https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...
What DHS is doing are administrative warrants, with no judicial overview (unless you sue to stop them).
The US Federal government has different branches, and only certain branches have certain powers. This is widely known because we teach this to US children before they are 14 years old, sometimes aided by literal cartoons.
These "warrants" are not at all equivalent, the same way that a President cannot dream up and declare a "law" (even if he calls it that) because only Congress may make those.
It is actually amazing America managed to function as well as it has been to be honest.
1. The loopholes were not exploited sooner.
2. No one cares about patching them, not before real-world identification, and not even after identification. They only keep increasing.
The only saving grace has been the two term limit of the President.
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.
It clearly does as your comment was very pointed towards Obama but fails to mention Trump once. I'm curious as to why that would be? Are you ignoring the massive amount of funding that ICE/DHS has received to invade cities of the President's opponents to crush dissent? Or maybe the threats of face scanning to be put on a "domestic terrorist" list? I don't recall Obama doing those things. A common pattern I'm seeing during this admin is: good things are attributed directly to Trump, but bad things are the government having too much power that his predecessors can be blamed for.
"Good tsar, bad boyars"
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.
I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.
But that's besides the point. There is a real argument that the U.S. government, in trying to catch Snowden, was protecting national security. There is no such argument with Trump.
Because that is exactly what we're talking about here. And if you don't have a like-for-like comparison, then we have nothing to discuss.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
I hope courts go further and find them in contempt, or engaging in something akin to barratry, or otherwise abusing the legal system.
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.
But to anybody only just waking up to this unaccountable surveillance-industrial complex now: Welcome! While I wish you had been with us after Snowden, I am glad you are here now.
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.
Why? Because they knew that stability and economic prosperity were things people wanted. They of course never went far enough and didn’t ever want to rock the boat.
But, importantly, what you’re trying to do is wrong. Trump is not like corporate dems. It’s significantly worse. There’s not a single redeeming thing about this regime.
And all republicans are 100% behind trump. That means the entire Republican Party is guilty and responsible for what trump does.
So yes, it is appropriate to paint the entire group with one broad stroke. They’re all guilty of enabling a criminal to shred the constitution and destroy the entire fabric of US society for the next few generations. (The US has backslid to the late 1800s - blatant corruption everywhere).
I've clearly shown why this is blatantly false, and your comment does nothing to argue against it.
> Why? Because they knew that stability and economic prosperity were things people wanted.
This is laughable. Ah yes, in 2014 the average American definitely wouldn't have wanted the Epstein files to be published, sure.
You can't say this with a straight face. The capital class wouldn't have wanted it, the average person absolutely would have.
> 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)
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.
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. They looked at orgs with certain things in their name, but it was an investigation. No government action came of it. It was not abuse. This is another lie by the republicans.
2. It is an oversimplified view to suggest that Democratic and Republican parties completely flipped during the late 60s but they certainly did reverse views on race.
3. They put extra scrutiny organizations with "Tea Party" or "patriots" in their names and admitted as much. Unless the Obama administration was secretly Republican and put out this "lie" to negatively impact themselves as part of some grand reptilian conspiracy.
Empires do not fall with dignity or grace I suppose.
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.
Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.
I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.
I use a VPN router that sends all of my traffic to a public VPN; if you don’t want HN having your location and identity, stop giving it to them.
How about when Amazon engineers colluded with the federal government to shutdown Parler? It would be like Trump working with hosting servers for Blue sky and getting it shutdown.
Twitter and Facebook were caught colluding with the Biden administration to censor Americans. There weren't 10 posts a day on HN about it, and it was pretty quickly ignored and forgotten.
Until all of these things are addressed, I certainly won't support the freedom of speech for people that won't support mine.
The problem is that I don't think many people even see this behavior as a problem.
It has shown me that many people are willing to support the murder, censorship, and other political violence of people they don't like. I'm not talking about the right.
That means you don’t support freedom of speech. But we already knew that because you already explained your authoritarian views.
What I don’t understand is why authoritarians such as yourself (as well as many of the what I call “blue MAGA” authoritarian counterparts on the left) still pay lip service to concepts such as free speech and the rule of law. These concepts fundamentally encapsulate that they are applied equally. If you don’t support them for your enemies (and criminals, and immigrants, and trans people, etc), then you simply don’t support them, period. “Free speech for my side” simply isn’t. “The rule of law (but only for citizens)” isn’t support for the rule of law.
I find all forms of government censorship to be abhorrent, regardless of which party is in power. I support free speech and freedom from government interference for the MAGA crowd as I do for everyone else, despite their active and continued efforts to curtail my legal rights to same (as Trump has repeatedly said out loud).
The subpoenas are intended as part of the database the Trump administration is building identifying American citizens with anti-Trump views.
There can be only one reason for such a database: to punish and terrorize the citizenry of this county.
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.
And while the U.S. has less social spending overall, the trend shows the opposite of your story. In 2000, when the U.S. elected pro-immigration George W. Bush, social spending was 14.1%. In 2024, when people voted for "mass deportations" Trump, social spending was 19.8% of GDP. The U.S. was spending more of its economy on social welfare in 2024 than Australia, Canada, and the U.K. were spending back in the early 2000s--but the far right is much stronger today than it was back then.
All three countries spend a slightly greater share of an overall larger economy on social welfare than they did in 2000.
I'm a statistician. That (first) graph is a case study in how to lie with statistics. They should teach it in class.
I'm out, I recommend you spend some time reading about this issue. Inequality and welfare cuts leading to the rise in the far right is fairly well established. One (misleading) graph doesn't disprove it. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
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.
All it takes is one "wrong" thing to go viral and anybody goes in the retribution list.
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.
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.
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!
Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.
You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.
It's too late. Multiple copies of all the posts exist already.
If you start censoring yourself because of potential consequences, you’re complicit.
Sooner a dead lion than some kind of shabby boot-donkey.
But in this specific case I do not agree with complying with this bullshit in advance.
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.
Any idea why the culture's been shifting here? I've always loved the deep & insightful back-and-fourths we've had on HN, but now a lot of that nuance is lost, and it's mostly just kneejerk reactions ("thing is the way it is because GREED, simple as that") and the endless nit-picking of unimportant details.
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-...
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...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline#:~:text=...
Some of these claims don't have bulletproof video evidence and DNA, 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.
> murder of hundreds or thousands of girls and 1 year old babies
I don't assume it's astro-turfed, I assess it is, and I want answers to confirm or refute it.
As the Supreme Court has already apted noted, organizations enjoy free speech rights in the U.S. as well, including the right to advocate for positions you or others wouldn't normally take.
You’re regurgitating lies from the Republican party’s impressive propaganda machine.
Trump is as anti free speech as you can get. There’s no debating this fact. The evidence is overwhelming. Anyone that is regurgitating the lines you are is doing so in bad faith: at best, you’re being willfully ignorant.
Many of these (radio broadcast, independent websites) aren't accessible to non-technical people.
Many of these (cultural traditions, town criers) are obviously unserious.
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.