Tag: police state

Group Chats About ICE Whereabouts Are Protected Speech. The FBI Is Investigating Anyway.

Group chats about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents aren’t illegal. But FBI Director Kash Patel doesn’t seem to care.

On Monday, Patel told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that the FBI was investigating a Signal group in which people had been chatting about ICE agents’ whereabouts.

The Trump administration has said that people are doxing federal agents, employing a term once reserved for the act of publishing private information about someone’s identity or address online. “Doxing” generally implies that this sharing is done with ill intent.

But there are all sorts of perfectly benign reasons why Americans—whether in the country legally or not—might want to keep tabs on where immigration authorities are going. Sharing this information allows people to protest, observe, or document ICE activity, or avoid run ins with ICE agents.

Chatting about ICE agent whereabouts is unambiguously speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. So the idea that the FBI would investigate on these grounds is worrying.

“There does not appear to be any lawful basis for this investigation,” said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “The First Amendment generally protects the publication of legally-obtained information, including much of what the Trump administration has labeled ‘doxxing.’ That protection extends to using an app to share information about ICE activity.”

In his interview with Johnson, Patel paid lip service to the First Amendment. Yet he also framed Signal chats pertaining to ICE whereabouts as inherently suspect and/or likely to lead to criminal actions. “You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” he said, drawing a direct link between constitutionally protected activity and criminality.

Of course, trapping ICE agents and harming them would indeed be illegal. But the illegal part of that is the trapping, the plotting harm, and the harming, not merely the knowing where the agents are or chatting about where they are. And even if some individual ultimately uses the location information to inflict harm, it still would not make the mere sharing of that information illegal.

“The First Amendment has narrow exceptions for true threats and speech intended and likely to provoke imminent unlawful action, but the government cannot trigger those exceptions simply by claiming that speech puts officials in harm’s way,” notes Terr. “The First Amendment also does not protect criminal conspiracy, but that requires evidence of an agreement to commit a specific crime and a substantial step toward carrying it out. No such evidence appears in the Signal messages that have been made public.”

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“This Is a Warning”: ICE Agents Follow Protesters Home

Federal agents in Maine are now threatening ICE watchers at their homes.

Liz Eisele McLellan, a volunteer ICE watcher monitoring the intensifying federal operations in Maine, told the Portland Press Herald that a federal agent came to her home to threaten her. “It was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me,” McLellan said.

McLellan said she spoke to one agent, while three cars blocked the street outside. “This is a warning,” one agent said, according to McLellan. “We know you live right here.”

McLellan said she called 911 and recounted what had happened to the dispatcher, who told her she should comply with orders from federal agents.

Last week, a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent warned a woman filming their activities in Portland that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a domestic terrorist.

This comes just weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of two, while she was observing federal immigration operations in Minneapolis. The Press Herald report came out the day before CBP agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse who was attending a Minneapolis protest in the wake of Good’s death.

Two people who work as volunteers in Minneapolis, driving supplies to immigrants hiding in their homes from federal agents and following ICE vehicles, told The Atlantic that agents had gone to their homes to threaten them too.

While legal threats against observers may sound absurd, a recent security threats assessment leaked from the Department of Homeland Security revealed the department’s intention to broaden the definition of domestic terrorism.

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ICE’s Secret Watchlists of Americans

“We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” a masked federal agent taunted a protester filming him in Maine last week.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response was firm: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

There’s just one problem: She’s lying.

Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), “Antifa,” and others who are promiscuously labeled “domestic terrorists.”

I can reveal for the first time that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).

Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States. Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.

There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watchlist to eliminate confusion, duplication and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” says a DHS attorney intimately familiar with the subject. The attorney spoke on the agreement that their identity not be disclosed.

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watchlist of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watchlist of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watchlist of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade.

The new domestic-related watchlists—a set of databases and applications—exist inside and outside the FBI and are used by agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol to organize the Niagara of information in possession of the federal government. Collectively, they create ways to sort, analyze, and search information, a task that even artificial intelligence has failed to conquer (so far).

Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

Administration officials have alluded to all of this, though contrary to the Hollywood idea of some all-seeing eye, actual government watchlists are more a patchwork system of lists and applications, each of which might have individual justification or even legitimate purpose to aid law enforcement but overall form the basis for massive violations of American civil rights.

“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month.

Watchlists in general fly in the face of the spirit of the Constitution and the protections it’s supposed to embody against unreasonable search and seizure, and relating to the right of privacy.

“Fairness can rarely be obtained by secret, one-sided determination of facts decisive of rights,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said of a Justice Department list of subversives during the Red Scare. “Secrecy is not congenial to truthseeking.”

Now, the national security community has developed an interlocking set of lists and applications that are secret not just to the public but opaque to most who toil in the federal agencies themselves. Asked about the watchlists, a Border Patrol agent recounted to me how they punch their data into their own proprietary application, not really knowing what happens after that.

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Top Federal Drug Official Touts Therapeutic ‘Promise’ Of Psychedelics And Slams Schedule I Research Barriers

A top federal health official is again touting the therapeutic “promise” of psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA—though she says the drugs’ Schedule I status remains a research barrier to scientifically validating their efficacy.

In a blog post this month, National Institution on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow said the “potential use of psychedelics in the treatment of various mental health conditions has made these drugs a hot area of scientific research, as well as growing public interest.”

NIDA, as well as other agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have been particularly interested in tapping into the therapeutic potential of ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA—each of which are undergoing trials that could pave the path to their broader accessibility to patients with serious mental health conditions.

These psychedelics “represent a potential paradigm shift in the way we address substance use disorders,” Volkow said, caveating that “there is much we still do not know about these drugs, the way they work, and how to administer them, and there is danger of the hype getting out ahead of the science.”

The director said the “promise of psychedelic compounds likely centers on their ability to promote rapid neural rewiring,” which “may explain these compounds’ relatively long-lasting effects, even with just one or a few administrations.”

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Amelia Victorious: How to Lose the Culture War With a Video Game

There’s something genuinely funny going on in the United Kingdom right now.

The British government’s Prevent office, housed under the Home Office (think Department of the Interior, but allergic to dissent), partnered with a media nonprofit called Shout Out UK (like a PBS focused on preventing “radicalism”) to come up with a clever new way to re-educate British youth.

The concern, as always, was “radicalization.” They thought the solution was inspired: a choice-based video game. Kids like games. Games involve decisions. Decisions shape values. What could possibly go wrong?

Thus Pathways was born, a government-funded interactive morality play designed to gently shepherd British children toward being properly antiracist, properly accepting, and properly enthusiastic about the ever-increasing number of migrants reshaping their country. Civics class, but fun. And digital. And corrective.

As part of this effort, the designers introduced a character named Amelia, a cute, purple-haired, vaguely goth girl who carries a Union Jack and talks about Britain being for the British. She was meant to function as a warning, a living illustration of how nationalism can look attractive, even charming, and yet be dangerous to the impressionable youths of Britain who may not have fully internalized the idea that Brexit is bad and they are to obey their elitist overlords.

What they did not anticipate was that the public would take one look at adorable, charming Amelia and decide she was the good guy.

What Prevent Was Supposed to Be

To understand how Pathways ended up here, you have to rewind to what Prevent was originally meant to do. The program emerged from the post-9/11 security logic that shaped Western counter-terror policy across the board. The target was not opinions or aesthetics. It was violence, and specifically Islamist terrorism and the recruitment pipelines that fed it. “Radicalization” meant movement toward planning or committing acts of terror.

The rationale was simple and, frankly, understandable. Governments have a duty to stop people from blowing up buses and concert halls. Identifying grooming networks, interrupting recruitment, and diverting individuals away from violent ideologies was the job. That’s why Prevent sat under the Home Office in the first place. Bombs and bodies are not abstract problems.

Over time, however, the definition of “radicalization” began to stretch. Then it stretched again. Eventually it stopped describing a trajectory toward violence at all and started describing a trajectory away from approved social and political consensus. The concern shifted from what someone might do to what someone might think, or worse, what they might feel attached to.

This is where Prevent quietly stopped being about prevention and started becoming about management, and specifically the management of populations rather than threats. Cultural signals like flags, language, and other symbols of national belonging were reclassified as early warning indicators. Discomfort with mass migration was treated less as a political opinion than as a diagnostic symptom. Belonging itself became something to be solved.

Once the mission changed, the tools followed.

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The New York Times Is Trying To Rebrand Venezuela’s New Dictator as a Serious Thinker

The New York Times has depicted Nicolás Maduro’s successor—Venezuelan dictator Delcy Rodríguez—as a pragmatic technocrat, a market-friendly reformer, and a “cosmopolitan” who helped to stabilize the Venezuelan economy. The Times claims that Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution has evolved into a “brutal capitalism” under Rodríguez’s purview. “A relative moderate,” Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev wrote, “Ms. Rodríguez is the architect of a market-friendly overhaul that has stabilized the Venezuelan economy after a prolonged collapse.”

In a series of articles bylined or co-authored by Kurmanaev and Simón Romero, Rodríguez is credited with heading “a market-friendly overhaul which had provided a semblance of economic stability.” One article states that “hyperinflation was halted and economic growth returned” under her watch. The Times’ reporter Pranav Baskar has underscored Rodríguez’s credentials and style, writing that she presents “herself as a cosmopolitan technocrat in a militaristic and male-dominated government.” Romero and Kurmanaev have contrasted her “technocratic, numbers-heavy communication” approach with Maduro’s “folksy style.”

The article that provoked the most outrage in Venezuela’s expat community was published last September and bylined by Times reporter Julie Turkewitz, who was granted “a rare visa for foreign journalists” and traveled to Caracas for an interview with Rodríguez. The resulting article featured a portrait of the now-dictator, stylishly dressed, looking introspective and calm, as she peered through a window, casting a gentle glow on her face.

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Britain To Roll Out Facial Recognition in Police Overhaul

Britain’s policing system, we are told, is broken. And on Monday, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced that the fix would arrive in the form of algorithms, facial recognition vans, and a large check made out to the future.

The government plans to spend £140m ($191M) on artificial intelligence and related technology, with the promise that it will free up six million police hours a year, the equivalent of 3,000 officers.

It is being billed as the biggest overhaul of policing in England and Wales in 200 years, aimed at dragging a creaking system into the modern world.

The ambition is serious. The implications are too.

The plan is for AI software that will analyze CCTV, doorbell, and mobile phone footage, detect deepfakes, carry out digital forensics, and handle administrative tasks such as form filling, redaction, and transcription. Mahmood’s argument is that criminals are getting smarter, while parts of the police service are stuck with tools that belong to another era.

She put it plainly: “Criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, some police forces are still fighting crime with analogue methods.”

And she promised results: “We will roll out state-of-the-art tech to get more officers on the streets and put rapists and murderers behind bars.”

There is logic here. Few people would argue that trained officers should be buried in paperwork. Technology can help with that. The concern is what else comes with it.

Live facial recognition is being expanded aggressively. The number of police vans equipped with the technology will increase fivefold, from ten to fifty, operating across the country. These systems scan faces in public spaces and compare them to watch lists of wanted individuals.

This is a form of mass surveillance and when automated systems get things wrong, the consequences fall on real people.

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Failing French President Macron Wants To Ban Under-15 Kids From Social Media – And He Wants It Done Fast

France’s Emmanuel Macron is a ‘leader’ in the quest for a cause.

A failing lame-duck President polling in the 16-18% range, fresh from the historic low of 11% approval, he needs some issue that will help him back into the good graces of the French voters who don’t trust him, and believe he has been a failure as head of state.

Usually, Macron tries to find it in ‘global warming’, but that con is not working anymore – so he tried to be a ‘warrior leader’ meddling in Ukraine, and lately sent an astonishing 15 soldiers from the 27th Mountain Infantry Brigade to Greenland.

What a Napoleon, right?

Now, it appears that ‘Le Petit Roi’ has found a new cause that can make him appear in a positive light for part of the French society.

Macron is pushing his government to ban children under the age of 15 from social media and – what’s more – he wants to ‘fast-track the legal process’.

He means to ensure that the ban can enter into force in September, at the start of the next school year.

CBS News reported:

“In a video released late Saturday by French broadcaster BFM-TV, Macron said he had asked his government to initiate an accelerated procedure so that the proposed legislation can move as quickly as possible and be passed by the Senate in time.

‘The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale’, Macron said. ‘The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated. Neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms’.”

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Nine Bureaucracies Walk Into Your Browser and Ask for ID

By the time you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that somewhere, quietly and with a great deal of bureaucratic back-patting, someone is trying to figure out exactly how old you are. And not because they’re planning a surprise party.

Not because you asked them to. But because the nine horsemen of the regulatory apocalypse have decided that the future of a “safe” internet depends on everyone flashing their ID like they’re trying to get into an especially dull nightclub.

This is the nightmare of “age assurance,” a term so bloodlessly corporate you can practically hear it sighing into its own PowerPoint.

This is a sprawling, gelatinous lump of biometric estimation, document scans, and AI-ified guesswork, stitched together into one big global initiative under the cheery-sounding Global Online Safety Regulators Network, or GOSRN. Catchy.

Formed in 2022, presumably after someone at Ofcom had an especially boring lunch break, GOSRN now boasts nine national regulators, including the UK, France, Australia, and that well-known digital superpower, Fiji, who have come together to harmonize policies on how to tell whether someone is too young to look at TikTok for adults.

The group is currently chaired by Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán.

This month, this merry band of regulators released a “Position Statement on Age Assurance and Online Safety Regulation.”

We obtained a copy of the document for you here.

Inside this gem of a document is a plan to push shared age-verification principles across borders, including support for biometric analysis, official ID checks, and the general dismantling of anonymity for the greater good of child protection.

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Government-Controlled Digital ID is Not the Optional Convenience It Is Being Sold As

The UK government has pledged to introduce a digital ID system for all UK citizens and legal residents by the end of the current Parliament (so no later than 2029). The integration of digital ID into government services, though already under way, has hitherto been largely voluntary. However, it is becoming steadily less optional, as the government has said it will now be required as a precondition for work in the UK, and a version of it (GOV.UK One Login) is already being imposed unilaterally upon company directors throughout the UK.

Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones has suggested in a recent interview (19/11) that digital ID is completely optional and will simply make government services more accessible and convenient. But this is a rather disingenuous sales pitch. On the one hand, Starmer himself insists that digital ID will be required as a precondition to work legally in the UK; on the other hand, like any new technology, there will be a transition period, but voluntariness is unlikely to last forever. 

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