DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/07/doj-goes-after-us-citizen-for-developing-anti-ice-app

by ProAm • 1 year ago

183 65 1 year ago

appleinsider.com

ipnon• 1 year ago

The developer has not been charged.

jkaplowitz2• 1 year ago

But he has been publicly threatened by the Attorney General:

"We are looking at him," she said on Fox News, "and he better watch out."

(Source: The submitted Apple Insider article, citing Wired, which as noted in the quote was citing Fox News.)

When the head of the DOJ publicly threatens someone, saying that she "goes after" that person is entirely accurate.

gorlilla• 1 year ago

How is that not prior restraint?

msgodel2• 1 year ago

Just a reminder for those who aren't aware: Apple typically makes you upload your government ID to publish apps. I used to be part of their developer program (although I never finished any of the apps I wrote) and was forced to upload mine. For those of you who think there's no problem with forcing everyone to go through the app store, here's just one more serious issue that creates. Now they can be subpoenaed for something that could otherwise have been done anonymously.

haswell• 1 year ago

FTA:

"We're working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations," Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said to press, "and we're going to actually go after them and prosecute them... because what they're doing, we believe, is illegal."

epistasis4• 1 year ago

Guilty, until proven innocent, or until it's proven that there's no law that is being broken.

i80and3• 1 year ago

It's not really relevant in a greater sense that they haven't been charged, if the DOJ is making credible threats. Which they are.

bb887• 1 year ago

And there's no punishment for Pam Bondi, she's got a get out jail free card with a Trump pardon.

akerl_2• 1 year ago

"credible threats" is a term of art, and these comments aren't that.

bb887• 1 year ago

Correction: The developer has not been charged... yet.

If you dig into someone's past, you can probably find something, or make it look like there's something. Pay informants. Frame people for other crimes. Etc.

When a justice department doesn't believe in the laws they're supposed to uphold, they don't have to follow their own rules. They can send people through the judicial wringer by merely filing a complaint against them.

That in itself is a punishment.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

There are so many (especially commerce) laws and the lawless regime will find an excuse to deport them to CECOT without due process.

roody15• 1 year ago

Agree one worrying idea is using rumors to discredit or just put pressure on the individual in question. Can simply monitor the individual and then report any odd behavior to friends, co-workers, etc. The result is the individual has to focus on these issues and will likely seize the behavior. No charges ever even need to be filed, and nothing is illegal on doing this activity.

spacemadness2• 1 year ago

Might be a good career move for a lawyer to represent him since it’s an obvious violation of his rights.

budududuroiu• 1 year ago

What's the difference between this and Waze?

bb887• 1 year ago

Well... there's no "ICE" button in Waze. /s

There's not. But it attempts to thwart the administration's efforts into conducting raids.

layman51• 1 year ago

I don’t understand. I thought it was an app where you could see where they’re selling ice and where you could go purchase it before it melts?

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Even Google has a traffic police spotting function, but not a general police locator. It’s a gray area

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

Waze doesn't get in the way of fascists

throwawaygmbno• 1 year ago

There is an argument to be made that Waze helps white people avoid prosecution where as an anti-ICE app based on their current focus mostly does not. There is no point in pretending there isn't an explicitly racist goal in many of the administration's policy, even if it isn't the only thing that motivates them.

bb887• 1 year ago

This is what weaponization of the DoJ looks like. Under Bush 41 they would try to hide it to make it look like they weren't because of political fallout. But now they don't have to hide it anymore.

The DoJ is supposed to uphold the law, and not be criminals themselves.

dluan• 1 year ago

There was a time when the Hacker part of Hacker News meant something. But now I look around and see faces like Shaun Maguire's, Dario Amodei's, millions of engineering man hours being poured into the "Salesforce for Killing People". What are we even doing here.

bb887• 1 year ago

It's interesting that money has no morals, it's just money. The reality is that the more money you have, the more freedom you have too.

The easier it is to pay off officials. The easier it is to escape juris diction. The easier it is to live the way you want, laws be damned.

labster• 1 year ago

We are getting back to the original meaning of hacker from a millennium ago, one who chops, cuts, and hews apart, especially hacking apart our fellow man.

busterarm• 1 year ago

Oh puh-lease. The origins of the term hacker wrt computers is meant to mean somebody reckless without self-discipline. One of the earliest uses of it in print was to describe folks working in MIT's AI lab in the mid-70s. People working in a field on the fringes of respectability.

That was just as accurate a description back in that day as it was of the 80s-00s "hackers" that people associate with counter-culturalism and building cool shit. I remember what technologists were like in the 90s. The same amount of effort that went into building the world wide web went into insane shit like cryogenics. Y'all complain about the fringe ideologies of people like Musk and Thiel, but that's exactly who we're talking about when we're talking about old school hackers. That and a half dozen other fringe personalities with fringe ideologies.

If we were to talk about people working at the frindges of respectability, "Salesforce for Killing People" is exactly the kind of company that they would work for. Heck, back in those early decades your options were also research labs or defense industry...

We were never all one team of good guys with good intentions. I mean, a sizeable percentage of people in our industry have at some point worked for Meta...

barkingcat• 1 year ago

you missed the boat by about 10 years.

UncleMeat• 1 year ago

a16z hired Daniel Penny, a man whose key qualification was killing somebody on the subway. The system is well and truly lost.

epistasis4• 1 year ago

This reminds me of Aaron Swartz's persecution, which seemed to be under a law on the books that was unjust. This appears to be an even more brazen abuse of prosecutorial power, threats without even the cover of an attempt at enforcing a law, just plain thuggery.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

I look at this and think open source devices with mesh networks, that's what people need, but I guess the bad guys (government agents) can get them and locate you via a signal that's being emitted?

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

You'd have to make sure no persistent identifiers are emitted. Like how phones use a randomized MAC while scanning for wifi.

goku12• 1 year ago

Someone always objects when I say this. But here's the issue. You can't resolve political crises with technical solutions. You need political solutions. The regime shouldn't have been allowed to make such activities illegal and persecute citizens for that. But that isn't even the worst concern at this point. Remember that the military is being used to oppress political dissent within the country.

Technical solutions may give you a temporary upper hand in pursuit of a political resolution. But without the latter, technical solutions will simply devolve into a technical arms race that you cannot possibly win, due to the near infinite resources the regime commands. If at all they can't defeat you technically, they'll just order an indiscriminate crackdown.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

I think you're right, but I also think it's important to be able to communicate outside of the control of central authority.

But yes, it's probably wishful thinking because as I said, they would be able to track you down with the signal your device emits and stomp you with the boot of authoritarianism. Maybe in the future we'll able to communicate anonymously with quantum entanglement :)

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646

tomhow4• 1 year ago

Thanks!

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646 - July 2025 (836 comments)

overstay89302• 1 year ago

I mean even putting the politics aside, you do kind of ask for this to happen when you start putting actual pressure on real people. Someone was eventually going to do something about this.

Pretty authoritarian but it's not like this just didn't happen under previous administrations. It just didn't happen publicly. You could definitely get someone visiting you at your door if you made apps that make certain things too easy.

epistasis4• 1 year ago

Only under authoritarian governments would one expect something like this.

Real police would not be alarmed at having their presence noted. Secret police that are masked up to avoid identification, and equipped with more military equipment than was typical for daytime patrol by soldiers in Fallujah is not anything like what happened under prior administrations.

overstay89302• 1 year ago

This is completely normal in Germany, try and make an app that is too good at IPTV and you get a visit from the police.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

Wired source from last week:

Trump officials want to prosecute over the ICEblock app

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459075

ryandrake• 1 year ago

This article went from #3 on the front page of HN to #260 in ten minutes[1]. Talk about someone wanting to keep you from reading about it!

1: https://hnrankings.info

tomhow4• 1 year ago

Several users flagged this submission, correctly.

The topic of the app's launch was on the front page for several hours last week and generated a huge discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496729

This latest story doesn't seem to carry any "significant new information", which is a critical qualifier for a new HN thread.

The article's topic is the quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview, and even that was made – and reported – last week when the topic was still active on HN. It's a detail in the overall story that has already had major coverage here. If there was an arrest or some other material legal action, that would likely warrant a new thread.

Edit: I updated the comment to remove the incorrect implication that there is any new information in the article at all.

octo888• 1 year ago

Was it the actual flagging by users that deranked it? Or mod intervention based on those signals?

Not disagreeing with the action just curious about the ambiguity in your comment

rsynnott• 1 year ago

The only new information is a quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview

This feels like an illustration of just how unhinged the US has become, that the _AG threatening a private citizen_ is not considered major news. The frog is, if not boiled, at least sous-vide'd.

93po2• 1 year ago

i wish more people used hckrnews.com front end, it prevents issues like this

Sammi• 1 year ago

You realise what bias hn has when you use hckrnews.com and are able to see what they remove. Not that I think hn has a stronger bias than other forums, but it is there.

p3rls• 1 year ago

was it their SSL that expired yesterday? i briefly remembered how much i hate the default interface

kapildev• 1 year ago

Wouldn't using hn.algolia.com also solve the issue?

JohnTHaller• 1 year ago

For folks wondering why this is newsworthy, the Attorney General of the United States is threatening a US citizen with curtailing his protected speech.

DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app

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