ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
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Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
They have a bunch of guys with guns. Maybe no warrants or id's or anything legal like that, but guns are probably enough.
With this latest bill, they are going to be one of the largest armed forces in the world. They'll get more money than the US Marines.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
And when they do call it out, people will be told by Fox News and others that "this senator is opposed to the work ICE is doing to solve the problem of illegal immigrants", and other news agencies will say "such-and-such official says this senator is opposed to..." and the propaganda will spread and people will believe it.
A judiciary can only function as a check on other types of power when it is allowed to do so. Merely being called by that name is not enough.
Sure you might be fine (they just harass the brown and black people), but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20240529/what-happens-if-you-board-a...
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
Getting into clubs as a teenager was comical - as there is no standard ID most people had 'work ID' that was just a laminated bit of paper. Or would carry a paper drivers license with no photo on it.
There are zero known exceptions to this principle.
Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/canada-police-mistakes-novia...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Story-Jane-Doe-Book-About/dp/067931275...
Yeah, we know cops in Mexico are corrupt. Our police force has a very different problem set that we need to solve. Pointing out a different problem in a different country contributes nothing.
Paid parental leave creates both deadweight loss and moral hazard. It also tends to reduce labor inversely proportional to labor's cost, with the largest reduction in labor hitting highly skilled, sub middle-aged females. This should be obvious as it lowers the expected productivity of workers, moreso when you extend parental leave to family leave and allow for the care of ailing elders. The argument for it seems to hinge on the dollars allowing greater workforce participation, but I'm not sold that greater participation with lower expected productivity is greater than fewer productive workers.
Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
Regarding healthcare, it's well known that decreasing prices increase demand. While some healthcare demand is totally inelastic (injuries, cancer, etc.), the front line pcp interactions are elastic. Compound in people's willingness to decrease self care since they don't have to pay for future healthcare, and you've increased the rate of inelastic demand instances in the future, increasing demand. Now consider that prices would no longer be dictated by free markets, and now we have trouble with price discovery, with the power seemingly going to the single consumer, so it's likely treatments will be underpaid, which may lead to fewer practicioners and fewer innovations. Maybe I'm wrong... I haven't thought about heath economics in a long while. My preference would be to see a forced decoupling of healthcare provided as work benefits such that everyone had to purchase it on the open market (even if that loss of negotiating freedom between private parties irks me).
Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you. That's the foundation of socialization, everyone's resources - that they fork over from taxation - is shared for various activities and settlements that give as many individuals (past, present and emerging) as much of an acceptable baseline of living as it can.
To be sure, the goal of socialization is also not usually to make everyone rich or give immense quality of life, it's to make sure everyone has the same "lowest" bar for things that members of society deem as essential, and that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible.
But by definition it is inefficient. Redistribution of money from Person A to Person B necessarily means Person A can't spend that money. If their optimal utility was to give that money to Person B, you wouldn't need such a policy governmentally.
Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
As an annecdotal example, my state offers 12 weeks of parental leave. The maximum they are willing to pay is about $550/week. My company provides two weeks of paid leave. So for 10 weeks, I get the $550 from the state. But my w2 income is about 2k/week post tax, post 401k max. So I would forgo about $1400 a week to stay home. Daycare costs $550/week, so it's far better for me to work. But then I don't get the time off. And yet I still pay for others. This is an example of a terrible implementation of the already bad policy.
- Preventative care is far cheaper and more effective than reactive care (e.g. your dentist telling you to floss more in a particular area vs. filling a cavity vs. filling a root canal)
- Insurance is more effective at dispersing costs amongst a larger pool of people
- In a system like the US where insurance companies must negotiate prices with healthcare providers, larger pools have more bargaining power
What happens when the single purchaser of healthcare refuses to pay an amount sufficient to raise supply to meet demand?
I would propose that we legislate the ban of employer provided healthcare benefits instead of making it universal.
You can do what you're describing today, in this world. I think the fact that you don't is instructive.
Moreover, this blinders-on-libertarianism "I should only pay for things directly for me" approach doesn't work if you pick and choose; you have to address it in context of the entire system (ie, you can't silently accept all the benefits and only shout about the individual moments you don't come out on top).
This society, for better or worse, pools money to do things at scale even when some of those things don't have the direct and equal benefit to every individual, instead aiming for a general good for all, stability, and a platform for everyone to have higher potential.
Yes, this gets abused in many ways and yes, it should always be constantly evaluated for effectively spending money.
However, your anecdotes about how the women or the poors get more than you in certain policies aren't impactful without looking at the whole which includes everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
> everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
There is certainly some gain in being able to outsource research, but it is difficult to determine if it is a net good for society or the individual due to the moral hazard it generates. Not worrying about your bank being a scam allows actual banks to take on outsized risk and then not face any repercussions. It skews the appetite for risk that disproportionately benefits risk takers. For a recent example, see the Silicon Valley Bank failure, which the FEDs totally bailed out to prevent a collapse across many more banks, mostly because those banks overleant at low mortgage rates and couldn't sell the low interest notes at face value after the rise in interest rates, leading to a liquidity crisis.
Focusing on growth comes at a cost; lots of inefficies are introduced. Instead, we could focus on being efficient and low waste and allow the growth to come naturally.
The moral hazard of checks notes mothers breastfeeding and attending to their newborn children and husbands asssisting for a few weeks. Yes. What an absolutely upsidedown society we'll have if we allow such a thing to happen. Terrible. Need to ensure that doesn't happen.
And we need to reduce the rate of this happening to ensure checks notes wealthy people continue producing at high rates to profit the even wealthier.
That so many people have such mindsets and continue to wonder why our birthrates are dropping is astounding.
Wake up buddy. Keep drawing these lines. See where they go. I guess we'll both be dead though, so it doesn't matter.
Challenge. Healthcare is very much a public "good". The healthier evereyone is, the less we spend on healthcare overall. And the more we can accomplish overall. It works in everyone's benefit for society to be healthy.
The same way it works in everyone's benefit to have roads. We both want to get to the store/work/etc, and want healthy people to take care of those places. Neither one is a need, both are beneficial to everyone.
For the record, I also suggest roads do not meet the definition of a public good.
It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
> It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
I'm not ignoring this cost. I'm stating that this cost should be borne by the individual that elected to have a child; e.g., lowered labor participation for some duration. The current US federal policy recognizes this by allowing unpaid leave for some duration.
> It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
My point exactly. If above average compensation is actively harmed by this policy through deadweight loss, it means the policy is bad. This ignores the plethora of moral hazard that is introduced too. For example, how to we reconcile those laborers that take 12 weeks of paid taxpayer vacations only to promptly quit their job upon restarting it? These folks were always going to drop out of the labor force; now we've given them 12 weeks of free money redistributed from productive members.
> Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
Religious inclinations should direct followers how to execute behavior for themselves of a voluntary nature. It should not be used to dictate that everyone in society follow the same moral orders at the behest of a gun, which is what governmental policy does.
I don't think anyone thinks 12 weeks with a newborn is a vacation, and yet most people probably wouldn't trade that 12 weeks with their newborn for anything in the world.
> I'm not ignoring this cost
You literally are ignoring the cost, as its not your given model. And its not a cost that will only be borne by the immediate caregivers, there are knock-on costs throughout society that will be felt by this change.
> Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you.
I'd set the reason as even more basic than that. Children are absolutely essential the future of society. There is literally no way to argue that is not true.
Since they are essential to society, we should be working on ways to support them; as a society. Now, this can be argued against. But I feel pretty strongly that "I do not think it is important for us, as a society, to works towards goals that beneficial to society" is a fairly brain-dead stance. You can argue about the best uses for _available_ money; but to argue that's a matter of priorities, not "is it a valid goal".
To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
These redistributions are not pareto optimal and have major deadweight losses and introduce moral hazard.
We have an entire system of laws we put in place to force people to increase their utility within society.
What your statement is effectively arguing is... to go with anarchy; that we should not have rules that change human behavior, because human behavior _should_ be to maximize utility.
I think it's pretty well accepted that "just let everyone do whatever they want" isn't a viable system for a society.
But I absolutely agree that the government shouldn't do much, if anything, more than that. Incentives to shape behavior should be extremely limited, because the government is the only entity that is allowed to force involuntarily transactions.
Voluntary transactions ensure that the transacting parties have a pareto optimal outcome. This is what should be maximized, even at the detriment of the longevity of society itself.
I'm not deep enough in the theory to know whether "voluntary transactions create a Pareto-optimal outcome" is a true statement. I suspect not, because of information asymmetry and so on.
Pareto-optimal is also kind of an arbitrary stopping point - you chose it because it supports your argument, not because it's actually a good one. If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
> If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist, and now poor Elon is far worse off. My point of search for pareto optimality is exactly that we should avoid this outcome because it's not better. Following it to it's logical conclusion, redistributing all wealth until it was exactly equally divided amongst the population would produce the most good outcome.
Communism is Pareto-optimal (both the utopian kind and the USSR kind). Authoritarian dictatorship is Pareto-optimal. Hitler's Germany was Pareto-optimal. Democracy is Pareto-optimal. Whatever America's doing right now is Pareto-optimal. Pretty much everything that ever arises in practice is Pareto-optimal.
Imagine a society with only two people - me and you - where I am constantly stomping my boot on your face and enjoying it. This would be Pareto-optimal, because in order for you to stop having your face stomped on, you'd have to make me stop enjoying it and that wouldn't be a Pareto improvement. Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?
> I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
So literally nothing. You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
> How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist
No, I'm talking about everyone having 1000 times more resources except for Elon. The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now). With regards to Pareto-optimality, this would be very much a "stop stomping your boot on my face" scenario.
My comments were with regards to a system that enforces private property. To that end, having one's face stomped on involuntarily would be a violation of private property.
We could consider a system whereby one person has 100% of the fixed resources while the other has 0%. It's pareto optimal and maximally inequitable. My point is that it is wrong to take from the person with 100% to redistribute it to the person with 0%. But it would be pareto optimal if a voluntary trade occurs, and I also accept trades of duress to be voluntary (e.g., the person with 0% sells their body for a meal).
> You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. I want these (national defense). Enforcement of private property does violate the nonrivalous condition, but that service is still necessary to provide a system whereby private property exists.
> The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now).
The move to redistribute Elon's wealth breaks pareto optimality. All this does is move the gini coefficient to 0, but the total resources in the system are constant.
Everybody drives the same roads ("Why would I pay to maintain Smith Street? I've never driven on it?"), some people REALLY need a firefighter in an emergency.
To the extent these impact public buildings, I think this is a good thing. Just like I think public employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on age, race, etc.
But in both cases I would argue that private companies should not be held to the same standards.
Firefighters could arguably be a public good in that they are (approximately) nonrivalous and are definitely nonexcludable. In addition, fire fighting as a public good prevents the free rider problem that would likely exist with this service in the private market.
It's a net benefit to society encourage people to have kids and keep the number of births closer to replacement rate.
>To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly, they might still not have a baby if they don't have time to take care of the baby without parental leave. Long work hours for couples decreasing the national birth rate is a negative externality. If all companies acted hostile to parents and no one became a parent, that might boost each individual company's productivity levels, but they would be killing off the workforce in the long term. That, like overfishing, would be an example of the tragedy of the commons.
Yes. That is my point. Theft is required to execute this policy, which defines the deadweight loss.
I argue that companies may offer better leave benefits in order to attract workers. My company provides six weeks for primary and two for secondary caretakers.
Amazon gives a month or something like that. Clearly I would have incentive to work there if I could, and by that I mean others better skilled than me fill those vacancies. The policy is effective.
I have a lot of libertarian tendencies but shouting that you're being robbed (from the safety of your stable, productive, society that protects even your right to complain like that) feels childish to me - the actual first step if you're going to act this way seems to be trying to get out from under this government that you never agreed to so you can start doing things your own way. The irony of people who say "if you don't like it, leave" is that they rarely take their own advice.
As a side note, I'm always curious when I see someone say that taxes are theft -- what is "theft" and "property" in your world view without the other systems underpinning it? It seems to always boil down to "stuff in your possession that you can keep someone else from taking away" which always boils down to violence at the end. Does " theft" even make sense in this context and, if so, did you "steal" everything first? It always seems like such a "rules for thee but not for me" kind of claim so I'm (genuinely) curious if you have a more substantial platform for your libertarianism.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
I don't think it's helpful for me to try to take a position about what is and isn't theft by governments you were born into but wish you weren't. I don't even know how to start untangling that one and I think perspective overwhelms any reason there anyway.
I do appreciate your response about my question - very helpful!
I want to be more progressive. I really do! It feels good because typically you get to provide for the less fortunate. But my atomic unit is the individual, and I can't seem to make my belief system reconcile individual liberty and government-enforced charity. That's why I come here sometimes. It helps me talk through things and try to find counterexamples to my ideology.
I appreciate everyone's time and discussions.
It happens that most advanced societies consider the widespread availability of medical care to be a similar force multiplier, something that enables every individual in the society to produce more and earn more and reach their full economic potential.
Free-market solutions to health care are problematic because there's nothing free about a market that everyone is forced to participate in by virtue of being alive. Likewise, private insurance models make little sense when every insured customer is virtually guaranteed to file expensive claims at one point or another.
Consequently health care is widely considered a valid area for governmental involvement and taxation. Yes, the money for public health care is "stolen" from you, but again, there is a widespread consensus that the economy that you participate in is healthier as a whole because of that. Just like public subsidies for many other things that many/most people agree are important but that fall outside what conventional markets do well at providing. In a society that didn't attend to such needs, you might have more money from a numeric standpoint, but it would be worth less.
Obviously there are weak points in this argument from a libertarian perspective, but it's very hard to convince people that it's without any merit at all.
Look at what is happening to South Korea.
I too hate the top-down prescriptivism of narrow "benefit" policies administered by employers. But until we fix the economy so most people have the market power to tell their employer they're taking 3-6+ months off for $whatever, have the savings to pay for it, and be confident that that either their employer will want them back at the end or that they will be able to find a different employer, then it's what we're stuck with. So if you really want to reform this, then work towards fixing wealth inequality.
(The healthcare thing is a politically radioactive topic. It would be fantastic to prevent employers anticompetitively bundling healthcare with employment, but it would take a lot of political capital to rise above fearmongering to people with "good" employer plans and the desire of politicians to lean on the current system out of expedience)
If you focus on smaller instances of redistributive policies without addressing that, you've done the equivalent of admitting a logical contradiction to your axioms and thus are able to come to some decidedly anti-individual-freedom conclusions. In this case, further turning the financial screws on the edges.
Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
The point is that without actually doing the former, your point in isolation on the latter comes across as completely out of touch. Currently, the vast majority of people simply do not have the kind of wealth required to make a decision like you're advocating. As it stands, the financial treadmill is a fixed quantity - so in that context, what you're effectively advocating is for people to not have the time to have kids, period.
> Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
Yes, that is exactly the problem! When you push everywhere with a justification of individual freedom, the places you tend to actually move forward are where you're actually serving an agenda of entrenched centralized power. For example, look at this individual-liberty-appealing "fiscal responsibility" refrain of the past 30 years - it ended up facilitating all that newly-printed money to be given away to banks / asset holders, rather than say purposefully spent making sure our industrial base wasn't getting completely hollowed out. It was basically a kayfabe for looting, and not supporting individual freedom at all.
In a perfect world I would have preferred if that new money hadn't been created in the first place, and that wealth had remained distributed throughout society rather than centrally collected and then centrally assigned. But that wasn't anywhere close to being on the table. So we have to be real about the actual results of the specific policies we're advocating for, lest we become patsies helping to destroy individual liberty.
Sensible government programs aren't deadweight loss - they are net gains - although a lot of what governments do, especially what the US government does, is not sensible. For example, you pay taxes to have property rights, and I don't think you think that is deadweight loss.
Meanwhile your concern about "why should I pay for someone else?" is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
Yes. This is exactly right. And that is because private insurance allows people to voluntarily consume it. Not everyone has the same appetite for risk. Allow people to maximize their individual utility!
Its wild to read cops in the US are not corrupt, did people just not read modern US history? Prohibition? Civil rights? Union busting? The Pinkertons?
What you're describing is bad but also pretty mild by international standards.
[1] https://www.securitas.com/en/newsroom/press-releases_list/se...
I worked as a security guard through college. Never chased a skateboarder, but I did ask them nicely to leave at least once a week.
People play fast and loose with the word "corrupt" the same way they do with "conspiracy".
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
Yeah they'll bend the law for their buddies but we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy (this last part is a gripe I have with most government stuff here, not just law enforcement related).
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
Many people have WAY worse concerns. There's a sheltered view here, but it's not the one you're thinking of.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
Why did they do that?
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
With FOP stickers, "courtesy cards", placard abuse, and violent impunity, there's lots of corruption going around.
https://apnews.com/article/nypd-courtesy-card-police-miscond...
But I'd prefer not to interact in their official capacity with them if possible because there is a non-zero chance that the specific officer I'm talking to is not one of the good ones.
I recently had a run in where I was photographing a duck on the roof of a house. A cop literally ran up to me and asked what I was doing with his hand on his gun, holster released. I was fortunate that he realized how nuts his behavior was when I pointed out that I was taking a picture of a crazy duck sitting on a chimney. I also realized that I probably would have been shot had I not been calm and polite.
I suspect many Black people would prefer paying a bribe to being killed by police at an outsize ratio, or paying a bribe to being charged more aggressively and sentenced more harshly.
Police brutality and incarceration is worse than bribes, my dude.
Disproven already: "Interacting with cops will never make your day better"
Second, I doubt many victims feel like their days are better after talking with the police. Just look at the abysmal solve rates.
Good luck petitioning the dictionary! :)
(This is not a comment on your politics. The moderation call here would be the same if you had the opposite politics, or any others.)
Edit: This has been a problem for a long time. I don't believe it's your intention to abuse HN, so I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this, we'll end up doing so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121542 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436733 (Feb 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19972399 (May 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715736 (April 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758558 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16749749 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457684 (Feb 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234007 (Jan 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849007 (Dec 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15773271 (Nov 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484503 (Oct 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672661 (June 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233383 (April 2017)
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
The police as they are now in North America are not a good option, they're just the least worst option. You call them and they show up and you hope that they cause more problems for the offender than the victim, but that's never guaranteed.
I have. Several times. In the latter two cases (burglaries at my home and my brother's home -- one in NYC and the other in the Bay Area), the police were spectacularly inept and completely useless.
In the first case, the police arrested the perpetrators more by happenstance than design, despite the fact that these kids (all except the 22 year-old ringleader were 16 or younger) had been committing similar crimes for months.
As the old saw goes, "I don't hate the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
Cops are not your friends, even as a victim; neither are lawyers or judges. Treat the whole justice system more like a Linux server with an SQL injection: amoral, and can be made to do anything you want, if you're evil and happen to know how which levers to pull and how to not get caught.
Since it's relevant here, I am a white man.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
> the benefits are limited
So, which is it?
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
Don't try to overpower the hijackers? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and fail? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and succeed? You live. It only takes one person to do the math and realize they are basically in a no-loss scenario.
People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.
So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.
To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.
History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_West_Flight_612
Here is an example where a man got a gun on a plane in 2007, which directly disproves the 'equality' if passengers.
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
It’s not about legality. It’s about compliance.
If you become a target, they will arrest you and drop charges later. They will make you miss work and lose your job. They will set up surveillance on you to catch you doing anything else they want to continue harassment.
You don’t have to look hard to see reporting of officers using official databases to settle personal scores. 404 media just did a big expose on ALPR Flock DB abuses
Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of sending "homegrowns" to overseas concentration camps, so it won't be long now before you don't have to do anything wrong to be targetted and you don't have any recourse regardless.
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
with some discussion at: DOJ Opens Door To Stripping Citizenship Over Politics - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-opens-door-to-strippi...
"We can't let those (accused) commies take over New York (even if elected)"
If you post to local social media groups about DUI checkpoints or mobile speed cameras you’ll be scolded by about 30% of people.
People are willing to put a couple of weekends into making a middle school or high school competition happen. They're a lot less willing to do it if they have to go to an FBI station to get fingerprinted or produce a state and federal background check first. And I'm not talking about people with something to hide; I'm talking about people with a completely clean background who just don't want to be bothered.
Few years back got chased by a cop and ticketed (and scolded) for not restraining kiddo (small town and my clever 2yo somehow learned how to unbuckle themselves (even that houdini clip didn't help)). Warned I could get prosecuted for child neglect if I continue. I suspect the daycare has tipped him off.
2. Supposing I did believe it and did say it, I would be well within my rights to say it. The First Ammendment assures the right to say things like that, no matter how dumb and misguided those things are.
But for many DUI checkpoints safety is not the goal. It's simply a pretext to check everyone's papers.
Or is perhaps the chance of a random test at any moment more of a deterrent?
Instead, evaluate yourself on the basis of your standing with the regime. If they dislike you for any reason including your skin color, they will find some sort of national security threat in your actions. Or they may punish you first and then claim the inability to correct it. On the other hand if they need you, they will completely ignore your actions, including even leaking of extremely sensitive information to unauthorized individuals.
Because that's basically what's unfolding under fascism means.
Flashing your headlights to warn others of cops or anything else is generally considered free speech. IIRC, this has been ruled on several times in pretty high courts.
So double check with a lawyer, but I'm like 99% confident there's nothing illegal about these types of Apps. I mean Waze has been doing it for years and even Google maps notifies you about speed traps.
If some new ruling makes it not free speech, we're in danger
Hasn’t the light flasher helped someone who was breaking the law avoid detection?
And isn’t the intent of the flasher to ensure that people who were breaking the law have enough time to stop doing that long enough to avoid detection?
> However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained
Obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer, but the people who make posts on this app have no contact with the people the app ostensibly benefits. If the app helped targets of ice find willing drivers in the area to help them escape to somewhere else, that’d be one thing since there is now a direct relationship with a person and the accused and direct action on the part of the app user. But I don’t see how this app is materially different from posting speed traps or DUI checkpoints on Waze, an action that has absolutely helped people avoid lawful intervention by police.
An analogy might be to have a sign in a shop warning thieves of CCTV - the purpose is to prevent theft and is not considered to be helping someone avoid detection, although it does also do that.
This looks much the same to me as people warning those around them of ICE activity.
It is literally telling someone to obey the law, because the law is watching.
Police notifications on GPS don't really give you much notification to turn off onto a different road or to avoid them, at least on freeways, which is the only time I've seen them.
Times sure are changing
Here is a list (but I can't say how accurate it is): https://lizhiguos.com/driving-aids-and-speed-camera-warnings...
You can have a reasonable system one way or another. I would take Swiss regulation over US one any day personally.
oh great, stealing my idea?
He admitted to having used cannabis on two occasions — in Germany and in New Mexico.
- It’s legal in both places, so in my mind it was irrelevant, he said." - Nordlys
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/25/norwegian-tourist-jd-... https://www.nordlys.no/denied-entry-to-the-us-admitted-to-le...
Oh we're not going to let tourists into our country because we asked them whether or not they'd ever smoked pot and they said yes.
We have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but if it is, that's the dumbest thing I've ever f*** heard, especially given the marijuana's legal in most states in the United States that anyone outside the US would actually want to visit
With the “narcotic paraphernalia” referring to “a photo of the traveler with a homemade wooden pipe” according to Mikkelson.
The official document for his rejection stated this reason:
> it appears you are attempting to engage in unauthorized employment without authorization and proper documentation
With all these conflicting accounts in mind, perhaps it is plausible that he was denied entry because of his admitted legal cannabis use on two prior occasions. Or perhaps Homeland Security indeed retaliated against a someone for possessing a JD Vance meme, then decided to lie about it.
We don’t get this in NZ. Waze has removed this feature after threats. I don’t like cops either, but it is super fair and logical to me.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
Example: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/23/politics/niger-troops-law...
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895401/iraqi-parliament-vo...
Even when a country’s leaders unanimously tell us to withdraw our troops, we say nah:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-withdrawing-iraq-agreemen...
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
In an ideal world police are helping tourists find their way to their destination, helping grannies cross the street and writing the occasional traffic fine.
Where I live, violent crime is rare.
If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.
They just need to do enough to trigger others off.
That sounds like the opposite of what they should want.
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
What do you mean by this? I don’t use the app in the article (or Waze or any others, so they don’t let _me_ know).
What does ICEBlock do differently?
I would assume they mean that cops have a general duty to prevent/catch crime. So all you're doing by notifying people with waze or head taps is saying "hey there's police there!" Which everyone has a right to know.
However, because ICE is specialized, warning people of their presence might be seen as more akin to attempting to warn someone that their house is about to be raided by the FBI
It sounds like he's suggesting the app is intended as a way to target officers for assassination or something? That does seem like it might make a difference if it were true, but it also doesn't really seem like the intent of the app at all.
Trump pardoned felons who attacked law enforcement on January 6th. Bondi has no credibility calling out anyone for endangering law enforcement. If a Democrat were to match Trump’s rhetoric, they’d be promising pardons for anyone who physically assaulted ICE. They’re not. This entire shitshow is posturing.
Actually pretty decent tech reporting if true. This is a non trivial task that can take some time to setup and analyze. If the app is secure and uses certificate pinning it would require reverse engineering it to patch over the pinning before you could MiTM the traffic and actually see it decrypted.
They can hand it over to the government real quickly.
The author does not provide a Android version and does not specify why.
Edit: ok, the author does specify why, see the replies below.
> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
edit: however, GrapheneOS disputes this: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w
They say they'd have to maintain a DB of device info and user accounts to send push notifications, whereas Apple devices do not require this.
https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.
I disagree. Every single criminal is going to have a scanner the next day, and it'll become impossible to apprehend genuine criminals.
On the other hand, I would support mandatory recording and archiving of law enforcement radio, just like we are already doing with air traffic control. Combine this with independent incident investigations with public disclosure, and you've essentially achieved the accountability you are asking for.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
Only for Trump to throw out the nomination as part of his falling out with Elon, saying Isaacman was a democrat.
> “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” the statement said.
So they're not even trying to disguise the fact anymore that they're a bunch of goons? And this, coming from a person that went to law school.
Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
You know they could be going for the Streisand effect. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to add false incidents to reduce the effectiveness of the app. Nothing will get those people riled up like a court ruling in favor of the app. In the end, it could work to the administration's favor to have the app up and running. Nothing like acting all offended in public then celebrating privately as unnecessary fear and confusion sets in with false reports.
Ice are the good guys
The left think evil is good and good if evil nowadays
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=HaZeust#44411990
A military branch (either de facto or de jure) that exists for the majority purpose to directly target, round up, and imprison or deport individuals on U.S. soil - especially with a proven record of limiting due process - should have NEVER happened. I cannot stress enough, we're a few bad days - and more and more likely 1 executive action away - from at-scale "Tree of Liberty" stuff.
Let's figure out accurately what scale and scope of damage and harassment is coming.
See also: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-budget-big-beautiful-b...
Isn't due process a rule of law? How about laws against bribery?
When the Republicans are in power they move things rightwards. When the Democrats are in power they don't move things in either direction. The net effect is a move to the right, and you cannot influence that by voting, and the overall rate of movement depends on how often each party wins, which you can influence by voting.
The chance that a third party wins and moves things leftwards is zero.
“We should note that in 2025 we need an app to help people breaking the law avoid law enforcement”
https://www.iceblock.app/android
(Concerned that the information they would be required to store and handle may require they work with the government during a subpoena)
Apple also has to handle this (internally) to do push notifications, but I suppose that theory is Apple has pockets to fight the government (or it's at least out of the developers hands)
There is an argument to be made that Apple is better positioned to fight financially... However, the current administration tends to threaten blocking or mergers/acquisitions, or other red tape unless they comply. I doubt Apple would accept such financially damaging threats to protect ICEBlock's users.
As a side note, they do fight sometimes, they fought the EU's DMA for example, but in Russia and China, they complied without a fight though to my knowledge.
See? No laws broken, perfectly safe.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
On the other hand, Google isn't exactly working with the authorities either. They moved Google Maps' location history to on-device storage because of the many warrants they were served, for instance, and they too refuse to decrypt phones.
These companies know to pick their battles, but they did take on the government various times.
This is untrue at some technical level: Apple is currently unable to break AES-256.
The San Bernadino case was about having Apple create and sign new firmware that would enable a brute force attack - which could easily be unsuccessful. I don't believe the Secure Enclave found in newer models even allows for a brute force attack (enforcing some delay, among other things) from BFU state.
(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)
and they can make their own push system so that claim doesn't hold water?
I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering.
It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy.
All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.
Apple could be subpoenaed for the data, and we all know that Tim Apple is happy to jump when Trump says jump.
Meanwhile on Android they could easily just distribute the app from their own website and if they really insist on push messages there are plenty of non-google options that are actually private.
Someone explain to him that whatever he is doing, he needs to end to end encrypt so none of the infrastructure or middlemen can see anything but ips and who installed it (until they control the end device). (Better yet use veilid if it works yet, or i think there is some kind of tor routing over http these days)
Also he is making a weird mistake by not being a website instead of obvious corporate controlled "app", also should have tried harder to keep anonymous
A. Sideload an app so that google play store doesn't know you've installed it.
B: Run periodic background tasks to poll any https endpoint so no service provider has logs of device ids for push notifications.
C: Create local notifications on the device.
Also, as an offside, this is one of the things I hate about Google's handling of AOSP: they keep shuttling things into their proprietary layer, making it next to impossible for alternative approaches to gain traction.
I know it's possible to do push notifications without user accounts - I'm doing that in an app I maintain.
But it is tedious to publish Android apps with a personal developer account - you need to run a 2 week test with 12 (used to be 20) users before you can release the app.
What prevents law enforcement for ordering the developer to alter the application in a way that reveals user info, maybe the order is simply that they have to hand over their signing certificates for the app?
Edit: What I don't know is whether a web app running on iOS could do the equivalent of a push notification. Last I heard, WebKit's functionality is/was? limited here. That might be a reason to use a native app after all.
If you didn't, you'd just buy another phone. That's what HN tells me.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
Can't you run it mostly offline with OSM ?
The regular Maps SDK on Android is entirely free. There are very few reasons to even end up paying API costs, you're either running afoul of their terms of service, or wanting to use dynamic maps for some reason. My company has 15M monthly users on a _very_ maps heavy app and pays absolutely nothing on Android.
In my immediate area, ICE has been "spotted" numerous times and that news relayed on social media. Unfortunately, ICE hasn't actually engaged in any removal operations in this county. All of the sightings have been other agencies. The spotters are batting 0.0, and that's without any bad faith actors purposely spoofing reports.
My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the ordered scale-back on ICE agricultural worker immigration enforcement took place before they got to this county. That said, I don't know why they haven't been here, just that they haven't.
Usually resolved by reputation systems and auto-ban algorithms.
I wonder how long until this one gets removed under the same ridiculous pretence.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/apple-removes-police-trackin...
So a traffic app?
Want empty parking at a Dodger game? Use the ICE app.
Also a great honeypot to query out all the users of this app and schedule them for a visit.
> The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
In other threads people have noted that the Dev's decision to be iOS only means Apple has a complete list of users but the Dev does not.
I am hearing a lot more about ICE raids, particularly on reddit. Is this an artefact of more attention to raids that have been going on for years, or is there an increase in the number or impact of the raids? I find it hard to tell as I'm in somewhat of a bubble in terms of the US news I come across.
This no longer the case.
So, ICE is incorrectly enforcing the law, under the Trump administration.
For a bit of context, the administration decided to use undocumented people (read: Latin migrants) as (one of many) scapegoats and made a to promise to deport a certain number of millions. By most accounts the number of immigrants he promised to deport is well above the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, especially Latin migrant workers, which has been the target of, to put it frankly, persecution.
Is this a cultural thing? Because I've heard that US immigration laws kind of suck (long waiting times etc), but I don't really see how this is a solution to anything?
The techical aspect I get of course - I use Waze & I'm glad when someone reports cop with a radar etc. But ICE is not really something, that should concern normal citizens, right? They don't normally interact with US citizens, so as long as you have some kind of ID, they can check that and that is the end of your interaction with them. Or am I missing something?
I'd honestly be glad, if someone could explain that to me, I'm genuinely interested in understanding what is going on.
ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).
So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).
Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.
I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.
Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.
Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.
I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.
Thanks for the comment & explanation
As someone not born in America, I find the politics surrounding it quite odd as well.
I've lived in 5 different countries so far (ranging from developed to developing), including the US, and what makes the US stand out is the lack of immigration enforcement. It's wild that you can enter the US illegally (or overstay) and, until recently, live your entire life without much concern. You can be employed illegally, go to school, get a bank account, pay taxes, and even be charged with a crime, serve a sentence and be released, without anyone bothering to see if you're in the country legally.
Every other country I've lived in takes immigration seriously. If caught in the country illegally, you're deported very quickly and pretty much banned for life from coming to the country again. Police and the courts enforce immigration laws, employers face serious penalties for hiring people in the country illegally.
And practically nobody in those countries bats an eye. They see it as normal as enforcing any other law.
So the federal justice system & laws are completely separate from the local law and one does not talk to the other? I always thought that these things are more interconnected.
In my country I know for sure, that these systems are interconnected so if you are for example checked during a traffic stop, the police officer can immediately see whether you have a valid permit to stay. And if you don't they will immediately arrest you & hand over to the immigration enforcement.
In short, being deported can destroy your financial safety, risk your personal safety, remove you from your social safety net, separate you from your family, and leave you in a country to which you have no recent connection and may not even speak the language.
We are a country, largely, of immigrants. Many of us (but perhaps a minority these days) believe that if you work hard, support your community, and live peacefully, you should be able to make your way to a better future in America. So in this way, mass deportation is also a conflict of values. Especially as the administration revokes naturalization and threatens birthright citizenship.
Of course, if US did not enforce immigration policies for decades, I can see why people are upset when they suddenly start being enforced. But on the other hand I'd also have to ask, why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws? I mean if the Democrat party (?) mostly stands for not enforcing these immigration policies, they certailny had their time in power, right?
And without getting into the details about whether deportations are right or wrong, it seems to me that most people that are protesting right now should actually aim their anger on the Democrat party who actually left everyone hanging. This administration (atleast from my "outsider" point of view) just does what they said they will do all along.
Or am I missing something? Thanks for your comment though, I honestly did not know that there was little to no enforcement of these laws for so long.
There have been efforts by all presidents over the last 20 years to do so.
Obama increased the rate of deportations and doubled border patrols as part of a gambit to reach consensus on immigration reform. Congress didn't take up the offer. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/01/29/preside....
Trump (first term) put forward reforms that never passed the Senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act).
Biden late in his term put forward an immigration reform package that Trump, as a candidate, guided his party to reject. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/unraveling-misinformation-...
The US Congress is not an effective institution. It is captured by lobbying dollars. And the specific geographies each member represents in the House of Representatives have been organized to create partisan (far-left/far-right) districts that don't elect middle-ground candidates. Congress is more partisan than the country in general and also corrupted by financial influence. By design, the US Congress requires broad consensus to operate (bills need to pass the house, the senate, and then be signed by the president; to pass the senate, many bills need 2/3rds approval in practice). Congress has been largely unable to reach this broad consensus (on many issues, not just immigration) over the last many years.
But if these things are true, it means that political representation in the US is utterly broken and needs to be somehow re-shaped. I mean the fact that there were attempts to do something for past 20 years and nothing has been done (effectively) is just mad. Right now you seemingly have some kind of status quo, that can be shifted to one side or another through executive orders, right?
That's insane, it seems that after 250 years or so you basically ended up with a crossover of a monarchy and corporatism.
From the outside the congress seems really extremely polarized to me - either extremely conservative people (10 commandments in every classroom, no abortion, no universal healthcare etc) or extreme progressives (no difference between man/woman, cannot tell what a woman is etc). There seems to be no "sane" middle grounds on the US political scene - or atleast it is not visible to the outside.
I kind of feel for you, that actually really sucks. And the worst part is that I personally don't really see any "non-messy" way to change this system because it is controlled by the very people you would need to get rid of in order to make it actually work. And all of them will fight for the status quo, because many of them have been part of the system for so long, that they could not survive by doing anything else.
I'm not surprised by the fact that California has a different politics to for example Florida (I hope I picked good "extreme" cases there ). That is, as you said, very similar to the EU - you have extremely conservative Poland/Hungary and you have very liberal France (for example). But in EU the federal enforcement mostly works through the local governments and is not a completely separate entitiy.
In the EU we really don't have "federal law" in the same manner you seem to have in the US. When the EU passes a law, all states implement it locally (even though the local implementation may vary) and the local law enforcement enforces that law. We don't really have a federal ICE for example, it is always a thing that is handled by the local state. (Well, perhaps there is an official part of the Europol that handles immigration, I have never really heard about it nor have I seen anyone).
We don't have a "federal" EU army, too. Every state has its own armed forces, that are completely independent (well, chain of command-vise) to the others.
Another difference is - as you pointed out - that we are much more densely populated (like 3 times the population density). That's why some of the things we said really surprised me, because you cannot really escape others in the EU. Almost anywhere you go, you are at most 30m by car to some form of "civilization" (for example city/village with working internet and a pub). Btw even though this might be a little bit of an exaggeration, it is not a big one
For the record, nobody says or believes this. We believe one should be free to change their gender, eg a woman should be free to live as a (trans) man. That's an entirely different thing than saying the man/woman dichotomy doesn't exist.
However if we'd go in there, I think there are many people on this side of the argument that really believe/push the extreme version of this. Atleast that's my impression. But since we had for example biological males competing with biological females in strenght-based sports, I'd say this impression is not that inaccurate.
That is, atleast for me personally, an insane thing. Even though I personally fully believe that trans person should be able to live freely their live, I think there are some limitations simply because of that dichotomy and sports are one of those few examples of things trans person should not automatically be able to do and it should be strictly on the case-by-case basis.
But maybe I'm wrong - I'm of course very open discussing other points of view. These sensitive topics are rarely discussed in a civil manner online, so I'd be honestly glad to do so, because I really want to try & understand what drives people on this side of the argument.
In the U.S., sharing the location of police officers is generally protected by the First Amendment, as long as the information is obtained legally and is publicly available. This is why apps like Waze and police scanners are lawful and widely used.
For an act to qualify as obstruction of justice, there must be a clear and intentional effort to hinder or delay law enforcement in the investigation, arrest, or prosecution of a crime.
Since that's obviously the intent with this app, it's relying on a thin veneer of plausible deniability.
Look no further than CALEA mandated forensics packages on most network backbone gear!
https://www.subsentio.com/solutions/platforms-technologies/
You see, we've had government mandated "apps", but they are intentionally "hidden" (only by omission of course) from the layperson! So you, John Q. Public, are not exposed to them, but every regulated service provider is turned into a facilitator for law enforcement monitoring activity.
Bumping it down to handsets simply hasn't been done because it's just easier to plug in upstream through Third Party Doctrine and it'd be self-defeating in a sense to straight up make and admit that handsets purpose is to surveil you for law enforcement purposes. Businesses can have compliance compelled through the threat of disincorporation, so can be relied upon to cooperate as a pre-requisite of doing business.
Now, this software is generally considered "the good guys doing good guy things" so isn't generally considered problematic. As I hope is being learned by everyone; there is no line between a system that exists for well intentioned people to do good things with and a system capable of being used by evil people to do evil things, at scale with.
https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-co... ("The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring")
What's this about? Surely it's technically possible to implement. Can someone add more detail?
I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
> The app is only available on iOS, because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk.
Can anyone describe what this means? I don't know of a requirement to collect data on android? Is there something I'm not thinking of?
[EDIT] carried on reading the comments and it appears to be answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445392
I think your impression is pretty dated, like to 2010 or something?Apple has generally kept iPhones fully updated for a good 5-7 years, with some security updates after and apps typically supporting n-1 or n-2 OS. Current iOS 18 supports devices back to the iPhone XR/XS released in 2018. And the pace of progress has leveled off a huge amount since the heady early days in the steep part of the S-curve. But prices still fall fast on used phones. Even if you go back fewer years, iPhone 11s and 12s can be had for a few hundred bucks or less and still work well (I had a 12 until recently). Battery replacement can be done for ~$30.
So while sure, if someone was always on the newest phone that'd have some premium, it's definitely not any big deal or sign of riches to have an iPhone. They're all over the US market space.
An iPhone would be a very minor expense for a person from middle class (lawyers, doctors, sofware engineers…).
I imagine for working class or poor people Android vs iPhone could be a real concern financial though.
But a regular software dev or a GP is the perfect representation of a middle class - having enough money for comfortable life, travel, owning a house, new car, leisure activities and having money for investments.
If one can’t afford these (all at the same time) - it is not middle class. Middle class is not a “median - average salary class”, by a long shot.
Can you define "upper middle class" and "upper class" in a way that excludes all but "some of the most successful" doctors, lawyers, and software engineers? Because I sure can't.
Pity that it's not open source and decentralized using something like iroh.computer, especially given the lacking Android support.
So, yeah, it did not took long before public chats with real-time reporting popped up and became country-wide phenomenon.
Welcome to the club, America!
Well, they are one logical leap away from realizing that instead of sending undesirables to CECOT they can send them to their guerre du jour instead.
I guess Erik Prince could use a penal battalion or two.
Plus, web apps are gimped on iOS (no notification support without going through a cumbersome PWA installation flow and data getting wiped every 14 days if you're just letting it run in the background).
People avoid ICE because they're breaking the law themselves, or have hysteria over illegals being deported (a benefit to tax-paying citizens).
That's all there is to it.
It has nothing to do with "our country is being turned to a police state", because that's what Biden did with his 87,000 armed IRS agents.
Woah, HNers being intellectually dishonest? I could never have guessed!
Who could tell, then they go all "woe is me, the US will be wholly irrelevant in less than a decade because Trump" without a smidgen of irony or self-reflection ad-infinitum in these threads.
We're called "Orange Reddit" for a reason.
It’s like complaining there’s more shark attacks in the summer vs winter and concluding sharks have seasonal mood swings.
probably the same weird compulsion to cosplay the gestapo in the first place. they don't need to move in silence. they want to make people afraid.
Waze has had a way to report speed traps for years. Where are those subpoenas? That at least is a loss of revenue.
This also assumes that this can be traced back to whoever reported it in the app, and it would be trivial just simply not log any PII on that
That assumes people were going to break the law in the first place by speeding... you can't be guilty of the crime of not helping someone else commit a crime.
Maybe if they had some way to prove that you knew it would help them avoid police in order to speed... but that seems like a pretty high bar of evidence would be required (and they would have to attempt to go after you in the first place).
>Reporting on the presence on police is protected first amendment activity
Reporting on the presence on police is protected first amendment activity, but like I said, that’s just ink on paper.
It effectively means nothing now and yea, I wouldn’t download this app because of it
This reminds me of the musk elonjet case on twitter. Generally, if I were to follow a person (in public spaces) and constantly report their location, is that against the law? (If yes, could you clarify which law specifically?) If it is truly against the law here, does it make a difference that here the reports are non-individual in nature, ie reporting that ice is present, not that a particular ice officer is present.
Is there something special about doing the same thing for police/ice?
I think I remember this kind of scenario coming up in supreme court cases before but don't remember specifics, and google isn't helping.
But I admit I generally feel that my response is "So what?"
which seems to suggest this specific scenario has not been addressed by the supreme court, but has been addressed by various appeals courts, and it claims that 61% of the population lives in states that have affirmed this right.
A federal judge in Missouri barred tickets for drivers who flashed headlights to signal a speed trap, the Supreme Court in Houston v. Hill affirmed the right to challenge police verbally, and other federal rulings in Florida and Tennessee reached the same conclusion.
Alerting neighbors that agents are around is expression, not obstruction. And case law protects it in case they want to try (though this is becoming increasingly irrelevant, which - at the same time - makes our social contract to honor such institutions proportionally irrelevant)
As it is, by batting for the legality of alerting traffic checks, you’re already batting for the alert and notification of police presence - because that’s what traffic checks consist of
You might need to download an image and install it via a computer if you don’t have enough free space or something.