Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html

188•jjwiseman•1h ago

Comments

KnuthIsGod•1h ago

How long before they come for Hacker News ?

Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump.

A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.

lokar•1h ago

Or, adjust your priorities and resist more. Authoritarians win when people let them.

jmclnx•52m ago

Plus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,

assimpleaspossi•46m ago

Nah. People who sit on social media would rather stand on street corners and yell at people.

DavidSJ•1h ago

I don’t think we should preemptively surrender our free speech to the authoritarians.

ryanmcbride•1h ago

Okay you go ahead and give in I'm gonna not though

comrade1234•1h ago

I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.

bink•1h ago

Even if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.

Macha•1h ago

And there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.

nozzlegear•1h ago

There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.

asdff•1h ago

You can do it just you have to email dang directly about it. Pretty stupid system.

helterskelter•1h ago

Archive.org probably already has it anyway.

46493168•1h ago

That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.

Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.

nostrademons•1h ago

You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.

pesus•57m ago

Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.

JoshTriplett•37m ago

There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.

AnimalMuppet•50m ago

I believe that, even within that two hour window, you cannot delete if anyone has replied to it.

You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.

layer8•24m ago

The HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.

add-sub-mul-div•1h ago

You can't delete comments here. It's why I've only ever made anonymous throwaway posts or comments.

But in this specific case I do not agree with complying with this bullshit in advance.

madaxe_again•1h ago

Man, they can fucking blow me.

If you start censoring yourself because of potential consequences, you’re complicit.

Sooner a dead lion than some kind of shabby boot-donkey.

dagi3d•58m ago

Fearing the consequences doesn't make you a complicit but a victim. Sure there will be people who will take a more brave/difficult stance, but can't blame others for not doing so, we don't know they'd put at stake.

organsnyder•52m ago

You can be both complicit and a victim.

booleandilemma•1h ago

This is known as a "chilling effect".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

mikestew•1h ago

Let ‘em come. Even if I could delete my posts (you can’t, BTW), I’m not deleting shit. And I’m sure not obeying in advance.

asdff•1h ago

Let them come for us. If it comes to that, trolling social media to arrest american citizens en masse, people are going to be forming militias and I'll join up the local outfit. I don't care anymore. I'm ready to take a stand if it comes to it and take back our country and I'm sure I'm not alone on that either.

endemic•1h ago

I feel like this is the inevitable end result. Ironic that we’ll finally get well-regulated militias.

marysminefnuf•1h ago

I want the government to know how i feel. I want them to see my posts and comments. If this anonymous surveilance without warrants is the only way to be acknowledged then thats a form of protest to me and it has made me want to be more outspoken knowing we are all being watched. Fuck ice.

LightBug1•1h ago

For the record: FUCK ICE, bunch of pseudo-fascist thugs, or paid off mercenaries. Wankers, the lot of em.

ynac•1h ago

To all the replies herein:

Dang - I haven't read that kind of hacker attitude anywhere, even here, in a long time ya'll. I ain't kiddin', I got a little weepy.

I don't know what the rally cry of hackers would be, but Atari 800, assembly code, and solder smoke for all!

GaryBluto•1h ago

I hope that this is hyperbolic satire and not a genuine viewpoint because it is incredibly unrealistic to the point of being almost fantastical. The US government aren't going to "go after" or interfere with Hacker News at any time in the future unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism (which it shouldn't become anyway).

reaperducer•21m ago

unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism

That's the thing about AI and scale. You don't have to only target the big fish. You can cast a wide net and scoop up data on people in every nook and cranny of the internet.

The concentration camps were loaded with people who thought their town was too small for the Nazis to bother with.

sroussey•13m ago

You don’t even need AI, just data brokers. And no warrant needed, only cash.

Terr_•13m ago

Why do you think these folks operate in a rational and proportional manner?

All it takes is one "wrong" thing to go viral and anybody goes in the retribution list.

malcolmgreaves•9m ago

Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.

It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.

> popular hotbed of political activism

First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.

Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.

And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.

AnimalMuppet•2m ago

It is highly illegal - unconstitutional - for them to go after HN, even if it becomes a popular hotbed of political activism.

krautburglar•1h ago

One day redhat is going to grease Trump's pole with enough cash, and King Donald is going to send a member of his tribal-tattooed, part-time MAGA influencer burgerwaffen to pull-up the black van and take you under cover of night for posting wrongthink about wayland & systemd.

zaptheimpaler•1h ago

You are ruled by pedophiles, rapists and murderers. They have released a fraction of the epstein files heavily redacted and are deleting even those in real time.. they are deleting files so they can then pretend they are fake. if you don’t wake the fuck up and start fighting now you will face things worse than death.

https://epsteinexposed.com/ - file explorer

https://x.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/2022425434626183307?s=61

https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1r2lxir/theyve_del...

Im not a conspiracy theorist at all, but there is tons of evidence of rape, torture, murder of hundreds or thousands of girls and 1 year old babies. This is not an exaggeration. I don’t know how else to explain this, AI or the ICE controversy of the week barely registers compared to the things that have happened. It’s so evil that it sounds insane until you read it but it is real.

Alupis•54m ago

> They have released 2% of the epstein files

3,500,000 pages[1] have been released, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.

If this was only "2%" of the files, you're alleging there's 175,000,000 pages of documents. Absolute nonsense. That's not even realistic. Not to mention nobody but the government knows how many pages are in "the files" - anything else you see is just made up.

> Im not a conspiracy theorist at all... murder of hundreds or thousands of girls and 1 year old babies

laugh out loud...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-publishes-...

zaptheimpaler•44m ago

https://x.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/2022425434626183307?s=61

this is one example mentioning babies. There are hundreds of other pictures and emails re young girls. If you bother to look into this, you will see. you would rather feel superior nitpicking a minor detail while missing the fucking point. Good job. Heres another crumb, a tiny sliver of evidence:

https://hyperallergic.com/epstein-files-detail-gruesome-alle...

Alupis•34m ago

You're interpreting that email to mean they've killed thousands of one year old babies? Or perhaps it was a joke about a party that had a bunch of babies at it... I dare say, you're so deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole you don't know which way is up.

zaptheimpaler•16m ago

I said thousands of victims, not thousands of babies or murders. That much is confirmed even by the FBI.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline#:~:text=...

Some of these claims don't have hard video evidence, and i suspect you would call those fake too even if they did but they are not unbelievable when considered in the context of everything that's been shown. I can't do that for you.

Anyways, if that's not enough for you to even spend some time reading the news, then I don't know what is. Enjoy being stupid and smug.

AngryNPC•19m ago

This guy gets it, and isn't falling for the distractions.

Also, what is going on with this thread? Everyone here sounds like they're from Reddit, which has one of the most hysterical and heavily-propagandized userbases in existence.

One person here even said that Reddit is "free from MAGA influences". Like lol, Reddit is nothing but bot accounts and activist moderators who will insta-ban you for wrong-think. The whole site is nothing but astroturfing, and you have to be an NPC to believe any political post on its frontpage.

HN's has been one of my fav sites to lurk on for at least a decade, but I can't tell it apart from Reddit sometimes.

zaptheimpaler•7m ago

HN has taken a very sharp turn over the past 2-3 years. Putting aside politics, they are reflexively cynical, misinformed and confident in their ignorance even about technology. Missing the boat on AI as well for years as its evolved from cool chatbot that hallucinates to can write full codebases with few errors and solve unsolved research problems with some assistance.

nozzlegear•1h ago

If Trump's going to throw me in his El Salvador gulag for being a deep state Soros-backed neoliberal globalist shill on HN, I'm going to make sure somebody in his regime at least has to read my bullshit first.

tehjoker•27m ago

They have a limited amount of power to suppress opinion even with their powerful tools and thugs. Their method is to go after big platforms and prominent individuals. If you keep speaking up anyway, it will overwhelm them.

infotainment•1h ago

This is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS.

Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.

throwawayq3423•36m ago

just to be clear trump administration is not using Patriot Act era standards. They're going far beyond what any previous administration has done and openly breaking the law.

I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.

hodgehog11•1h ago

This is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.

iugtmkbdfil834•36m ago

The interesting thing is that the time to oppose it these encroachments was somewhere between 2001 and say.. 2015 ( some events, but nothing in particular other than general acceptance by general populace ). And now the masses are crying foul? Now is absolutely not the time to try to get online invisibility cloak.

notepad0x90•1h ago

twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.

What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.

I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.

whynotmaybe•1h ago

The good old choice between plague or cholera.

bediger4000•1h ago

It's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"?

And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.

softwaredoug•1h ago

Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.

Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.

rtkwe•44m ago

I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.

JoshTriplett•40m ago

> I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid.

I hope courts go further and find them in contempt, or engaging in something akin to barratry, or otherwise abusing the legal system.

rtkwe•29m ago

I mean more is better here for sure.

throwawayq3423•37m ago

Good faith by the federal government can no longer be assumed.

Donald Trump's real legacy is not any single action, but a complete inversion of trust of the US government by its citizens.

And the world.

GaryBluto•30m ago

The federal government in the United States has not been, in my opinion, trustworthy for a decade or two at this point. I don't see how somebody could take issue with what the Republicans are doing now but not have lost faith in the government after something like the Snowden fiasco.

malcolmgreaves•20m ago

Wrong. Stop both sides-ing this. What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans: Nixon, Regan, Bush, and now Trump.

GaryBluto•13m ago

The concept of "both-sidesism" is a thought-terminating cliché that attempts to be a more reasonable sounding way of saying that one side is holy and the other is sinful that was invented on social media platforms for propaganda purposes.

> What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans

Many examples have been given in this post's comments alone and are already well-known by the average HN user, such as:

1. The Snowden Leaks (Obama)

2. The Pentagon Papers (exposed under Nixon, describes actions under Kennedy and Johnson administration)

3. The IRS Targeting Controversy (Obama)

4. DOJ Surveillance of Journalists (Obama)

throwaway173738•7m ago

No, it’s an attempt to weigh the actions of either side in aggregate. What you’re doing is trying to argue that everything is awful and so why bother. I’ve seen numerous examples of one group acting well-meaning and sincere, and numerous examples of the other group taking advantage and sewing chaos. If you think they’re both the same you’re either not paying attention to everything or you only care about a very few things. Either way it’s going to be impossible for me to find common ground with you as long as you refuse to try to work with what you’ve got.

GaryBluto•3m ago

> What you’re doing is trying to argue that everything is awful and so why bother.

I don't know how that could be construed from my comments.

> Either way it’s going to be impossible for me to find common ground with you as long as you refuse to try to work with what you’ve got.

If I don't agree with you you won't agree with me? This isn't a revelation.

malcolmgreaves•2m ago

Number 1 was Bush. The republicans crated the NSA surveillance machine.

Number 2 — know your US history. The democratic and republican parties flipped philosophies in 68. Their dems went pro integration and the southern dems went to the Republican Party, which remained segregationist. Nixon was closer to Kennedy and LBJ than Humphrey.

Number 3 is nothing - it wasn’t active targeting. They implemented rules to check all organizations. The republican affiliates ones were skirting the rules. This is another lie by the republicans.

Number

deaux•9m ago

Wrong. Stop being so brainwashed by party politics.

Corporate dems - which are all of them in the last two decades - doing little for the average citizen, protecting megacorps, accelerating wealth concentration, protecting the billionaires, have also played a big role in maling the average citizen distrust their government.

Do you really think not a single one of them knew about the Epstein files? You can't be taken seriously if you do. And if you don't, their participation in keeping it hidden too builds distrust, even if 20 times more reps were involved. The dem candidate of only 10 years ago must have known. The chance she didn't is so small.

Snowden's revelations built distrust. Everything he revealed was absolutely "both sides". You can say "one side has been much worse", and sure, that's fair. But pretending that the other has been squeaky clean and that their own actions haven't played a huge role in the current situation is just sticking your hand in the sand.

People are tired of having to choose between "awful A" and "even worse B". If the dems stopped nominating "awful A" and replaced then with "decent A" then it'd be a landslide. But they won't. They haven't changed one bit. Mamdani, finally an example of "decent A", was hindered. They didn't want to see him win at all, and only started cheering for him when he finally did. By a huge margin, because he's a "decent A".

Until this changes, until the day that decent candidates of Mamdani are universally cheered on and given the full first choice backing by that party, not a single thing will get better, and it will only get worse, because it means the inevitable next rep winner will be even worse.

I'm not sure how you got this mindset, but it's not great, and I'm sure deep down you're smarter than this. These aren't football teams to cheer for.

throwaway173738•11m ago

Because for all of the issues I take with Obama over Snowden, there were also attempts to keep promises and maintain stability and order within the country. Say what you will but there were no literal masked thugs kidnapping people at gunpoint under Obama. With many things you have to weigh a person’s actions in balance, and in balance Trump is way way way way way way worse than Obama.

mindslight•9m ago

I lost faith that the government represents my interests with Binney, Klein, and Snowden. I then lost faith that the government won't actively go out of its way to attack me with Grump. A pattern of escalation is still escalation.

salawat•18m ago

When Europeans wonder why the U.S. is so backwards and barbaric about not implementing a National ID scheme. Look no further, ladies and gents, because at least once every 200 years, the population has a day of supreme brain off and puts someone like Trump in office. Once that happens, you too will appreciate why it should be hard for the government to do things.

Herring•57m ago

Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.

idle_zealot•52m ago

Apparently something like 30% of Democrats (voters, not representatives) now identify as "Democratic Socialists." I assume this is because it's what Bernie and Mamdani call themselves while advocating for the above mentioned measures. The establishment Democrats will fight like hell to stem the tide, but there does seem to be increasing support for these populist policies among liberals.

rayiner•48m ago

How’s that working in Germany, the UK, Italy, etc? The only way that actually works is for left wing parties to adopt restrictive immigration policies, like Denmark did: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo

Herring•26m ago

Those three examples all implemented some kind of austerity, which reduced safety nets and increased economic insecurity.

Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.

rayiner•15m ago

The idea that there's been meaningful austerity isn't borne out by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... There was a dip after the financial crisis and a blip that returned to normal after COVID. But Germany, Italy, and the UK all spend a slightly greater share of their GDP on social welfare now than they did in 2000.

mrtesthah•42m ago

I would counter that a majority of Americans are actually in favor of these things, but our supreme court has been corrupted by billionaires and is stymying any real progress along these lines. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...

aa_is_op•52m ago

Imagine organizing an anti-government movement on the platform of a guy who sponsored said government.

hackyhacky•47m ago

What are the alternatives for organizing large groups of regular (non-tech savvy) people? Carrier pigeon?

willturman•24m ago

Word of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.

hackyhacky•15m ago

Many of these (word of mouth, community organizations, religious organizations, meetups, neighborhood meetings) don't work beyond the local area.

Many of these (radio broadcast, independent websites) aren't accessible to non-technical people.

Many of these (cultural traditions, town criers) are obviously unserious.

giancarlostoro•45m ago

I'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...

softwaredoug•32m ago

One difference, this was in response to an actual search warrant granted by a judge.

What DHS is doing are administrative warrants, with no judicial overview (unless you sue to stop them).

Terr_•21m ago

We shouldn't dignify their schemes with their jargon: They are generating internal memos and submitting complaint/threat letters.

charcircuit•8m ago

Both types of warrants are just as valid.

Gud•4m ago

No they aren’t.

dymk•21m ago

Sounds like a whole bunch of “both sides!!”

This ain’t the same

GaryBluto•20m ago

You're right. What the government did to Lavabit was much worse and had more meaningful, visible consequences.

guerrilla•17m ago

There's only one side: the state as a tool of the ruling class.

helterskelter•15m ago

I had an account at the time! He gave the govt the key, handwritten on paper, to stall for time so he could delete everything. I wish every admin had that sort of integrity.

He had a followup project, magma (https://github.com/lavabit/magma), that was supposed to be a secure email alternative. It's a shame it never took off.

webdoodle•4m ago

You are a 100% right, and that is just one example of Obama's subservience to a future totalitarian government he started, and handed off to Trump, who has continued too increase the dystopian fascist state.

Obama did these things as well:

1) Got a Nobel peace prize after ordering the killing a U.S. citizen by Drone, without a trial or conviction.

2) He failed to renew the Smith-Mundt Act, which only took his signature, unleashing the restriction on the U.S. military of conducting PSYOPS on U.S. citizens and residents.

3) He created the U.S. Global Engagement Center which allows the coordination of the above mentioned PSYOPs and censorship.

4) He gave NSA Prism mass-surveillance access too 16 law enforcement agencies, including ICE.

He did the last three, AFTER Trump was already President elect. Clearly doing the needful for the fascists state Trump would later continue to swell. Biden wasn't even a speed bump, he used the U.S. GEC too censor and muzzle any dissent about COVID, where it came from, how it was funded, etc.

Aeolun•28m ago

I just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.

reaperducer•27m ago

It makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.

Terr_•20m ago

How many of our past account email settings are kept?

nxobject•15m ago

I'll need to look this up, but IIRC HN is one of the sources included in a fairly popular LEO market "online media presence" aggregation tool.

yanhangyhy•15m ago

oh boy, ICE will mess up with the mid-term selection and make sure Trump get another 4 years.

phendrenad2•13m ago

MAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.

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