FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
That's unequivocally a lawful basis for a court-ordered search warrant. They must have probable cause that the person being searched has evidence of a crime; not necessarily that the search target and the criminal suspect are one and the same. Search is investigative; not punitive.
The newsworthy part of this is it's a journalist they raided, and to go after their journalistic sources at that. It's previously been a DoJ policy not to go after the media for things related to their reporting work. But that policy wasn't a legal or constitutional requirement. It's merely something the DoJ voluntarily pledged to stop doing, after the public reaction to President Obama's wiretapping of journalists in 2013,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inv... ("2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters")
Let's be real, it can be both. A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain. Raiding in the middle of the night instead of when they step out their door in the morning, ripping open walls when all they're really looking for is a laptop, flipping and trashing the place in a excessive manner, breaking things in the process, pointing guns at children, shooting the family retriever, etc. I don't know if they took this raid too far in any of these ways, but it wouldn't surprise me.
To my understanding, a US search warrant authorize law enforcement officers to search a particular location and seize specific items. The requirements are:
1# filled in good faith by a law enforcement officer 2# Have probable cause to search 3# issued by a neutral and detached magistrate 4# the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized.
There is nothing about the owner of the location. It can be a car, a parking lot, a home, a work place, a container, a safe, a deposit box in a bank, and so on.
The significant question here is about probable cause. Why were those items interesting for the FBI to collect? Are they looking to secure evidence against the leaker, and if so, what was the specifics of the search warrant? The article states: "The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation".
Probable cause should not be about preventing journalists access to documents they already got, as that would be like going after Barton Gellman.
Something worth noting at least for pedantic purposes, since practice is quite different; technically speaking every person has the same rights and laws to follow as a journalist. Fundamentally, there are really no differences between a journalist and a regular person engaging in the same activities.
It's an indication of the unique system architecture that differentiates the USA from all other societies on the planet.
It has been attacked, infiltrated, poison pilled, and really rather devastated in especially the last 100 years, but it is still standing, for better or worse, whether it can be restored or it just needs to die in order to give others a chance to rebuild something improved on the core characteristics of the Constitution.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
I do wish that the law provided for concepts of minimal damage and repair should there be actual damage (not just creating a mess) that doesn't result in evidence. ie: if you tear open drywall, there better be something behind drywall that was collected as evidence.
However, that's not the case, and even civilly it's hard to collect damages even when it's the "wrong house"... though thatt's one of the few exceptions I've seen... also, iirc, there's been some 4th amendment arguments to construe having to pay for use/damages, not sure where that has landed.
IANAL.
Could you litigate to recover the costs and repair any damage done? Is there case law around what is a reasonable level of dishevelment?
The issue here is the American tradition of a free press and the legitimate role of leaks in a free country. The PBS article is a bit better on context:
> The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
> In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
> The moves rescinded a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fbi-searched-home-of-w...
My understanding is that searches of journalists still must be signed off on by the AG personally.
If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
if someone goes snooping around my 1000yd backstop without signing in at the range house, they are suicidal.
there is a lot of signage, and curtailage, and a darwin prize
CNN tells viewers its illegal to read Wikileaks emails (2016)
“Also interesting is—remember—it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
> The search came as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
The classification system only works if the handling requirements for information that it covers are unambiguous.
Based on your own logic then Assange did not have any requirement to protect classified information yet he was Public Enemy number one.
I know people who personally sat on the Edward Snowden board and spent years of their life trying to create a case within the intelligence community against this guy
There is a difference between someone essentially just handing you a pile of classified documents and you going around soliciting and encouraging people to break the law and mishandle the documents to give to you.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2011-09-28/the-dangerous-cult-...
> The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian.
> This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behavior – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable.
> His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use.
> [The Guardian] made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger.
Jonathan Cook does a good job of telling this story.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-07-29/the-assassination-o...
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-05-04/persecution-julian-...
Does that include (former) presidents as well?
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65775163
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
(Asking for a friend.)
Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).
Former administrations, to their credit, exhibited some degree of restraint that the current administration lacks. However, they indicted Julian Assange and plenty of people back then have warned precisely about the kind of things happening today.
- The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653012
- Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639165
From the EFF back then:
> Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/governments-indictment...
'Could'? Its because you people are acting as if its not already ugly that it got this ugly.
It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.
The problem is nobody is willing to use their constitutional right to fight for justice, because everyone is deathly afraid of losing even a little bit of their comfortable life.
If people were more willing to use the rights given to them by a specific amendment, none of this would happen.
You have your anarchic situations, International Relations, non-law breaking situations like having a conversation with a friend/stranger, and everything not covered in (signed) (legal) writing.
You have your hierarchy. When the police get involved, when your boss can fire you, legal, etc.. In this case, you still need 4 things to happen: There needs to be a legal basis(Legislature), they need to be caught(Executive), they need to be found guilty (Judicial), it needs to be enforced (Executive).
I wouldn't give up in hierarchy yet. But know the limitations.
Obviously not many <$20 stolen objects would warrant an FBI raid, but also if it were actually worth <$20 then Veritas wouldn't have paid $40,000 for it.
AFAICT their journalistic immunity basically got them out of charges for buying goods they knew to be stolen at time of purchase, which is federally illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2315 and separately illegal in all 50 states.
It's funny you say that because that'd be just the same, classified information that leaked. They'd just change the codes and try to find who leaked them. The codes themselves would be inconsequential (once changed).
Along with the diary, tax records, cellphone and family photos were stolen from someone's home, then sold for $40,000 to a far-right activist / centrist paragon of journalism James O'Keefe (whichever you prefer). Said paragon was alleged to have paid these (eventually convicted so I'm allowed to say) criminals more money to steal more stuff from this home.
While the warrant's probable cause section was redacted (maybe inappropriately), the facts of the case are still that the person being raided was alleged to have actually participated in an ongoing conspiracy to commit theft and transporting stolen property across state lines.
I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.
And yeah, it's not a great situation with terrible optics. It would've been better for everyone if he just didn't steal the classified documents to begin with or, once requested, he returned them.
Is there another law saying that government officials need to return all classified documents that would apply to him and not to the reporter?
- it's okay when Side A goes after Assange (a journalist) for possessing classified material. Also, Side A encourages journalists in certain countries to do exactly what Assange did.
- it's not okay when Side B goes after journalists aligned with Side A
Regarding Gellman, he could have been prosecuted. Under strict interpretation he admitted to retaining classified information. The government is then in a catch 22 situation where they have to verify, publicly, the information he held creating a Snowden like situation where it is no longer secret. It is a very messy area of law and a zealous DOJ can exert tremendous pressure on individual journalists even though they are better shielded than non-journalists. Essentially, by prosecuting someone they have to prove it is national defense information and in so doing they will end up disclosing the information themselves making it dubious a jury would ever convict.
It is the same reason we can freely discuss Snowden-leaked information now. It is not a secret. Even if it is classified it has lost its legal protection.
In short, if this journalist even vaguely induced anyone to leak information to her she can be prosecuted and the precedent there is much less in her favor.
When you phrase it that way though, it doesn't actually sound that bad. If a crime was committed, and some uninvolved person possesses evidence about that crime, the authorities need to be able to access it.
To give another scenario: if someone gets shot in front of my parked car, but the bullet passes through them and gets lodged in my car, the police should have the power to compel me to hand over the bullet even if I don't want to (which is important evidence that only I have).
> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
But if Barton Gellman was the only person in possession of the full collection, and the police needed it to help find the perpetrator of the crime, it would be legitimate for them to compel Gellman to hand over a copy.
However, it wouldn't be legitimate for them to go after you or me if we download the information from some public website, because that would serve no legitimate investigative purpose.
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/stan-swamy-h...
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
We are on step 3
The number of police and public based killing is much higher than comparable countries elsewhere.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
It was the mid 2010s yes.
And they’re not going to abduct and torture and American citizen out of the blue. The more “intensive” methods are higher cost, the intention is just to increase the friction involved with engaging in the routine and scalable, ordinary forms of snooping.
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
That's how the US is right now.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.
I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.
As curretly constituted, no. But it doesn't hurt to start contingency planning to build a force that is eventually loyal to its state and the Constitution over the men who hold the office at that time.
But ICE is behaving pretty sloppy. I'm not sure it could get to that point without (just due to risk multiplied by sheer number of interactions) ICE accidentally escalating something via sloppiness, crossing something that they don't value but is a hard line to their local PD security detail, refusing to stop and getting smoked that way, either by their own security or by a passer by while their security shrugs.
A fed might not care about literally doing a George Floyd, but your security force might just walk off rather than be party to that.
Where are you getting this?
J6ers attacking cops is currently being celebrated. That's an ad hoc militia. (Tarrio built an actual one.)
FU USA FU
And just to be clear: The biggest military force of the world threatens denmark, scrambles the economy around the world due to sudden politic changes (tarifs) and destroys its own integrity as an ally
We're just powerless to do anything, as the (probably) legally elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge into ... everything in sight.
Our Checks refuse to speak up in Congress, and our Balances keep voting to make the (current) POTUS immune to the law.
If you don't like that, the only solution is to push for limited government next time you're in power.
Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day. This is a deliberate design feature of the US political system. It's the only way to get people to wake up for the need to limit government power.
A good start would be ending selective prosecution by restoring the original role of grand juries: to decide whether or not to hire a contract prosecutor for a single case. Public Prosecutors can be just like Public Defenders -- contractors of the court, with no discretionary powers.
Only if there's a functioning system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, there is not. This Court is willing to use motivated reasoning to achieve its preferred outcomes; to slow-walking favorable rulings for Democrats while expediting favorable rulings for Republicans (often without explanation via the "shadow docket"); and to throw out decades of precedent in the process by ignoring stare decisis, a bedrock legal principle which ensures stability of the judicial process.
Just to give an example, consider the ban on universal (national) injunctions. One might be surprised to learn that it was the Biden administration that initially petitioned the Court for the ban. However, the Court found such a ban unnecessary then (i.e., when lower Courts were blocking the Biden administration's agenda), but conveniently found it necessary during the second Trump administration (when lower courts started blocking the Trump administration's agenda). And just as another kick in the balls, they used the birthright citizen case as a vehicle to bring the matter to Court, strengthening the President without even deigning to address the Trump administration's obviously illegal executive order.
The result of this mess is that, if the Trump administration is eventually voted out, it is highly unlikely that an incoming Democratic administration would be able to capitalize on the expansion of executive powers that this Court has given to this President. We see a similar situation in Poland. After ~a decade in power the Law & Justice party was voted out, but the new coalition government has not inherited the same ability to government, with its agenda constantly curtailed by Law & Justice appointees embedded throughout the government (including the highest court).
Trump doesn't take the normal route as any other president did.
Of course with his second term, at least people can't complain how he interacts with your ex allies like us germany. Thats fair to do, shitty and short viewed but hey.
But certain things like his fraud coins etc. this is bluntly illegal and he did not do this shit in his first term.
Also the US has always kind of been the biggest threat to world peace, with the exception of Nazi Germany. It only feels outrageous now because White people are being attacked too instead of the usual targets
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”1. Feed cat, ensure that friend will adopt cat.
2. Talk to any family members.
3. Uninstall Signal
4. Take too many Ambien.
Or:
“I’m sending this to you confidentially so please don’t respond since metadata will show I contacted you.”
Reporter: responds anyway
What's the point of the reporter not responding?
I should have worded that part more clearly.
Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.
Did you miss the lesson from the actual guillotine? It’s just another escalation in the cycle. The parties switch from raiding to guillotining each other. The guillotine doesn’t solve the problem, it just raises the stakes.
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
Also, since many people bring up the french revolution. Peak weapons tech back then was front loading muskets and the fights in paris were desparation driven bloodbaths, where such weapons were eventually captured by the revolution. Today, the power gap to be outperformed by free markets is much bigger.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
Some administrations may see this as a feature not bug…
We can disagree on tax policy, immigration policy, even very strong issues, and I'm happy to fight about those issues and respect disagreement. But in the last month, the president has invaded a foreign country without even notifying congress, has used literal thug tactics to try to get lower interest rates, and now he's obviously illegally entering the home of a reporter to take information which is clear violation of the first and fourth amendments.
This is unamerican. It's a violation of the clear principles of the constitution. It's against the law. It's trivially deserving of impeachment.
Your assertion isn't supported by, well, anything. The problem is that constituents think they can't affect their representatives' positions. They can.[0][1] Especially if there's a concerted effort to do so.
For every constituent who writes/calls/emails, there are at least a half-dozen more who feel the same way.
The problem isn't that contacting your representatives isn't effective, it's that by not doing so, you're ceding power to those that do.
[0] https://act.represent.us/sign/does-calling-congress-really-w...
[1] https://americansofconscience.com/calling-congress-still-mat...
That's what the government said when Pentagon Papers were released. Guess what happened.
But I guess time is different now, and today's supreme court isn't the same as the one in those days.
Journalists have always shown great tenacity when it comes to reporting news even if it jeopardizes their employment, but if it jeopardizes their safety… that’s perhaps one level too far for many journalists.
See: james o'keefe
uh oh sounds like the Guardian is asking for a raid too
Of all the things trump has done, I actually like this one. At least he’s being honest about his intentions for what this department does.
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.
We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.
Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.
Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.
A five year old can see the problems with a lot of this stuff, which once upon a time you'd defend with vague notions of a self-policing culture or the ghost of ethics in governance. Those kinds of non-safeguards can work fine in a stable system, but they inherently rely on foreknowledge of future conditions not changing in unpredictable ways.
The self-reinforcing recursive loop underlying all this is that the systems of governance can only be changed by the governors. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that democracy will fail so long as it's representative - the incentives to fix the system itself are simply not there because any inefficiency is exploitable for personal gain (so why fix it?) The doomsday proposition that comes out of that though is that the system cannot be changed - only replaced once it decisively breaks. Maybe that's what all this is. I would hate to find another bottom but I fear there's more to go before we get there.
Who is responsible for the system if not the individual - and the collective thereof?
The fundamental problem is the citizen not being educated or caring enough about their own independence and state of being in the framework of a global economy and sovereign nation state
"They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens.
But people are being targeted for what they say, for disagreeing publicly. That's real. And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
I too wish people also cared as much about the 1st amendment, but sadly I think the tide is turning on that. Too many on both the right and left seem okay with censorship and harassment.
With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.
They notice. They care. They just love it.
The "free speech absolutist" folks never were.
They don't need to take your gun away, they just need to give you enough reasons to not use them. And even in 1779, it required lots of planning and coordination, and lots of loss to life and property to achieve change that way.
The focus should be more on elected politicians, and voters themselves and how they vote/not vote. If the mid-terms were being held today, how many people would vote? It's scary, who wants to risk their lives for a vote? not many.
I fear the governors of states will have to intervene, and the way that goes might lead to a conflict with the federal gov.
That's certainly possible. Maybe even likely. Fortunately, we now have more information[0] to correlate whether or not that's true.
Perhaps soon we'll see a "Show HN" with a searchable database of those folks with links to known "patriot" groups. That would be interesting.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whistleblower-leaks-person...
> the dataset includes names, work emails, phone numbers, job roles, and other employment details for frontline agents and support staff—a level of detail that has alarmed officials concerned about the safety and privacy of federal employees and their families
Worth noting that all of the information specified is public information and the people it concerns are public officials.
I don't think they're bad people, just think sometimes we humans seem stuck in a very us vs them mindset and it becomes more about my team vs your team than anything else.
That never happens because the parties vested in that right resist every single time. Effectively. With real numbers. Not media campaigns or propaganda social media mechanisms. Largely without protesting, with no need to get into degrees of legality in doing so.
You don’t get to say “that never happens” as if it isn’t the explicit goal of an entire political party. You get to realize “we don’t let that happen”.
As to current events… the mass deportation guy won elections, why is it you expect armed resistance to federal officers carrying out the exact thing the majority of voters wanted?
You can disagree on anything you like, but, I find the “why aren’t people shooting federal officers who are enforcing immigration law!?” posts to be extreme affirmations of echo chamber. If you don’t like it, get your reps to change the laws, not suggest murdering people who you don’t like.
I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
Down ballot. There are very few elections where nothing on the ballot is of stake.
The two-party system will always leave you with suboptimal choices when it comes to casting your vote, but the alternative to Trump was two decades younger.
But when one side represents fascism and the other doesn't the choice is still easy.
Biden was no longer a candidate even by the time the last election happened.
Look to Mamdani. Note that the real election there was in the primary. If you squint a bit, the US electoral system looks like the French one. There's two rounds of voting, and in the first one you get to pick who is the crook that will be put up against the fascist in the final round.
It's going to be boring and time consuming, but people have to use the levers they do have available to do internal Democrat party politics if they want to improve the situation.
At the risk of sounding sarky, you are going to have to do more than protest at the weekend (!) to stop what is happening to you.
Yes, some protests happen when it's convenient for the protesters. That does not invalidate their protests, nor any others with a similar message. It does not weaken the message nor the movement.
The rebellion had to raise the temperature faster, more dramatically, in order to wake people up. To make the frogs realize it was hot and jump out.
Lonni Jung: "You realize what you've set in motion? People will suffer."
Luthen Rael: "That's the plan."
Luthen believes that to succeed, they need to anger the Empire and make them come down hard on the citizens, which in turn will fuel the rebellion.
C.J. Cregg: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy, or is this not a job for the U. S. House of Representatives?
Leo McGarry: Well, they'll get around to it sooner or later.
C.J. Cregg: So let's make it sooner - let's make it now.
Whenever ICE goes into a new city, they're meeting more and more community resistance. The protestors have mostly been very smart about remaining civil, which continues making ICE look worse and worse as they tear gas and arrest peaceful protestors.
The supreme court has ruled (somewhat surprisingly) that Trump can't deploy the National Guard into cities any longer.
Trump's approval rating has continued steadily declining since he took office, and the midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath.
I'm mid-40s and this is the best-organized and most successful demonstration movement I've witnessed in my lifetime. Occupy got close, but that felt like something that the more 'extreme' ones were actively participating in, with more passive support from the populace. Now it feels like everyone is getting directly involved in one way or another.
I think we're one or two bad incidents away from wide-scale rioting.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not denying it's appropriate; it just seems remarkable to me that it's being used so often lately.
Probably because a country that was famous for trying to spread their idea of "freedom" all across the world, seemingly can't notice themselves that the country is rapidly declining into full on authoritarian dictatorship, with a very skewed perspective of "freedom", and the people who are opposing it, aren't rioting (yet at least).
The judicial arm of the government aren't even enforcing the laws of the country anymore! Not sure how, but it'll get worse before it gets better. Quite literally a fitting analogy in this case.
In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
In what way is what she was doing similar to Snowden? Snowden was a huge bombshell, with droves of material, proving what a lot of people suspected was happening, but had no proof.
This journalist seems to have been receiving a ton of "small leaks", of improper firings and a lot of other federal misbehavior, but all within the US, and all with things we already knew was happening.
So rather than "one big sea of bad", she was investigating "a thousand small cuts of bad" across thousands of people who had evidence.
Snowden leaks had global implications that changed relationships between countries, while this seems mostly internal to the US.
I bet it's the recipe for the military-grade copium some people are on
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
“ Natanson was told that she is not a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Instead, it appears to be related to an ongoing probe of a government contractor in Maryland.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-was...
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
James Burke, the Veritas guy, the ABC News guy, etc.
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.