plan—Tesla's plan and legal department plan—was to convince the entire team and myself to close the internal investigation that we opened in the company to fix a serious safety issue." Notably, Tesla has been among the leading employers of H-1B visa holders, who perform work in specialty occupations.

https://www.chron.com/culture/article/tesla-engineer-deporta...

More evidence for the idea that H-1B visas are abusive, the tying of a work permit to a particular employer.

Fun fact to consider: when you apply for citizenship, you have to list which organizations you're a member of on the form you submit to USCIS. This includes trade unions and political parties and such. Failure to complete that form truthfully is potential grounds for denaturalization in the future (on the basis that citizenship was obtained through fraud and thus was never valid). Given that this administration has already talked about denaturalization a lot, I wouldn't put it past them to cross-reference those forms with any databases they can get their hands on.

Yeah but these things are not unrelated. This whistleblower is now risking being disappeared, and that will affect the calculations of all the other people considering blowing the whistle on the many other baldly illegal things this administration is doing.

The fear is the point.

>>It's all terrible, but it pales in comparison to the fact that the government can now disappear people to a gulag in El Salvador

90% of people who were sent to the gulags survived and came back. This is much, much worse.

>90% of people who were sent to the gulags survived and came back

You can survive brutal conditions, but you won't be the same after. And that 10% is like a million and a half of people.

Please don't trivialize suffering of people.

Saying that El Salvador prisons are worse than gulags trivializes suffering? What an odd accusation.

You think these aren't related? There are quotas to fill in El Salvador...

Also, one illegal act doesn't excuse another. It's important to not willfully move the overton window over even more.

Musk is heavily anti Union. He’s running DOGE. They exfiltrated highly confidential data from the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees things like labor disputes.

This is all under the auspices of Trump, which is figuring out how to get away with ‘deporting’ US citizens to El Salvador without due process.

Connected the dots yet? How long do you think until union organizers are getting black-bagged in the middle of the night and disappeared to El Salvador? A month? Less?

> the government can now disappear people to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process

To be wafer-thin fair to Trump et al, that was started by Bush with Guantanamo.

It's almost like all those people who said the federal government's post 9/11 power grabs set a bad precedent and moved us incrementally further down various slippery slopes were right.

It seems they’ve learned their lessons on Guantanamo: That was too much hassle with the legal battles so now they just cut them loose with a shoulder shrug and a “no jurisdiction” fig leaf.

This is true, important, and it's also important to recognize how long it was left open by both sides. "Imperial rebound" is very real. If you create a special extra-legal space which allows you to abuse people, it will expand.

Which is exactly why a lot of us thought that was a really bad idea at the time.

First they came for enemy combatants, called them terrorists, shipped them to a torture prison abroad, stripped of all rights and still keep some there despite not having them convicted. But I'm not an enemy combatant, so I didn't care.

Then they care for immigrants, called them enemy aliens, shipped them to a torture prison, stripped them of all rights despite not having anybody convicted, but I'm not an immigrant, so I don't care.

<--- you are here right now -->

On the gripping hand, just because Bush, our greatest war criminal (derogatory), did something doesn't mean that Trump should. If anything, he should have learned why it's a bad idea.

The point is that what we're witnessing is the logical end result of the preceding decades of giving the federal executive more and more unchecked power (it didn't start with Bush, either).

Trump is indeed uniquely bad in many ways, but the reason why he can do so much damage is because he was given access to the tools accumulated by previous presidential administrations.

I hope that we'll learn our lesson once this is over. But I'm also skeptical.

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