Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ICE Agents

312 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by Aboutplants

110 Comments

monomania

7 hours ago

It'd be a shame if people started checking potential hires, tenants, dates, and business transactions against this info, cutting off ICE from large segments of the economy and society. I bet they'd feel really dehumanized.

Computer0

6 hours ago

Interesting to note that this would be illegal if said person decided to serve in a war you oppose. I think this law is unjust and you should be able to discriminate when hiring for occupational history.

xphos

5 hours ago

I think you only come out with this type of thinking if you've never really spent much time with people who served in the armed forces. Wars are declared by politicans not soldiers. Soldiers are enlisted to serve (at least in the US and most western nations) at the behest of the democratic body that employs them.

I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.

Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.

genocidicbunny

4 hours ago

> They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.

Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"

Computer0

2 hours ago

So we should ignore the atrocities of people who sold their soul for cash because they sold their soul?

zinodaur

4 hours ago

If you take their cookie for dropping their bombs - it seems like you’ve earned whatever blame comes your way for the people you kill. It never seems like much blame makes it back anyways

Computer0

3 hours ago

The military is for killing. I am fundamentally opposed to that. Anyone who signs up to be a soldier I have a moral qualm with.

justinhj

2 hours ago

Don't you feel grateful you likely have peace and security because of these people?

vrganj

22 minutes ago

In the case of the US, this view is pure propaganda.

Peace from who? Mexico? Canada? Which country is going to invade you?

All the American military does is bomb Middle Eastern countries and leave a huge mess. I do not believe US security is helped by bombing weddings and schools. I would even argue that it worsens it, by creating a bunch of people that lost their loved ones to those acts and that then turn to terrorism as a means of revenge.

whatshisface

6 hours ago

Of all the things our troops have to be to go on deployment, persuaded is not.

nilamo

3 hours ago

Luckily we haven't been in war for decades.

bronlund

4 hours ago

I approve. The problem isn’t surveillance, the problem is that everybody doesn’t have access to the data :D

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

Can you search for agents near me?

camel_gopher

9 hours ago

Local agents want to meet you.

bigwheels

8 hours ago

And they already know your location. They're 3 minutes away.

venusenvy47

6 hours ago

I clicked on various names in the database, and all of them showed "record created 2022-xx-xx" for every single one. (It was an actual date and time in that year that I can't remember.). I'm curious if this dump is for people that were employed there back in 2022, and would exclude the ones that joined after 2025. Or if there is something about the data format that makes that creation date inaccurate.

cdrnsf

6 hours ago

This calls for the world’s tiniest violin.

liveoneggs

9 hours ago

what was the okta config error?

eastbound

8 hours ago

Just upvoting to emphasize that Okta, SSO and MDM services in general are an extremely major single point of failure. From the point of view of a non-expert in security, it would seem like segmenting the authentication services of companies should be a security requirement.

bcvvvy

8 hours ago

Dunno why you’re downvoted. You’re not wrong.

Trusting an SSO system, or anything with security sensitive data on the public internet presents an attack surface with untenable risk when your adversary is thousands of people with LLM tools.

It’s going to take a lot of this before people realise using someone else’s computer is a pretty fucking stupid idea.

I mean Entra and Okta got popped. That should have been the point companies looked at this risk and went nope.

anal_reactor

4 hours ago

First, SSO is often non-negotiable. Otherwise employees spend a huge chunk of their working day just logging into different services.

Second, too complicated security setups often result in trivially hackable global passwords and shit like that because turns out, there are very few people willing to daily rotate and remember 30 different cryptographically random 256-bit arrays.

Third, no matter how robust your security setup is, there will always be someone who finds a flaw in it, so a much better solution is to just do bare minimum and get insurance.

It's strange to be that so many security experts are completely detached from how humans actually act.

RachelF

3 hours ago

Both are true, it is a single point of failure and a single point of convenience.

What always puzzles me about this stuff and critical infrastructure like nuclear powerplants, is why is an internal network connected to the public Internet at all?

If you have to connect it to the Internet, then why is it talking to unknown devices?

xvxvx

10 hours ago

In a note with the files, the hackers wrote, “They have our information, so it's only fair that we have theirs.”

I mean, they’re not wrong…

MrVandemar

5 hours ago

Lie to us, and we'll lie to you.

Spy on us, and we'll spy on you.

Poison us, and we'll poison you.

-- The East

tamimio

8 hours ago

What an interesting times, a hack the “exposes” people who are supposedly and should be publicly known to start with.

dbg31415

8 hours ago

Right? Let's just keep this list as a list of people who should never hold office, or work in law enforcement ever again once Trump goes.

"Leaks" like this should just be a FoIA request. Anyone enforcing the law should have their face, and badge number, prominently shown at all times.

That's how we show that we aren't ashamed of our laws. Any time it takes a mask to do your job... you know you're doing something you ought not be doing.

righthand

10 hours ago

This should already be public information imo.

derac

9 hours ago

Yes, why do we have undercover domestic spies and enforcers? Is that something we want? Vote!

Revanche1367

8 hours ago

If this was in another country that is not predominantly inhabited by people of western/central European heritage, US mainstream media would've been calling these "undercover" agents the "secret police" or "stasi" or some other term heavily connotated with tyranny and oppression.

spl757

7 hours ago

Woe is the one that must wear The Scarlet T

ck2

10 hours ago

Not sure how I feel about this but I am sure about one thing

There should never ever be a masked police force in this country, it's disgusting

Think about all the things we've written off in the past two years and faded from the news

Like military helicopters landing on a city building and them blowing the doors off all the apartments dragging everyone from their apartments

And all bets are off for the next two years, looks like Dems will get the Senate but even then they can't stop the scorched-earth that is coming

drop_star

10 hours ago

Remember when these people had issues wearing masks (Covid). Now all of a sudden its not a problem.

ck2

9 hours ago

I am not so sure people started saying "this is fine"

more like he started 1000 other fires, several each week if not a new one each day to make far worse problems

It's not just the most corrupt administration, it's the most chaos and definitely by design

btw all investigations dropped for the execution of two citizens, I mean that's definitely not fine with anyone, just way too many other problems going on now at the same time

well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days

ryandrake

9 hours ago

> well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days

This assumes The Other Side will do anything if they do get into power. My prediction: A milquetoast moderate leads the (D)'s and declares: "In the interest of unity and moving forward, we will not go after anyone in the previous administration. Let us all hold hands and get past this with minimal drama... They have pinkey promised they will never behave this way again when they get to power, and we believe them."

KerrAvon

8 hours ago

The Democratic base is way too angry for that to fly this time. If Jeffries tries it he'll be removed as speaker.

spencerflem

7 hours ago

Democratic politicians are the ones that could remove the speaker, not voters.

dabinat

8 hours ago

Part of the problem is that the justice system is as slow as molasses. They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough.

JumpCrisscross

3 hours ago

> They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough

This was mostly Merrick Garland being a muppet.

wredcoll

8 hours ago

Eh, owning the supreme court helps a lot. It moves pretty quickly when it needs to protect trump.

toomuchtodo

9 hours ago

It's wrong when they feel like it infringes on them, it's okay when it empowers and emboldens them to cause harm to others without repercussions.

pixelatedindex

9 hours ago

It feels more like a reverse psyop, like “look we are wearing masks now, isn’t this what you wanted”?

As long as the sides keep reducing common ground, the farther away from government for the people, by the people we go.

wredcoll

8 hours ago

Tell me more about how "the sides" are reducing "common ground"?

bediger4000

9 hours ago

Again, let's think of two children fighting over their shares of a cookie. Child A says he should get all of the cookie. Child B says that wouldn't be fair, the cookie should be split evenly, half and half.

The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.

denkmoon

9 hours ago

who exactly is the adult in the room supposed to be in this analogy? There _is_ no adult in the room, just the two children.

thrance

8 hours ago

The adult in the room here is the moralizing "enlightened centrist" that puts bothsideism in every conversation about politics.

DeluluDon

8 hours ago

Just remember that 1984 is fiction and not an instruction manual. Try not to get too authoritarian over demographics (any and all of them).

cowlevel

6 hours ago

This appears to be a complete non sequitur. Did you reply to the wrong comment by mistake?

SchemaLoad

8 hours ago

There's going to be massive trials over the next few years. So many people are going to have accountability catch back up to them. Maybe not the ultra rich but all these ICE goons shooting people on the street will be held accountable.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA

8 hours ago

I Want to Believe

analognoise

5 hours ago

They’re already starting state level charges against some of them. There’s definitely accountability coming.

sheepscreek

9 hours ago

Anytime I see one I can’t shake off the feeling I got when I first saw Watchmen. I thought “this is so dystopian and bizarre; so out there”. Didn’t have this in my bingo card for the decade.

havnagiggle

9 hours ago

The Senate can hold people in contempt with a 50% vote. So they could do something to reign in the fascists starting January, but I'm not holding my breath. And that's still a long road.

ck2

9 hours ago

Senate has no mechanism to prosecute contempt charges

That goes to the DOJ, which of course means nothing happens, at least for next 800 days

jfengel

9 hours ago

That opens a can of worms that you're never going to close.

Maybe this is such an emergency that it's worth the risk. But the risk is extremely high; if you do it to them, even with the best of reasons, they are going to do it back to you for any reason they can think of.

anon84873628

9 hours ago

Hence why it is important to be thorough.

Plus they will do it anyway. There is no shame or honor regulating their behavior.

Accountability is what was missed last time and is the only way forward.

wredcoll

8 hours ago

God I am tired of this argument.

What you're saying is that "we" shouldn't enforce the law because "they" will break the law in response.

Aside from being inherently morally bankrupt, they'rw already breaking the law.

nilamo

8 hours ago

Good! Both sides should be prosecuting each other over violating the constitution.

wredcoll

8 hours ago

Hey remember when we had a 2 (plus?) Year trial over whether or not the president had sex with someone other than his wife? Something about family values or morality or whatever they said at the time?

fn-mote

6 hours ago

What’s your point?

SpicyLemonZest

4 hours ago

"They" are currently trying to deport Ilhan Omar, a sitting Democratic senator. Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he's illegally running in the 2028 Presidential election. How much more open can a can of worms be?

nonethewiser

9 hours ago

Many will say that they wouldn’t need to protect their safety and privacy if they werent doing something wrong.

But in terms of if its ever appropriate for law enforcement to wear masks, isnt the question if its ever possible to threaten a law enforcement officers safety who isnt doing something wrong?

The FEDs wear masks in cartel operations all the time and that seems fine.

ethin

8 hours ago

I'm not really sure what your getting at. The entire reason that masked LEs are opposed is because (1) it makes it impossible to hold them to account and (2) it makes it trivial to impersonate any LE (ICE hasn't exactly tried all that hard to make special gear for themselves, just buying what's on EBay and similar, so literally anyone could just buy the same gear they're using and impersonate an ICE officer, and since ICE doesn't like identifying themselves, you would have no immediate way of distinguishing between a random citizen who wants to ruff you up or murder you versus a LEO)

KerrAvon

8 hours ago

Yup. This is not okay. It should be illegal. Maybe it is, IANAL. This person didn't know whether she was getting arrested or kidnapped or why. On top of which this is unnecessary brutality on the face of it. This needs to stop.

https://kotaku.com/umamusume-pretty-derby-cosplay-clara-tan-...

> As she hits the sidewalk, Tan hears what she describes as “a godawful crack” come from her foot, and then realizes she’s being cuffed behind her back. “I’m being kidnapped and I have no idea who these men are,” Tan writes. She’s dragged to an unmarked SUV, thrown in the back, and claims to have heard one of the men say, “This could all have been avoided if you’d just come quietly.”

dabinat

8 hours ago

They don’t have a right to privacy when they’re at work. The Supreme Court has said it is legal to film officers, including their faces, while carrying out their duties.

resters

8 hours ago

At first I hoped that fears about ICE abuses were overblown, but then I saw video after video of masked, badge-free agents manhandling and throwing grandmas and elderly/weak people to the ground and generally acting like thugs, stalking immigration courts for people trying to comply, doing nazi salutes, etc. It quickly became clear that ICE is largely made up of KKK or proud boy thugs who see it as a chance to brutalize a vulnerable population that they despise.

Now that this data has been leaked, identities can be correlated with facial recognition, gait analysis, and other biometrics to conclusively identify the agents who committed crimes. Much of the video footage shows agents flagrantly breaking the law, abusing power, violating the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Now that his leak has occurred, criminal ICE agents will be brought to justice for many of the crimes committed already, and the data will also inform the prosecution of crimes they will likely commit during the rest of Trump's term in office. Many of the crimes are violations of state law, so there is nothing the executive branch can do to stop the prosecutions.

blacklion

8 hours ago

Do you really believe in this?

You can see fate of Guantamo's officers and their chain of command. As far as I remember, nobody was really punished, several people were dismissed, but with full pension.

JumpCrisscross

3 hours ago

> Do you really believe in this?

I do. Guantanamo wasn't killing American citizens.

wyre

6 hours ago

Are you really asking if OP believes that ICE agents should face justice for the crimes and abuse they have committed?

cowlevel

6 hours ago

I think they're asking if GGP believes they will face justice. GGP used the word "will".

phs318u

10 hours ago

This is a dupe. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280691

The Techdirt article also links to the searchable front end to the dump.

https://icepi.cx/

paaloeye

9 hours ago

Not really

phs318u

9 hours ago

Yes really.

Jtsummers

9 hours ago

Per dang in many previous comments, it's not a dupe. Multiple submissions of the same topic are fine, it's only (maybe) a dupe when a discussion starts or it's actually the same submission. You linked to a submission with 0 comments submitted a whopping 15 minutes earlier. This one is the one that got traction, neither is a dupe. If someone submits it again, now that there is a discussion, or submits the same Wired article, then those would be dupes.

paaloeye

9 hours ago

wired vs something I've personally never heard before article vs a few paragraphs + image

Not really.

phs318u

5 hours ago

Not sure whether your or my having heard of a site before necessarily discounts it, especially given the closeness (or at least fear) of many larger media outlets with this administration.

Having said that, I couldn’t see the full article on Wired. I don’t have an account and I suspect many don’t. I could see it via archive.is.

nvr219

9 hours ago

Maybe really.

TacticalCoder

8 hours ago

At this rate soon it's going to be very suspicious if someone is not part of any leak ; )

morkalork

8 hours ago

Awfully convenient happening days before the midterm elections. Is this the precursor to a declaration of emergency? Perhaps after an act violence that was enabled by the leak?

paaloeye

8 hours ago

So cool, terrorist Karen can now easily email/LinkedIn/whatever escalate to a skip-level manager if an officer is misbehaving.

dlahoda

7 hours ago

I can now without leak. 5 top out of 11 levels of managers in leak seems tend to have LinkedIn anyway.

sailfast

8 hours ago

Whatever your feelings about ICE and this administration, there are probably some undercover folks in real danger at the moment. Probably doing some real work to stop some real abuses that you’d want them to stop. (Not saying all - but likely some / many to be in that program)

So - while I might agree that secretive domestic organizations like MI5 should not exist and sunlight is good for government, I feel for the families of the folks that might catch a bullet because of this.

simoncion

7 hours ago

> Whatever your feelings about ICE and this administration, there are probably some undercover folks in real danger at the moment.

I'll say the same thing that no one with access to a microphone said during the 2013 NSA data leaks:

What makes you think that the Bad Guys didn't already have access to this information? The folks that should have detected this clearly didn't. [0] Given that the Good Guys didn't learn about this until it was made public, neither they nor we have any idea of knowing how many Bad Guys have been siphoning off this data and for how long.

[0] In this specific incident, Okta appears to be claiming that there has been no breach despite claims that it is the source of the information. Back in 2013 -given that the NSA would often claim something that would be quickly countered by the publication of yet another leaked document- it was pretty clear that the NSA had little idea of what data had been released to the press.

sailfast

7 hours ago

I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely suggesting that there’s potential that non-state actors like a local human smuggling ring, drug ring, or human trafficking operation may now be able to easily type in some name and figure out they have been infiltrated.

Of course it’s possible some bad guys had this. But probably not all of them.

EDIT: I would also not equate these leaks to the NSA leaks in terms of resources and sophistication required to know about the NSA programs vs potential public access on the open internet with this one. Resources and intelligence required seems quite a higher bar, but that’s just me being an armchair quarterback.

simoncion

7 hours ago

> I’m merely suggesting that there’s potential that non-state actors like a local human smuggling ring, drug ring, or human trafficking operation may now be able to easily type in some name and figure out they have been infiltrated.

...what exactly do you imagine the Bad Guys would do with the information that they've likely been siphoning off of the systems of ICE and -in the past- the NSA? Do you imagine that they'd be exclusively distributing it via Sneakernet? Just like the Good Guys, the Bad Guys also have access to IT guys who know how to set up a login portal... and the well-resourced ones are totally capable of setting up things akin to SIPRNet.

sailfast

6 hours ago

I’ll update my threat model to include sophisticated non-state human traffickers or smugglers that are all sharing intel with each other if that’s what you’re suggesting? Or perhaps just selling in the dark to whomever is buying? Sounds like you know this is happening?

I’m not making a good guy / bad guy judgment here FWIW. I do, however, find it less likely a smaller scale non-state operation would bother hacking a government agency or buying info on the open market. Sounds like it’s a higher priority than I thought.

Makes sense for larger orgs at higher levels - but I admit my mental model didn’t think about parallel private attempts to exploit, sell, use and otherwise secure comms. It was a blind spot. Seemed too leaky and obvious given the incentives to leak information - but I clearly don’t understand bad guys very well.

chneu

8 hours ago

Hell nah. They signed up for this. They knew exactly what their mission was. Stop defending people who were recruited to deport, and in many cases assault, innocent people.

Making lame excuses for "the good guys" reinforces that these people are doing good. They arent.

Your excuse will be used against you as soon as it's convenient to them.

reallydoingthis

7 hours ago

And who's going to make them pay? You? What do you have planned? Can you take the heat after?

sailfast

7 hours ago

I don’t personally believe that everyone at ICE is specifically focused on this administration’s efforts (most are of course and many have quit in protest). In the past, the agency has done work that you’d probably want done around human smuggling and trafficking, anti-terrorism (actual terrorism) etc, and I wouldn’t paint all agents with such a broad brush. People stick around in the hopes they can do a good job again when the next guy lands. Sometimes!

Anyway - I just wanted to point out that these things can have consequences in the real world for people that aren’t necessarily the evil people you paint a picture of in your head. This isn’t a “oh just a few bad apples” thing - on the contrary that agency is quite rotten and should be disbanded.

Not a value judgment. Just sayin’ that this dump is 53+ certified undercover legal names out in the open.

spl757

7 hours ago

ICE, today, is an illegal militia that appears to have killed at least 3 citizens in cold blood. Bad actors get away with it when good actors look the other way and do nothing. If you work for ICE right now, you know just how unpopular they have become. You have to bend the knee to be in this administration, so FAFO I guess.

sailfast

2 hours ago

Unfortunately it’s very much a legal militia until proven otherwise.

Know that you don’t have to bend the knee to work for the government. You still have your oath, your union, and the knowledge that this ends in two years. Many have left, but not all. Those who stayed don’t necessarily agree or like what is happening.

aliasxneo

7 hours ago

Literally had to scroll to the bottom of the thread to find any sort of sensible comment. HN is in such sad state these days. Sorry you were downvoted by the radicals.