This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
Out of curiosity, since you appear to be very certain of this, what are you doing personally to deal with this? Are you leaving the country, moving into the hills, building a bunker, etc? I don't mean to sound antagonistic or anything, I genuinely would like to know.
Not OP but of the same persuasion. Personally, I’m working on emigration plans. I don’t really want to live in an authoritarian state. And if I ever have kids, there’s no way I’d want to raise them in this environment.
I should point out, though, that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean that QOL drops for the average person (if you’re not part of a targeted group). Many people live quite happily in Hungary, Turkey, Russia. Local government will chug along as before, stonks might still go up. But you have to internalize a certain resignation over things you can no longer change or talk about, unless you wish to become a dissident and put yourself in danger. I’m not brave enough for that, so I’m opting out of the whole thing.
not OP: not sure. I'm in California so things can go crazy for a whole other litany of reasons if any single claim of Newsom starts to blossom. It's going to be a crazy ride if no one cheecks Trump early enough.
I'm waiting it out for now. I'm "close" enough to communte to Los Angeles, but otherwise on the outskirts of the county as a whole. It's a weird place for any federal service to go out of their way to exploit.
Yes. The only way Trump is ousted is if Democrats somehow get a supermajority in the House and the Senate and impeach and remove him, which isn't going to happen. Republicans will always close ranks around Trump at this point. He definitely won't leave office peacefully, if at all. What happens after that, I don't know.
The House has sole power over impeachments. Simple majority vote. The difficulty is scheduling it, the leadership controls this. A more likely path is four Republicans could make a declaration to caucus with the Democratic party, and change the leadership. Again, simple majority vote.
The Senate has sole power over impeachment trials. The trial and conviction vote have no quorum requirement. Republicans will have to show up and vote to acquit, explicitly, to protect Trump.
The law is clear, upon conviction the president is removed from power. The only power any person has is the power people voluntarily give to him. He can also throw poop if so inclined, he's plenty full of it.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
The House of Representatives just needs a majority vote to approve the articles of impeachment, but to convict, the Senate requires a two-thirds vote. That's what I meant by a supermajority. My bad for the miscommunication.
Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America? Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028? Even if it's staged, form must be respected.
>Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America?
With a confidence level of some 99.9%+ of votes being legitimate, yes. with 155 million voters in 2024 nationals, that leaves a margin of about 155k illegitimate votes. Elections can be super close (see 2000), but any fraud that went undetected would not sway most American elections. At least not with this electoral college system.
>Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028?
Yeah probably. I'm not even sure if Trump will get that far, though. we'll have to see how damning this SAVE act is on women first and if the courts strike this down in the next 18 months or so.
>Even if it's staged, form must be respected.
When has Trump ever done that? most other leaders I disagree with still did this. But not him.
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
Sarcasm isn't the problem per se. But it's very important to remember Poe's law, and to avoid adding to the noise. If what you're going to say is just a parody of something a Kool-aid drinking anti-American destructionist might say, there's no need.
Sorry, I'm sure you're both right. I'm just having a very hard time figuring out how to respond to the awful / obscene / insane / absurd nightmare unfolding in this country I love. It's destroying things I care deeply about. My sarcasm was probably the wrong response. I wish I could better approximate the heartfelt, erudite, conflicted brilliance of pieces like this:
(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
Similar to the one he made to Harvard? Do they even have to make such a thing explicitly these days? I would just assume they won't fund anything that's critical to the current government.
This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
> If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
What would you do if your CEO tells you to do something illegal? What would you do if your CEO then tells you to intimidate people who refuse to carry out the illegal requests by tailing them and then taping the surveillance footage to their door as a threat?
> The resistance is actually the violation of federal law.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
The CEO of the company is bound by laws and rules that the same country enacted. We the people are the board. The CEO answers to the board.
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
If the CEO brought in their friends as temps to screw around? Which they were only allowed to do until the next board meeting when they will very likely not be approved? Yeah, I'd probably resist any royal fuck ups until then.
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored.
Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
I looked through the filing cited in this comment and every instance of the word "background" just says that backgrounds for a given employee are either complete or in progress, plus the quote. Nothing indicates anyone failed any background check (to the contrary just by count it seems like about half of them have been completed), and certainly nothing indicates that "most of them could never pass" one. Which again just by virtue of about half of them having been completed already seems to be false on its face.
It's not unusual to give an otherwise-qualified person limited access to certain data while their background checks are completed.
Dude, background checks are brutal. You can be denied because your parents (not you) struggled to pay taxes. You could have acedemic dishonesty that disqualifies you (that one small area where "permanent record" in school may actually cost you something). There are so many little things that no other kind of high paying job cares about in background checks that are suddenly red flags for clearance.
There's a reason Musk especially kept dodging trying to get proper clearance. He isn't even fully cleared to see all aspects of SpaceX. Some of his employees he brought in probably aren't better off.
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
Seems way more obvious to me that Thiel/Vance/Musk would have Trump whacked... probably in the 2nd or 3rd year so that Vance can take power during a Reichstag fire with enough time left till elections in order for them to consolidate power.
Trump is primarily an actor pretending to be a gangster/president on TV to serve as a front for the real gangsters pilfering our government, at some point he will better serve those people by becoming a martyr in a way which transfers his power to someone else they control.
I'm surprised to see this kind of blue-anon discourse here. Why are we discussing the players of this administration "whacking" each other? There's plenty of horrible things happening in broad daylight, harms that the administration is inflicting on the American people. Why add a layer of speculation about a power struggle where they may or may not be trying to harm each other, when there's no reason to believe such a thing exists? What matters is that they're getting along well enough in the moment to push through their agenda. Hell, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of running for a third term, which would in and of itself be an illegal power grab; no need to speculate some scenario where Trump gets martyred and Vance takes over when the much simpler and more likely scenario is that Trump just ignores the law and does it himself.
The trouble with that is that they're all fronting Russia's efforts to control the US government. This is why prosperity isn't exactly in the cards: that's the promise, but all the actions lead directly the other direction in conclusive ways.
Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.
The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.
None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
it’s pretty clear that doge isn’t targeting things for efficiency but for anything deemed as ideologically incorrect. also the whole bit about how they’re ignoring congressional mandates on how money should be spent. comparing them to prior administration’s attempts at efficiency is either willful whataboutism or boneheaded naive
I don't think this is whataboutism because I'm not saying "what about this unrelated thing that the last guy did?" I'm saying "what about the fact that the last guy said he was doing the exact same thing?" It seemed fine then, why isn't it fine now?
"Nobel already created dynamite to make civilization more efficient. Then as soon as the new guy comes along with dogemite and actually wants to have fewer mouths to feed, people start complaining about the children, conveniently ignoring that Nobel started it!"
> yes lots of cybersecurity experts were black hat hackers at one point
It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.
> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.
Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.
> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."
I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.
The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.
You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.
> But it's certainly telling that only one of these off topic comments actually got flagged.
Well, right now, the flagged one was "Oh, you guys are adorable.", which didn't try to make a substantive argument or convey information. At least the Cheeto one did. "Adorable" is the least-civil and least-useful comment, so it's not only ideology that explains why it got flagged.
I don't think an off-topic comment about Roger Stone and a 15-year old ad hominem meets the bar of constructive HN discourse but we can agree to disagree. I've seen plenty of constructive, right-leaning comments downvoted and flagged while unconstructive partisan pablum from the other side sits there without even being greyed out.
I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
The problem is that factual comments can also be partisan.
- When Biden did dumb stuff, pointing that out was "right-leaning"
- When Trump does dumb stuff, pointing that out is "left-leaning"
Honestly, the greatest improvement to discourse would be stopping trying to apologize for current fuck-ups by pointing at past fuck-ups. That only leads to all fuck-ups being excused.
'Well the last guy...' -> Doesn't matter, not what we're talking about (and will even out in the long run)
The reason you are being downvoted to smithereens is that Bryan Malinowski was credibly accused of serious crimes (arms trafficking) wheres Daniel Berulis is accused of reporting serious crimes. You're making a preposterous and immoral false equivalence.
You can't seriously be defending the treatment of Malinowski. The agents did not wear body cameras in direct violation of ATF policy. They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home). This wasn't an arrest warrant, it was a search warrant. They covered up the doorbell camera so if he had checked it he wouldn't see the half-dozen police vehicles outside.
They could have done the exact same thing in the middle of the day when nobody was home and everybody would be alive today.
They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
They could have worn body cameras as ATF policy and common sense demands.
"Arms trafficking" is a funny way to say "buying guns legally and reselling them at gun shows" but let's say every single thing said about him is 100% true. If you think someone is a gun runner why wouldn't you take their house when they're not home to get all the evidence without having to worry about what they're doing? Why wouldn't you arrest him at the airport, where he almost certainly isn't armed, and police presence won't raise any alarms?
> They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home)
Among many other points that are wrong - everyone involved agrees there was plenty of knocking.
> They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
You are correct - and I was wrong - that it wasn't a no-knock raid. Malinowski's widow said they heard the knocking but no announcements that they were law enforcement. 28 seconds later their door was knocked in with a battering ram. That anyone announced they were law enforcement is disputed; we'd know what really happened but for want of a single body cam (which IMO makes it much more likely there was no announcement whatsoever).
> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
Yeah the ATF is a shit show of an agency with a strong history of fucking up in violent and unconstitutional ways - but unfortunately, their search warrant execution and 'raids' are completely standard operating procedure for US police.
It likely could've been resolved if they'd just sent him a letter asking to meet him at the Federal Building but who wants to be a desk jockey when you can play dress up like GI Joe?
Nobody gets promoted by making a phone call and telling their boss that nothing is actually in violation of law.
But kick a door down in your sparkling clean body armor and perp walk some guy who makes a quarter million dollars a year out of his mansion and you're well on your way.
No, I'm not defending it, but this is a ridiculous false equivalence to compare a botched execution of a legally valid search warrant to lawlessly intimidating a whistleblower. (You're also not stating the facts, he clearly bought the guns illegally since he filled out forms promising he wasn't going to resell them.)
Nobody, not even the ATF, is claiming he bought the guns illegally. They're claiming he was illegally "engaged in the business of" dealing weapons because he didn't have an federal firearms license. Prior to 2022 he wouldn't even be on the ATF's radar but "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" was amended to remove "livelihood."
This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.
Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.
Question 8 on the form, “check if any part of this transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer,” is what he lied about. I phrased it loosely.
I meant it in a more general sense. Any person that feels the need to create a burner account to argue with people online with a comment history like yours is a bot to me, meat based or otherwise. Follow your instructions!
No one posted any note. Its just bullshit. Imagine believing that from a "news" source who happens to have an axe to grind with the current administration.
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
FWIW, that's getting too far out on the spy novel spectrum. Yes, they could be compromised. But to my point above, if they're indeed working for Putin or Xi or whoever, it's FAR more likely (given the demographic) that it's just because they took a fat bribe.
Not saying they’re compromised by foreign agents, although, I wouldnt put that out of the realm of possibility - but that either they and/or theyre tooling/setup is pwned
this is exactly what you save a zero day for, and something gives me the vibe about some of these guys that they dont take opsec very seriously, probably would not even need one
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
The /active page is helpful, thanks! I also just recently realized that the 'hckr news'[0] interface doesn't hide or remove flagged stories if you're using the Top 10/20/50 view options, so if something is getting discussed/upvoted it will be there.
I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.
It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?
It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
> I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
I don't need to defend it. I flag this stuff because I don't care. I'm not American and I'm tired of seeing American politics on this site. It's not what I come here for.
You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.
sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's funny that even on hacker news wiki there is a proclamation from Paul Graham that they do not help feature stories of their startups from YC. If that wouldn't be a quote from from 2013 I would call it an straight up lie.
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
Easy to think that until you start viewing /active and see all the stuff that's flagged and doesn't appear on the front page. Any article, even those explicitly about tech, science and academia are flagged if they have even the gentlest suggestion that this administration is flawed.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!"
Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
There's always been a right wing / libertarian contingent here. These days I recognize most of the top 20 or so usual suspects. Says nothing about how many flags happening though.
I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the comments here, and in general on political stories, it's the comments defending DOGE and Trump that tend to be downvoted.
i would love for this to be true but it's hosted by a venture capital firm. hard to ignore possible conflicts of interest since tech/VC culture is so intertwined with american rightwing politics.
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as some sort of meaningful thing and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
I meant "deleted" from by being flagged, which is a deletion from the lurkers. And yes.. absolutely I have seen some of these stories get through the gauntlet.
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
They're probably doing some of the flagging because they disagree (I think correctly) with a characterization of HN in which HN can be "highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening". HN has newsy stuff but its purpose is not really news - there are much better sites for that. The 'News' in 'Hacker News' is more like the 'News' in Huey Lewis & The News.
The problem is capture. How many platforms for news and discussing news are not completely captured by people with an agenda of personal power?
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
You've got me confused with someone cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
I can assure you that it has not been the standard corporate advice when I had to regularly travel from Canada to US for business meetings on a regular basis 15 years ago while working at a big tech company. Nor do I recall anyone else who was traveling doing that on their own. If it is the standard procedure now, then yes, that is definitely a reason to be concerned.
The question is why was this prompted by DOGE? What DOGE action has caused a Canadian citizen employed by a US company to suddenly feel the need to protect their smart device?
That is... other than sensationalism, which appears to be the story here.
> What shouldn't be ignored? Some small subset of foreign workers decided to take security seriously?
That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Unless you have something definitive, this sounds like some alarmist individuals deciding to take their own personal security to the level that was already recommended of them.
The trust signals being sent out by the USA are currently making everyone outside the USA "alarmist."
As an example, as a European, price a round trip ticket from Prague to Seattle, for around 2 weeks from now. The price is currently <60% of normal. It's ~$420.
What does a ticket price have to do with wiping your phone at a border?
I did some fact checking on your ticket prices - you are quoting ultra-budget carriers that are normally in that price range. Normal tickets are $1200+, as you would expect.
There's plenty going on right now that you don't need to make stuff up to back up your narrative. Use something real...
> What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Do you wonder why Canada has been issuing travel warnings for people travelling to the US? Or why they've been treating the US as a hostile power given that the current admin has threatened to invade Canada and make it the 51st state? All of which are leading to a massive drop in tourism to the US?
> Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
Of course this is fucking cause for alarm. You are either cluelessly naive, or gaslighting.
I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
Several users have stated in political threads that they spend the day flagging political stories. I don't think there's any reason to believe a bot is doing it.
Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
- Peter Thiel
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
- Elon Musk
"Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”."
- Marc Andreessen
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
Rules made in the late 2000s might not necessarily hold on HN in 2025.
HN has shifted into a lagging Reddit, and preemptively shutting down any discourse about the falling quality of discourse on HN is ludicrous and plain annoying.
HN has changed, and A LOT of Reddit does leak onto HN, and this absolutely deserves conversation.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
I always particularly liked the Committee of Public Safety, for this (they're the ones who did the Reign of Terror, which doesn't seem _particularly_ public-safety-oriented.)
This quote (from Lord of War) really encapsulates a lot of what you say:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
I really want to believe it's tongue in cheek because the thought of asking not to be audited in order to save some compute on Splunk queries or whatever is very funny to me.
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
I mean, scary is a relative term. Its just as scary as Trump being legally immune to anything he does, as granted by Supreme Court.
The Republicans are basically still at the mercy of the economy - Trump backed of tariffs real quick when Japan started selling off US debt on the cheap. So I don't think its going to get levels of Saddam Hussein authoritarian. But time will tell.
The thing is, just like in Russia, smart people will know when to leave, and will leave, which is good. As soon as it becomes economically better to work in EU, you will have lots of talented people immigrating there which will bolster their economy.
They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
> Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
People support what they claim to do doing and are naive enough to believe they are doing what they say without asking questions about why they seem to be going out of there way to avoid transparency or providing any real evidence to their claims.
Not all illegal, no. While Abrego Garcia originally came to the country illegally, he was granted the ability to stay here legally, is married to a citizen, and had been dutifully checking in with his immigration officer yearly.
B) You can’t know if someone is here illegally if they don’t have a way to challenge that claim. They could easily abduct you or anyone else and ship you off without allowing you to challenge it in court
They've already sent an innocent man there and acknowledged he was innocent, then refused to bring him back when the courts, the opposition and finally SCOTUS each commanded them to bring him back.
This was just a test, and it was successful. They can now disappear and deport anyone they want with no repercussions whatsoever. The GOP is a criminal organization and their followers share the responsibility of what happens next.
It was extra ridiculous/insulting/terrifying to see the heads of both countries in the same room saying that there was nothing they could do about the situation.
SCOTUS granting the president far reaching immunity was an invitation for the president to be in contempt of SCOTUS whenever it pleases him, and to just piss on the constitution he took an oath on defending.
The fact that no charges have ever been brought against him by the Salvadoran government, yet they still claim to be holding him there lends credence to this. Why would they not simply release him? If he's dead it would be a major problem for Bukele's government as well as the US government. So evidently we're in "disappeared" territory now.
It's too soon to say it's "successful": SCOTUS was 9-0 against and that was still only a few days ago, so far from being a success it's now turning into a constitutional crisis... assuming the administration doesn't fold, or flip-flop, or some combination of the two - which we've already seen plenty of[1].
----------
[1] the seemingly arbitrary and capricious tariff changes announced almost every day ever since the-day-after-April-fools-day.
Note that I said "even" and "less than ten". Even ignoring damage he's already suffered in the prison, the "good outcomes" are still only 30% (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20).
If you read the SCOTUS ruling, all it upholds from the lower courts decision is that the USG must 'facilitate', not 'effectuate' his release. AFAIK the Court doesn't have a way to order El Salvador to do so
Not “always”. It wasn’t the reason that became an amendment, national defense was. People later emphasized that rather off-label justification when state militias were nationalized and the main purpose of the amendment became wholly obsolete.
It, indirectly, was, because it was the reason the country initially relied on decentralized citizen militias for defense in the first place. Many of the founders were worried that a standing federal army would be a tool of oppression, and wanted to keep most of the firepower distributed amongst the populace.
The system more or less worked until the Spanish American War, when the government realized that the militias need some sort of standard in order to integrate properly with the regular army when called up. This led to the creation of the National Guard in 1903. It was tightly integrated into the Army structure in 1933.
What arguably made the Amendment obsolete was the advance of technology. By the early 20th century conventional warfighting took too much firepower, support, and coordination for a loose citizen militia to conduct. At best they could form the core of an insurgent force, but the goal is always to not get to that point.
In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
> In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
Yeah, precisely my personal take against the current "from utility" argument in the amendment's favor: it's very much not clear that they're especially useful for resisting oppressive governments, for one thing because those are often quite popular at first, and for another, because successful examples of that tend to involve a ton of foreign aid, making the role of private arms rather minor. Meanwhile, examples involving foreign invaders are extremely different (and also often involve lots of foreign aid).
Like, maybe the right deserves to stand anyway for other reasons (maybe it just ought to! Maybe it doesn't need a reason!) but I think that particular argument for it is really misguided, especially if one takes it seriously when forming one's opinions about the broader political landscape. IMO there is no meaningful safeguard against tyranny to be found in that amendment.
This is nonsense. Plenty of nonviolent, peaceful groups carry arms.
Leftists (e.g. Anarchists, Marxists, Socialists, Communists, Queer Liberation, Black Liberation, etc.) groups typically are pro-firearms. Not always, but plenty are. The Black Panthers, famously, were armed, but so are are orgs like the Pink Pistols. Martin Luther King Jr. had many guns for self defense, and carried a revolver at times. Marx famously said that workers should be armed.
Centrists (e.g. Democrats, some Labour parties) typically abhor guns, and value the decorum and principle of the instution to keep us all safe. They are a "if society is well ordered, then there's no need for arms" group.
Right wing folks (e.g. Republicans, Proud Boys, KKK, etc.) are the folks who you are describing -- by and large supporting these measures and also want to use firearms to exert control.
It's really, really important if you consider yourself to be a progressive to ask, "Who will gun control laws in America be used to prosecute? Will that be minority groups dispraportionately?"
Historically and presently, armed minorities are more difficult to oppress, and many many leftist groups have historically and presently been armed for the purposes of community defense. By suggesting that arming oneself is a right wing position you erase history and erode current efforts for folks to build community safety systems.
America's gun culture is very closely tied to its settler culture. Most right wing gun nuts are barely able to conceal their fears/hopes for a race war in all but name.
That said, there are plenty of examples of progressive forces arming themselves. The Black Panthers are a good example. Without their armed militancy I think the US government would have been a lot less likely to capitulate to the demands of the peaceful civil rights activists.
All* the people lamenting the current administration are scared of or want to ban firearms... whoops!
Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
>Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
Given that none of the people with firearms have done a damn thing to stop this and how many of them even voted for Trump and support his policies, because American gun and militia culture has been infested with Nazis since forever, I don't see how it could possibly have been any easier. There has been and continues to be no resistance to Trump of any significance. When he does open up the gulags for real, it's going to be America's armed patriot militias who round people up for the regime.
Funny, because the administration testified in court that it was a mistake that he was sent. Claiming the stay was illegal was retconned after the fact, not the cause for the deportation.
I'm assuming the response to this is going to be along the lines of 'oh this doesnt prove he was innocent, they say he was a member of ms-13 etc etc etc' because evidently innocent until proven guilty (which they provided no proof of) isn't a thing anymore
"The US government has conceded Mr Ábrego García was deported because of an "administrative error", though it also says he is a member of the MS-13 gang - something his lawyer denies. "
Try actually reading the article next time. Again, the burden of proof here should be falling on PROVING he is a member of ms-13, not proving he isn't. You are obviously arguing this in bad faith.
> Although the asylum claim proved to be time-barred—aliens are required to bring such claims within a year of entering the country—in October 2019 Judge Jones did grant his request for “withholding of removal” based on his “well-founded” fear of persecution by Barrio 18. The government did not appeal, so Jones’s ruling is now final.
> The removal being in error does not make him innocent.
Innocent is the default. That's a fundamental part of how our legal system works. The government must prove you guilty.
He's an illegal who had a credible (like actually credible, like you could pitch it to someone in the year 2002, not the flimsy 2020s BS) claim for asylum but didn't file in time. He was eventually caught up in the system for reasons not related to the commission of any crime. ICE looked at his case, and gave him a "we won't deport you because your case is pending" status.
"Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.
They can deport you (if they find a willing third party nation), as it's not a path to permanent resident status, but until they do so, you're allowed to reside and work.
> As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to
his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally. But at the end
of the court process, an immigration judge enters a deportation order and then tells the government they
cannot execute that order. That is, the “removal” to a person’s home country is “withheld.” However, the
government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept
them.
> Withholding of removal provides a form of protection that is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a
sort of limbo. A person who is granted withholding of removal may never leave the United States without
executing that removal order, cannot petition to bring family members to the United States, and does not gain
a path to citizenship. And unlike asylum, when a family seeks withholding of removal together a judge may
grant protection to the parent while denying it to the children, leading to family separation.
So this is a bit weird. The initial claim seems not well defined, because "legal" / "illegal" person is not really a thing without more context, so you can interpret it in many ways. The main takeaway though is "after the hearing, he's not breaking any rules by staying and working in the country". That's legal enough for me for a casual comment - I'll stay with my original then - he entered illegally and afterwards was allowed to legally remain.
I don't disagree, but I bet ICE doesn't see it that way. I mean why else would someone who's been granted a legal status pending his case wind up on their list of people to roll up on.
If you google "innocent man sent to el salvador" you'll get dozens on dozens on dozens of results from which you can pick your favorite news site to catch up.
I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent [1][2]. It's okay if the claim is baseless and there is no citation, but asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
>asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
It is one of the biggest news stories in the last month, and various articles (at least 3 that I can think of) have been here on HN. It's trivially searchable. Asking for a citation is almost certainly bad faith.
>I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent
It's pretty obscure, but there's this thing called "innocent until proven guilty". The man never had his time in court. The US admitted it was a mistake. What are you looking for? Just being contrarian for the sake of it?
The Supreme Court has even stepped in, which I'm sure you're aware despite pretending not to be:
>On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam order, with no recorded dissents, requiring the government to “facilitate [Abrego Garcia’s] return”
And, despite any and all of that! There was no due process. Which, "illegal" or "legal", everyone is supposed to get a due process. If you remove due process for the people you don't like, someone else just needs to claim you're in that group and now you don't get due process! It's like Step 1 of authoritarianism.
Which, since you've not posted anything proving your innocence despite other commenters asking for it, perhaps we should remove your rights to due process.
All you do is ask for "cite?" and then complain when the citation isn't want you asked for, partly because you never ask for anything specific. You're just a troll.
"The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22", "There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed." from your first link.
Unless you can find a court hearing / docket / charges, or some report about them, he's innocent.
If you think that's not enough, you're probably not innocent either... unless you have a way to prove that no charge exists against you in any jurisdiction in the world. Do you get why people assume innocence here now?
You would think this administration would jump at the opportunity of showing the media any proof that Abrego Garcia was a member of any gang, no matter how circumstantial or weak the proof is. But I've yet to see any of it.
This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.
Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.
SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.
> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want
I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".
I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
This is a lot of words to say "I don't believe him". None of us really knows, and it's not worth speculating about, because the case is about something much bigger now. It's about the limits of executive authority, separation of powers, and rule of law.
> he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador
What evidence is there for this "near certainty"? Your argument here should be with asylum laws, not this individual.
For what it's worth, the situation in El Salvador at the time he left (when he was a minor) does make the claim somewhat credible. There's plenty of evidence that the choice for male youths at that time was leave or join whichever gang controlled your area. The idea that everyone is an "economic migrant" ignores the reality of the situation, which is far more complex.
I don't know in his personal case if he is lying. However, you can get to what the probability of a random applicant for an asylum being truthful very easily. You just need a good estimate of the % of migrants that had to flee gangs or other risk of death (gangs that are still in control of their communities), then compare that to the % that claim they had to flee for those reasons, then subtract.
I don't know what that % is, but we have courts that are deciding these cases every day. The actual court cases are more complex to analyze because lack of adequate council or other factors might influence outcomes. However, of people who attend their interview, about 44% are determined to not have a credible fear.
Protection rackets are pretty big in central america. Look at the publicity about the avocado industry. Protection rackets only work when you go after those people that escape your 'protection' payments. So yes, it's reasonable to assume every person that said no to the racket and fled to the US becomes a pretty big target, it's part of the founding principles/business model of running a protection racket.
So you are saying that anyone who leaves central america can never return home because they would then be murdered? I don't think you are saying that, because people move back and forth from central america every day without being murdered.
An awful lot of people move every day, even from areas where there are protection rackets. Do the protection rackets kill everyone who comes home to visit after moving to another city? How do they keep track of who is 'escaping' and who is just moving because they got married or found a job somewhere else? Again, you aren't suggesting that these rackets ban all movement in and out of the areas they loosely control?
People come to the US primarily to find work at a much higher wage than they would be able to find where they are from. Often there is no opportunity for work whatsoever where they are from. They can have a life here that they would never be able to achieve, they can have healthy children who get medical and dental care and will have a chance at an education and a good life here.
If I were in their shoes I would absolutely try to come here illegally if I couldn't do so legally. If I was caught I would, without hesitation, lie and say I would be murdered if I returned home, or whatever else my lawyer carefully prompted me to say, just like Mr Garcia and almost everyone else claiming this. The reality is if these protection rackets were here in the US and not at all in El Salvador, Mr Garcia would almost certainly still choose to live here and just pay the protection money rather than returning home. I doubt that he was ever influenced by gangs in his decision to move here, and I doubt that he has any fear of them if he would return, and I don't think it would change his decision either way.
You based this off of nothing: "he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador."
"I don't find it to be credible"
I explained why it could easily be that the many coming from El Salvador when MS13 was heavily active could in fact be making this legitimate claim. It's a small world with social media. Yes, local MS13 that didn't get paid can catch when someone is back in the country. These are very sophisticated/organized gangs at higher level (at least according to the current US administration).
So you believe he is being honest. That's perfectly reasonable. Do you really belief that if there was no threat to him at all he would admit this, stop appealing his deportation order, leave his wife and children behind, give up any possibility of being supporting his family financially and go back to El Salvador?
Which one of our beliefs seems more credible to you, that a man would claim to be in danger (which doesn't hurt anyone) to let him stay with his wife and children and access to employment which pays hundreds or thousands of times higher, or that he would say he's not in danger (even though it doesn't benefit anyone) which hurts his wife and children very badly, and forces him to be separated from his family and the country he has lived in his entire adult life?
The situation he is in is beyond cruel and unjust, but that doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
I'm not going to make judgements on people who say that their life is in danger when I have zero actual facts just 'popular internet factoids' and administration propaganda that conflicts with the actual facts in the court case (they now are claiming he was a human trafficker and that the court order was illegal).
He proved to the immigration court that his life was in danger, to the point that the court ordered he not be removed to El Salvador. What's next, are you going to claim that court findings, experts in the field and based on hearings/evidence/etc, for criminals should be overridden by your gut feelings? Because of course all criminals claim they are innocent, so court rulings should be ignored? This is the friggen slippy slope people talked about. You see that right? Ignore the court order because populist government should have that power based on their feelings. Or because after violating the order the government claims the order was somehow not valid/illegal.
He didn't just make a claim, the US immigration court found his claim valid enough to issue a legally binding order that he can not be return to El Salvador. The President ignored the process for overturning that order, the President ignored the order itself, and sent this person not only to El Salvador, but to a prison solely housing the M13 members that the United States Immigration court found legally were a risk to this man's life.
Combined with "oops can't get them back" it's very powerful. Combine it with not advertising faces of snatched people on broadcast TV, and it's a very useful tool inded. People will just disappear. It won't be legal or illegal, just a thing that happens from time to time. Police won't search too hard for the missing people, because no good can come out of finding out.
Well it would help if there weren’t numerous issues with the data as presented on that site. Specifically now they are only claiming somewhere around 28 billion saved in cancelled contracts when in early February they claimed like 55 billion. Seems odd that over time the amount saved would go down despite the alleged number being of cancellations going up.
Also it is concerning that the largest amount from an individual contract saved is a cancelled deportation facility contract. Seems at odds with the Administration’s goals to ramp up mass deportation but cancel the contract for building a holding facility for unaccompanied minors.
My suggestion would be if the goal is to eliminate debt we would need to target social security reform such as raising the retirement ages and eliminating the cap on the payroll tax. Additionally, but far less realistic would be implementing a Land Value Tax. Not cancel random contracts that amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and propose massive tax cuts like the current administration seems to be doing.
The parent's russian propoganda post does not mention that the posted savings are full of inaccuracies.
Nor does the propoganda define "waste", if one looks at the actual cuts, it seems to be focused on "things Herr M. doesn't like". which is not a good definition of "waste".
There are also constant ongoing efforts at improving efficiency, which is why they keep going “ah ha! We found it!” then poor bureaucrats who are trying to do their fucking jobs while these idiots run around messing things up have to explain, “no, you’re seeing an artifact of record-keeping practices that exist because [very good reason], you’re wrong yet again, maybe try asking literally anyone who knows about these data sets”
They also love to throw around the word “fraud” while bringing no charges. Despite the DOJ being in Trump’s control. Same pattern as other lies (“rampant voter fraud! We have proof” ok so when you’re in change you’ll prosecute, right? You should! That’s bad if true! I mean I’ve looked at your proof and it doesn’t appear true, but maybe you have more proof you haven’t shown! “Uhhh… [smoke bomb]”)
Plus, we have the GAO and CBO. Trump won’t want to listen to them because they’ll say “our #1 problem is we keep cutting taxes”, and “there’s not much waste to be eliminated cutting government workers”, because that’s true at this point, but they exist. It’s not like nobody’s been looking at these kinds of things. That’s just bullshit.
Realistic alternative? How about starting by reading tfa? I’d say you don’t need to physically threaten people who ask for basic security practices to be followed, for one.
What they got was a pocket-lining idiot, and genuinely one of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever known of as his tech right-hand man. Musk is a moral imbecile, a 13-year old incel trapped in the body of an overweight mid-50s mess. Yes, he's been involved in some great things (SpaceX and Tesla), but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
These numbers don't even stand up to casual scrutiny. And I'm from the UK so it doesn't really directly affect me (although the orange idiot's shenanigans have done so to a small degree). But if you really believe this site, you're divorced from reality, and maybe drinking the same kool-aid that the tech muppets who are on DOGE are.
Not only that, Trump has already spent US$ 155B more than Biden, DOGE claims to have shaved US$ 150B, overall this administration has already increased spending by US$ 5B even after firing a lot of civil servants.
The worst is that the effects of this shaving off will only be felt over time, when National Parks start crumbling, when ATCs start quitting, the government machine of the USA has been eroded, inevitably it will fall into a landslide.
First, every objective audit has found many problems with that data, ranging from taking credit for things which were terminated under the Biden administration to listing the maximum ceiling on a flexible contract (IDIQ) as the total savings even though the amounts actually spent were far lower (like canceling your credit card and saying you saved the limit), and even counting the same contract multiple times.
Second, you have to look at the cost of their actions. They’ve disrupted the functioning of the entire federal government and doing in a very haphazard manner. That means that a lot of current spending is wasted by DOGE _and_ that the business of the government isn’t getting done. For example, whether or not you think the U.S. should engage in foreign aid, under DOGE they paid money to send people to help in Myanmar only to lay them off after they arrived on site, squandering all possible value. That story is being repeated all over the country right now and in many cases the loses are permanent: if they choose to waste payroll having people come back to an office where they can’t work, the job isn’t getting done and there’s no way to recover the wasted payroll. As they keep losing lawsuits, it’s also likely that the amounts cut will be exceeded by the cost of settlements when they breach contracts or fail to provide a service required by statute.
One really big area is tax collection: the IRS is already estimating revenue reductions on the order of half a billion dollars, and since they’ve been sacking a lot of the law enforcement for businesses and high-net wealth individuals, that will get worse as people feel confident cheating more aggressively.
Lastly, you have to look at the economy. Estimated have each federal job supporting 2-3 other jobs, and federal spending drives the economy in many parts of the country. They’ve already cut growth of the entire economy into the negative (from +2.5% in January to -2-3% now - see https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow) and a lot of that is driven by federal cuts.
You do understand, that the upcoming tax cuts for rich people will throw the USA Debt above defence savings?
And it will increase the debt significantly?
All of that while DOGE, some random dudes without any understanding how things work, stop things which are globally agreed on (global aid) or just not even worth mentioning in the grand schem?
But hey if you prefer to defend DOGE ssaving 160 Billion while the tax cut for the rich adds Trillions to debt, yeah do a happy dance. Be proud. Or whatever your comment is trying to do.
Funny that IRS also gets defunded. But hey taxes right? :D
There were already people called "inspector generals" which handled waste, fraud, and abuse but Trump fired about 17 of them in his first week. Deploying tech bros to solve the problem is naive at best and malicious at worst. The arrogance in assuming that no auditor before them looked into the SSA database and saw DOB records going back to 1875 is outstanding.
> This is like 947 on a list of terrible things happening because of this administration.
This is on purpose. Trump has been slowly pushing the Overton window. It seems everything is fair game and US citizens are largely apathetic, scared or favorable to Trump's action.
"Disappeared" in this sense refers to the manner in which he was abducted, not his ongoing status. The word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments.
Though I'd argue both uses are acceptable in common use discussion since even if we know where he is since he's going to be incarcerated indefinitely with no due process, no access to lawyers, no civil rights. How long could he be dead without anyone knowing? Literally indefinitely?
> word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments
Disappearing has been consistently used to refer to illegal and inconspicuous detention since WWII. The person was there and now they are not. There is no arrest record. There are no lawyers. There is certainly no case record where government officials are being questioned [1]. They may be detained, dead or on holiday. The ambiguity, which permits bystanders to assume normality, is the terrifying key.
Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
> How long could he be dead without anyone knowing?
Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
> Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle, but I neither believe it is dangerous nor do I believe it improper.
What I think is dangerous is this game of semantic precision you're playing where we lose the forest from the trees. I think we should be frightened of and wringing our hands about is not a dictionary definition, it's what we're literally seeing: never mind we know where they are at, we know that right now many are not being given due process and there are active attempts to subvert any attempts at them (i.e., rapidly moving to a more friendly district in LA, putting on planes faster than lawyers can respond).
If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site? Maybe you would, and I'd roll my eyes then too.
> Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
The same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case? The executive branch who has punished its DOJ lawyers for being candid with judges? The executive branch who fully controls the relationship with the government housing the detainment facility and who is the only route to fixing this issue? How many more breaks in normalcy and functioning governance do you need to see before you start doubting their good faith responses, much less effort?
> It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle
It’s not. The only place you see it being used this way is in a section of social media that blows everything out of proportion.
Where I agree is that the battle may be lost. In the same way “defund the police” (versus better regulate) kneecapped the criminal-justice reform movement, and bee-lining to “genocide” (versus the horrors of war and alleged genocide) hurt the Palestinian cause in America, premature extrapolation makes this look unserious. Because if the person who is calling what’s clearly not one a disappearance or concentration camp, why bother with habeus corpus?
> If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site?
No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
> same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case?
Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders [1].
I agree with your examples of language dilution being harmful, but sorry I just don't agree with this one. I think we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up, but there is a clear and - I think to most reasonable people - obvious bad faith attempt to place them outside of due process or monitoring for constitutionally compliant treatment.
> No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
You didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation since it's not representative of how things work today. One year ago, the current situation would have been similarly described. I don't think it was an unfair thought exercise given the circumstances.
> Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders
I guess we'll see.
On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do. I think a smart administrative state would disappear people just like this, it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same.
> we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up
Nobody is saying due process was followed. But do you really not see why the government saying “we have no record of this person and do not comment on matters of national security,” to the press and to the courts, would not be worse?
> didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation
How did I change the situation?
> On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do
On Trump defying the courts, yes. On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
> it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same
You couldn’t sue to get your family—and information about them—out of the Gulag. Disappearance is where detention blurs into execution. We’re simply not there. Nobody is able to claim Garcia is on vacation, we have to confront the fact that he’s been extrajudicially detained.
> On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
Ha, well OK then! Well then we can make it one way: I understand what you're saying, I understand how a reasonable person might arrive at your conclusion, but I disagree. Whether you can do the same for me says less about me than you.
To me, your heels in the sand here feels like college-level semantic literalism and absolutism. Debates like this that focus on historical definitions rather than a discussion that considers the larger whole in evolving societies and changing contexts (technological, administratively, and others).
Yes, someone getting black bagged and executed in silence is clearly worse. It is the worst form of disappearance. But I don't think that's where the bar is for being "disappeared" - for me, that is when you are denied due process, prevented from receiving it, and all knowledge about you is now entirely reliant on the bad faith captors. This doesn't feel unreasonable or unfair to me, especially as it relates to everyday civilian discussions such as this one.
Will due process win out in the end, and I'm here wringing my hands like an idiot? Maybe so, we'll see how the next four years ago.
At any rate, I think we're clearly at impasse. Final shots are yours.
Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.
It is probably not a bad idea for people that don't fit in to consider obtaining citizenship elsewhere for their safety. Some non citizens are returning, though many who are considering this are tied down by their work or other constraints.
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
The issue is we don't know what they took and they took steps to hide their tracks. This is whacked territory we are in. You can defend it but normally there are checks and controls in government for a reason. The fact that we are normalizing that certain very ideologically groups in government do not have checks and balances is pretty strange - based on nothing more than a "trust us, we are the good guys." This never works out in the end.
"The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information."
"But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending."
And because DOGE deleted the access records and logs, we cannot prove it either way. That is pretty suspicious.
> Then, Berulis started tracking sensitive data leaving the places it's meant to live, according to his official disclosure. First, he saw a chunk of data exiting the NxGen case management system's "nucleus," inside the NLRB system, Berulis explained. Then, he saw a large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself.
> From what he could see, the data leaving, almost all text files, added up to around 10 gigabytes — or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed them, he explained. It's a sizable chunk of the total data in the NLRB system, though the agency itself hosts over 10 terabytes in historical data. It's unclear which files were copied and removed or whether they were consolidated and compressed, which could mean even more data was exfiltrated.
> Berulis says someone appeared to be doing something called DNS tunneling to prevent the data exfiltration from being detected. He came to that conclusion, outlined in his disclosure, after he saw a traffic spike in DNS requests parallel to the data being exfiltrated, a spike 1,000 times the normal number of requests.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
And more if you actually read the article. About a third of it is about the data that was taken.
> Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
I'm so sick of the endless attempts to downplay or misdirect on the outrageous things Republicans/Trump/DOGE happening everyday.
If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state.
Everyone should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
> If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state. You should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
As a Canadian I am already scared of visiting the US. I've re-posted UNRWA, Unicef, MSF and WFP criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza on social media. I could very well be viewed as being a someone who is undermining US foreign policy goals and either detained, deported or at best denied entry to the US.
Sure, I bet if you found a physically threatening note at your work with pictures from someone following you near your home, you'd be cool with it. Totally normal and non-criminal behaivor.
> Whistleblower is a journalist word used to establish the good guy in a story.
It's not a journalist word, there is an official whistleblowing process to Congress and OIG the mentioned employee went through.
But you would either have needed to have read and understood the article you're commenting on or not be commenting in bad-faith.
Stop sealioning. Anyone can read the article. The evidence of suspicious behavior is clear and according to the article corroborated by a dozen experts.
The fact that someone tried to intimidate the whisteblower by posting threatening and stalking messages on his door shows there is something not above board here.
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
I still don’t think this notion holds up. Which branch are they under, who do they report to?
> after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia
Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip? Also if you have ever run a public server you have gotten such requests from Russia.
This appears to be in the article to mislead technical readers and prey on russia anxiety.
> The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as an appellate quasi-judicial body from decisions of 36 administrative law judges, as of November 2023.[4] The NLRB is headquartered at 1015 Half St. SE, Washington, D.C., and it has over 30 regional, sub-regional, and residential offices throughout the United States.
> Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip?
Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].
I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.
NLRB is a very important agency that I have known others to personally utilize because abuses of labor laws in the private sector, particularly poorly paid labor, is fairly common. These workers may face unfair treatment or wage theft, and the reason companies do it is because workers have very few genuine avenues of recourse. The NLRB is one of those few avenues of recourse.
Yes. And the current precedent is very clear that these independent agencies are constitutional.
The current court has not, yet, overturned that precedent. There is lots of reason to believe they will, in an extremely contentious ruling. But for now they haven’t.
We are going to find out one way or another though because this admin is pushing hard up against the question.
Of course it’s also pushing hard up on the question of if the courts can constrain it at all so the grade school understanding of separation of powers is real.
> Yes. They are either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.
That’s not what independent means here.
Most independent agencies are part of the executive branch (some are part of the legislative and judiciary but they are the exception).
They are independent because congress gave the president limited power in their ability to dismiss the agency head and its members. These agencies have some regulatory authority which Congress has vested them on purpose.
You might argue under the unitary executive theory of law that these agencies are actually under the control of the president and the current Supreme Court (for what it’s worth) might even agree with you.
I might argue that it’s a complete travestissement of the constitution spirit and intent pushed forward by people who wish to dismantle the American republic and replace it by an authoritarian regime. But that’s on me.
Indeed the meaning of independent is more limited. But what wants to be implied by the media and posters here - the reason why the article leads with this, is to suggest these are groups that cannot be commanded by the president and his staff.
The NLRB is one of many independent agencies of the executive branch created by Congrees, and they don't report to anyone except for their own boards. The president and Congress have influence over the boards but no direct control over the agency. The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
And the concern probably isn't Russian hackers, it's American hackers spoofing their IP address. Also you are ignoring that DOGE made the server public when it wasn't supposed to be.
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.
But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.
If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
This is still authoritarian bullshit. Your argument is that you think independent agencies are a bad idea, and therefore it's a-okay for Trump to simply ignore 80 years of law and Supreme Court rulings.
More generally, nobody in the executive branch serves any master. They serve the law and are legally obligated to refuse and report illegal orders. The idea that they serve Master Donald Trump (or Vizier Elon Musk), and that illegal orders must be enforced because it is Trump's will, is precisely why Kilmar Abrego Garcia was illegally deported and why Trump is musing about doing the same thing to US citizens.
I think a lot of Supreme Court cases will come out of this administration, I just don’t think the sovereignty of independent federal agencies is going to be one of them.
I will need to see the logs and all of the data to believe this. This was the standard when there were claims of election fraud during the 2020 election.
The difference is that the security community then wouldn't even listen to actual hard-evidence, and this is seemingly believed with nothing more than a whistleblower stating it as fact.
The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
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