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FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

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Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#981

Post by pickleRick243 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #724
heavyset_go wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things? If you think what you've seen is bad, consider how bad the stuff you don't see is, and then consider how bad it is for those who aren't the type to post on HN.

Also consider that there are 340 million people in the US. With that sort of population size, you can construct whatever narrative you want out of daily video clips of 1-in-a-million events. >the type to post on HN. When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site? The userbase here is considerably further left than a very left-wing state such as California. That will very much be reflected in what gets po…

Almost 40% of California voted for Trump. The political polarity of a group can be measured in multiple ways. If you measure it by the views of its elected representatives or leaders of its institutions, it will look quite extreme because every 55/45 gets converted to a +1. In other words, you can have nearly 30% of a state being against gay marriage, yet "obviously" California is extremely gay-friendly.

I suspect (for no concrete reason in particular besides a feeling) that the readership of HN is fairly similar to California in political demographics. Active commentators are considerably more left-wing due to selection effects.

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#982

Post by zahlman »

tencentshill wrote: post #30
quercus wrote: post #21

[flagged]

Yeah! Signal has nothing to do with technology. The government trying to snoop on a private E2EE service is not worth discussion.

> trying to snoop on a private E2EE service

They are not trying to break encryption. They got a tip-off from a private citizen who got past vetting and infiltrated the group.

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#983

Post by nobody9999 »

tasuki wrote: post #958
itake wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Session is a low-privacy fork of Signal. source: https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707409

What better alternatives do we have? Not tying my account to a phone number, but rather saving thirteen words, is exactly the UX I've always desired. I don't even need privacy, but I hate losing things when I inevitably lose my phone number.

>What better alternatives do we have?

Set up your own XMPP or Matrix server and only expose it via Tor.

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#984

Post by metalliqaz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #561
metalliqaz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him. He's the most hard-core fascist in the bunch.

> Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him He’s going to jail in a way Trump isn’t. That’s ultimately a fall guy.

I no longer have any reason to think that justice will prevail.

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#985

Post by nobody9999 »

larkost wrote: post #329
fudged71 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using an…

I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin). This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear af…

>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.

Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#986

Post by pseudohadamard »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #664
pseudohadamard wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a footnote, it was also written at a time when a bunch of guys with muskets could face down another bunch of guys with muskets. When one side has tanks and attack helicopters and training and outnumbers you a hundred to one it doesn't really work any more.

That would explain why it was so easy for the US to suppress insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan... It's actually rather difficult to think of tyrannical regimes which persisted against an armed citizenry in the long term.

People in Iraq and Afghanistan were willing to eat grass and blow themselves up to resist the foreign invaders. How long do you think Meal Team Six will keep going if they can't get to a Burger King?

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#987

Post by octoberfranklin »

tasuki wrote: post #958
itake wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Session is a low-privacy fork of Signal. source: https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707409

What better alternatives do we have? Not tying my account to a phone number, but rather saving thirteen words, is exactly the UX I've always desired. I don't even need privacy, but I hate losing things when I inevitably lose my phone number.

Ricochet (chat via Tor .onion circuits): https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/

Tox (if you're addicted to phones): https://tox.chat/

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#988

Post by octoberfranklin »

copirate wrote: post #806
zahlman wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, one member of the group uploaded a personal photo as an avatar. I've also heard of side-channel attacks on Signal that could allow for profiling a user's location, which with the FBI's resources could presumably eventually result in identification.

Sure, I was not talking about Signal. Something like Bitmessage[1] can. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmessage

Bitmessage is/was awesome, but it fundamentally doesn't scale.

Every user has to attempt decryption of every message sent by any sender. Later they cobbled on some kind of hokey sharding mechanism to try to work around this, but it was theoretically unmotivated and an implementation minefield (very easy for implementation mistakes in the sharding mechanism to leak communication patterns to an observer).

Bitmessage would be great if we had something like Schnorr signatures (sum of (messages signed with different keys) = (sum of messages) signed with (sum of keys)) that could tell you if any of the sum of a bunch of messages was encrypted to your secret key. Then you could bisection-search the mempool.

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#989

Post by 0928374082 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #758
glaugh wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that. If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.

The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point. A particularly high profile example would be the plot to kidnap a state governor a few years ago. As to actually acting on what they learn, within this context yeah that would be troubling.

> The FBI infiltrating political groups of all stripes is to be assumed by default at this point.

That (US domestic political groups, anyway) is their job, after all?

Re: FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

#990

Post by kennywinker »

mycodendral wrote: post #918
kennywinker wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these federal officers? They’re men in masks with camo and body armor kidnapping people off the streets and refusing to show identification beyond a patch that says “ICE”. That is who is alleged to be impeded.

Yes, they are federal officers. There is no pattern of mass kidnappings by impersonators occurring here. Interpreting masked officers in tactical gear as kidnappers, or claiming that a patch saying “ICE” is insufficient identification, is not a legally valid basis for suspicion or resistance.

The fuck it is.

Sure, most of the people kidnapping people off the streets and incarcerating or deporting them without due process in violation of the constitution are federal officers. But unless they identify themselves clearly, you’d be stupid to not resist.

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