FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

ICE may well be a similar situation.

If you don’t believe the criminal activity is organised, you can find the PDFs distributed in the Signal groups which contain instructions on violating the law.

What are you even talking about?

Compare it to the situation in Minnesota. Protester bites of the finger of an agent. Is that protesting? Groups of people follow agents around blowing whistles while they're trying to do their job. Can protesters show up at an someone else's workplace and start blowing whistles at everyone? Diners? Medical offices?

https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/officer-will-lose-fin...

Now a situation has been created where everyone involved in those Signal chats could be...charged with conspiracy. The door is opened for that argument to be made and until the charge was thrown onto those women after the abortion protest, nothing like that had been done before.

FACE Act and Assault charges, plus damages were absolutely warranted. Conspiracy charges were political punishment.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-immigration-approval...

> Just 39% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing on immigration, down from 41% earlier this month, while 53% disapprove, the poll found.

Do you think the protests leading to escalations were done simply? Or BECAUSE of the awful implementation? (Masks, no IDs, no accountability, no body cameras, etc.)

If it is the latter, then isn't the blame to be placed squarely on the original enforcement philosophy?

Otherwise it reads like DARVO tactics. If we were talking about a relationship it sounds like -- Person A emotionally abuses Person B to the point of person B pushing back, and then Person A using the fact that Person B reacted (perhaps adversely) as justification for even more emotional abuse.

ICE have lost the trust of a significant portion of the people in Minnesota because they are using unreasonable force, eroding constitutionally protected rights and behaving with impunity.

They are, in reality, just conducting a politically motivated campaign of harassment. If they truly wanted to deport as many people as possible they'd start with border states like Florida and Texas, places with 20x more undocumented immigrants.

I expect the vast majority of government abuses in recent history the world over have to at least some degree followed the law according to those carrying out the acts. Thus it is almost to be expected that as a situation escalates those crying foul might occasionally find themselves opposing the rule of law as described by those in power.

To state it plainly, not all "rule of law" is subjectively equal.

Seems completely reasonable given ICE is murdering, arresting, and deporting citizens and legal residents.

The government wronging 1 person to rightfully enforce the law on 10 is unacceptable.

ICE are engaging in violence, warrantless forced entry to homes, at least two shootings that border on murder, they even tried to force entry into an Ecuadorian embassy.

They are detaining citizens at random, relocating them physically and in some cases releasing them; if they don't die in detention due to lack of access to medical care.

If you cannot see how these activities should be observed, documented, protested whilst still standing for professed Amercian values...

Edit: Ah excellent, downvotes without reply because facts are... uncomfortable!

Here's the sources:

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/ice-agents-blocked-from-... - Ecuadorian consulate.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f... - warrantless entry

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-... - many, many US citizens detained only for charges to vanish at the merest scrutiny

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/27/five-year-ol... - deporting citizens

https://newrepublic.com/post/205458/ice-detainees-pay-for-me... - cutting off medical care

https://abcnews.go.com/US/detainees-heard-cuban-man-slammed-... - deaths in custody

By your logic, combined with the actions of the ICE folks in Minneapolis, anyone who submits the location of a DUI checkpoint into Waze[0] should be summarily executed?

Is that your argument? ICE has murdered people for documenting their locations and actions which, by your statement was to allow others to "dodge" law enforcement.

Documenting a DUI checkpoint does exactly the same thing. So. If your position is that law "enforcement" is allowed to summarily shoot to death folks who document their actions and locations in one context, then they should be allowed to do so in other, more serious contexts like DUI checkpoints.

Is that your claim? If not, please do provide some nuance around what you said, because that's how I understood your statements.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze

Instead, people are getting killed and videos are coming out that seem very chaotic, where people with different predispositions than you can empathize with the police. If those videos were people getting arrested and pepper sprayed for speaking out and for helping each other, they would hit a lot harder for a much larger population.

That is absolute nonsense. You can be a peaceful protestor whilst still inconveniencing the authorities.

Possibly the most famous non-violent protestor of all time is the unnamed man who stood in front of a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.

Another contender would be Gandhi, who promoted civil disobedience for peaceful protesting.

Highlight something in my comment that you believe is untrue, and I'll be happy to prove it.

> Second, noise is not an obstruction. It is ok and legal to produce whistles.

I did not argue to the contrary. I argued that noise makes it harder for officers to do their lawful duty, because that lawful duty involves verbal communication.

> because they had phone in hand and you are frustrated.

That is not why they were shot.

> while ICE men literally openly threaten to kill people who are no threat.

Please show me where you think this has happened. The only threat to kill people I have heard came from a Florida sheriff, who specifically said that this would happen to people who "throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies".

> and then are proud of their murdering colleagues.

Please show me where you think this has happened.

> heavily armed cowards jump at observer, 8 on one, there is no resistance and then they call it resisting arrest.

They are ordinarily armed, he was not an "observer" (as demonstrated by the fact that he was in the middle of the street and a car had to swerve to avoid him), there were not 8 of them, and there was very visible and prolonged resistance.

You do not appear to understand what "no resistance" looks like. When you are on the ground and under arrest, "no resistance" looks like not attempting to get up, and attempting to put your hands behind your back so that handcuffs can be applied. There is video of a protester in Texas doing this; no further harm came to him. This is not particular to ICE or to federal vs. state law enforcement, and not new. This is just how arrests work, and how they have worked, in the US, Canada and other places.

This kind of behavior would not be tolerated any more if it targeted other work environments. Harassment (and that's the most generous interpretation) is not free speech.

The video shows him physically interposing himself between the officer and a woman, and appearing to resist physically.

> You're taking a pretty broad interpretation of "interference."

It is not broad, as explained by the one sentence you omitted from that paragraph.

> Walz is a weak Democrat who can't even condemn the organization

He has very clearly done this on multiple occasions. As I said, he has even been making public speeches claiming that ICE aren't even LEO, which is false.

> abducting his State's citizens

This has not occurred. Arrest is not abduction.

> If you mean to imply that Democrat officials are organizing the resistance then that's laughable.

I do mean to say that Cam Higby asserts exactly that, and appears to believe he has considerable evidence to substantiate the claim.

> You do realize that almost all undocumented people living in the US are on overstayed visas, right? We let them in after checking they weren't dangerous, then they started working and living here.

I don't understand why you think they should be permitted to stay under those conditions.

> Clearly our immigration system is broken if it leaves this many residents undocumented. And your proposed solution is strict enforcement?

Yes; if you have a time-limited visa, you should be expected to leave the country when it expires, and you should expect for there to be strict enforcement of that rule. Otherwise the time stamped on the visa is meaningless.

> Imagine, if you will, applying this standard to, say, speeding.

I see no reason why this is comparable.

The second conception of law is what the federal government is doing now: oppression of opponents of the powerful, and protection of the powerful from any harm they cause to others.

We are currently in a battle to see which side wins. In many ways the struggle of the US, as it has become more free, is a struggle for the first conception to win over the second. When we had the Civil War, the first conception of law won. I hope it wins again.

  > Signal's messages are encrypted at rest though? Because Android and iOS are both full disk encrypted.

  1) Toast notifications include messages
  2) Keyboard

The second is less obvious and unfortunately with iOS I don't think there's a solution. Under Android, by default, Signal uses the incognito keyboard. Android promises not to use typing patterns for its learning but like Apple you ultimately have to trust them. But unlike Apple you can install 3rd party keyboards from Fdroid which are entirely local (some even have learning capabilities and plenty have local STT).

But again, neither of these are actual issues with Signal or any other E2EE app. The problem is the smartphone.

  > I do agree with that when you can't hide from the company, you can't hide from the US government either.

I don't think you can hide from targeted government surveillance. Or at least you have to go to some serious lengths to. But I do strongly believe that apps like Signal help you avoid dragnet operations and mass government surveillance. We should differentiate these types of things. I'm no doing anything nefarious so I'm not concerned with the former targeted surveillance (though I still dislike it in principle), but mass government surveillance is, in my view, a violation of my constitutional rights and everyone should take steps to fight against it.

Truth is, most mass surveillance can be avoided fairly easily: use an E2EE communication app like Signal (cross platform) or iMessage (security only with your Apple friends), install an ad blocker, set "do not track" in your browser, get a cookie destroyer (or use incognito/private), and disable tracking in each and every app (annoying...). This isn't a perfect defense from mass surveillance but it sure does get rid of like 80+% of it and that's a really good step in the right direction. There's no such thing as perfect privacy or perfect security, there's only speedbumps and walls. The intention is to make it hard and costly.

I nitpick because people do not differentiate these two and become apathetic. Acting as if it is pointless to make these changes. But mass surveillance (and surveillance capitalism) is where the disinformation campaigns and manipulation comes from. Unless you're some elite criminal then framing the conversation as "you can't hide from the government" is naive. Besides, I'm not trying to hide from the government. I have nothing to hide. But the checks and balances are that they have to have a reason to look. Get a warrant or GTFO. That's what making these types of changes is the equivalent of.

If NSA employs primarily some high functioning people on spectrum or similar types, which often don't work well in societies with tons of strangers, then moving off is also not the worst idea if one has enough skills and good equipment to not make it into constant hellish survival.

The SA was eventually hung out to dry, because Hitler feared Ernst Röhm had too much power (among other reasons)— by executing SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer)…

To say the violence of the SS was quick to be extreme really forgets the ten plus year road they took to get there. I’d really suggest, as disheartening and sad as it is, to read about all this yourself. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the US right now are astonishing. It’s almost as if someone in the White House is using history as a playbook.

Which sort of goes full circle since Hitler took a lot from how brutal and racist the US towards slaves and non-whites.

Honestly answer: what is the purpose of literally every government publishing lists of their employees' names, where they work and how much they make, which includes police and teachers of small children?

I'm not asking for a primary source, just something without a political axe to grind.

But it's still very funny seeing the Right wrestle with "wait, the other team has guns?!" and "wait, Trump sounds like he wants gun control?!" right now when this claim has been the basis of their argument for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._46

> This essay examines the relative strength of the state and federal governments under the proposed United States Constitution. It is titled "The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared"… he describes at length in this paper a series of hypothetical conflicts between state and federal government. Madison does not expect or hope the constitution to lead to the kind of conflict between state and federal authority described here. Rather, he seeks to rebut the arguments that he anticipates from opponents of the constitution by asserting that their "chimerical" predictions of the federal government crushing state governments are unfounded

It may very well be an accident, miscommunication, or people even misinterpreting some of the things shown in the video. We'll find out eventually.

It could be argued that both the activists and the officers contributed to the situation getting to where it was. The activists shouldn't be following them around and harassing them, even if it is legal to do so up to a limit. The officers should have kept their cool, even with the whistles. The activists shouldn't have broken the law, whether the officers broke their protocol first or not.

Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life. If he went in knowing that risk and accepted it, then he went out doing what he believed in. If he was misinformed that he was entering a safe situation where his life wasn't at risk, then he was lied to.

It's not rich to blame Alex at all. That doesn't mean it's entirely his fault or that his own mistakes justify his death, only that if you're going to make a string of mistakes don't choose that moment to be when you are harassing people who have guns. If anything good comes from this being so public, it'll be that if people do choose to harass law enforcement at least they can learn to be safer about it.

These officers know that the second they kill someone they will be unmasked. They don't get to kill people and remain anonymous. Each officer has a gun assigned to them and they know which bullets came from what gun. Generally, if an officer kills someone, it's because they felt justified in making the decision. They'll have to sort out what that justification was, even if it involved a chain of mistakes by the officer or other officers that created a cascade.

> What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?

I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS or their capacity to investigate. It has to be better than the local justice system there.

What I do know based on past performance is that Minneapolis courts have severely underserved justice. I think JD Vance referred to them as kangaroo courts. Not sure if that's precise or accurate by whatever definition, but I would never trust their court system.

"There is no indication", yeah so about misinformation...

> Nothing illegal about that at all.

The first thing I said is that it's not illegal.

> No reasonable court would find that the activists did anything wrong, while they certainly would find two federal employees ("officers") are culpable in the murder of one of those activists.

The videos don't show all the events leading up to the moment he was shot, but multiple federal laws were broken just in the videos we do have. Murder has a specific definition and nothing here suggests murder.

Why is it so important to you that other people see what you see before any investigation is complete? Look at how courts handle video evidence to gain some perspective on why your thinking which seems to rely so heavily on video evidence alone is simply flawed.

You've clarified that you don't support vigilantism...so, what benefit do you get from someone deciding guilt beforehand?

Why is it your position that people should not wait until investigations are done and it has been combed through in court? What purpose does that serve if not for vigilantism?

It sounds like you are aiming primarily for a political benefit or a sort of emotional moral validation through cultural acceptance of your view. This is why we have courts, because people can become very emotional and invested in an outcome. It can become a critical part of your identity and world view that someone be guilty. Those are generally presented as cautionary tales in history books, not the example to live by.

There are still things they agree on and pass legislation for, but on many other issues they both obstruct each other. The actual details of that aren't as relevant as the fact that they have trouble passing legislation and can't be relied on for many important issues at present.

> No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill.

If he was an authoritarian dictator king tyrant master emperor, I would care, but he's not, so I don't care. The evidence does not support that position. There's a lot of rhetoric, propaganda, sound bites, teases and more, but those do not produce reality. They produce perspective.

> The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution.

This is false. The supreme court decision did not fundamentally say that he was immune to prosecution. That is what was spread about it to foment anger, but I read the actual language of the decision and it's just a lie.

> And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base.

Unless you're talking about something I haven't heard about yet, they were not legal US citizens and they were not sent to Venezuelan prisons. There was someone who had some kind of temporary legal status and so there were complexities around it, but they weren't a US citizen.

> People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.

I don't know anyone like me. It's common for people to be unable to navigate the gray area. It's either black or white. You are either "with us or against us". That's just purely juvenile. Does Trump have some moral failings? Sure. Is he some kind of arrogant character? Sure. I think on one side, some people will get so stirred up into such a moral panic that they'll believe any false thing about him. On the other, some people get so caught up in his reality distortion field that they'll believe anything he says. If you fully give up and end up settling into one of those grooves, you lose all sense.

No US president is a king, because the US doesn't have kings. The country isn't structured that way. Most countries legitimately do not understand this, because almost no countries are structured the way the US is.

> Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king? Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?

A king is a very specific thing and you don't need to be a king to have a power which has been delegated to you.

> You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?

When people watch news or listen to world leaders talk, it comes with a sense of authority. Many people are predisposed to automatically think that is the end of it, that they've found the truth. Like clockwork, Trump says some big bold thing that gets people talking and he does this to produce the kinds of results he's after that other people have trouble getting. It gets him a lot of criticism and hate, but he's been doing this since the 80s or even earlier.

He creates a "monument", because he says that nobody cares about deals that aren't monumental. The small uninteresting deals don't get much attention. People don't invest in it. As a result, he thinks small deals are actually harder to do than big deals. So he makes everything a big deal. He's a big deal. Ukraine is a big deal. Gaza is a big deal. Canada is a big deal. Greenland is a big deal.

Now, in order to be credible, he has to be known as a person who does get some big things done. So what you do is you see what can you actually do, and you do the biggest thing you can get done. Now you have credibility. You use that credibility as leverage to make larger claims and people will take your larger claims seriously, even if people who are anchored in reality may have the sense to know that larger claim is a bluff. He bluffs so much. If you remember that old youtube video of trading up from a paperclip to trade all the way until you get a car, it's like that.

So much talk about threatening to leave NATO, or destroying NATO by invading Greenland or any of that nonsense only makes NATO stronger. It makes them say, "hey, we need to be more independent. maybe we can't fully rely on the US if they're talking like this. let's invest more." When they invest more in their military, now the whole alliance is a little stronger. This is important, because World War 3 may be coming and we either need our allies to join us in some way in South East Asia, or we'll need them to be able to hold their own in Europe.

It amazes me the stuff he gets away with, but he's not any kind of threat to democracy.

> Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?

We were already in Venezuela in the 1900s. It is estimated to have upwards of 300 billion to over a trillion barrels of oil. That dwarfs basically every other country. Oil is important for global stability and we still haven't discovered any energy solutions that fully erase dependence on oil. So long as it is needed, it has to come from somewhere. If Russia and China control it, that risks oil being traded primarily in some currency other than USD, even propping up some reserve currency. Venezuela also had Russian and Chinese military hardware, with Russia recently agreeing to send them missiles. That allows for comparisons with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were also a stopping point for the shadow fleets which were breaking international law and helping fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Iranian terrorist groups were also operating in Venezuela. It was also at risk of becoming the next North Korea, but with both nukes and oil. It would've been a nightmare for freedom, democracy and global security.

Despite the fact that the man in question that was killed had a legal permit for said gun AND 1 of the ICE agent even took his gun away and despite this was shot to death while lying on the ground?

So where is the urgency? Not enough KDA ratio to score high enough on the scoreboard?

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-border-agents-i...