I'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late.
Despite all its other warts, the FISA court is (A) an actual judicial-branch court (B) created by legislation and (C) the justices cannot be removed on direct Presidential whim.
In contrast, "administrative warrants" are more like an executive-branch manager writing a memo, where an unscrupulous President could get them removed in a day for not writing the "right" memos.
Ah, you must not be American. At least over here--the subject of the news post--that belief would be considered pro-dictatorship nonsense.
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.
The constitution does not give the judicial branch the exclusive power of issuing warrants. Having certain exclusive powers doing mean every action can only be exclusively done by them. Each branch has an obligation to adhere to the constitution.
I had an account at the time! He gave the govt the key, handwritten on paper, to stall for time so he could delete everything. I wish every admin had that sort of integrity.
He had a followup project, magma (https://github.com/lavabit/magma), that was supposed to be a secure email alternative. It's a shame it never took off.
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.
Because it distracts from the point I'm making. Our founding fathers setup this country a certain way, and along the way we left the different branches of government to assume new powers without any amendments, and now we're surprised that they're walking all over the constitution? This problem extends beyond the current administration. It will only get worse before it gets better.
Remember, someone FAR WORSE can run for president, someone far worse can absolutely win. Don't make the assumption that your current least favorite administration will be as worse as it gets, because that is how you wind up giving that future administration the keys to the kingdom.
You're freeing this administration from any blame. No system of governance can resist a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push. If the Democratic Party is to share part of the blame, it's in the fact that it is completely bought by special interests and thus unwilling to push pack against the Republicans. But don't be mistaken, this is entirely on Republicans, both their corrupt politicians and stupid voter base who cheer on their rights being trodden upon, as long as the other side suffers more.
You are a 100% right, and that is just one example of Obama's subservience to a future totalitarian government he started, and handed off to Trump, who has continued too increase the dystopian fascist state.
Obama did these things as well:
1) Got a Nobel peace prize after ordering the killing a U.S. citizen by Drone, without a trial or conviction.
2) He failed to renew the Smith-Mundt Act, which only took his signature, unleashing the restriction on the U.S. military of conducting PSYOPS on U.S. citizens and residents.
3) He created the U.S. Global Engagement Center which allows the coordination of the above mentioned PSYOPs and censorship.
4) He gave NSA Prism mass-surveillance access too 16 law enforcement agencies, including ICE.
He did the last three, AFTER Trump was already President elect. Clearly doing the needful for the fascists state Trump would later continue to swell. Biden wasn't even a speed bump, he used the U.S. GEC too censor and muzzle any dissent about COVID, where it came from, how it was funded, etc.
Edward Snowden had stolen the most sensitive classified secrets from The United States Intelligence Community and Donald Trump is looking to squash dissent of his attempts to nullify the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.
I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.
To be fair, those sensitive secrets included secret, unconstitutional, dragnet surveillance programs targeting american citizens, and the fact that the director of national intelligence had perjured himself during congressional hearings on those programs.
Less than 1% of what Snowden took and leaked pertained to domestic surveillance programs, The rest was intelligence capabilities and sources and methods.
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.
What they did to snowden was illegitimate but at least they had the cover that he was an insider that had signed a contract with the government. They are going after random ass people expressing a 1A opinion now. Legally very different ballgames even though both dissenters are correct to voice their opinions and knowledge and should not have been pursued for objecting to extravagant government wrongdoing.
Friend, if you followed Snowden's saga at all, you would know that those events don't need to be similar to be relevant to the discussion at hand. In other words, just because you have a problem with Trump, does not mean the two issues are not connected.
Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.
When Europeans wonder why the U.S. is so backwards and barbaric about not implementing a National ID scheme. Look no further, ladies and gents, because at least once every 200 years, the population has a day of supreme brain off and puts someone like Trump in office. Once that happens, you too will appreciate why it should be hard for the government to do things.
I just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.
twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.
What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.
I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.
just to be clear trump administration is not using Patriot Act era standards. They're going far beyond what any previous administration has done and openly breaking the law.
I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.
It makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.
You know this is all public and almost every person here has zero opsec, right? There's no point even asking YC for the data, unless you want to target that one very specific person.
You should assume that the IP address used for any online service (which for most people maps with timestamp to their home address and credit card for the cable bill) is not secret.
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.
This is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.
The interesting thing is that the time to oppose it these encroachments was somewhere between 2001 and say.. 2015 ( some events, but nothing in particular other than general acceptance by general populace ). And now the masses are crying foul? Now is absolutely not the time to try to get online invisibility cloak.
Some couldn't vote then broskie. In particular because of things like age, and school, and parents being spoonfed propaganda and having the desire for vengeance stoked for dat Middle East invasion and things. So since that couldn't happen, it seems the next best time to address the issue is now.
Kind of like when protestors on J6, who only walked near the capital, were thrown in prison for years based on Google GPS data?
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.
> Until all of these things are addressed, I certainly won't support the freedom of speech for people that won't support mine.
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).
Republican propagandists were quite successful at spinning the emergent corporate infringement of natural rights as a bona fide illegal government action led by "the left", to fool enough useful idiots into supporting their "alternative" of a wannabe-dictator planning a full scale governmental assault on our rights.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.
I would counter that a majority of Americans are actually in favor of these things, but our supreme court has been corrupted by billionaires and is stymying any real progress along these lines.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...
Apparently something like 30% of Democrats (voters, not representatives) now identify as "Democratic Socialists." I assume this is because it's what Bernie and Mamdani call themselves while advocating for the above mentioned measures. The establishment Democrats will fight like hell to stem the tide, but there does seem to be increasing support for these populist policies among liberals.
How’s that working in Germany, the UK, Italy, etc? The only way that actually works is for left wing parties to adopt restrictive immigration policies, like Denmark did: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo
Those three examples all implemented some kind of austerity, which reduced safety nets and increased economic insecurity.
Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.
The idea that there's been meaningful austerity isn't borne out by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... There was a dip after the financial crisis and a blip that returned to normal after COVID. But Germany, Italy, and the UK all spend a slightly greater share of their GDP on social welfare now than they did in 2000.
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.
That graph is really deceptive. Eg the Greece curve is going up (!!), which can make you think there was no austerity. Probably the GDP in the denominator shrunk faster than the govt could cut pensions.
Well how much have the countries aged? In that case you should expect it to go up, maybe it's still a lot less than it should be.
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...
The Trump administration has demanded fealty to Trump, the man, not the office holder. Any Executive Branch employee who refuses to issue a subpoena that the Trump administration wants issued will lose their job in seconds.
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.
MAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.
Far too many criminals are being protected from prosecution by the Donald. He now has literal armies of criminals in whose best interests it is to keep him in office. Will they scoff at committing more crimes to make sure their protection doesn’t evaporate due to an election?
Plus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,
I hope that this is hyperbolic satire and not a genuine viewpoint because it is incredibly unrealistic to the point of being almost fantastical. The US government aren't going to "go after" or interfere with Hacker News at any time in the future unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism (which it shouldn't become anyway).
Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.
It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.
> popular hotbed of political activism
First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.
Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.
And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.
unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism
That's the thing about AI and scale. You don't have to only target the big fish. You can cast a wide net and scoop up data on people in every nook and cranny of the internet.
The concentration camps were loaded with people who thought their town was too small for the Nazis to bother with.
I want the government to know how i feel. I want them to see my posts and comments. If this anonymous surveilance without warrants is the only way to be acknowledged then thats a form of protest to me and it has made me want to be more outspoken knowing we are all being watched. Fuck ice.
Let them come for us. If it comes to that, trolling social media to arrest american citizens en masse, people are going to be forming militias and I'll join up the local outfit. I don't care anymore. I'm ready to take a stand if it comes to it and take back our country and I'm sure I'm not alone on that either.
I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.
There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.
That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.
Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.
Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.
There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.
Yes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.
They have a limited amount of power to suppress opinion even with their powerful tools and thugs. Their method is to go after big platforms and prominent individuals. If you keep speaking up anyway, it will overwhelm them.
If Trump's going to throw me in his El Salvador gulag for being a deep state Soros-backed neoliberal globalist shill on HN, I'm going to make sure somebody in his regime at least has to read my bullshit first.
One day redhat is going to grease Trump's pole with enough cash, and King Donald is going to send a member of his tribal-tattooed, part-time MAGA influencer burgerwaffen to pull-up the black van and take you under cover of night for posting wrongthink about wayland & systemd.
Fearing the consequences doesn't make you a complicit but a victim. Sure there will be people who will take a more brave/difficult stance, but can't blame others for not doing so, we don't know they'd put at stake.
It's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"?
And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.
Word of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.
Every single one of these has been effectively used to organize at geographic scale within this most recent century before "non-technical" even existed as a possible descriptor of a human being.
Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.
I'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...
One difference, this was in response to an actual search warrant granted by a judge.
What DHS is doing are administrative warrants, with no judicial overview (unless you sue to stop them).
We shouldn't dignify their schemes with their jargon: They are generating internal memos and submitting complaint/threat letters.
Both types of warrants are just as valid.
No they aren’t.
Coming from a different branch of government does not make one any more or less valid than another.
I think you’re confused on the difference between these, and what an administrative warrant is in particular.
Trying to draw a distinction between the secret FISA court and administrative warrants from DHS is shaving the baloney a little thin.
Despite all its other warts, the FISA court is (A) an actual judicial-branch court (B) created by legislation and (C) the justices cannot be removed on direct Presidential whim.
In contrast, "administrative warrants" are more like an executive-branch manager writing a memo, where an unscrupulous President could get them removed in a day for not writing the "right" memos.
Ah, you must not be American. At least over here--the subject of the news post--that belief would be considered pro-dictatorship nonsense.
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.
The constitution does not give the judicial branch the exclusive power of issuing warrants. Having certain exclusive powers doing mean every action can only be exclusively done by them. Each branch has an obligation to adhere to the constitution.
> Each branch has an obligation to adhere to the constitution.
Somebody tell that to the executive branch, they seem to have forgotten it some time in late January, 2025.
Wait until you find out judges are appointed by the president...
It is actually amazing America managed to function as well as it has been to be honest.
Yes. It's incredible that:
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.
The entire point of having multiple branches of government is that they have different powers.
There are both different powers and similar powers between the different branches.
Do you understand the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial warrant?
I had an account at the time! He gave the govt the key, handwritten on paper, to stall for time so he could delete everything. I wish every admin had that sort of integrity.
He had a followup project, magma (https://github.com/lavabit/magma), that was supposed to be a secure email alternative. It's a shame it never took off.
Sounds like a whole bunch of “both sides!!”
This ain’t the same
Yeah? Because you can't just flip flop on these things once you open the can of worms, the next administration has the same toy box you leave behind.
> It doesn't matter who the president is
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"
Because it distracts from the point I'm making. Our founding fathers setup this country a certain way, and along the way we left the different branches of government to assume new powers without any amendments, and now we're surprised that they're walking all over the constitution? This problem extends beyond the current administration. It will only get worse before it gets better.
Remember, someone FAR WORSE can run for president, someone far worse can absolutely win. Don't make the assumption that your current least favorite administration will be as worse as it gets, because that is how you wind up giving that future administration the keys to the kingdom.
You're freeing this administration from any blame. No system of governance can resist a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push. If the Democratic Party is to share part of the blame, it's in the fact that it is completely bought by special interests and thus unwilling to push pack against the Republicans. But don't be mistaken, this is entirely on Republicans, both their corrupt politicians and stupid voter base who cheer on their rights being trodden upon, as long as the other side suffers more.
You are a 100% right, and that is just one example of Obama's subservience to a future totalitarian government he started, and handed off to Trump, who has continued too increase the dystopian fascist state.
Obama did these things as well:
1) Got a Nobel peace prize after ordering the killing a U.S. citizen by Drone, without a trial or conviction.
2) He failed to renew the Smith-Mundt Act, which only took his signature, unleashing the restriction on the U.S. military of conducting PSYOPS on U.S. citizens and residents.
3) He created the U.S. Global Engagement Center which allows the coordination of the above mentioned PSYOPs and censorship.
4) He gave NSA Prism mass-surveillance access too 16 law enforcement agencies, including ICE.
He did the last three, AFTER Trump was already President elect. Clearly doing the needful for the fascists state Trump would later continue to swell. Biden wasn't even a speed bump, he used the U.S. GEC too censor and muzzle any dissent about COVID, where it came from, how it was funded, etc.
Edward Snowden had stolen the most sensitive classified secrets from The United States Intelligence Community and Donald Trump is looking to squash dissent of his attempts to nullify the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.
I get what you're saying, but please have some perspective. the two things are not even remotely similar.
To be fair, those sensitive secrets included secret, unconstitutional, dragnet surveillance programs targeting american citizens, and the fact that the director of national intelligence had perjured himself during congressional hearings on those programs.
Less than 1% of what Snowden took and leaked pertained to domestic surveillance programs, The rest was intelligence capabilities and sources and methods.
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.
What they did to snowden was illegitimate but at least they had the cover that he was an insider that had signed a contract with the government. They are going after random ass people expressing a 1A opinion now. Legally very different ballgames even though both dissenters are correct to voice their opinions and knowledge and should not have been pursued for objecting to extravagant government wrongdoing.
Friend, if you followed Snowden's saga at all, you would know that those events don't need to be similar to be relevant to the discussion at hand. In other words, just because you have a problem with Trump, does not mean the two issues are not connected.
Who was imprisoned for their speech against the US president by Obama and how did Snowden stop that?
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.
If you think for a moment of arguing that throwing people in jail is the only way to impede someone's liberty, you are in for a world of a surprise.
Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.
> I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid.
I hope courts go further and find them in contempt, or engaging in something akin to barratry, or otherwise abusing the legal system.
I mean more is better here for sure.
Good faith by the federal government can no longer be assumed.
Donald Trump's real legacy is not any single action, but a complete inversion of trust of the US government by its citizens.
And the world.
When Europeans wonder why the U.S. is so backwards and barbaric about not implementing a National ID scheme. Look no further, ladies and gents, because at least once every 200 years, the population has a day of supreme brain off and puts someone like Trump in office. Once that happens, you too will appreciate why it should be hard for the government to do things.
Sadly, a National ID scheme is by far not the only way the U.S. is backwards and barbaric.
I just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.
I played Deus Ex and the FEMA camps are now ICE camps.
Empires do not fall with dignity or grace I suppose.
This went from #2 on the front page to the bottom of page 2 very quickly. It's unfortunate.
twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.
What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.
I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.
The good old choice between plague or cholera.
http://archive.today/kqLpX
This is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS.
Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.
just to be clear trump administration is not using Patriot Act era standards. They're going far beyond what any previous administration has done and openly breaking the law.
I have a feeling they would have gotten here even if Obama didn't expand the surveillance state.
It makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.
I'll need to look this up, but IIRC HN is one of the sources included in a fairly popular LEO market "online media presence" aggregation tool.
Hmmm, how many of our past account email-settings are kept?
You know this is all public and almost every person here has zero opsec, right? There's no point even asking YC for the data, unless you want to target that one very specific person.
You should assume that the IP address used for any online service (which for most people maps with timestamp to their home address and credit card for the cable bill) is not secret.
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.
That's great, would be nice to see which accounts.
This is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.
The interesting thing is that the time to oppose it these encroachments was somewhere between 2001 and say.. 2015 ( some events, but nothing in particular other than general acceptance by general populace ). And now the masses are crying foul? Now is absolutely not the time to try to get online invisibility cloak.
Some couldn't vote then broskie. In particular because of things like age, and school, and parents being spoonfed propaganda and having the desire for vengeance stoked for dat Middle East invasion and things. So since that couldn't happen, it seems the next best time to address the issue is now.
Kind of like when protestors on J6, who only walked near the capital, were thrown in prison for years based on Google GPS data?
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.
> Until all of these things are addressed, I certainly won't support the freedom of speech for people that won't support mine.
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).
Republican propagandists were quite successful at spinning the emergent corporate infringement of natural rights as a bona fide illegal government action led by "the left", to fool enough useful idiots into supporting their "alternative" of a wannabe-dictator planning a full scale governmental assault on our rights.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.
I would counter that a majority of Americans are actually in favor of these things, but our supreme court has been corrupted by billionaires and is stymying any real progress along these lines. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...
Apparently something like 30% of Democrats (voters, not representatives) now identify as "Democratic Socialists." I assume this is because it's what Bernie and Mamdani call themselves while advocating for the above mentioned measures. The establishment Democrats will fight like hell to stem the tide, but there does seem to be increasing support for these populist policies among liberals.
I think it's because the Democratic Party has moved away from socialist policies, e.g., Medicare For All.
How’s that working in Germany, the UK, Italy, etc? The only way that actually works is for left wing parties to adopt restrictive immigration policies, like Denmark did: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo
Those three examples all implemented some kind of austerity, which reduced safety nets and increased economic insecurity.
Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.
The idea that there's been meaningful austerity isn't borne out by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... There was a dip after the financial crisis and a blip that returned to normal after COVID. But Germany, Italy, and the UK all spend a slightly greater share of their GDP on social welfare now than they did in 2000.
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.
That graph is really deceptive. Eg the Greece curve is going up (!!), which can make you think there was no austerity. Probably the GDP in the denominator shrunk faster than the govt could cut pensions.
No, real GDP (inflation adjusted) grew considerably in Germany and the U.K. over that time, and was stable in Italy: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1RMz0.
All three countries spend a slightly greater share of an overall larger economy on social welfare than they did in 2000.
Well how much have the countries aged? In that case you should expect it to go up, maybe it's still a lot less than it should be.
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...
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The Trump administration has demanded fealty to Trump, the man, not the office holder. Any Executive Branch employee who refuses to issue a subpoena that the Trump administration wants issued will lose their job in seconds.
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.
MAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.
Far too many criminals are being protected from prosecution by the Donald. He now has literal armies of criminals in whose best interests it is to keep him in office. Will they scoff at committing more crimes to make sure their protection doesn’t evaporate due to an election?
How long before they come for Hacker News ?
Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump.
A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.
Or, adjust your priorities and resist more. Authoritarians win when people let them.
Plus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,
Nah. People who sit on social media would rather stand on street corners and yell at people.
If someone is motivated enough to attend protests, they're motivated enough to go vote.
Let ‘em come. Even if I could delete my posts (you can’t, BTW), I’m not deleting shit. And I’m sure not obeying in advance.
I don’t think we should preemptively surrender our free speech to the authoritarians.
I hope that this is hyperbolic satire and not a genuine viewpoint because it is incredibly unrealistic to the point of being almost fantastical. The US government aren't going to "go after" or interfere with Hacker News at any time in the future unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism (which it shouldn't become anyway).
Why do you think these folks operate in a rational and proportional manner?
All it takes is one "wrong" thing to go viral and anybody goes in the retribution list.
It is highly illegal - unconstitutional - for them to go after HN, even if it becomes a popular hotbed of political activism.
/me waves hands around wildly
This admin is constantly doing illegal things and when challenged in court has over a 70% loss rate.
Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.
It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.
> popular hotbed of political activism
First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.
Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.
And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.
unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism
That's the thing about AI and scale. You don't have to only target the big fish. You can cast a wide net and scoop up data on people in every nook and cranny of the internet.
The concentration camps were loaded with people who thought their town was too small for the Nazis to bother with.
You don’t even need AI, just data brokers. And no warrant needed, only cash.
I want the government to know how i feel. I want them to see my posts and comments. If this anonymous surveilance without warrants is the only way to be acknowledged then thats a form of protest to me and it has made me want to be more outspoken knowing we are all being watched. Fuck ice.
To all the replies herein:
Dang - I haven't read that kind of hacker attitude anywhere, even here, in a long time ya'll. I ain't kiddin', I got a little weepy.
I don't know what the rally cry of hackers would be, but Atari 800, assembly code, and solder smoke for all!
Let them come for us. If it comes to that, trolling social media to arrest american citizens en masse, people are going to be forming militias and I'll join up the local outfit. I don't care anymore. I'm ready to take a stand if it comes to it and take back our country and I'm sure I'm not alone on that either.
I feel like this is the inevitable end result. Ironic that we’ll finally get well-regulated militias.
I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.
Even if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.
There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.
And there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.
That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.
Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.
You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.
Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.
There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.
Yes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.
I believe that, even within that two hour window, you cannot delete if anyone has replied to it.
You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.
You can do it just you have to email dang directly about it. Pretty stupid system.
The HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.
Archive.org probably already has it anyway.
Okay you go ahead and give in I'm gonna not though
ICE and CBP are building a lot of concentration camps. Clearly, they are planning to fill them.
> Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here
It's too late. Multiple copies of all the posts exist already.
This is known as a "chilling effect".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
They have a limited amount of power to suppress opinion even with their powerful tools and thugs. Their method is to go after big platforms and prominent individuals. If you keep speaking up anyway, it will overwhelm them.
Sorry. No. I'm not going to get pushed around by a bunch of bootlickers.
If Trump's going to throw me in his El Salvador gulag for being a deep state Soros-backed neoliberal globalist shill on HN, I'm going to make sure somebody in his regime at least has to read my bullshit first.
Preach comrade. And I want them to reflect on how they're protecting the Epstein Class while going after free speech.
One day redhat is going to grease Trump's pole with enough cash, and King Donald is going to send a member of his tribal-tattooed, part-time MAGA influencer burgerwaffen to pull-up the black van and take you under cover of night for posting wrongthink about wayland & systemd.
Man, they can fucking blow me.
If you start censoring yourself because of potential consequences, you’re complicit.
Sooner a dead lion than some kind of shabby boot-donkey.
Fearing the consequences doesn't make you a complicit but a victim. Sure there will be people who will take a more brave/difficult stance, but can't blame others for not doing so, we don't know they'd put at stake.
You can be both complicit and a victim.
For the record: FUCK ICE, bunch of pseudo-fascist thugs, or paid off mercenaries. Wankers, the lot of em.
You can't delete comments here. It's why I've only ever made anonymous throwaway posts or comments.
But in this specific case I do not agree with complying with this bullshit in advance.
oh boy, ICE will mess up with the mid-term selection and make sure Trump get another 4 years.
It's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"?
And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.
Imagine organizing an anti-government movement on the platform of a guy who sponsored said government.
What are the alternatives for organizing large groups of regular (non-tech savvy) people? Carrier pigeon?
Word of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.
Many of these (word of mouth, community organizations, religious organizations, meetups, neighborhood meetings) don't work beyond the local area.
Many of these (radio broadcast, independent websites) aren't accessible to non-technical people.
Many of these (cultural traditions, town criers) are obviously unserious.
Every single one of these has been effectively used to organize at geographic scale within this most recent century before "non-technical" even existed as a possible descriptor of a human being.
Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.