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Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

You're confusing 'seeing a license plate' with 'querying restricted databases'.

Taking a photo is legal. Running plates through law-enforcement/ALPR systems is not, and auto body shops don't have that access.

Real-time identification != observation - it implies unauthorized data access.

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Journalists doing ride alongs have already identified the system and it doesn't really on "restricted databases", they rely on observation and multiple attestation. In any case, there are indeed commercial services for looking up license plate data, and they rely on watching the notices that are published when you register your vehicle. It's the same reason why you receive all sorts of scammy warranty "notices" when you buy a car.

In fact the first clue that they look for is having Illinois Permanent plates because that is a strong indicator that they are using rental vehicles. That doesn't take a database, it's just a strong signal that can be confirmed by other evidence.

Do federal agents rent their vehicles?

The crowd sourced lists don't identify the owners of the vehicles, because that does not matter. They identify vehicles that ICE is using, and "likely a rental" is one good signal.

If that was what you meant, you should have said that. Do you have any actual evidence this is happening, or are you just confusing possibility with probability?

I don't buy the claim that it's happening, but they were pretty clearly talking about the lookups, not the photos. They started off by mentioning "insiders".

> If that was what you meant, you should have said that.

I think the choice of the verb "scanning" indicated it clearly enough.

Perhaps for you. This word is equally applicable to visual observation.

> through law-enforcement/ALPR systems

Were they doing that? I haven't read the article, that's why I'm asking.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/minnesota-signal-gate-di...

I don’t see anything there about querying license plate databases. There is a spreadsheet of donors to some kind of organization.

https://x.com/camhigby/status/2015093635096658172

Also, what is the outrage about? This administration has deported the least number of people compared to all previous administrations. Obama deported 3.1 million people, ten times more than Trump today. Same ICE, same border patrol.

It literally say it is a crowdsourced list... a completely legal activity. If you can't figure out what the outrage is about after Alex Pretti and Renée Good then you're being intentionally obtuse.

1. The outrage had been there prior to their death.

2. Their death is the outcome of the outrage.

Their deaths are an outcome of the heavy handed immigration enforcement that has caused the outrage. The raw number of deportations is not the only metric. The enforcement tactics of the Obama admin are not the same as Trump's, this is obvious and incontrovertible.

You don't have to agree with the criticisms but to not even be able to understand why people are upset stretches believability.

Duh... You're still collapsing cause and context. The protests preceded the deaths; the deaths occurred during confrontations created by the protests. That makes them an outcome of escalation, not the original trigger.

And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody (https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...) with nowhere near this level of outrage. What changed is media framing and amplification, not the existence of harsh enforcement.

It doesn't have to be the original trigger, you asked "what is the outrage about?" and those deaths are part of it.

> And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody

You continuously ask this same question, get an answer, and ignore it. ICE enforcement was not the same under Obama and Trump even if Obama had high deportation numbers. The deaths in that report were from medical issues or neglect. Horrible, absolutely, but not shootings, not American citizens, and not protesters.

Maybe instead of assuming everyone is a stooge that can only do what the media tells them, consider they may actually have some legitimate grievances?

I don't know what they think they're doing there. If the most interesting thing they found was the public website leading to a fundraising platform for mutual aid a) there is literally nothing illegal there, and b) you can find that website linked to publicly by conservatively 25% of the twin cities population. It's literally the most prominent fundraising website anyone has been posting.

Wrong. The "protesters" were conducting counterintelligence to locate where ICE was operating. The plan was to disrupt the operation. Like it or not, this is against the law. Period.

I know you want to frame it a different way, but the articles you are posting don't describe anything that's illegal.

I'm not framing anything. There are screenshots of the chats where people literally say "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody, go there!". This is called interfering.

The "interfering" this are describing is your framing. You want it to be interference in a legally actionable way, but it simply isn't.

18 U.S.C. § 111 - Assaulting, resisting, impeding officers (including federal agents)

18 U.S.C. § 1505 - Obstruction of Federal Officers (this includes ICE itself - obstructing or interfering with an ICE arrest is a crime)

18 U.S.C. § 118 - Obstructing, resisting, or interfering with federal protective functions

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

But that's not the end of the analysis. The legal line isn't 'force or nothing'; it's intent + conduct. Speech and observation are protected, but coordinated action intended to impede enforcement is not.

If "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody go there" is followed by mobbing vehicles, blocking movement, inducing agents to disengage, or warning targets to evade arrest, that crosses from protected speech into actionable conduct.

Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...

Quote: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) it is "likely to incite or produce such action."

See Brandenburg v. Ohio (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492)

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

There is no evidence of this at all.

There is enough smoke to at least perform an investigation. As I said, this administration has deported 10x less people than the previous administrations.

You seem quite narrowly focused on the number of deportations rather than the methods being implemented. The primary criticisms of the current ICE surge in Minnesota focus on the general aggressiveness and lack of professionalism of these agents, not the deportations numbers.

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