DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app | Hacker News Reader

DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app

appleinsider.com

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ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646

Thanks!

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646 - July 2025 (836 comments)

Wired source from last week:

Trump officials want to prosecute over the ICEblock app

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459075

This article went from #3 on the front page of HN to #260 in ten minutes[1]. Talk about someone wanting to keep you from reading about it!

1: https://hnrankings.info

Several users flagged this submission, correctly.

The topic of the app's launch was on the front page for several hours last week and generated a huge discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496729

This latest story doesn't seem to carry any "significant new information", which is a critical qualifier for a new HN thread.

The article's topic is the quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview, and even that was made – and reported – last week when the topic was still active on HN. It's a detail in the overall story that has already had major coverage here. If there was an arrest or some other material legal action, that would likely warrant a new thread.

Edit: I updated the comment to remove the incorrect implication that there is any new information in the article at all.

Was it the actual flagging by users that deranked it? Or mod intervention based on those signals?

Not disagreeing with the action just curious about the ambiguity in your comment

It's always a combination of upvotes, flags, vouches, auto-penalties and manual penalties that affect the ranking. I don't know which was the particular one of the downweights that pulled it off the front page; it was already off when I first saw it. But it's a clear-cut case of a duplicate post, so there was no need for me to do anything to alter what had already happened.

> The only new information is a quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview

This feels like an illustration of just how unhinged the US has become, that the _AG threatening a private citizen_ is not considered major news. The frog is, if not boiled, at least sous-vide'd.

I don't live in the US, and that's not what I wrote. I wrote that it's not additional news beyond what has already been reported and discussed here, and this story is no more current/recent that the main reporting from last week.

Here it is referenced in two comments in that thread, posted over five days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445727

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44448673

i wish more people used hckrnews.com front end, it prevents issues like this

You realise what bias hn has when you use hckrnews.com and are able to see what they remove. Not that I think hn has a stronger bias than other forums, but it is there.

to be fair ive used hcknrews exclusively for years and if anything it helps reinforce the perspective of HN moderation being fair and well balanced. stuff gets removed sometimes but its entirely bc its rage bait/bad content and appropriately user flagged, or its content already massively discussed elsewhere and the posts are merged

there was only a single time i can recall there being something completely nuked and me raising an eyebrow being like "uhhhh that's pretty sus" but couldnt even tell you what it was about, it was years ago. and i can chalk that up to me having my own biases too

was it their SSL that expired yesterday? i briefly remembered how much i hate the default interface

Wouldn't using hn.algolia.com also solve the issue?

For folks wondering why this is newsworthy, the Attorney General of the United States is threatening a US citizen with curtailing his protected speech.

The developer has not been charged.

But he has been publicly threatened by the Attorney General:

> "We are looking at him," she said on Fox News, "and he better watch out."

(Source: The submitted Apple Insider article, citing Wired, which as noted in the quote was citing Fox News.)

When the head of the DOJ publicly threatens someone, saying that she "goes after" that person is entirely accurate.

How is that not prior restraint?

Sort of by definition, prior restraint is when the government prevents someone from doing something (in the context, of the term, generally always speech/expression) prior to it happening.

This is the kind of bluster that has certainly become more common in recent years, but has to some extent always been part of political theater. You'll see the same kind of thing every now and then if somebody tweets about how they'd love to feed a political figure into a wood chipper, or that the government should be launched into the sun. The Secret Service or some executive official will post that they're "investigating the matter and will take all available action", only for it to turn out that the comment was obviously protected speech.

This doesn't seem to be true. Implications of Government speech are not taken lightly and I can see examples of "informal censorship" including implied threats of legal action being classed as prior restraint. Pretty moot given today's US legal environment though.

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantam_Books,_Inc._v._Sullivan

"Justice William J. Brennan Jr. delivered the majority opinion that stated that the actions of the Rhode Island commission to Encourage Morality in Youth were unconstitutional due to their actions violating the First Amendment by placing a prior restraint on free speech. Justice Brennan's opinion stated that the commission's practice of notifying book distributors and retailers about "objectionable" publications, combined with implied threats of legal action, effectively made a system of informal censorship."

It's certainly some inappropriate kind of intimidation, but the concept of prior restraint includes some claim that the person is forbidden from doing something, and it typically pertains to speech acts rather than to the distribution of functional tools. "He better watch out" from the AG is certainly a serious threat, but its meaning is too vague and implicit to reach the level of a prohibition or to definitively pertain to speech acts.

Just a reminder for those who aren't aware: Apple typically makes you upload your government ID to publish apps. I used to be part of their developer program (although I never finished any of the apps I wrote) and was forced to upload mine. For those of you who think there's no problem with forcing everyone to go through the app store, here's just one more serious issue that creates. Now they can be subpoenaed for something that could otherwise have been done anonymously.

anonymous app submissions will make the app store more dangerous. You can go the extra mile and create a company or legal entity if you want to hide your name, but it's straightforward for gov. to get your identity no matter what, they can just ask Apple or Google

There still should be a way to share software anonymously. Just saying "it's dangerous so the whole use case is invalid" is retarded, lazy, and if you're an OS vendor benefiting from an app store the way Apple does, malicious.

Maybe it’s better as a web app in that case.

FTA:

> "We're working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations," Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said to press, "and we're going to actually go after them and prosecute them... because what they're doing, we believe, is illegal."

Guilty, until proven innocent, or until it's proven that there's no law that is being broken.

The defendant still has to pay for their defense, even if the charges were frivolous.

Exactly, and defense of a federal prosecution is a multi-million dollar defense.

Federal criminal prosecutions have a 91% conviction rate. 89% plead guilty, only 2.3% go to trial and most of those are convicted. A Just Us system.

A crime will always be found.

When I played Half-Life 2 for the first time as a teen, the dialogue of

man 1: "They have no reason to come to our place." man 2: "Don't worry, they'll find one"

felt so abstract

It's not really relevant in a greater sense that they haven't been charged, if the DOJ is making credible threats. Which they are.

And there's no punishment for Pam Bondi, she's got a get out jail free card with a Trump pardon.

She just needs to be convicted of state charges or hauled to the Hague.

"credible threats" is a term of art, and these comments aren't that.

I think this is pretty clearly outside the context of the term of art, but whatever, "threats of applying dubious legal force that a reasonable person might gnaw their fingernails at".

Care to explain why? The threats are specific and made by people in power to execute them. What standard for "credible" would fail here?

Correction: The developer has not been charged... yet.

If you dig into someone's past, you can probably find something, or make it look like there's something. Pay informants. Frame people for other crimes. Etc.

When a justice department doesn't believe in the laws they're supposed to uphold, they don't have to follow their own rules. They can send people through the judicial wringer by merely filing a complaint against them.

That in itself is a punishment.

There are so many (especially commerce) laws and the lawless regime will find an excuse to deport them to CECOT without due process.

Agree one worrying idea is using rumors to discredit or just put pressure on the individual in question. Can simply monitor the individual and then report any odd behavior to friends, co-workers, etc. The result is the individual has to focus on these issues and will likely seize the behavior. No charges ever even need to be filed, and nothing is illegal on doing this activity.

Might be a good career move for a lawyer to represent him since it’s an obvious violation of his rights.

There was a time when the Hacker part of Hacker News meant something. But now I look around and see faces like Shaun Maguire's, Dario Amodei's, millions of engineering man hours being poured into the "Salesforce for Killing People". What are we even doing here.

It's interesting that money has no morals, it's just money. The reality is that the more money you have, the more freedom you have too.

The easier it is to pay off officials. The easier it is to escape juris diction. The easier it is to live the way you want, laws be damned.

We are getting back to the original meaning of hacker from a millennium ago, one who chops, cuts, and hews apart, especially hacking apart our fellow man.

Oh puh-lease. The origins of the term hacker wrt computers is meant to mean somebody reckless without self-discipline. One of the earliest uses of it in print was to describe folks working in MIT's AI lab in the mid-70s. People working in a field on the fringes of respectability.

That was just as accurate a description back in that day as it was of the 80s-00s "hackers" that people associate with counter-culturalism and building cool shit. I remember what technologists were like in the 90s. The same amount of effort that went into building the world wide web went into insane shit like cryogenics. Y'all complain about the fringe ideologies of people like Musk and Thiel, but that's exactly who we're talking about when we're talking about old school hackers. That and a half dozen other fringe personalities with fringe ideologies.

If we were to talk about people working at the frindges of respectability, "Salesforce for Killing People" is exactly the kind of company that they would work for. Heck, back in those early decades your options were also research labs or defense industry...

We were never all one team of good guys with good intentions. I mean, a sizeable percentage of people in our industry have at some point worked for Meta...

you missed the boat by about 10 years.

a16z hired Daniel Penny, a man whose key qualification was killing somebody on the subway. The system is well and truly lost.

This is what weaponization of the DoJ looks like. Under Bush 41 they would try to hide it to make it look like they weren't because of political fallout. But now they don't have to hide it anymore.

The DoJ is supposed to uphold the law, and not be criminals themselves.

What's the difference between this and Waze?

Well... there's no "ICE" button in Waze. /s

There's not. But it attempts to thwart the administration's efforts into conducting raids.

I don’t understand. I thought it was an app where you could see where they’re selling ice and where you could go purchase it before it melts?

That's a very - wait for it - chilling ... effect on free speech then. /s

Even Google has a traffic police spotting function, but not a general police locator. It’s a gray area

Waze doesn't get in the way of fascists

There is an argument to be made that Waze helps white people avoid prosecution where as an anti-ICE app based on their current focus mostly does not. There is no point in pretending there isn't an explicitly racist goal in many of the administration's policy, even if it isn't the only thing that motivates them.

This reminds me of Aaron Swartz's persecution, which seemed to be under a law on the books that was unjust. This appears to be an even more brazen abuse of prosecutorial power, threats without even the cover of an attempt at enforcing a law, just plain thuggery.

I mean even putting the politics aside, you do kind of ask for this to happen when you start putting actual pressure on real people. Someone was eventually going to do something about this.

Pretty authoritarian but it's not like this just didn't happen under previous administrations. It just didn't happen publicly. You could definitely get someone visiting you at your door if you made apps that make certain things too easy.

Only under authoritarian governments would one expect something like this.

Real police would not be alarmed at having their presence noted. Secret police that are masked up to avoid identification, and equipped with more military equipment than was typical for daytime patrol by soldiers in Fallujah is not anything like what happened under prior administrations.

This is completely normal in Germany, try and make an app that is too good at IPTV and you get a visit from the police.

I look at this and think open source devices with mesh networks, that's what people need, but I guess the bad guys (government agents) can get them and locate you via a signal that's being emitted?

You'd have to make sure no persistent identifiers are emitted. Like how phones use a randomized MAC while scanning for wifi.

Someone always objects when I say this. But here's the issue. You can't resolve political crises with technical solutions. You need political solutions. The regime shouldn't have been allowed to make such activities illegal and persecute citizens for that. But that isn't even the worst concern at this point. Remember that the military is being used to oppress political dissent within the country.

Technical solutions may give you a temporary upper hand in pursuit of a political resolution. But without the latter, technical solutions will simply devolve into a technical arms race that you cannot possibly win, due to the near infinite resources the regime commands. If at all they can't defeat you technically, they'll just order an indiscriminate crackdown.

I think you're right, but I also think it's important to be able to communicate outside of the control of central authority.

But yes, it's probably wishful thinking because as I said, they would be able to track you down with the signal your device emits and stomp you with the boot of authoritarianism. Maybe in the future we'll able to communicate anonymously with quantum entanglement :)

Sorry sir, to buy your entangled Q-bit card, we'll need to see some ID. <ID scan kept on file or forwarded to LE>

Please, if you haven't noticed, network effects are designed to work against you punching up.

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