Yup, but here is the rub: you and me can't buy the real stuff. You have to be a professional law breaker, which means you are in organized crime (don't forget the white collar guys), or you are working for Intelligence, in whatever capacity, in whatever oversight. The problem is that for offensive surveillance organizations the line between crime and work gets blurred quickly. That is why I am not too enthusiastic that our Dutch intelligence agency will receive offensive capabilities as well. Information is power, and you will soon end up with an organization that feels limited by oversight, but that also can easily accumulate means to evade such oversight. Bonus points if people from those kinds of organizations find their way in legislative branches or overseeing powers.

This has been a process of decades. Also surveillance, cybercrime and business do connect. If you look at the history of capital flows in the US, you will see a massive shift of capital from military has been redirected to the surveillance industry. If you would cut out surveillance from the USA economy, things would look quite different. The stock market is heavily skewed towards companies with this business model. As food for thought, think about what the GDP looks like without Apple, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc. To give an example of just one facet, Meta alone makes billions on crime each year [1] and will fight toot and nail anyone who dares to threaten their business model of addiction and privacy violation. To continue down this path against the interests of the public, these companies feel confident enough to try their hands at dangerous games [2], of which history teaches us that will always end in tears, because zero-sum is in the end a hunger game.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[2] https://abc45.com/news/nation-world/big-tech-ceos-attend-tru...

They're suggesting[1] they'll be attempting arrests at polling locations, which due to the statistics on fraudulent votes(statistically microscopic), equates to interference and intimidation since we know ICE isn't beyond arresting US citizens to harass them. This will have a chilling effect on citizens who are remotely non-white, who may avoid voting in person due to the risks associated with interacting with the under-trained ICE forces.

Additionally, USPS's current plans[2] for purging mail-in votes will disenfranchise the other method of voting.

[1]https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/dhs-chief-says-i...

[2]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whistleblower-postal-service-ne...

They're the leading agency in the US involved in stopping human trafficking and child exploitation. Unfortunately the good work they do is being overshadowed by the other nonsensical shit.

Modern American version of the SS.

causing misery

I know you all are here getting ready for a circle jerk, however ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They monitor all goods and such coming and going from the country.

Ok, so they can amortize expense and scarcity. But if they are reusing exploits, why isn't WhatsApp or the phone OS patched? I'm confused how they can be known functional infections, used multiple times, and then not get checked by the vendors? Even not be thwarted by some incidental app-patch. WhatsApp and Signal must know of this, don't they have some AI tools to fuzz and fix?

Tech in general (including HN) skews right wing. The era of the countercultural social rebel is long over. Now it's largely just people who have the bag defending the status quo and a whole bunch more people who think they'll one day be holding the bag so are defending the status quo. Tech companies are now fundamentally just defense contractors.

There are an awful lot of people who don't hate opression. They simply hate being oppressed. And those are two very different things.

This claim probably upsets a bunch of people who don't want to think of themselves as right wing. They'll point to rainbow flags in their bios at the same time they're the most NIMBY people in the Bay Area and they basically want homeless people to just die.

The illegal immigrants are not as scary as ICE.

I’m sure we could come up with a better system than paying extreme amounts of money to detain in terrible conditions non-violent people who were following the rules that were previously given to them.

[dead]

> Still, Laura Loomer shouldn't have the power to advance his deportation.

This is a really key point. Trump operates like a mafia boss. Being in the protected class is a privilege that is fully dependent on the perception of the boss and those close to him. "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law."

It's not a good way to run a country. Did we have perfectly applied rule of law before the Trump era? No, but Trump is bringing us to new extremes of legal inequality.

The real terrifying aspect of this whole story has nothing to do with Milo Vs ICE.

It's the fact that these previously cartoonish figures on Twitter are now wielding some level of power.

People love to say "oh just get off those bad social medias", but that fails to recognize how there is now multiple social media sites exercising a high level of coercion and misinformation that is injecting the previously goofy "it's just online" into real life.

The white nationalism that has been boosted by Elon and co IS REAL. It will have lasting effects on every facet of our society. The people who used to be internet clowns are now deporting their enemies.

I can't emphasize this enough, this is BAD.

There is no one with any level of morals or ethics at the wheel. It makes too much money to tear apart society. You can bring up endless cliches, "mainstream media", "billionaires", "politics". But the fact is, news channels have spent endless hours covering Hassan(the twitch streamer) and avoiding actual news. Nearly every facet of society has been captured to manipulate us, and there is no good ending for any of this.