I don't see what's so bad about wanting to avoid an area where there's police activity going on. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're doing anything wrong, it's as simple as not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint or get stuck in traffic because they need 8 squad cars taking up a lane to k-9 search someone. As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
afavour · 2h ago
There's barely any point examining the app on its merits.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
wslh · 1h ago
Genuine question: is sharing the location or distribution of information about police presence illegal? I assume this would be treated differently if it involved military positions, but I'm curious about how the law applies in this case.
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
Jtsummers · 40m ago
Only if you knew by virtue of something like access to secret information (the things you'd have a security clearance to access).
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
throw4565e3 · 57m ago
Since Waze still has their speed trap reporting feature, I’m guessing it’s still legal.
idontwantthis · 1h ago
Absolutely not illegal.
cmurf · 2h ago
If the existence of the app is evidence of nascent police state, what does increasing the budget of ICE by 13x suggest?
amarcheschi · 1h ago
That reinforces the idea of police state
tiahura · 1h ago
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state.
Or, perhaps it shows that illegal aliens don’t want to get caught?
velcrovan · 57m ago
My wife was just naturalized as a US Citizen a year ago. You can bet she doesn't want to be anywhere near that mess. Her legal status provides her basically no protection from any ICE rookie with a chip on his shoulder.
esseph · 53m ago
For those of you not paying attention, just posting a response like this can make you and your family a target.
This is not the US I knew.
jakeydus · 20m ago
I'll take immigrants in my neighborhood over ice agents in my neighborhood every day of the week.
marssaxman · 2h ago
Navigation apps have long been reporting police activity along with other aspects of traffic you might want to avoid.
Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
frontfor · 1h ago
> Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
datpuz · 2h ago
Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
acdha · 2h ago
Nobody forgets that, it’s just that abuse and misconduct sour that. In many communities, people have to weigh the odds that reporting a crime will lead to more problems for them than it will help, with consequences ranging from lack of help to theft to rape or even being shot by mistake. American police departments have largely set themselves above the law, so the average person doesn’t know whether they’re getting a good cop who is genuinely trying to help them or the bad cop whose behavior has been covered up by their fellow officers for years. Anyone concerned about public opinion of police should be focused on accountability and oversight to rebuild public trust.
AlexandrB · 2h ago
Let's be real. For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world. There are places where you better be ready to fork over cash every time you encounter the police.
afavour · 2h ago
> US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
jvergeldedios · 1h ago
I've never understood the "be happy you're not in authoritarian Russia" type of argument for papering over the shortcomings of circumstances here in the US. Like, ok? Why are we comparing ourselves to places that are worse? Shouldn't we be striving to make things better relative to our own ideals and standards?
AlexandrB · 1h ago
I'm using this argument because some of the recent proposals for fixing policing in the US are, frankly, ridiculous nonsense ("Defund the Police"). It's thus helpful to remember that we're discussing one of the better police systems in the world here, not the bottom of the barrel, and revolutionary change is not likely to create some kind of utopian law enforcement organization that never does anything wrong.
jvergeldedios · 17m ago
So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.
Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.
SpicyLemonZest · 14m ago
I don't think we should defund most police agencies in the US. I absolutely think that we need to defund ICE, throw a substantial number of its current employees in jail, and build a new immigration enforcement agency from the ground up. Nobody who authorized masked raids by the secret police can be trusted to enforce the law and I do not consider any agency who employs them legitimate.
babypuncher · 48m ago
It's like any economic discussion I have when visiting my parents. I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system, and they immediately start talking about communist East Germany like that's somehow relevant.
jakeydus · 19m ago
yOu LiVE iN sOCiEtY YeT yOu CritIciZe SoCiETY
AlexandrB · 2h ago
I can't speak for other first world countries, but Canada has its share of police misconduct. The most recent example is the mishandling of the 22-person killing spree in Nova Scotia[1], and the Toronto police are so famously bad at investigating sex crimes and protecting victims that an entire book was written on the subject[2].
Corruption allows incompetence to thrive. Deliberate inaction can also be whitewashed as "incompetence".
jimt1234 · 1h ago
This has been down-voted a lot, but I actually kinda agree, at least with the second assertion. I've been going down to Baja, Mexico frequently for years, and, as an American (white dude), you quickly learn that you're a target for local police - you're basically their ATM. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You just do your best to avoid them, like agents in The Matrix.
WarOnPrivacy · 1h ago
>> For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
watwut · 1h ago
Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Canada ... when you compare them to most corrupt states, you are not proving they are best. You are peoving they are not absolute bottom.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
It's not that they're corrupt in the literal sense. It's that they have discretion of enforcement of laws so expansive with so many precedents in their favor that they basically have de-facto power to arrest anyone and that when they do want to do something stupid they're not "corrupt" so you can't just pay them off to be reasonable.
lupusreal · 33m ago
Credit where credit is due, American cops are considerably less corrupt than American politicians. Most people in America would never even dream of trying to pay off a cop to get out of a speeding ticket, that sort of thing just doesn't work and everybody knows it. On the other hand, bribing local politicians to get some land rezoned for your business, or some other similar crap? That's just standard operating procedure in small towns everywhere.
SpicyLemonZest · 36m ago
Corruption just doesn't have much to do with the kind of misconduct that comes up in the US. It's true, yes, that an American officer who's decided to mistreat you won't usually accept a bribe to stop.
mlinhares · 2h ago
Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
Its wild to read cops in the US are not corrupt, did people just not read modern US history? Prohibition? Civil rights? Union busting? The Pinkertons?
korse · 1h ago
Funny story about the Pinkertons if you don't already know... if you skateboard or do similar shenanigans involving parking structures or industrial wasteland, you've probably been chased by their direct descendants.
What you're describing is bad but also pretty mild by international standards.
FireBeyond · 1h ago
> Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
potato3732842 · 1h ago
They're not literally corrupt. There's just a huge amount of conflict of interests, bad incentives and bad behavior.
People play fast and loose with the word "corrupt" the same way they do with "conspiracy".
mlinhares · 1h ago
You could try searching "police corruption in the US" before saying they're not literally corrupt.
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
potato3732842 · 29m ago
Yeah, corruption happens but it's not endemic.
They are not "literally corrupt" in that we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy.
9283409232 · 2h ago
LA Police are a literal gang. There are places with police that are corrupt in more obvious ways such as places in Africa but to say US cops are some of the least corrupt is ridiculous.
AlexandrB · 1h ago
This is a very sheltered take. Go south of the border to Mexico (you don't need to go anywhere as far as Africa) and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout. That's not to mention that cartels are allowed to run rampant and collect "protection" in Mexican cities because the cops either don't care, are in the cartel themselves, or are being paid off.
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
9283409232 · 1h ago
You don't need to go south of the border. You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day. I'm not interpreting least corrupt as no corruption. I think least corrupt is still a ridiculous statement.
wordofx · 1h ago
lol you watch too much tv.
bnjms · 20m ago
This is recorded. There is at least one famous one on YouTube.
9283409232 · 57m ago
Spend some time in the less fortunate areas of your city. You'll learn very quickly how things work when it comes to the police.
bobsomers · 1h ago
This is Whataboutism. What the police are like in Mexico is irrelevant to someone living in the United States.
heavyset_go · 24m ago
> Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim.
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
marssaxman · 1h ago
I have not been unusually lucky in that way, though. I can think of half a dozen occasions when the kind of people who call the cops would have done so, but I didn't, because I expected they would do no good - if they bothered to show up at all - and might well have caused a lot of harm.
ubermonkey · 2h ago
Sometimes, maybe, and increasingly rarely. I live in Texas. Ask me about Uvalde.
zoklet-enjoyer · 1h ago
I have. They showed up late and didn't do anything useful
cess11 · 1h ago
Yeah, it's great that someone shows up three hours late and writes a worse report than you would.
dmkolobov · 2h ago
Consider yourself lucky that you've never called the cops as a victim and then been further victimized by the police.
No comments yet
9283409232 · 2h ago
I've called cops as a victim. They were less than helpful to say the least. If anything, they were annoyed that I even bothered to ask for help.
scottyah · 2h ago
Since we're throwing in personal experiences to shape skimmer's overall emotions on police- I had a great interaction with police after someone called a wellness check on elderly neighbors. They tried hard to assure they were safe without being invasive or annoying.
bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
I have had positive experiences with American police, but not as many as the negative experiences, and the negative where great enough to sour me on authority. In fact whenever I had a positive experience it was just so weird to have a cop not ruining your day because they had the power to do so, that it seemed surreal.
9283409232 · 2h ago
You are missing the point if you think it is about shaping someones' emotions towards police. The point is that there are plenty of valid reasons to just want to avoid interactions with or areas with police.
mindslight · 1h ago
I've dealt with the cops a handful of times, with responses anywhere from unhelpful to helpful. It helps to have the right expectations - can a given situation be improved by adding some readily-aggressive dudes, who at the very least will be a little annoyed at having to be there? Sometimes, that answer is yes. Police perform a necessary function in society, and I wouldn't want to have to do that role myself (despite DIYing most other things).
But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
cmurf · 1h ago
People won’t forget that the presently sitting POTUS pardoned > 1600 convicted criminals who attacked police officers.
He promised he’d do this before the election. He did it on day 1. No amount of cleansing will get that stank off, it’s only that some people love that particular odor.
On Jan 6, 2021, Donald Trump sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States, because Mike Pence refused Trump’s illegal order to overturn an election that Trump had lost.
siliconc0w · 3h ago
They've abducted US citizens, it's perfectly reasonable to want to avoid them.
No comments yet
ljf · 2h ago
And I grew up believing that America was 'land of the free'.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
netsharc · 1h ago
The UK has a complicated relationship with IDs anyway, they don't have a national ID, no one's mandated to have a passport, and a driving license is also optional (only if you want to drive). The US is almost like that except that not having a driving license is an oddity there.
triyambakam · 2h ago
But are you white?
whstl · 2h ago
I’m a latino in Germany of all places and for years I didn’t carry any identification because the only one I had was my passport, the german work permit was just a sticker in one of the pages. I am obviously not gonna risk losing my passport, so it was home.
Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.
Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.
riedel · 40m ago
I am a white German with no migration background and i believe it is not all that beautiful here and I have been checked on various places. The reason is, that it really also depends where you are, because police has the right to check IDs e.g. in places where migration crimes are more likely like railway stations or in a buffet zone close to the border. In other places law requires far more actual reasons or a far more concrete suspicion. But I have also been checked in the middle of the night on a flixbus that got pulled out from the highway at the border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which IMHO clearly violated German police law.
kstrauser · 3h ago
You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
potato3732842 · 2h ago
>Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
No comments yet
SpicyLemonZest · 23m ago
In many states you’re required to identify yourself, but cooperation with law enforcement is otherwise never required. My sense is that ICE generally still releases citizens swiftly, and if they don’t think you’re a citizen for some reason you’re not going to win an argument about it on the spot no matter how much you cooperate.
hayst4ck · 2h ago
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
potato3732842 · 2h ago
>"who will hold them accountable
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
jahewson · 1h ago
So there’s this thing called the judiciary…
netsharc · 1h ago
In this thread: you slowly realizing that you live in an increasingly corrupt despotic police state...
Sure you might be fine (they just harass the brown and black people), but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
jkestner · 1h ago
Oh yeah, those guys who came up with qualified immunity.
watwut · 1h ago
Pretty much all layers say judiciary is deferential to cops and prosecution to the point of absurdity.
hayst4ck · 1h ago
OK, I don't disagree, but there is nothing that guarantees the judiciary will act constitutionally or protect people's rights, so "who will hold the judiciary accountable if they violate your rights, try to punish you for lack of obedience, or fail to hold those who violate peoples rights accountable?""
shermantanktop · 1h ago
North Korea has a judiciary. So does Iran. So does China. They all have the rough equivalent of a Supreme Court too.
A judiciary can only function as a check on other types of power when it is allowed to do so. Merely being called by that name is not enough.
hayst4ck · 2h ago
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
kstrauser · 2h ago
> Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
davidw · 2h ago
> ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of
They have a bunch of guys with guns. Maybe no warrants or id's or anything legal like that, but guns are probably enough.
With this latest bill, they are going to be one of the largest armed forces in the world. They'll get more money than the US Marines.
hartator · 2h ago
> anywhere that's not an airport
Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
wvenable · 2h ago
Murdering all the passengers made another 9/11 impossible -- nobody is going to sit quietly while their plane is hijacked anymore.
hayst4ck · 2h ago
History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
wvenable · 2h ago
Prior to 9/11, hijackings occurred with mild frequency and the official policy was appeasement: get the plane safely landed and then negotiate with the hijackers. In any ways, 9/11 was possible due to exploiting that particular policy.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
mh- · 2h ago
As a frequent flyer who has thought about this scenario a bit, I agree with this. And I actually think that as long as the FAs kept making their inane announcements about credit cards and so forth, most pax wouldn't even notice a takeover at the front of the plane.
mariodiana · 43m ago
Unless I'm mistaken, I remember some years ago the Apple Store blocked a DUI Checkpoint app. Has that changed?
bryanrasmussen · 2h ago
I've considered making a similar app for Denmark's train and bus ticket checkers, but I expect it would get rule illegal and blocked.
This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
Yeah, sometimes people develop an antipathy to certain social structures, and then that antipathy is defined as anti-social I guess, but there's probably no amount of Jantelov you can lay on that will make them change their minds.
potato3732842 · 10m ago
>This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
>Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Man your comment is a great example of horseshoe theory.
The people who support ICE's current activities justify it with all the same mumbo jumbo about "degrading public trust" and "better for society"
Only they're trailer park clowns not ivory tower clowns so they use words tinged with racism instead of words tinged with communism. But you're all f-ing clowns at the end of the day.
soderfoo · 1h ago
I went as a biljettkontrollant (Swedish ticket inspector) for Halloween—thought it’d be funny as a Yank expat.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
potato3732842 · 7m ago
That's in poor taste, but only because it cost them money.
clocker · 33m ago
> asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport.
Doesn’t Real ID solve this problem?
Jtsummers · 29m ago
In the US, we're not ordinarily required to keep any sort of ID on our person. There are some exceptions, such as the mentioned airports, crossing federal borders (as in to Canada or Mexico), some federal facilities, maybe some state/local government facilities, and (state dependent I've learned) when operating a car. Otherwise, you're pretty much free to leave your home in nothing but shorts and maybe a shirt (public decency laws and all) and go almost anywhere without issue.
Real ID is irrelevant to this. The issue is that now they can demand that people prove their citizenship almost anywhere and anytime beyond the few places it was permitted before.
goopypoop · 2h ago
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
mschuster91 · 2h ago
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
abeppu · 2h ago
There are so many layers of crazy here but the one that strikes me most is attacking CNN for having a piece about the App. I.e. it's not just that reporting police activity is treated as a problem (it's not) but even an article discussing the way that some people are reporting police activity is a problem.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
EGreg · 2h ago
This reminds me of how we have articles and handwringing about “our soldiers were attacked” in a country they had no authorization to even be. It is never discussed what they were actually doing there, but this is usually framed as in “we need more money to defend our men and women overseas”.
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
>"...we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not a protected speech. That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country."'
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
water-data-dude · 2h ago
I’m nervous about how willing SCOTUS has been to throw out precedent and side with this administration.
chrisweekly · 2h ago
head taps?
ggreer · 2h ago
People on motorcycles signal "police ahead" to riders in the opposite direction by reaching up with their left hand and tapping their head/helmet.
datax2 · 2h ago
on a motorcycle when you pass a cop you tap your helmet to warn other riders.
wat10000 · 2h ago
They know, they just don't care. They have a friendly Supreme Court, and even if they lose in court they suffer zero consequences for trying.
beepbopboopp · 3h ago
The security secretary and attorneys general going after a private citizen by name is gross
davidw · 3h ago
Basic authoritarian stuff.
justin66 · 1h ago
Going after him is (worse than) gross. Using his name is normal.
ldoughty · 3h ago
Apple App Store only. Developer has a statement about privacy concerns on Android:
(Concerned that the information they would be required to store and handle may require they work with the government during a subpoena)
Apple also has to handle this (internally) to do push notifications, but I suppose that theory is Apple has pockets to fight the government (or it's at least out of the developers hands)
Yeah, that's basically what I deduced. They throw Android under the bus but _really_ it's not any more private, it just makes it up to Apple to comply, not the developer.
There is an argument to be made that Apple is better positioned to fight financially... However, the current administration tends to threaten blocking or mergers/acquisitions, or other red tape unless they comply. I doubt Apple would accept such financially damaging threats to protect ICEBlock's users.
fn-mote · 3h ago
Apple has resisted pressure from law enforcement in the past. That gives me a real reason to believe that they will not fold in the future.
realusername · 2h ago
They also threw their Chinese users under the bus and complied with the russian government as part of their war censorship.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
As other commenters have noted, Apple's treatment of Russian and Chinese users should not give you hope for their resisting US federal oversight.
jeroenhd · 1h ago
Apple fought back against forced decryption orders. They could theoretically decrypt any iPhone they're given with new firmware but they don't want to.
On the other hand, Google isn't exactly working with the authorities either. They moved Google Maps' location history to on-device storage because of the many warrants they were served, for instance, and they too refuse to decrypt phones.
These companies know to pick their battles, but they did take on the government various times.
kstrauser · 3h ago
Agreed, and they certainly have better lawyers than an indie dev could afford.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 2h ago
If there is any silver lining in any of this, it may be that people will finally start taking privacy as not completely irrelevant trade-off to convenience. I am not really holding my breath, but if people do not have that level of self-preservation in relatively clear instances, it probably does not matter anyway.
BlueTemplar · 1h ago
The issue is much older than the current US administration : Apple has been listed as participating to PRISM since 2012, and considering the whole opacity of the Patriot Act (and its derivatives), the secret courts in particular, it makes whatever they (or any other US company) might say about their commitment to privacy (when the opponent is the US government) rather irrelevant.
(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)
johnklos · 2h ago
This is... misleading at best.
So GrapheneOS says two irrelevant things: one, about ANDROID_ID, and two, about spoofing locations.
Even if we know nothing about what's going on behind the scenes, we know for a fact that Google keeps and uses data that can correlate any user / device with their actions. This is something their business model includes, and we all know they do this all the time. They've even been caught lying, saying they weren't doing this when in fact they were.
So it's incredibly disingenuous for GrapheneOS to mention two irrelevant things, then make the claim that, "Making posts with inaccurate technical claims about Android doesn't inspire confidence."
Yes, GrapheneOS, this doesn't inspire confidence at all. I wouldn't believe anyone who writes irrelevant things when discussing very specific issues in an attempt to confuse and mislead.
jeroenhd · 59m ago
Apple tracks user location too. If you log into your iCloud from a country you've never been to, you're going to have to need to provide your 2FA code even with a valid session token. They're not stupid.
Apple is very much in favour of user privacy, as long as that privacy means "protecting your data from third parties". When it comes to the data Apple itself collects, they're far less conservative. They don't share information derived from their massive databases per se, but they do keep track.
Thanks to Apple and Find My, stalking people is easier than ever. The company can look up where you are and where you've been. They'd probably fight a court order to provide live location data to ICE, but who knows what that'll mean with the current American government.
Even on iOS, user data ends up in the hands of data brokers through ads. They're not supposed to collect all that data, but that's not stopping an unethical company from trying.
Android's privacy issues are there, but only if you're protecting your privacy against companies. If you're trying to protect your privacy against the government, there's no difference, really.
miloignis · 1h ago
But Google doesn't have to be involved! GrapheneOS is specifically a de-googled Android.
Even for normal Google-y Android, you could provide the APK to side-load, so it doesn't go through the Play Store or Google's FCM at all, an option you don't have with Apple.
I think this is what the Graphene posts are trying to say.
As others mention, having a web app would make a lot of sense.
beefnugs · 1h ago
Yeah people dont know what they dont know, but just the fact people are risking their freedom to do something is important.
Someone explain to him that whatever he is doing, he needs to end to end encrypt so none of the infrastructure or middlemen can see anything but ips and who installed it (until they control the end device). (Better yet use veilid if it works yet, or i think there is some kind of tor routing over http these days)
Also he is making a weird mistake by not being a website instead of obvious corporate controlled "app", also should have tried harder to keep anonymous
UmGuys · 25m ago
Oh shit. Graphene says it's a honeypot. Slick marketing.
snickerdoodle12 · 2h ago
Yeah, it's absolute nonsense.
Apple could be subpoenaed for the data, and we all know that Tim Apple is happy to jump when Trump says jump.
Meanwhile on Android they could easily just distribute the app from their own website and if they really insist on push messages there are plenty of non-google options that are actually private.
ck2 · 3h ago
Everyone can bypass Play store from side-load from a web download without root
and they can make their own push system so that claim doesn't hold water?
jeroenhd · 52m ago
Making your own push system on Android is rather unreliable. On phones from several brands (Samsung, for one) the system would constantly try to kill any long-running polling operation or background refresh daemon.
I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering.
It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy.
All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 2h ago
That.. is only technically true. For a huge population of Apple users, messing around with non-standard solutions is not exactly popular.
OutOfHere · 2h ago
It is a false statement since apps can trivially be side-loaded on Android.
callahad · 2h ago
Interesting that Apple even allows ICEBlock on the App Store given that 13 years ago they blocked the publication of an app that notified users of American drone strikes abroad as "objectionable" content: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/apple-drone-stri...
jeroenhd · 1h ago
I think Apple hates the current American leadership enough that they'll take their sweet time to take down this app.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
genter · 39m ago
Tim Cook was at Trump's inauguration, and donated $1 million to it. While I don't know what his private views are, his public ones are to cozy up Trump.
nottorp · 3h ago
I think Iran has a similar app for signaling where the religious police is checking haircuts and head covers :)
After they run out of migrants they'll come back to check haircuts and covers.
Authoritarianism 101.
hackyhacky · 2h ago
> After they run out of migrants they'll come back to check haircuts and covers.
Anf your voting record and your attendance of protests.
_DeadFred_ · 2h ago
You don't downsize a government agency once it's been given a budget larger than the entire Marine corps. You just give it new targets if needed.
josefresco · 2h ago
Why isn't this a privacy first PWA? Is a native iOS app more secure? Even if I delete it from my device it's still in my "Cloud" and there's a record (at Apple) of me downloading/installing it.
StackRiff · 1h ago
Apple provides a lot of things for free that you'd otherwise have to pay for (maintain, pay for, and/or scale) yourself. A big one that comes to mind is maps API and geocoding. This is all free on iOS, if you use the API from a native app.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
BlueTemplar · 1h ago
Why do you even need an API in the first place though ?
Can't you run it mostly offline with OSM ?
Aurornis · 2h ago
The article is sparse on details, but I assume an app like this relies on background location services to determine when nearby alerts are relevant.
tempodox · 2h ago
Aren't there also browser APIs for location services? I imagine this functionality could be possible with a web app.
Edit: What I don't know is whether a web app running on iOS could do the equivalent of a push notification. Last I heard, WebKit's functionality is/was? limited here. That might be a reason to use a native app after all.
int_19h · 44m ago
The tricky part here is receiving notifications in your proximity while the app is in the background. Native apps can request permission to track your location at all times, but I don't think that's an option for PWAs.
bigyabai · 2h ago
That's okay, you trust Apple right?
If you didn't, you'd just buy another phone. That's what HN tells me.
FYI - It's rising to the top rn because it is also being flooded with false reporting as an adversary tactic.
kennywinker · 3h ago
A small number of people could easily flood a system like this with bad reports. Every good faith user has to wait for an actual sighting - bad faith users don’t.
aerostable_slug · 2h ago
Also, good faith users are very often wrong.
In my immediate area, ICE has been "spotted" numerous times and that news relayed on social media. Unfortunately, ICE hasn't actually engaged in any removal operations in this county. All of the sightings have been other agencies. The spotters are batting 0.0, and that's without any bad faith actors purposely spoofing reports.
davidw · 3h ago
Same could work for ICE reports if you could figure out a way to submit them without being traceable... Hrm.
atemerev · 2h ago
Ah, the good old Sybil attack problem.
Usually resolved by reputation systems and auto-ban algorithms.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
So ICE is ... everywhere?
UmGuys · 30m ago
> "because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk."
What's this about? Surely it's technically possible to implement. Can someone add more detail?
wnevets · 1h ago
ICE is a waste of tax payers money, I rather have satellite data for hurricanes.
apparent · 1h ago
Interesting that this is an iOS app, not Android or web app. What percent of illegal immigrants who are worried about being randomly swept up (i.e., those who can be visibly profiled) have iOS devices?
I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
xoa · 34m ago
>I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
I think your impression is pretty dated, like to 2010 or something?Apple has generally kept iPhones fully updated for a good 5-7 years, with some security updates after and apps typically supporting n-1 or n-2 OS. Current iOS 18 supports devices back to the iPhone XR/XS released in 2018. And the pace of progress has leveled off a huge amount since the heady early days in the steep part of the S-curve. But prices still fall fast on used phones. Even if you go back fewer years, iPhone 11s and 12s can be had for a few hundred bucks or less and still work well (I had a 12 until recently). Battery replacement can be done for ~$30.
So while sure, if someone was always on the newest phone that'd have some premium, it's definitely not any big deal or sign of riches to have an iPhone. They're all over the US market space.
mijoharas · 1h ago
Part of the article said this:
> The app is only available on iOS, because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk.
Can anyone describe what this means? I don't know of a requirement to collect data on android? Is there something I'm not thinking of?
Yay, Streisand effect! More power to the publisher and every user of this app.
aidenn0 · 54m ago
Slightly OT, but TIL that I've never heard of the 2nd most popular social networking app on the App Store ("threads").
yahoozoo · 9m ago
Surely this won’t be used by trolls.
DaveChurchill · 1h ago
I am worried the app is just a honeypot made by bad actors to get a create a database of the "rebels" they will soon be hunting down.
aerostable_slug · 3h ago
It's a fantastic way to avoid crowds at Wal-Mart, the county fair, car shows, etc. Just a few clicks and the lines shrink. Great app!
Sarcasm aside, with no gates to avoiding spoofed ICE sightings the usefulness of the app seems questionable at best. This is doubly true when observers in this area have historically been unable to differentiate non-ICE Federal law enforcement from ICE (so even users who mean well are filling the system with bogus data). There have been numerous "ICE sightings" in this area when in fact no immigration enforcement actions have occurred in the county (DEA and HSI have been at work, though).
ldoughty · 3h ago
This might also be hampered by the desire to not store any device info if they stores device info, they might be able to build a reputation system for believing reports. They claim this is for user privacy, but it really just shifts the privacy defense to Apple -- so will Apple fight the gag order and subpoena for names of users of this app? At least if the developer did it themselves there could be a canary[1].
Is the stat they keep repeating relevant? Attacks on ICE agents increased 500%? If attacks went from 1 to 6 that is an increase of 500% but if there is also 6x more ICE activity the baseline rate of attack is the same.
It’s like complaining there’s more shark attacks in the summer vs winter and concluding sharks have seasonal mood swings.
kevingadd · 1h ago
The baseline number of attacks was in the single digits, yes.
jvergeldedios · 1h ago
I also have a feeling their definition of "attack" would differ from mine.
oxqbldpxo · 2h ago
Can Sauron use his Palatir to get info from this app?
syedkarim · 1h ago
Why is this an app and not a website?
jeroenhd · 47m ago
Cheaper and easier to build. Apple's SDK offers a lot of options and doesn't require a lot of credit card details, unlike some of Google's APIs.
Plus, web apps are gimped on iOS (no notification support without going through a cumbersome PWA installation flow and data getting wiped every 14 days if you're just letting it run in the background).
cess11 · 1h ago
For one users don't have to say they consent to data extraction as often, and some people don't use web sites very much.
egorfine · 2h ago
We had the same thing happening in Ukraine. Conscription agents are sweeping the streets and forcefully kidnapping people.
So, yeah, it did not took long before public chats with real-time reporting popped up and became country-wide phenomenon.
Welcome to the club, America!
atemerev · 2h ago
O hi.
Well, they are one logical leap away from realizing that instead of sending undesirables to CECOT they can send them to their guerre du jour instead.
I guess Erik Prince could use a penal battalion or two.
adolph · 3h ago
The application appears to be a geofenced messaging application like Yik Yak. What is to prevent feds from joining and changing their appearance based on reports of their current appearance?
GuinansEyebrows · 2h ago
> What is to prevent feds from joining and changing their appearance based on reports of their current appearance?
probably the same weird compulsion to cosplay the gestapo in the first place. they don't need to move in silence. they want to make people afraid.
actionfromafar · 2h ago
Remove their masks and drop their guns? Half is won in that case!
ck2 · 3h ago
Has anyone decompiled it yet to make sure it's legit?
asacrowflies · 3h ago
Yeah in this case not being FOSS makes it most likely a honeypot
kstrauser · 2h ago
How so? If I report seeing ICE at 123 Main St., that doesn't mean there are more than usual undocumented immigrants there. It just means that's where I saw ICE at that moment.
asacrowflies · 2h ago
Not a honey pot for immigrants but for dissidents and anyone anti ice or anti administration
kstrauser · 1h ago
If we go down that road, I suspect everyone registered to vote as a Democrat will be on the same dissidents list.
salawat · 2h ago
There was a commenter that got buried, where the person making it wasn't aware of the precedent for government mandated "apps". So i80and...
Look no further than CALEA mandated forensics packages on most network backbone gear!
You see, we've had government mandated "apps", but they are intentionally "hidden" (only by omission of course) from the layperson! So you, John Q. Public, are not exposed to them, but every regulated service provider is turned into a facilitator for law enforcement monitoring activity.
Bumping it down to handsets simply hasn't been done because it's just easier to plug in upstream through Third Party Doctrine and it'd be self-defeating in a sense to straight up make and admit that handsets purpose is to surveil you for law enforcement purposes. Businesses can have compliance compelled through the threat of disincorporation, so can be relied upon to cooperate as a pre-requisite of doing business.
Now, this software is generally considered "the good guys doing good guy things" so isn't generally considered problematic. As I hope is being learned by everyone; there is no line between a system that exists for well intentioned people to do good things with and a system capable of being used by evil people to do evil things, at scale with.
system2 · 3h ago
The silly app requires iOS 18.2. I have an iPhone 11 and can't get to iOS 18. They shot themselves in the foot with this ridiculous requirement.
vanchor3 · 2h ago
Are you sure you have an iPhone 11? My iPhone 11 runs iOS 18.5 fine and is reportedly going to support iOS 26.
Sweet, going to use this when I go to the grocery store later.
apparent · 1h ago
Probably people will use it when going to baseball games and theme parks as well, to scare others into staying home.
SomeHacker44 · 2h ago
Just wanted to say a positive thing about some of our law enforcement folks in the US, without intending to minimize all the other comments.
I fly a small plane across our Canadian border from time to time. Each time I come back I clear at an "International" airport with on site customs. In the Northeast I have never had anything but the most pleasant interactions with Customs personnel. Very friendly, efficient. One memorable comment from an officer years ago was "Thanks for stopping by!"
On the Florida border (e.g. flights from the Caribbean), things are more formal, busy and a little more brusque, but still well above the acceptable line.
So... Maybe do not generalize to everyone in government, but it never hurts to be wary and minimize unnecessary interaction.
ews · 2h ago
We are talking about a gang of unidentified, masked thugs (most don't even believe they are real federal agents but bounty hunters) which brutalize people based on how they look or what accent they have and send them to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
Please do not derail the conversation with a 'whatabout' and another 'not all cops'. Nobody is generalizing for nothing here, and of course not everyone in government is evil, it's even stupid to point that out.
GuinansEyebrows · 1h ago
i want to assume you have good intent here, but you have to understand that this is kind of tone-deaf in the face of my neighbors being forced into vans and disappeared. i'm truly happy that you haven't had to experience the same kind of abuse and i hope that ICE doesn't start disappearing people who fly private planes alongside fruit vendors and day laborers for the crime of being brown.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
Or, perhaps it shows that illegal aliens don’t want to get caught?
This is not the US I knew.
Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/canada-police-mistakes-novia...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Story-Jane-Doe-Book-About/dp/067931275...
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
Its wild to read cops in the US are not corrupt, did people just not read modern US history? Prohibition? Civil rights? Union busting? The Pinkertons?
[1] https://www.securitas.com/en/newsroom/press-releases_list/se...
What you're describing is bad but also pretty mild by international standards.
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
People play fast and loose with the word "corrupt" the same way they do with "conspiracy".
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
They are not "literally corrupt" in that we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy.
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
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But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
He promised he’d do this before the election. He did it on day 1. No amount of cleansing will get that stank off, it’s only that some people love that particular odor.
On Jan 6, 2021, Donald Trump sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States, because Mike Pence refused Trump’s illegal order to overturn an election that Trump had lost.
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I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.
Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
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This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
Sure you might be fine (they just harass the brown and black people), but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
A judiciary can only function as a check on other types of power when it is allowed to do so. Merely being called by that name is not enough.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights
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Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
They have a bunch of guys with guns. Maybe no warrants or id's or anything legal like that, but guns are probably enough.
With this latest bill, they are going to be one of the largest armed forces in the world. They'll get more money than the US Marines.
Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20240529/what-happens-if-you-board-a...
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
>Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Man your comment is a great example of horseshoe theory.
The people who support ICE's current activities justify it with all the same mumbo jumbo about "degrading public trust" and "better for society"
Only they're trailer park clowns not ivory tower clowns so they use words tinged with racism instead of words tinged with communism. But you're all f-ing clowns at the end of the day.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
Doesn’t Real ID solve this problem?
Real ID is irrelevant to this. The issue is that now they can demand that people prove their citizenship almost anywhere and anytime beyond the few places it was permitted before.
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
Example: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/23/politics/niger-troops-law...
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895401/iraqi-parliament-vo...
Even when a country’s leaders unanimously tell us to withdraw our troops, we say nah:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-withdrawing-iraq-agreemen...
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
https://www.iceblock.app/android
(Concerned that the information they would be required to store and handle may require they work with the government during a subpoena)
Apple also has to handle this (internally) to do push notifications, but I suppose that theory is Apple has pockets to fight the government (or it's at least out of the developers hands)
There is an argument to be made that Apple is better positioned to fight financially... However, the current administration tends to threaten blocking or mergers/acquisitions, or other red tape unless they comply. I doubt Apple would accept such financially damaging threats to protect ICEBlock's users.
On the other hand, Google isn't exactly working with the authorities either. They moved Google Maps' location history to on-device storage because of the many warrants they were served, for instance, and they too refuse to decrypt phones.
These companies know to pick their battles, but they did take on the government various times.
(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)
So GrapheneOS says two irrelevant things: one, about ANDROID_ID, and two, about spoofing locations.
Even if we know nothing about what's going on behind the scenes, we know for a fact that Google keeps and uses data that can correlate any user / device with their actions. This is something their business model includes, and we all know they do this all the time. They've even been caught lying, saying they weren't doing this when in fact they were.
So it's incredibly disingenuous for GrapheneOS to mention two irrelevant things, then make the claim that, "Making posts with inaccurate technical claims about Android doesn't inspire confidence."
Yes, GrapheneOS, this doesn't inspire confidence at all. I wouldn't believe anyone who writes irrelevant things when discussing very specific issues in an attempt to confuse and mislead.
Apple is very much in favour of user privacy, as long as that privacy means "protecting your data from third parties". When it comes to the data Apple itself collects, they're far less conservative. They don't share information derived from their massive databases per se, but they do keep track.
Thanks to Apple and Find My, stalking people is easier than ever. The company can look up where you are and where you've been. They'd probably fight a court order to provide live location data to ICE, but who knows what that'll mean with the current American government.
Even on iOS, user data ends up in the hands of data brokers through ads. They're not supposed to collect all that data, but that's not stopping an unethical company from trying.
Android's privacy issues are there, but only if you're protecting your privacy against companies. If you're trying to protect your privacy against the government, there's no difference, really.
I think this is what the Graphene posts are trying to say.
As others mention, having a web app would make a lot of sense.
Someone explain to him that whatever he is doing, he needs to end to end encrypt so none of the infrastructure or middlemen can see anything but ips and who installed it (until they control the end device). (Better yet use veilid if it works yet, or i think there is some kind of tor routing over http these days)
Also he is making a weird mistake by not being a website instead of obvious corporate controlled "app", also should have tried harder to keep anonymous
Apple could be subpoenaed for the data, and we all know that Tim Apple is happy to jump when Trump says jump.
Meanwhile on Android they could easily just distribute the app from their own website and if they really insist on push messages there are plenty of non-google options that are actually private.
and they can make their own push system so that claim doesn't hold water?
I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering.
It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy.
All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
Authoritarianism 101.
Anf your voting record and your attendance of protests.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
Can't you run it mostly offline with OSM ?
Edit: What I don't know is whether a web app running on iOS could do the equivalent of a push notification. Last I heard, WebKit's functionality is/was? limited here. That might be a reason to use a native app after all.
If you didn't, you'd just buy another phone. That's what HN tells me.
In my immediate area, ICE has been "spotted" numerous times and that news relayed on social media. Unfortunately, ICE hasn't actually engaged in any removal operations in this county. All of the sightings have been other agencies. The spotters are batting 0.0, and that's without any bad faith actors purposely spoofing reports.
Usually resolved by reputation systems and auto-ban algorithms.
What's this about? Surely it's technically possible to implement. Can someone add more detail?
I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
I think your impression is pretty dated, like to 2010 or something?Apple has generally kept iPhones fully updated for a good 5-7 years, with some security updates after and apps typically supporting n-1 or n-2 OS. Current iOS 18 supports devices back to the iPhone XR/XS released in 2018. And the pace of progress has leveled off a huge amount since the heady early days in the steep part of the S-curve. But prices still fall fast on used phones. Even if you go back fewer years, iPhone 11s and 12s can be had for a few hundred bucks or less and still work well (I had a 12 until recently). Battery replacement can be done for ~$30.
So while sure, if someone was always on the newest phone that'd have some premium, it's definitely not any big deal or sign of riches to have an iPhone. They're all over the US market space.
> The app is only available on iOS, because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk.
Can anyone describe what this means? I don't know of a requirement to collect data on android? Is there something I'm not thinking of?
[EDIT] carried on reading the comments and it appears to be answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445392
Sarcasm aside, with no gates to avoiding spoofed ICE sightings the usefulness of the app seems questionable at best. This is doubly true when observers in this area have historically been unable to differentiate non-ICE Federal law enforcement from ICE (so even users who mean well are filling the system with bogus data). There have been numerous "ICE sightings" in this area when in fact no immigration enforcement actions have occurred in the county (DEA and HSI have been at work, though).
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
It’s like complaining there’s more shark attacks in the summer vs winter and concluding sharks have seasonal mood swings.
Plus, web apps are gimped on iOS (no notification support without going through a cumbersome PWA installation flow and data getting wiped every 14 days if you're just letting it run in the background).
So, yeah, it did not took long before public chats with real-time reporting popped up and became country-wide phenomenon.
Welcome to the club, America!
Well, they are one logical leap away from realizing that instead of sending undesirables to CECOT they can send them to their guerre du jour instead.
I guess Erik Prince could use a penal battalion or two.
probably the same weird compulsion to cosplay the gestapo in the first place. they don't need to move in silence. they want to make people afraid.
Look no further than CALEA mandated forensics packages on most network backbone gear!
https://www.subsentio.com/solutions/platforms-technologies/
https://www.fcc.gov/calea
You see, we've had government mandated "apps", but they are intentionally "hidden" (only by omission of course) from the layperson! So you, John Q. Public, are not exposed to them, but every regulated service provider is turned into a facilitator for law enforcement monitoring activity.
Bumping it down to handsets simply hasn't been done because it's just easier to plug in upstream through Third Party Doctrine and it'd be self-defeating in a sense to straight up make and admit that handsets purpose is to surveil you for law enforcement purposes. Businesses can have compliance compelled through the threat of disincorporation, so can be relied upon to cooperate as a pre-requisite of doing business.
Now, this software is generally considered "the good guys doing good guy things" so isn't generally considered problematic. As I hope is being learned by everyone; there is no line between a system that exists for well intentioned people to do good things with and a system capable of being used by evil people to do evil things, at scale with.
I fly a small plane across our Canadian border from time to time. Each time I come back I clear at an "International" airport with on site customs. In the Northeast I have never had anything but the most pleasant interactions with Customs personnel. Very friendly, efficient. One memorable comment from an officer years ago was "Thanks for stopping by!"
On the Florida border (e.g. flights from the Caribbean), things are more formal, busy and a little more brusque, but still well above the acceptable line.
So... Maybe do not generalize to everyone in government, but it never hurts to be wary and minimize unnecessary interaction.
Please do not derail the conversation with a 'whatabout' and another 'not all cops'. Nobody is generalizing for nothing here, and of course not everyone in government is evil, it's even stupid to point that out.