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.
> 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?
It's worthy of a book length history: some records were shredded, and some undoubtedly lost forever, but German citizens occupied Stasi offices and preserved records. At least some of the shredded records were digitized and reconstructed. There are over 100 million pages of archived Stasi documents in German archives today.
Thanks for the context. I knew a little how people could review their own Stasi file but wonder how easily was for them to discover the mapping from the agent code names to people's names.
I found this blog https://zipser2018feb.wordpress.com/under-surveillance/ from someone who reviewed their Stasi file. They were visiting professor of German from University of Delaware. As a visitor from the "capitalist West" of course they had file on him.
> The file reveals that there were nine unofficial collaborators of one sort or another who reported on my GDR-related activities and gathered information on me for the Stasi. Three were writers: IME “Dichter” (Poet), Paul Wiens, a well-known, well-connected poet and communist party loyalist [...] Two informants were good acquaintances, a married couple I got to know while living in East Berlin: IMV “Kurt” and IMV “Julia.” [...] There is evidence that two American Germanists, “unofficial sources,” informed the Stasi about my GDR-related activities in the United States. Although they are unnamed, I was able to identify them from the information provided. The file also contains four surveillance reports (one stretching over a three-day period), which were authorized by the Ministry for State Security and prepared by Stasi operatives. In these I have a code name: “Adler,” eagle, the bird of prey.
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.
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.
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.
i love that book -- i once rolled into an in school suspension with a copy of "eichmann in jerusalem" in my backpack, as i was a troll from an early age.
> 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.
> Unit 731 was a secret biological and chemical warfare research unit run by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1933 and 1945. An estimated 14,000 people were killed by infecting prisoners with deadly diseases, conducting vivisection, performing organ harvesting, testing hypobaric chambers, amputating limbs, and exposing victims to chemical agents and explosives.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should all spend the next term in the prisons they're kidnapping people into. Going to be interesting explaining this to future employers who will now be more equipped to identify new hires, or current hires that don't align.
> 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.
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.
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.
maybe i'm just a pessimist but i don't see anything really coming from this. democrats win in 2028, ICE gets scaled down and returns to Biden-era size, maybe 5-10 agents go to prison. so what if the public has their addresses and phone numbers? what changes?
With the current state of the Democratic party, I think they'll just trip over themselves and fail. I wouldn't consider them a guaranteed win for 2028.
not guaranteed but i think it's the most likely outcome considering current polls, and i don't expect Trump/GOP to win back many voters over the next two years
You'd be surprised. The only things conservative americans that lives in their isolated suburbs care about are gas prices and whether or not they can buy the new iphone for cheap.
What you're saying is that you support the state terrorizing the public as long as you are not personally bothered by it. Coward and a traitor. Wrong side of history, buddy.
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.
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.
I appreciate you being willing to have a genuine conversation about this. Unfortunately, I think both sides have become so consumed by outrage that finding common ground feels almost impossible.
I’m conflicted myself. Having grown up in New Mexico, I’ve known and been friends with many people who could face deportation. I wish there were a more accessible path to citizenship for them, and I know many of them wish the same.
At the same time, I find it deeply disturbing how many people celebrate Luigi Mangione, argue that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered, or applaud the exposure of private information belonging to their fellow citizens. It’s difficult to reconcile demands for compassion with such a willingness to dehumanize people we disagree with.
I wish we had a greater collective capacity for mercy, or at least a willingness to extend some grace to one another. But increasingly, I fear people have become more invested in fighting than finding peace. I genuinely hope I’m wrong.
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.""
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.
> Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.
No one believes that, this is a strawman. Notice how there were no large protests, no continual protests, and no widespread outrage before ICE's tactics were changed and a bunch of insurrectionists were hired? Yes, you do notice that "except for a few years recently".
Is there anything that may have changed in the past few years that may have caused people to be against ICE?
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).
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.
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.
The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.
They really are turning into something like the Stasi:
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-running-one-of-the-larges...
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And they're still being identified, decades later and still getting into trouble for it which I love.
> 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?
It's worthy of a book length history: some records were shredded, and some undoubtedly lost forever, but German citizens occupied Stasi offices and preserved records. At least some of the shredded records were digitized and reconstructed. There are over 100 million pages of archived Stasi documents in German archives today.
Thanks for the context. I knew a little how people could review their own Stasi file but wonder how easily was for them to discover the mapping from the agent code names to people's names.
I found this blog https://zipser2018feb.wordpress.com/under-surveillance/ from someone who reviewed their Stasi file. They were visiting professor of German from University of Delaware. As a visitor from the "capitalist West" of course they had file on him.
He did discover the names of some of this informants https://zipser2018feb.wordpress.com/my-stasi-file/
> The file reveals that there were nine unofficial collaborators of one sort or another who reported on my GDR-related activities and gathered information on me for the Stasi. Three were writers: IME “Dichter” (Poet), Paul Wiens, a well-known, well-connected poet and communist party loyalist [...] Two informants were good acquaintances, a married couple I got to know while living in East Berlin: IMV “Kurt” and IMV “Julia.” [...] There is evidence that two American Germanists, “unofficial sources,” informed the Stasi about my GDR-related activities in the United States. Although they are unnamed, I was able to identify them from the information provided. The file also contains four surveillance reports (one stretching over a three-day period), which were authorized by the Ministry for State Security and prepared by Stasi operatives. In these I have a code name: “Adler,” eagle, the bird of prey.
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.
How do we know that?
I wouldn't say "know", but it sure is what historical precedent suggests...
They don't but it appeals to their imagination.
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.
> 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/
Hanna Arendt coined the best term of all for it: The Banality of Evil.
i love that book -- i once rolled into an in school suspension with a copy of "eichmann in jerusalem" in my backpack, as i was a troll from an early age.
(happy halloween, orange site.)
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There was a guy from Japanese Unit 731 found working as a pharmacist many years after the war.
A monster hiding in plain sight.
> 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.
> Unit 731 was a secret biological and chemical warfare research unit run by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1933 and 1945. An estimated 14,000 people were killed by infecting prisoners with deadly diseases, conducting vivisection, performing organ harvesting, testing hypobaric chambers, amputating limbs, and exposing victims to chemical agents and explosives.
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.
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The real importance of this is archival. Who knows what would have been burned and shredded to protect the masked brutes.
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..
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As a natural born US citizen I feel terrorized. If you don’t then you aren’t paying attention.
Yet.
What bearing does this anecdote have on the discussion?
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.
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.
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.
If only Brutalist had RSS. Especially the summaries page... a pity. Or maybe I'm too old school.
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)
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.
See too: CBC lite[0]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news
And no doom scrolling. There is a bottom of the page and no Next Page button.
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.
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.
Man, find of the day. This is such an refined way of viewing the news (and then stopping and going outside).
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.
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.)
Oath. Fantastic.
Zwounds. Marvelous.
Discussion yesterday (330 points, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280864
The link is https://icepi.cx/ but they are currently fighting a domain takedown.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/icepick upstream coverage
You can also download the dataset there.
updated link (for now): https://icepicx.is/
They should all spend the next term in the prisons they're kidnapping people into. Going to be interesting explaining this to future employers who will now be more equipped to identify new hires, or current hires that don't align.
[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)
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> 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?
Unlike the SS, surveillance goes both ways now...
This gave me schadenfreude... Is it bad to feel schadenfreude?
chat what is the German word for person who feels guilty for feeling schadenfreude
im sure it is a spectacular word
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.
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.
> It's joy at someone else's misfortune.
A pretty negative view towards fellow humans.
Huh, that makes more sense, thanks. Whodathunk that The Simpsons wasn't an authority on translation? Let down again... :-/
Good. Let them have a taste of their own medicine.
maybe i'm just a pessimist but i don't see anything really coming from this. democrats win in 2028, ICE gets scaled down and returns to Biden-era size, maybe 5-10 agents go to prison. so what if the public has their addresses and phone numbers? what changes?
With the current state of the Democratic party, I think they'll just trip over themselves and fail. I wouldn't consider them a guaranteed win for 2028.
not guaranteed but i think it's the most likely outcome considering current polls, and i don't expect Trump/GOP to win back many voters over the next two years
You'd be surprised. The only things conservative americans that lives in their isolated suburbs care about are gas prices and whether or not they can buy the new iphone for cheap.
Dozens of the names, at least, correspond to J6 individuals.
The US has no actual national security at moment.
Unless you're a rich pedophile. Those guys are super safe.
National security is about whether there will still be a USA, not whether any specific person will still live.
You conveniently forgot "J_____"
... and gainfully employed!
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Fwiw the SSO angle is what gets me, one federated identity provider means one compromised path exposes every agency hanging off it.
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What you're saying is that you support the state terrorizing the public as long as you are not personally bothered by it. Coward and a traitor. Wrong side of history, buddy.
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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.
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.
I appreciate you being willing to have a genuine conversation about this. Unfortunately, I think both sides have become so consumed by outrage that finding common ground feels almost impossible.
I’m conflicted myself. Having grown up in New Mexico, I’ve known and been friends with many people who could face deportation. I wish there were a more accessible path to citizenship for them, and I know many of them wish the same.
At the same time, I find it deeply disturbing how many people celebrate Luigi Mangione, argue that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered, or applaud the exposure of private information belonging to their fellow citizens. It’s difficult to reconcile demands for compassion with such a willingness to dehumanize people we disagree with.
I wish we had a greater collective capacity for mercy, or at least a willingness to extend some grace to one another. But increasingly, I fear people have become more invested in fighting than finding peace. I genuinely hope I’m wrong.
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.""
Fighting in the US war of independence was a crime too, but those people are considered patriot heros.
Legality !== morality
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.
> Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.
No one believes that, this is a strawman. Notice how there were no large protests, no continual protests, and no widespread outrage before ICE's tactics were changed and a bunch of insurrectionists were hired? Yes, you do notice that "except for a few years recently".
Is there anything that may have changed in the past few years that may have caused people to be against ICE?
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).
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.
> 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
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