Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees

Posted by firefax 5 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by cdrnsf 48 minutes ago

ICE and DHS should be abolished, INS should be restored and immigration policy should be reformed to be far more humane. All of these employees should be barred from any and all future public service (and prosecuted where appropriate). There's no room for sympathy for an agency who routinely violates human rights, fires off tear gas by schools, kills civilians in the streets, fires their weapons into moving vehicles and on and on.

Comment by Zigurd 4 hours ago

The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.

Comment by GolfPopper 3 hours ago

They really are turning into something like the Stasi:

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-running-one-of-the-larges...

Comment by j4kp07 54 minutes ago

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Comment by rdtsc 49 minutes ago

> The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.

I thought it was quite the opposite: there were so many informants and records were shredded that it wasn't that easy to figure out. What was the mechanism for this identification? A public database records lookup?

Comment by barbazoo 4 hours ago

And they're still being identified, decades later and still getting into trouble for it which I love.

Comment by stephbook 1 hour ago

The German communist party managed to destroy all of its records, so the people in charge of this hellscape managed to escape justice. Only the foot soldiers were exposed.

Not really a great example of justice.

Comment by whoanoway 56 minutes ago

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Comment by firefax 3 hours ago

i had a woman i met at a policy conference confide that many bad people made it through both the nazi period and the east german times -- there's a type of sadist who maliciously complies with the rules in any way they can to the detriment of others who i despise and saw much too much of in the policy context.

i haven't been there in a long time, but this hacker looking across the pond, it looks like germany has changed...

i worry too many hackers have not sufficiently studied history.

Comment by pcthrowaway 1 hour ago

> maliciously complies

I think the concept you want here is "just following orders" or even "mindless compliance", rather than "malicious compliance". Malicious compliance refers to a sense of justice obtained from technically following rules, when you either disagree with the rule or the authority, in a way that is counterproductive to the goals of the authority.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/

Comment by chuckadams 24 minutes ago

Hanna Arendt coined the best term of all for it: The Banality of Evil.

Comment by ourmandave 1 hour ago

There was a guy from Japanese Unit 731 found working as a pharmacist many years after the war.

A monster hiding in plain sight.

Comment by lioeters 1 hour ago

> Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US between 1945 and 1959 for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe.

Comment by sixothree 3 hours ago

Speaking of which, I feel like ICE's next move is to start arresting people for not turning in their friends, neighbors, and coworkers. We know they're planning for it at least.

Comment by qtk8 2 hours ago

How do we know that?

Comment by justinhj 1 hour ago

They don't but it appeals to their imagination.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by wilkystyle 5 hours ago

Unrelated to the content of the article, but what a wonderful site text.npr.org is. It looks like a slightly enhanced version of my iPhone's reader mode and it displays instantly, scrolling with no lag, stuttering, or dynamic loading of page elements.

I wish more of the web were like this.

Comment by hatradiowigwam 4 hours ago

Like text.npr.org - there is also a CNN "lite" version too: https://lite.cnn.com/

I agree whole heartedly I wish more of the web were like this.

Comment by Uncle_Brumpus 1 hour ago

In a similar vein, I've been using https://brutalist.report/ for a while just to browse headlines. All the links lead to the full regular pages, so the articles themselves aren't "lightweight" like the CNN Lite version is. I still like how it lets me quickly peruse many headlines from lots of different categories and only click through onto something I'm genuinely interested in.

I wasn't aware of CNN Lite, I will add this to my news bookmarks.

Comment by soco 28 minutes ago

If only Brutalist had RSS. Especially the summaries page... a pity. Or maybe I'm too old school.

Comment by amenghra 4 hours ago

Bring back WML sites?

note: WML/WAL was a way to enable browsing a web-like thing on low powered devices.

For a bit of time, popular websites were available in two variants, wml and html (more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol)

Comment by chuckadams 29 minutes ago

No who remembers WAP has any desire to see anything like it return. A 'lite' subdomain is far easier and more effective by not trying to reinvent the entire stack.

As for WML, I'd say transport-level compression made that pretty much academic.

Comment by bch 3 hours ago

See too: CBC lite[0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

Comment by tocs3 4 hours ago

And no doom scrolling. There is a bottom of the page and no Next Page button.

Comment by onefiftymike 4 hours ago

I came across this years ago. It is pretty much the only news I will look at. They only update like 3 times a day too, so no incentive to keep coming back.

Comment by cowlevel 2 hours ago

It was created in protest to GDPR - "see how terrible the web would be if we followed GDPR" - and backfired a bit, but apparently not enough to delete it.

Comment by firefax 3 hours ago

a friend found it when fucking around with a DNS enumeration tool a while back.

lite.cnn.com is also useful on slow connections

(i post using tor.)

Comment by forestry 5 hours ago

Oath. Fantastic.

Comment by lioeters 1 hour ago

Zwounds. Marvelous.

Comment by cellsstudio 4 hours ago

Man, find of the day. This is such an refined way of viewing the news (and then stopping and going outside).

Comment by VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago

The Compuserve and Netscape ISP website husks also feature no-nonsense text-only news pages with 2000s-style renderings that are near-instant on any device.

68k.news also exists but has been broken for a long time. It's maintained by a retro computing youtuber who seems to have abandoned it or isn't paying attention to its brokenness.

Comment by 19 minutes ago

Comment by gnabgib 4 hours ago

Discussion yesterday (330 points, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280864

Comment by RRRA 33 minutes ago

Unlike the SS, surveillance goes both ways now...

Comment by MSFT_Edging 5 hours ago

The real importance of this is archival. Who knows what would have been burned and shredded to protect the masked brutes.

Comment by onemoresoop 2 hours ago

Trump will anyway throw them under the bus when he's done with them so it's a bit naive to expect their identities would be kept secret forever. And somehow they hoped those masks would do anything else beside terrorize Americans. As far as archival, yes that's a good idea. I'm sure the current admin will attempt to shred everything..

Comment by rmah 1 hour ago

"And somehow they hoped those masks would do anything else beside terrorize Americans"

As an legal american immigrant, I don't feel terrorized.

Comment by thunderfork 1 hour ago

What bearing does this anecdote have on the discussion?

Comment by smallerize 5 hours ago

The link is https://icepi.cx/ but they are currently fighting a domain takedown.

Comment by florkbork 5 hours ago

Comment by cowlevel 2 hours ago

You can also download the dataset there.

Comment by onemoresoop 2 hours ago

This gave me schadenfreude... Is it bad to feel schadenfreude?

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by zzzeek 42 minutes ago

chat what is the German word for person who feels guilty for feeling schadenfreude

im sure it is a spectacular word

Comment by chuckadams 20 minutes ago

Schadenfreude literally means "shameful joy", so it's kind of built into the word itself. Someone who doesn't feel at least a little tinge of wrongness is someone who's broken.

Comment by chihuahua 3 minutes ago

No it does not mean that. It's not "shameful joy". It's joy at someone else's misfortune.

"Schaden" means literally "harm". "Schamfreude" or "Beschaemende Freute" would be "shameful joy", but that's not a word or expression that anyone uses.

Comment by ranger_danger 4 hours ago

Dozens of the names, at least, correspond to J6 individuals.

Comment by isolay 4 hours ago

Good. Let them have a taste of their own medicine.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280864

Source urls only please, save the lite/archives for comments.

Full url: https://www.npr.org/2026/10/28/nx-s1-6021497/dhs-hack-ice (as submitted earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286722)

Comment by reallydoingagai 1 hour ago

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Comment by arduanika 2 hours ago

> exposing the names, phone numbers and addresses

> Ottignon, who has worked on similar data leak projects in the past, rejected suggestions that he and others connected to the Department of Peace or Distribution[sic] Denials of Secrets were doxing government employees.

Do words mean nothing anymore?

Comment by syngrog66 5 hours ago

The US has no actual national security at moment.

Comment by giantrobot 3 hours ago

Unless you're a rich pedophile. Those guys are super safe.

Comment by cowlevel 2 hours ago

National security is about whether there will still be a USA, not whether any specific person will still live.

Comment by ethagnawl 55 minutes ago

... and gainfully employed!

Comment by dionian 2 hours ago

ok

Comment by krylonmae 58 minutes ago

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Comment by ethfan 4 hours ago

Fwiw the SSO angle is what gets me, one federated identity provider means one compromised path exposes every agency hanging off it.

Comment by howunfortunate 2 hours ago

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Comment by kleiba2 2 hours ago

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Comment by greenpizza13 1 hour ago

The law does not always reflect ethics. It is a snapshot, sometimes old, of the ethics (or lack thereof) of a time and place. Crimes are laudible when the letter of the law misaligns with the ethics of the time, and then eventually laws catch up. If everyone always followed the law, nothing would ever improve.

Comment by giantg2 59 minutes ago

I get the concept, but the question then is if it's ethical to release those names when most of DHS has nothing to do with ICE. The age old question of how much collateral damage is acceptable. It seems most of the praise being given casts DHS as being similar Nazis, but doesn’t consider who is actually involved or not.

Comment by BinaryKnight 10 minutes ago

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Comment by Pannoniae 2 hours ago

From the article: "In a note attached to the files, the Department of Peace wrote, "They have our information, so it's only fair that we have theirs.""

Comment by advisedwang 1 hour ago

Fighting in the US war of independence was a crime too, but those people are considered patriot heros.

Comment by sigmarule 1 hour ago

Legality !== morality

Comment by rmah 1 hour ago

Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.

I'm not sure why since it was enforced this way for decades before except for a few years recently. Now, I think that one can argue that ICE is overly aggressive, that it casts too wide a net, that too many mistakes are made, that it should focus on specific violations instead, etc. But these are arguments that can be made for any law enforcement agency, and have been for over 100 years in the USA. Sometimes, IMO, they were even justified.

That said, however, it also seems that many have latched onto ICE enforcement actions as a bell-weather pre-cursor to additional actions that will lead to a dystopian outcome. Or is in the process of doing so as we speak.

Thus, if one believes this to be true, then one can see why actions taken to fight/oppose/slow down the process can be viewed in a morally good light and something to be celebrated.

Comment by aliasxneo 1 hour ago

I was just watching a video the other day of ICE protestors blocking NYC bridge traffic. Tons of people coming out of their vehicles pleading with them to move so they could get to their job, drop their kid off, deliver a DoorDash order, etc.

I'm all for fighting against your enemies, even if I don't see it exactly the same way. But when I see stuff like that, it just seems totally disconnected from doing anything meaningful towards their enemies (besides making more of them, I guess).

Comment by rmah 27 minutes ago

Those sort of tactics seem to come from the belief that "awareness" is an important precursor to socio-political change. Which, I guess is technically true. But I agree that this particular sort of awareness building is detrimental to their stated cause.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by ImPostingOnHN 1 hour ago

> Since when are crimes laudable?

I have faith that you understand the nuance of crimes sometimes being okay. For another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

Comment by 1 hour ago