"one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses."
Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?
Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?
Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?
Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.
US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?
So long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts, congress, or the whitehouse then these things will continue to metastasize.
The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.
That has shown to be nothing but hot air and wishful thinking. The second they got into power they’ve thrown any hint of caring about the constitution out the window.
The primary mechanism for redress of constitutional right violations under current law are monetary damages under FTCA, especially now that universal injunctions are dead. There's no actual counterbalance.
While Republicans certainly have a focus on illegal immigration, support for spying on American citizens is hardly a partisan issue.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
If you have some information on how much they approve or support these programs i'm open to hearing it, but i'm not sure how much "Both parties have bad people/policies" contributes to a discussion on this specific program.
In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
This is shifting the goal posts. You said this will continue to happen as long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts[0], congress[1], or the whitehouse [2; sic] - which kind of implies (actually not kind of, it directly implies) that if only there were some more Democrats around this wouldn't happen. So "both parties do this" is absolutely a valid criticism of your point and one you probably have to address.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
If anything i'm asking for the conversation to stay 'on-goal'.
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicityly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
Even so, scale, severity, and flaunting of the law matter. Current political powers have turned it up to 11. You can absolutely "both sides bad" in general, but I don't think you should be doing so within this context or it's disingenuous / whataboutism.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Surveillance expanded under Obama and Biden. It would have expanded under Clinton or Harris. It will expand under the next Democratic President and it will expand under the next Republican one.
Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.
Let's be clear here that this is explicitly not just surveillance. This is surveillance in service of abducting people without due process. We can debate surveillance in the abstract, but this specifically is a feeder program to a system that has illegally deported US citizens without any due process. (Which would have, at step 1, indicated that US citizens cannot be deported.)
This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.
All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.
I recall watching live when second tower was hit. US commentator immediately understood the situation and remarked how this is end of an era of freedom and how this will unavoidably bring massive surveillance state aparatus in place from now on and how entire world will be affected negatively. He was 100% correct in all he said.
But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.
Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.
100%. This expansion of surveillance is a bipartisan issue. It may be easy to use Republican lawmakers and admins as a scapegoat, but doing so is akin to hiding your head in the sand.
The part that gets me is how many useful idiots who are smart enough to know know better will cheer for these things when sold piecemeal. Your DEP starts trawling the cell phone location records to nab some guy who sold bad dirt. Your traffic cameras tell law enforcement how to tailor their revenue generation toward those who can't push back. Your school system monitors social media to nab some teenager for selling vapes his older relative bought. And people cheer. They call it progress.
Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.
If they can make illegal migrants disappear without any option for them to defend themselves in front of the legal system, they can make anybody disappear, including you.
And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.
The specific clearance requirement may suggest Section 702/FISA capability being employed.
If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.
It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.
No one spoke out when the government started abducting US citizens (who happened to be brown) off the street and killing them in detention centers or putting them on deportation planes to random countries without any due process. This is just the next logical step of the program. All authoritarian governments handle dissidents in this way.
yes, people spoke out, but i take your point. a lot of people seemed cool with it or were even excited for it when they thought it wouldn't effect them, but obviously, if they could get away with it with a subset of the population, that subset would only grow.
I mean, it's cliche but vote! Use your right to vote and vote in people who will hold those who abuse their power accountable.
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
When the government is shooting citizens in the face, disenfranchising voters, dismantling election committees, and encouraging militant groups to show up to polling places and intimidate vote counters, all while claiming every election they've been a part of was rigged against them, it's natural for people to look outside of voting to make an impact.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.
Blocking roads seems like a very fast way to have people turn on you and your cause. It might be effective in some places, but in much of America I think it's counter productive.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I'm just saying that voting is something that's a right given to US citizens [1] that is woefully underutilized. Only about half of those eligible bother voting! If you don't like the current state of politics, you should at the very least do the minimal effort to participate in our republic.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
(un)fun fact, Deloitte currently staffs what looks like a smaller version of this contract, that this may be intended to replace based on the timing. Example, award ID 70CDCR21FR0000022 on USAspending.gov
Anyone cheering for this fail to realize that these kinds of programs never ever go away. Even if their budget is restricted by a future congress, some forms of this will remain. Also, political changes occur every 4-8 years. Sooner or later, the other side will control the same levers. Instead of targeting immigration, it could be used to target a community/ideology/group of individuals you align with.
Nonsense. This administration erased entire programs with the stroke of a pen. A future administration could do the same. Everything this administration has done can be unraveled.
Keep people in “system 1” thinking to control them. Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up, it’s clear that although these fault lines always existed in US society, fringe opinions have been massively signal-boosted by bots for quite some time. I suspect there’s been a psychological Cold War going on online for at least the last decade or two, with a whole ecosystem of grifters and ragebait view farmers bottom-feeding off of state sponsored PsyOps, leading a corrupt inner circle of elite opportunists to take advantage of the resulting anger for personal gain. We’ll probably never get to tease apart what was a natural side effect of social media and what was engineered deliberately but I bet the story would be every bit as fascinating as the Manhattan project.
> Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up
This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.
We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.
If you oppose them, it'd be good to understand them instead of being shocked about straw men. If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders sharing eg. demographic data. "Remigration" is the key term, now.
Look what the Europeans did from their antisemitism in the 1940s. We need to criminalize hate politics like we've banned other antisocial behaviors such as assault and rape. This just feels so obvious to me. Political hatemongering isn't some mystifying slippery ghost.
But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"
Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.
That's a very leftist media view on the issues that actually concerned most on the right. Both sides used a lot of heavy strawman attacks and had a very distorted view of what the people actually wanted/cared about. In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload. The DEI and trans was just annoying because of how forced it was and how distracting from things that actually matter to most Americans.
yeah they may frame it as "uncontrolled migration" but given recent events like the Bo French tweet about Indian Americans, "uncontrolled migration" appears to be more of a euphemism for non-white people becoming more present in American society. Hence the desire to roll back a pluralistic democracy and install an ethnonationalist authoritarian that will privilege a certain class of people and punish others. This is at least the animus behind the MAGA core
As for swing voters, they really just wanted inflation to get under control. So they didn't even trade away their rights for DEI or migration control, just inflation. A bit disconcerting to see that people will so easily give away the very rights that people fought decades to have.
> In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload.
Did this actually happen though? Friends/family in e.g. Texas/California are unconvinced, and I don't think I ever saw any real data versus just scaremongering ("they're eating our cats and dogs").
Weren't the ads Trump ran on trans fear some of the most effective of the entire cycle?
On what basis are you deciding what is or isn't an issue? You think right wing media doesn't talk about DEI and trans people all day? It's like the only issue they have left to win "middle America" over on.
Who likes seeing ICE thugs round up non criminals on the basis of skin color and nationality alone? Not enough of the middle. I'm seeing more and more Trump voters saying they didn't vote for this. The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter not on partisans. How many of these voters have articulated the same regret when it comes his policies re DEI or trans rights?
Maybe you are projecting because it's easier to come up with an excuse based on alleged economic malaise?
>In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration
Theis issue with conservatives isn't the policy you believe in, the issue is that you are just so unbelievably ignorant of how the world works, to where you see an issue like migrants coming in, and think that its such a big problem that the best course of action is giving a flamethrower to a convicted felon rapist and likely a pedo (all the things you supposedly firmly stand against), and trusting him to burn just the right parts down with authoritative force (something you are also supposedly firmly against)
Furthermore, if you bothered to actually care, you would have paid attention, Dems completely would agree with you that undocumented migrants were a problem - Biden had a border bill that was bipartisan, supported by border patrol, that would have allocated all the correct funding to reign in the asylum process, which would have correctly filtered the people that were coming here to work, versus those taking advantage of the system. And consequently, Trump told the Republicans to vote against that bill because it would hurt his chances of getting elected.
So for people like you, it was never about the migrants - you don't actually care. It was always about racism and sexism. At least there isn't any questions about it anymore.
NSA has a culture of at least sort of following the laws that govern them. This needs to be ICE to land with people who will happily ignore court orders.
Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here. I suspect you and I have a lot of overlap on our opinions, which is great but sort of tangential to what I want to know.
> Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
You’re replying to a comment that is re-iterating that they are asking for the opinion of actual Trump supporters. Presumably you are not yourself a Trump supporter, and what you posted is not your opinion.
It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.
YCombinator and their lackies in Big Tech have promoted these types of abuses to occur. The comment section here will be filled with people who lack any substance but will gladly provide lip service. The stories of the modern day Gestapo cannot be told without Silicon Valley.
People doing illegal things is the problem. Change the law if you think it's wrong but it's the executive branch's duty to enforce the law.
You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.
This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.
Nope, I can distinguish between what is right and "wrong" without arbitrary laws decided by <1k corrupt politicians (Ds and Rs).
I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.
If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.
I'd rather my tax money wasted on get US people watched and silenced, than bombing schools and killing children in Middle East.
I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.
I can’t fathom this kind of thinking. It’s not a case of having to choose between the lesser of evils, it’s a case of having some principles and making decisions based on them.
"one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses."
Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?
Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?
Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?
Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.
US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?
1 - https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-d...
So long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts, congress, or the whitehouse then these things will continue to metastasize.
The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.
Republicans have suggested for years that there is a counterbalance in the bill of rights.
That has shown to be nothing but hot air and wishful thinking. The second they got into power they’ve thrown any hint of caring about the constitution out the window.
The primary mechanism for redress of constitutional right violations under current law are monetary damages under FTCA, especially now that universal injunctions are dead. There's no actual counterbalance.
Can I buy the same weapons the American military has access to?
Until that's true, the 2nd amendment is meaningless when USAF can buy JDAMs and F35s and I, an American citizen, cannot.
While Republicans certainly have a focus on illegal immigration, support for spying on American citizens is hardly a partisan issue.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
If you have some information on how much they approve or support these programs i'm open to hearing it, but i'm not sure how much "Both parties have bad people/policies" contributes to a discussion on this specific program.
In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
This is shifting the goal posts. You said this will continue to happen as long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts[0], congress[1], or the whitehouse [2; sic] - which kind of implies (actually not kind of, it directly implies) that if only there were some more Democrats around this wouldn't happen. So "both parties do this" is absolutely a valid criticism of your point and one you probably have to address.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
If anything i'm asking for the conversation to stay 'on-goal'.
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicityly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
Even so, scale, severity, and flaunting of the law matter. Current political powers have turned it up to 11. You can absolutely "both sides bad" in general, but I don't think you should be doing so within this context or it's disingenuous / whataboutism.
My response is not whataboutism.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Surveillance expanded under Obama and Biden. It would have expanded under Clinton or Harris. It will expand under the next Democratic President and it will expand under the next Republican one.
Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.
Let's be clear here that this is explicitly not just surveillance. This is surveillance in service of abducting people without due process. We can debate surveillance in the abstract, but this specifically is a feeder program to a system that has illegally deported US citizens without any due process. (Which would have, at step 1, indicated that US citizens cannot be deported.)
This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.
All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.
Need to rollback the entire post-9/11 security mentality.
Abolishing ICE and DHS is the baseline for Democrats I support going forward.
https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-bill-abolish-ice-shut-do...
I recall watching live when second tower was hit. US commentator immediately understood the situation and remarked how this is end of an era of freedom and how this will unavoidably bring massive surveillance state aparatus in place from now on and how entire world will be affected negatively. He was 100% correct in all he said.
But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.
Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.
100%. This expansion of surveillance is a bipartisan issue. It may be easy to use Republican lawmakers and admins as a scapegoat, but doing so is akin to hiding your head in the sand.
The part that gets me is how many useful idiots who are smart enough to know know better will cheer for these things when sold piecemeal. Your DEP starts trawling the cell phone location records to nab some guy who sold bad dirt. Your traffic cameras tell law enforcement how to tailor their revenue generation toward those who can't push back. Your school system monitors social media to nab some teenager for selling vapes his older relative bought. And people cheer. They call it progress.
Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.
Stop assuming that intelligence equates to morals, this has never ever been the case.
[delayed]
"enforcement and removal", from the actual name, sounds lots worse than "spying"
in fact it sounds uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens, like NKVD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka
The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated as VChK, and commonly known as the Cheka, was the first Soviet secret police organization.
If they can make illegal migrants disappear without any option for them to defend themselves in front of the legal system, they can make anybody disappear, including you.
And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.
> uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens
I'm sure Trump has had plenty of input from Putin about all this. Even if he's not formally an "asset", it's more a case of shared goals.
The specific clearance requirement may suggest Section 702/FISA capability being employed.
If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.
It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.
This would be illegal of course.
I mean, so is murdering people in cold blood, that's why ICE doesn't really do that.
Once they have deported the last undocumented immigrant this system won’t be just decommissioned, it will be repurposed.
No one spoke out when the government started abducting US citizens (who happened to be brown) off the street and killing them in detention centers or putting them on deportation planes to random countries without any due process. This is just the next logical step of the program. All authoritarian governments handle dissidents in this way.
Lots of people have spoken out... some have even died while speaking out.
Many people spoke out against it. I don't think "nobody spoke out" is the problem here
yes, people spoke out, but i take your point. a lot of people seemed cool with it or were even excited for it when they thought it wouldn't effect them, but obviously, if they could get away with it with a subset of the population, that subset would only grow.
Many citizens and some politicians spoke out.
Plenty of people spoke out but none of the people with power to stop it (courts, Congress)
I mean, it's cliche but vote! Use your right to vote and vote in people who will hold those who abuse their power accountable.
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
When the government is shooting citizens in the face, disenfranchising voters, dismantling election committees, and encouraging militant groups to show up to polling places and intimidate vote counters, all while claiming every election they've been a part of was rigged against them, it's natural for people to look outside of voting to make an impact.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.
I'm not saying you vote instead of doing other things. I'm just saying that this right is really underutilized and anyone who can vote should.
Voting is important, but your voice doesn't stop there. Take to the streets. Block some roads. Occupy some buildings.
The Serbians did that for two years straight, until their government resigned and called for new elections. Look at videos from a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jc29fk/breathtakin...
If a much poorer country with (for now!) much worse repression can do it, what's your excuse, Americans?
Politics isn't just the ballot box every couple of years. Politics is always and everywhere.
Blocking roads seems like a very fast way to have people turn on you and your cause. It might be effective in some places, but in much of America I think it's counter productive.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I'm just saying that voting is something that's a right given to US citizens [1] that is woefully underutilized. Only about half of those eligible bother voting! If you don't like the current state of politics, you should at the very least do the minimal effort to participate in our republic.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
Lots of people did.
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
So 700k a year for 142 analysts who might analyze this very comment someday and trace it back to me, great.
And I upvoted and replied. Great.
Now I’m lumped into this! Greaaat just great
Hey, analyst reading this: You should ask for a raise. Seriously look up income in your area, you're getting scammed.
Okay, who here doesn't read this $100M and think something along the lines of Dr. Evil...
Let's add some levity to the situation, and here's the link: https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE?si=lGJ7_L0IN31WNMKE
(un)fun fact, Deloitte currently staffs what looks like a smaller version of this contract, that this may be intended to replace based on the timing. Example, award ID 70CDCR21FR0000022 on USAspending.gov
Anyone cheering for this fail to realize that these kinds of programs never ever go away. Even if their budget is restricted by a future congress, some forms of this will remain. Also, political changes occur every 4-8 years. Sooner or later, the other side will control the same levers. Instead of targeting immigration, it could be used to target a community/ideology/group of individuals you align with.
This is all correct. The implication is the only long-term solution is dissolution of DHS.
Whatever functions we need can be rebuilt from scratch later. But this is a rebuild moment, not a refactor moment.
Nonsense. This administration erased entire programs with the stroke of a pen. A future administration could do the same. Everything this administration has done can be unraveled.
Unless it involves the pet projects of those who are really in control.
This seems like a problem, reaction, solution scenario where Big Tech was always the solution and needed a problem and a reaction.
It's also their preservation mechanism. expect some of the people investigated to be "anti tech extremists" https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Most un-American 142 intelligence operatives to ever exist.
It is just crazy to me that people traded their rights away just because they got mad at some DEI programs and trans people.
Keep people in “system 1” thinking to control them. Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up, it’s clear that although these fault lines always existed in US society, fringe opinions have been massively signal-boosted by bots for quite some time. I suspect there’s been a psychological Cold War going on online for at least the last decade or two, with a whole ecosystem of grifters and ragebait view farmers bottom-feeding off of state sponsored PsyOps, leading a corrupt inner circle of elite opportunists to take advantage of the resulting anger for personal gain. We’ll probably never get to tease apart what was a natural side effect of social media and what was engineered deliberately but I bet the story would be every bit as fascinating as the Manhattan project.
> Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up
This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.
We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.
If you oppose them, it'd be good to understand them instead of being shocked about straw men. If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders sharing eg. demographic data. "Remigration" is the key term, now.
> If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders…
You can't really understand a hypocrite by taking their public utterances at face value.
Look what the Europeans did from their antisemitism in the 1940s. We need to criminalize hate politics like we've banned other antisocial behaviors such as assault and rape. This just feels so obvious to me. Political hatemongering isn't some mystifying slippery ghost.
But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"
Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.
Its been a bad habit since 9/11 and the disgusting mess that is the PATRIOT act.
Never underestimate how much most Americans will gladly shit on their freedoms if they're told it will hurt someone slightly different than them.
That's a very leftist media view on the issues that actually concerned most on the right. Both sides used a lot of heavy strawman attacks and had a very distorted view of what the people actually wanted/cared about. In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload. The DEI and trans was just annoying because of how forced it was and how distracting from things that actually matter to most Americans.
yeah they may frame it as "uncontrolled migration" but given recent events like the Bo French tweet about Indian Americans, "uncontrolled migration" appears to be more of a euphemism for non-white people becoming more present in American society. Hence the desire to roll back a pluralistic democracy and install an ethnonationalist authoritarian that will privilege a certain class of people and punish others. This is at least the animus behind the MAGA core
As for swing voters, they really just wanted inflation to get under control. So they didn't even trade away their rights for DEI or migration control, just inflation. A bit disconcerting to see that people will so easily give away the very rights that people fought decades to have.
> In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload.
Did this actually happen though? Friends/family in e.g. Texas/California are unconvinced, and I don't think I ever saw any real data versus just scaremongering ("they're eating our cats and dogs").
Weren't the ads Trump ran on trans fear some of the most effective of the entire cycle?
On what basis are you deciding what is or isn't an issue? You think right wing media doesn't talk about DEI and trans people all day? It's like the only issue they have left to win "middle America" over on.
Who likes seeing ICE thugs round up non criminals on the basis of skin color and nationality alone? Not enough of the middle. I'm seeing more and more Trump voters saying they didn't vote for this. The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter not on partisans. How many of these voters have articulated the same regret when it comes his policies re DEI or trans rights?
Maybe you are projecting because it's easier to come up with an excuse based on alleged economic malaise?
>In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration
Theis issue with conservatives isn't the policy you believe in, the issue is that you are just so unbelievably ignorant of how the world works, to where you see an issue like migrants coming in, and think that its such a big problem that the best course of action is giving a flamethrower to a convicted felon rapist and likely a pedo (all the things you supposedly firmly stand against), and trusting him to burn just the right parts down with authoritative force (something you are also supposedly firmly against)
Furthermore, if you bothered to actually care, you would have paid attention, Dems completely would agree with you that undocumented migrants were a problem - Biden had a border bill that was bipartisan, supported by border patrol, that would have allocated all the correct funding to reign in the asylum process, which would have correctly filtered the people that were coming here to work, versus those taking advantage of the system. And consequently, Trump told the Republicans to vote against that bill because it would hurt his chances of getting elected.
So for people like you, it was never about the migrants - you don't actually care. It was always about racism and sexism. At least there isn't any questions about it anymore.
So, a Stasi more or less? Or perhaps KGB is more accurate
Guess is where Kash is right now and what dictators our dear leader really likes.
I thought the NSA already was the internal spy agency?
Why have one when you can have two?
NSA has a culture of at least sort of following the laws that govern them. This needs to be ICE to land with people who will happily ignore court orders.
NSA has a culture of technically following the law while blatantly subverting them.
That seems like a strict improvement over ICE still lmao.
Genuine question for people here who still like Trump...does this kind of stuff not scare you?
It doesn’t, because they think he’s on their side. As long as he keeps hurting the right people, they’ll tolerate anything he throws at them.
Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here. I suspect you and I have a lot of overlap on our opinions, which is great but sort of tangential to what I want to know.
> Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here.
(Sometimes called The Narcissist's Prayer.)You’re replying to a comment that is re-iterating that they are asking for the opinion of actual Trump supporters. Presumably you are not yourself a Trump supporter, and what you posted is not your opinion.
It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.
YCombinator and their lackies in Big Tech have promoted these types of abuses to occur. The comment section here will be filled with people who lack any substance but will gladly provide lip service. The stories of the modern day Gestapo cannot be told without Silicon Valley.
YC loves domestic spying. They can't get enough of it. Flock, Conntour, Lexius, Protent, Ornadyne, AvairSense, etc.
US of A fone fully rogue. With the help of the tech bros.
Hot take: This is a grifting and jobs program, not an actual solution to a real problem.
Whats the "real" problem? People working for roofing companies? American citizens commit more crime than immigrants by an order of magnitude.
People doing illegal things is the problem. Change the law if you think it's wrong but it's the executive branch's duty to enforce the law.
You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.
This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.
Nope, I can distinguish between what is right and "wrong" without arbitrary laws decided by <1k corrupt politicians (Ds and Rs).
I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.
If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.
I think it's a Curtis Yarvin take that political power is based on a party's jobs program. In that sense this is never surprising.
The starting people will have top secret security clearance. =(
Grifting, purchasing loyalty, and building a police state panopticon in case of inconvenient election results. A real dystopic trifecta!
I'd rather my tax money wasted on get US people watched and silenced, than bombing schools and killing children in Middle East.
I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.
If the people in the US get watched and silenced, how will they effectively pressure the govt to not bomb children in the Middle East?
I can’t fathom this kind of thinking. It’s not a case of having to choose between the lesser of evils, it’s a case of having some principles and making decisions based on them.
You can say no.