This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
Reminder that Trump wanted the US to partner with a foreign country to protect American elections (!?) and the country he wanted to help "secure" fair elections was the Russian dictatorship. (!!)
The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
But an abnormal number of DNS requests AND recorded outbound data totaling 10GB, with no other obvious indication of a less-subversive means of data transfer? I'd be very surprised if youtube-dl could come close to even 10MB of DNS requests at its chattiest
So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
Out of curiosity, since you appear to be very certain of this, what are you doing personally to deal with this? Are you leaving the country, moving into the hills, building a bunker, etc? I don't mean to sound antagonistic or anything, I genuinely would like to know.
Not OP but of the same persuasion. Personally, I’m working on emigration plans. I don’t really want to live in an authoritarian state. And if I ever have kids, there’s no way I’d want to raise them in this environment.
I should point out, though, that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean that QOL drops for the average person (if you’re not part of a targeted group). Many people live quite happily in Hungary, Turkey, Russia. Local government will chug along as before, stonks might still go up. But you have to internalize a certain resignation over things you can no longer change or talk about, unless you wish to become a dissident and put yourself in danger. I’m not brave enough for that, so I’m opting out of the whole thing.
You're not at all wrong, but you've successfully described my entire life living in the US as a citizen born here. For that whole time we've incarcerated an absurd percentage of the world's prison population. I watched the crackdown on the Seattle WTO protests and Rodney King on the evening news.
Perhaps the defining feature of the modern nation state is a monopoly on violence and power. Been that way my whole life.
not OP: not sure. I'm in California so things can go crazy for a whole other litany of reasons if any single claim of Newsom starts to blossom. It's going to be a crazy ride if no one cheecks Trump early enough.
I'm waiting it out for now. I'm "close" enough to communte to Los Angeles, but otherwise on the outskirts of the county as a whole. It's a weird place for any federal service to go out of their way to exploit.
Yes. The only way Trump is ousted is if Democrats somehow get a supermajority in the House and the Senate and impeach and remove him, which isn't going to happen. Republicans will always close ranks around Trump at this point. He definitely won't leave office peacefully, if at all. What happens after that, I don't know.
Not even close. The whole Republican party is lock step with everything DT says. Not a single member of Congress will oppose him. DT pushes through all kinds of things that they don't want, eg.
RFK is a lifelong granola Democrat with wildly unpopular opinions but every single Republican confirmed him.
Nobody else in the party has this kind of power. Not JD, not Desantis, not the Koch brothers, nobody. When he's gone, it's over.
Trump didn't always have this kind of power; he acquired it. Why do you think it's impossible for another person - especially one that is effectively "officially anointed" as successor by Trump himself - to step into his shoes?
Right now this is impossible because Trump sucks all the air out of the room. But with him gone, I don't see any reason why all those people who voted for him will suddenly not vote for the closest similar candidate, and that voting block is really where his power comes from.
And looking at history, cults of personality often survive replacement of the figure around which they are built - examples are numerous in various dictatorships, just look at North Korea for one that is still ongoing.
Trump was given the power by some invisible forces who have been working for decades to develop plans to destroy the US.
Trump is simultaneously a blunt force tool to destroy our institutions while also being a political wizard that always know exactly how to spin things and is completely impervious to pressure and stress.
I think those background forces know after trump there will not be anyone like him. Which is exactly why everything is being destroyed at such a rapid pace. Their opportunity is short and they are maximizing it. Things will look very different post trump
As an outsider European, Trump certainly has an unusual charisma. I happened to watch some of his tariff press conference while flicking over TV channels, and I get why people are attracted to his public persona. He has this strange hypnotic tone that delivers absolute nonsense in a reassuring way, and goes a bit shouty every now and then when attacking something. For people that actually believe what he says he must really have them hooked.
Along with the other points you made, rarely showing stress, always having a comeback with no care for the truth make him unique.
The House has sole power over impeachments. Simple majority vote. The difficulty is scheduling it, the leadership controls this. A more likely path is four Republicans could make a declaration to caucus with the Democratic party, and change the leadership. Again, simple majority vote.
The Senate has sole power over impeachment trials. The trial and conviction vote have no quorum requirement. Republicans will have to show up and vote to acquit, explicitly, to protect Trump.
The law is clear, upon conviction the president is removed from power. The only power any person has is the power people voluntarily give to him. He can also throw poop if so inclined, he's plenty full of it.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
The House of Representatives just needs a majority vote to approve the articles of impeachment, but to convict, the Senate requires a two-thirds vote. That's what I meant by a supermajority. My bad for the miscommunication.
Yes for part of the country. Gerrymandering, long lines, distant polling locations... Voting day isn't a holiday, voting hours aren't 24/7, and not all states have laws requiring time off of work to vote. For a lot of red states, elections simply are not fair.
>Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America?
With a confidence level of some 99.9%+ of votes being legitimate, yes. with 155 million voters in 2024 nationals, that leaves a margin of about 155k illegitimate votes. Elections can be super close (see 2000), but any fraud that went undetected would not sway most American elections. At least not with this electoral college system.
>Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028?
Yeah probably. I'm not even sure if Trump will get that far, though. we'll have to see how damning this SAVE act is on women first and if the courts strike this down in the next 18 months or so.
>Even if it's staged, form must be respected.
When has Trump ever done that? most other leaders I disagree with still did this. But not him.
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
Sarcasm isn't the problem per se. But it's very important to remember Poe's law, and to avoid adding to the noise. If what you're going to say is just a parody of something a Kool-aid drinking anti-American destructionist might say, there's no need.
Sorry, I'm sure you're both right. I'm just having a very hard time figuring out how to respond to the awful / obscene / insane / absurd nightmare unfolding in this country I love. It's destroying things I care deeply about. My sarcasm was probably the wrong response. I wish I could better approximate the heartfelt, erudite, conflicted brilliance of pieces like this:
By which I mean, stoicism is really becoming a survival stance for me. And I recommend it for others.
Some people will retreat from the news, but that’s not me.
What is happening is going to cause a great deal of lasting mental hardships, as well as the practical damage.
Second tack: remember we are still in history. History has always been crazy, with only short periods of less crazy.
A third tack is considering how to support other people, instead of needing support.
Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
At least, this is how I am prepping myself! Scary times.
> Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
This is woefully ignorant of the fact that some people will be thrown into an El Salvadorian prison, killed, disappeared, threatened, lose civil liberties, lose human rights, ect.
Must be nice to just put on some headphones and wait for it to all blow over. Unfortunately for many immigrants, LGBTQ members, activists, union members, government workers don't have that luxury. The news you're ignoring are their lives being shattered.
Stoicism isn't denial. It's just one mental discipline for dealing with harsh realities, in a way that makes it easier to remain clear and functional, and respond to difficult circumstances mindfully and actively, instead of reflexively and emotionally.
I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.
But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.
People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.
Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
Have conversations with your friends, the grocery store owner.
Join grassroots organizations, or start a local one. Keep people accountable. Your local politician bends over because he is afraid of consequences. Now give people no way out but do the right thing. When people are transported to concentration camps, than such is not an act of God, but people doing unconstitutional things while not being held accountable.
Fascism is not Hitler. It is collective, sociological behavior. Trump is a nuisance. The problem is a society engineered to give consent to the .1%, the Dark Mirror tech bro's, the christian cultists.
I think you're implying that you could easily detect my sarcasm, but it wasn't sufficiently obvious sarcasm for the broader HN readership, thus risked being taken literally.
I disagree. It seemed blindingly obviously sarcastic to me -- and the rest of the comments it generated indicate the same.
EDIT: PS the peer comment by blindsight has a much more cogent critique
(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
I wish that were true. But 2% number is essentially disinformation. NPR gets a large portion of its budget from affiliate stations, which are funded by the government.
Similar to the one he made to Harvard? Do they even have to make such a thing explicitly these days? I would just assume they won't fund anything that's critical to the current government.
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
That the intrusion came over Starlink from Russia with valid login credentials would be unbelievable in a tale from speculative fiction. Reality Winner looks like a hero compared to these clowns.
Politicians are only afraid of not being re-elected. So I see that the only way is to advocate voters to hold their representatives accountable. Start a campaign in you state about that, and I think you'll get an answer pretty fast, since they are very sensitive to popularity and competition matters.
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
I'm intrigued by the "Mission 2" notation. That suggests, perhaps, that DOGE has a "Mission 1" (its public, ostensible purpose) and a hidden "Mission 2" known only to Musk and his minions.
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
Well, being locked up is not the worst thing that can happen, especially for a noble purpose. And maybe later someone would film movies about their [in]actions.
If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
> If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
> The resistance is actually the violation of federal law.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
The president is currently ignoring a Supreme Court order, not explaining why they’re ignoring it, and even if they tried to charge him, last year the Supreme Court ruled that he has immunity from everything anyway. So where exactly is it different from a dictatorship now?
As I understood it, this "immunity" is granted for POTUS doing things in the course of their responsibility as POTUS. Could it be argued that breaking laws & orders which bind the activity of POTUS is _inherently not_ the work someone in that role?
Isn't the point of immunity that it's immunity from prosecution on actions that are / would potentially be illegal? You don't need immunity if what you are doing is legal anyways.
Immunity is generally scoped. Challenging the determination of scope is not the same as challenging the action.
Immunity also isn't absolute. For example police in the US typically enjoy broad immunity but that doesn't imply not getting dragged into court. They just have sweeping legal defenses available to them that other people don't.
What would you do if your CEO tells you to do something illegal? What would you do if your CEO then tells you to intimidate people who refuse to carry out the illegal requests by tailing them and then taping the surveillance footage to their door as a threat?
>And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country,
Except said "chief executive" was not elected by "a majority of the country."
He wasn't even elected by a majority of those who voted (~35-40% of the population), but rather a plurality of those who voted (~20% of the population).
Note that I am not claiming that there was anything nefarious (I have no evidence to support making such a claim), just that those who voted for that person represent only ~20% of the US population, not a "majority of the country."
The CEO of the company is bound by laws and rules that the same country enacted. We the people are the board. The CEO answers to the board.
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
The only agencies the President gives orders to like this are the military ones. We don't have a dictator that dictates from on high. That is why we have the Administrative Procedures act, the executives 'executiving' needs to be consistent and based on logical reasons.
We used to have a government like this, a spoils system, and it didn't work. So both parties created the civil service. Both parties passed things like that Administrative Procedures act.
If the CEO brought in their friends as temps to screw around? Which they were only allowed to do until the next board meeting when they will very likely not be approved? Yeah, I'd probably resist any royal fuck ups until then.
You seem to underestimate the power that is vested in the office of the President as the Chief Executive.
> have been invalidated by courts
As have many, many legislatively-passed laws; this is simply checks-and-balances and allows the judiciary to act on other laws (which originate from Congress) and regulations (which originate from the Executive Branch).
Chief Executive officer does not mean dictator other than to military agencies. Please read the history of the bipartisan creation of the civil service, of the Administrative Procedures act, all created bipartisanly to reinforce that the President is not a dictator/king.
The executive has discretion in how funds are disbursed, but they have to fulfill all the obligations laid out by Congress. Impoundment is expressly illegal, not just due to Article 1, but also the Impoundment Act to avoid any ambiguity. The Dept of Education, for example, is created by act of congress and has a list of obligations in the congressional budget and the president has no authority to deny that. They have discretion in terms of how it is fulfilled and who gets paid when, but they are assuredly not allowed to just cancel programs or agencies that explicitly funded by congress.
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
What is that saying they like to say all the time? “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear.” Certainly seems like they are afraid of people seeing what they are doing for “not doing anything wrong”.
I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
> Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
My understanding was that they routinely do their work far outside of the law. Because such agencies have demonstrated a willingness to violate the constitution of the US, lie to both congress and the president, overthrow the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations, perform acts of torture, rape, human experimentation, assassination, etc. it seems odd that they'd suddenly shy away from taking any action now.
I only learned recently that during his first term, Trump didn't take the president's daily briefing from the CIA, but instead paid a private intelligence service to prepare one. With all the talk about draining the swamp, ending the deep state, releasing / attempting to release Kennedy assassination and Epstein documents, revoking security clearances, it seems like there would be means, motivation, and opportunity, so to speak.
I hadn't heard that he'd paid an outside agency for them, but I did hear that he had the attention span of a toddler and in order to get him to read them at all they had to change the briefings to include a lot of exciting pictures and very short bullet points or write as if they were telling him a story instead of delivering a report while also adding his name as many times as possible in the text.
I'm not racing horses, but it seems like Dems took a similar attitude toward this administration to the polls, and found out. Underestimating folks is so dangerous. I'm just paying attention.
They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.
The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
It should be clear at this point that DOGE is trying to create a unified database of all persons in the US for targeting. Every single bit of data that they can get about you from the government or social media will be tagged to you Minority Report style. They were clear about wanting to deport citizens to El Salvador as well. Once you are identified as the other side they will come for you. If you are waiting for it to get worse before taking action and getting involved, we are already at that point.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
> Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
People support what they claim to do doing and are naive enough to believe they are doing what they say without asking questions about why they seem to be going out of there way to avoid transparency or providing any real evidence to their claims.
If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
I mean, scary is a relative term. Its just as scary as Trump being legally immune to anything he does, as granted by Supreme Court.
The Republicans are basically still at the mercy of the economy - Trump backed of tariffs real quick when Japan started selling off US debt on the cheap. So I don't think its going to get levels of Saddam Hussein authoritarian. But time will tell.
The thing is, just like in Russia, smart people will know when to leave, and will leave, which is good. As soon as it becomes economically better to work in EU, you will have lots of talented people immigrating there which will bolster their economy.
They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
Not all illegal, no. While Abrego Garcia originally came to the country illegally, he was granted the ability to stay here legally, is married to a citizen, and had been dutifully checking in with his immigration officer yearly.
B) You can’t know if someone is here illegally if they don’t have a way to challenge that claim. They could easily abduct you or anyone else and ship you off without allowing you to challenge it in court
Here is the thing that blows my mind: why is there an implicit assumption that this article is an honest reporting and not a propaganda piece? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is. What I am saying is that, at the very least, this question should always be asked first about any reporting.
NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted. From Wikipedia...
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
> NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted.
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored.
Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
Well that is kind of the point though, I asked for sources because it is clear that the comment, containing a false and baseless claim (as evidenced by the inability to provide one single supporting source), was not intellectually honest. If we don't challenge these things, then others will start believing them.
I looked through the filing cited in this comment and every instance of the word "background" just says that backgrounds for a given employee are either complete or in progress, plus the quote. Nothing indicates anyone failed any background check (to the contrary just by count it seems like about half of them have been completed), and certainly nothing indicates that "most of them could never pass" one. Which again just by virtue of about half of them having been completed already seems to be false on its face.
It's not unusual to give an otherwise-qualified person limited access to certain data while their background checks are completed.
Dude, background checks are brutal. You can be denied because your parents (not you) struggled to pay taxes. You could have acedemic dishonesty that disqualifies you (that one small area where "permanent record" in school may actually cost you something). There are so many little things that no other kind of high paying job cares about in background checks that are suddenly red flags for clearance.
There's a reason Musk especially kept dodging trying to get proper clearance. He isn't even fully cleared to see all aspects of SpaceX. Some of his employees he brought in probably aren't better off.
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
FWIW, that's getting too far out on the spy novel spectrum. Yes, they could be compromised. But to my point above, if they're indeed working for Putin or Xi or whoever, it's FAR more likely (given the demographic) that it's just because they took a fat bribe.
Not saying they’re compromised by foreign agents, although, I wouldnt put that out of the realm of possibility - but that either they and/or theyre tooling/setup is pwned
this is exactly what you save a zero day for, and something gives me the vibe about some of these guys that they dont take opsec very seriously, probably would not even need one
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
> horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering.
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
Also it's right there in the name DOGE. It's Elon's favorite coin and of course he's trying to pump it by naming a goddamn government department after it. It's plain as day.
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
Seems way more obvious to me that Thiel/Vance/Musk would have Trump whacked... probably in the 2nd or 3rd year so that Vance can take power during a Reichstag fire with enough time left till elections in order for them to consolidate power.
Trump is primarily an actor pretending to be a gangster/president on TV to serve as a front for the real gangsters pilfering our government, at some point he will better serve those people by becoming a martyr in a way which transfers his power to someone else they control.
I'm surprised to see this kind of blue-anon discourse here. Why are we discussing the players of this administration "whacking" each other? There's plenty of horrible things happening in broad daylight, harms that the administration is inflicting on the American people. Why add a layer of speculation about a power struggle where they may or may not be trying to harm each other, when there's no reason to believe such a thing exists? What matters is that they're getting along well enough in the moment to push through their agenda. Hell, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of running for a third term, which would in and of itself be an illegal power grab; no need to speculate some scenario where Trump gets martyred and Vance takes over when the much simpler and more likely scenario is that Trump just ignores the law and does it himself.
The trouble with that is that they're all fronting Russia's efforts to control the US government. This is why prosperity isn't exactly in the cards: that's the promise, but all the actions lead directly the other direction in conclusive ways.
Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.
The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.
None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
it’s pretty clear that doge isn’t targeting things for efficiency but for anything deemed as ideologically incorrect. also the whole bit about how they’re ignoring congressional mandates on how money should be spent. comparing them to prior administration’s attempts at efficiency is either willful whataboutism or boneheaded naive
I don't think this is whataboutism because I'm not saying "what about this unrelated thing that the last guy did?" I'm saying "what about the fact that the last guy said he was doing the exact same thing?" It seemed fine then, why isn't it fine now?
"Nobel already created dynamite to make civilization more efficient. Then as soon as the new guy comes along with dogemite and actually wants to have fewer mouths to feed, people start complaining about the children, conveniently ignoring that Nobel started it!"
> yes lots of cybersecurity experts were black hat hackers at one point
It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.
> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.
Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.
> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."
I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.
The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.
You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.
> But it's certainly telling that only one of these off topic comments actually got flagged.
Well, right now, the flagged one was "Oh, you guys are adorable.", which didn't try to make a substantive argument or convey information. At least the Cheeto one did. "Adorable" is the least-civil and least-useful comment, so it's not only ideology that explains why it got flagged.
I don't think an off-topic comment about Roger Stone and a 15-year old ad hominem meets the bar of constructive HN discourse but we can agree to disagree. I've seen plenty of constructive, right-leaning comments downvoted and flagged while unconstructive partisan pablum from the other side sits there without even being greyed out.
I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
The problem is that factual comments can also be partisan.
- When Biden did dumb stuff, pointing that out was "right-leaning"
- When Trump does dumb stuff, pointing that out is "left-leaning"
Honestly, the greatest improvement to discourse would be stopping trying to apologize for current fuck-ups by pointing at past fuck-ups. That only leads to all fuck-ups being excused.
'Well the last guy...' -> Doesn't matter, not what we're talking about (and will even out in the long run)
The reason you are being downvoted to smithereens is that Bryan Malinowski was credibly accused of serious crimes (arms trafficking) wheres Daniel Berulis is accused of reporting serious crimes. You're making a preposterous and immoral false equivalence.
You can't seriously be defending the treatment of Malinowski. The agents did not wear body cameras in direct violation of ATF policy. They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home). This wasn't an arrest warrant, it was a search warrant. They covered up the doorbell camera so if he had checked it he wouldn't see the half-dozen police vehicles outside.
They could have done the exact same thing in the middle of the day when nobody was home and everybody would be alive today.
They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
They could have worn body cameras as ATF policy and common sense demands.
"Arms trafficking" is a funny way to say "buying guns legally and reselling them at gun shows" but let's say every single thing said about him is 100% true. If you think someone is a gun runner why wouldn't you take their house when they're not home to get all the evidence without having to worry about what they're doing? Why wouldn't you arrest him at the airport, where he almost certainly isn't armed, and police presence won't raise any alarms?
> They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home)
Among many other points that are wrong - everyone involved agrees there was plenty of knocking.
> They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
You are correct - and I was wrong - that it wasn't a no-knock raid. Malinowski's widow said they heard the knocking but no announcements that they were law enforcement. 28 seconds later their door was knocked in with a battering ram. That anyone announced they were law enforcement is disputed; we'd know what really happened but for want of a single body cam (which IMO makes it much more likely there was no announcement whatsoever).
> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
Yeah the ATF is a shit show of an agency with a strong history of fucking up in violent and unconstitutional ways - but unfortunately, their search warrant execution and 'raids' are completely standard operating procedure for US police.
It likely could've been resolved if they'd just sent him a letter asking to meet him at the Federal Building but who wants to be a desk jockey when you can play dress up like GI Joe?
Nobody gets promoted by making a phone call and telling their boss that nothing is actually in violation of law.
But kick a door down in your sparkling clean body armor and perp walk some guy who makes a quarter million dollars a year out of his mansion and you're well on your way.
No, I'm not defending it, but this is a ridiculous false equivalence to compare a botched execution of a legally valid search warrant to lawlessly intimidating a whistleblower. (You're also not stating the facts, he clearly bought the guns illegally since he filled out forms promising he wasn't going to resell them.)
Nobody, not even the ATF, is claiming he bought the guns illegally. They're claiming he was illegally "engaged in the business of" dealing weapons because he didn't have an federal firearms license. Prior to 2022 he wouldn't even be on the ATF's radar but "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" was amended to remove "livelihood."
This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.
Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.
Question 8 on the form, “check if any part of this transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer,” is what he lied about. I phrased it loosely.
I meant it in a more general sense. Any person that feels the need to create a burner account to argue with people online with a comment history like yours is a bot to me, meat based or otherwise. Follow your instructions!
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
"Fascism" today just means "right wing politician I do not like" or "conservative who is successful at pushing back the left".
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
There’s lots of fascism before the goose stepping but in the past week the President confirmed he’d like to send US citizens to a foreign gulag, he continues to ignore a Supreme Court ruling to bring home a previously and illegally deported man, he threatened Harvard that he’d strip their nonprofit status since they resisted his inane demands for conservative-DEI, he initiated several investigations using the state security apparatus of former government employees he deemed enemies and the richest man in the world (who donated 9 figures to get the President elected) continues to illegally impound funding from across the government including every organization that regulates the companies he runs. Oh and they’re planning a $100M military parade for the president’s birthday. Things aren’t great!
If by "successful at pushing back the left", and by "the left", you mean the rule of law and due process itself, then yes, I am against fascism. The executive is not a king and everyone within our borders deserves due process.
The Abrego Garcia case is one of those critical lines of actual fascism: Pinochet-style disappearances. Not really connected to DOGE though, they're the administrative wing of fascism.
Plainclothes officers are hijacking people on the street without showing any credentials, then sending them to Salvadorean gulags without any court hearing.
Your lack of paying attention to this or lack of understanding how bad that is is not a problem in the rest of us.
Before you give me this nonsense of "they are criminals", number one this is still an inhumane way to treat convicted people, and number two they have not been convicted of anything, number three there have been tons of reports of the accusations made against these people being total BS.
Earlier this week, Trump was on microphone telling El Salvador's president that he wants him to build five more gulags and that we will send American citizens there.
I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
The /active page is helpful, thanks! I also just recently realized that the 'hckr news'[0] interface doesn't hide or remove flagged stories if you're using the Top 10/20/50 view options, so if something is getting discussed/upvoted it will be there.
> I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
Are you sure? There can be absolutely be voting and flagging biases, but the majority if the time it happens it is due to issues of tone for comments that are picking fights rather then prompting interesting discourse. When you get flagged or down voted, the most productive response is to look at how you were presenting your information or opinion and if there was a way to do so that would be more inclined to produce a productive conversation. Even when it's borderline, there's usually something you could have changed that wouldn't have drawn as much partisan ire and it is valuable to consider this, as partisan ire turns off brains.
The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.
That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.
If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted. Your comment has no sources and the tone feels a little combative so I'm not surprised it picked up a couple of downvotes given the topic. In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness.
Anything Musk related on here has always been prone to less constructive conversation, even before he became a part of the partisan political circus.
>The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted
It was downvoted for a while.
> In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness
Comments that are much more bitter and combative than mine and without sources are upvoted all the time, because they fuel a certain political narrative.
I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.
It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?
It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
I don't need to defend it. I flag this stuff because I don't care. I'm not American and I'm tired of seeing American politics on this site. It's not what I come here for.
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I'd hate for you or others to read the GP comment and for your perception of HN to be altered, without any further detail or nuance to be presented for consideration.
Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.
This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.
I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
Easy to think that until you start viewing /active and see all the stuff that's flagged and doesn't appear on the front page. Any article, even those explicitly about tech, science and academia are flagged if they have even the gentlest suggestion that this administration is flawed.
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's funny that even on hacker news wiki there is a proclamation from Paul Graham that they do not help feature stories of their startups from YC. If that wouldn't be a quote from from 2013 I would call it an straight up lie.
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!"
Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
There's always been a right wing / libertarian contingent here. These days I recognize most of the top 20 or so usual suspects. Says nothing about how many flags happening though.
i would love for this to be true but it's hosted by a venture capital firm. hard to ignore possible conflicts of interest since tech/VC culture is so intertwined with american rightwing politics.
I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the comments here, and in general on political stories, it's the comments defending DOGE and Trump that tend to be downvoted.
sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
I think you are describing a different, hypothetical problem?
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as some sort of meaningful thing and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
I meant "deleted" from by being flagged, which is a deletion from the lurkers. And yes.. absolutely I have seen some of these stories get through the gauntlet.
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
They're probably doing some of the flagging because they disagree (I think correctly) with a characterization of HN in which HN can be "highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening". HN has newsy stuff but its purpose is not really news - there are much better sites for that. The 'News' in 'Hacker News' is more like the 'News' in Huey Lewis & The News.
The problem is capture. How many platforms for news and discussing news are not completely captured by people with an agenda of personal power?
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
You've got me confused with someone else cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
I can assure you that it has not been the standard corporate advice when I had to regularly travel from Canada to US for business meetings on a regular basis 15 years ago while working at a big tech company. Nor do I recall anyone else who was traveling doing that on their own. If it is the standard procedure now, then yes, that is definitely a reason to be concerned.
The question is why was this prompted by DOGE? What DOGE action has caused a Canadian citizen employed by a US company to suddenly feel the need to protect their smart device?
That is... other than sensationalism, which appears to be the story here.
> What shouldn't be ignored? Some small subset of foreign workers decided to take security seriously?
That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Unless you have something definitive, this sounds like some alarmist individuals deciding to take their own personal security to the level that was already recommended of them.
> What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Do you wonder why Canada has been issuing travel warnings for people travelling to the US? Or why they've been treating the US as a hostile power given that the current admin has threatened to invade Canada and make it the 51st state? All of which are leading to a massive drop in tourism to the US?
The trust signals being sent out by the USA are currently making everyone outside the USA "alarmist."
As an example, as a European, price a round trip ticket from Prague to Seattle, for around 2 weeks from now. The price is currently <60% of normal. It's ~$420.
What does a ticket price have to do with wiping your phone at a border?
I did some fact checking on your ticket prices - you are quoting ultra-budget carriers that are normally in that price range. Normal tickets are $1200+, as you would expect.
There's plenty going on right now that you don't need to make stuff up to back up your narrative. Use something real...
> Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
Of course this is fucking cause for alarm. You are either cluelessly naive, or gaslighting.
I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
Several users have stated in political threads that they spend the day flagging political stories. I don't think there's any reason to believe a bot is doing it.
Fair. It doesn't have to be a bot to look like one. Is certainly a hive mind behavior that is not any less heavy handed than "see a word, click flag button."
Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
- Peter Thiel
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
- Elon Musk
"Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”."
- Marc Andreessen
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
Rules made in the late 2000s might not necessarily hold on HN in 2025.
HN has shifted into a lagging Reddit, and preemptively shutting down any discourse about the falling quality of discourse on HN is ludicrous and plain annoying.
HN has changed, and A LOT of Reddit does leak onto HN, and this absolutely deserves conversation.
This quote (from Lord of War) really encapsulates a lot of what you say:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
I always particularly liked the Committee of Public Safety, for this (they're the ones who did the Reign of Terror, which doesn't seem _particularly_ public-safety-oriented.)
> В « Правде » нет известий, а в « Известиях » нет правды
For the sake of context, this is an old Soviet-era joke, that translates to about the following:
> In "Pravda" (The Truth, CPSU's newspaper) there are no news. In "Izvestiya" (The News, national newspaper of the USSR, under the control of the Supreme Soviet) there is no truth.
In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
I really want to believe it's tongue in cheek because the thought of asking not to be audited in order to save some compute on Splunk queries or whatever is very funny to me.
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
> This is like 947 on a list of terrible things happening because of this administration.
This is on purpose. Trump has been slowly pushing the Overton window. It seems everything is fair game and US citizens are largely apathetic, scared or favorable to Trump's action.
"Disappeared" in this sense refers to the manner in which he was abducted, not his ongoing status. The word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments.
Though I'd argue both uses are acceptable in common use discussion since even if we know where he is since he's going to be incarcerated indefinitely with no due process, no access to lawyers, no civil rights. How long could he be dead without anyone knowing? Literally indefinitely?
> word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments
Disappearing has been consistently used to refer to illegal and inconspicuous detention since WWII. The person was there and now they are not. There is no arrest record. There are no lawyers. There is certainly no case record where government officials are being questioned [1]. They may be detained, dead or on holiday. The ambiguity, which permits bystanders to assume normality, is the terrifying key.
Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
> How long could he be dead without anyone knowing?
Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
> Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle, but I neither believe it is dangerous nor do I believe it improper.
What I think is dangerous is this game of semantic precision you're playing where we lose the forest from the trees. I think we should be frightened of and wringing our hands about is not a dictionary definition, it's what we're literally seeing: never mind we know where they are at, we know that right now many are not being given due process and there are active attempts to subvert any attempts at them (i.e., rapidly moving to a more friendly district in LA, putting on planes faster than lawyers can respond).
If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site? Maybe you would, and I'd roll my eyes then too.
> Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
The same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case? The executive branch who has punished its DOJ lawyers for being candid with judges? The executive branch who fully controls the relationship with the government housing the detainment facility and who is the only route to fixing this issue? How many more breaks in normalcy and functioning governance do you need to see before you start doubting their good faith responses, much less effort?
> It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle
It’s not. The only place you see it being used this way is in a section of social media that blows everything out of proportion.
Where I agree is that the battle may be lost. In the same way “defund the police” (versus better regulate) kneecapped the criminal-justice reform movement, and bee-lining to “genocide” (versus the horrors of war and alleged genocide) hurt the Palestinian cause in America, premature extrapolation makes this look unserious. Because if the person who is calling what’s clearly not one a disappearance or concentration camp, why bother with habeus corpus?
> If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site?
No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
> same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case?
Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders [1].
I agree with your examples of language dilution being harmful, but sorry I just don't agree with this one. I think we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up, but there is a clear and - I think to most reasonable people - obvious bad faith attempt to place them outside of due process or monitoring for constitutionally compliant treatment.
> No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
You didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation since it's not representative of how things work today. One year ago, the current situation would have been similarly described. I don't think it was an unfair thought exercise given the circumstances.
> Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders
I guess we'll see.
On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do. I think a smart administrative state would disappear people just like this, it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same.
> we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up
Nobody is saying due process was followed. But do you really not see why the government saying “we have no record of this person and do not comment on matters of national security,” to the press and to the courts, would not be worse?
> didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation
How did I change the situation?
> On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do
On Trump defying the courts, yes. On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
> it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same
You couldn’t sue to get your family—and information about them—out of the Gulag. Disappearance is where detention blurs into execution. We’re simply not there. Nobody is able to claim Garcia is on vacation, we have to confront the fact that he’s been extrajudicially detained.
> On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
Ha, well OK then! Well then we can make it one way: I understand what you're saying, I understand how a reasonable person might arrive at your conclusion, but I disagree. Whether you can do the same for me says less about me than you.
To me, your heels in the sand here feels like college-level semantic literalism and absolutism. Debates like this that focus on historical definitions rather than a discussion that considers the larger whole in evolving societies and changing contexts (technological, administratively, and others).
Yes, someone getting black bagged and executed in silence is clearly worse. It is the worst form of disappearance. But I don't think that's where the bar is for being "disappeared" - for me, that is when you are denied due process, prevented from receiving it, and all knowledge about you is now entirely reliant on the bad faith captors. This doesn't feel unreasonable or unfair to me, especially as it relates to everyday civilian discussions such as this one.
Will due process win out in the end, and I'm here wringing my hands like an idiot? Maybe so, we'll see how the next four years ago.
At any rate, I think we're clearly at impasse. Final shots are yours.
Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.
It is probably not a bad idea for people that don't fit in to consider obtaining citizenship elsewhere for their safety. Some non citizens are returning, though many who are considering this are tied down by their work or other constraints.
They've already sent an innocent man there and acknowledged he was innocent, then refused to bring him back when the courts, the opposition and finally SCOTUS each commanded them to bring him back.
This was just a test, and it was successful. They can now disappear and deport anyone they want with no repercussions whatsoever. The GOP is a criminal organization and their followers share the responsibility of what happens next.
It was extra ridiculous/insulting/terrifying to see the heads of both countries in the same room saying that there was nothing they could do about the situation.
SCOTUS granting the president far reaching immunity was an invitation for the president to be in contempt of SCOTUS whenever it pleases him, and to just piss on the constitution he took an oath on defending.
The fact that no charges have ever been brought against him by the Salvadoran government, yet they still claim to be holding him there lends credence to this. Why would they not simply release him? If he's dead it would be a major problem for Bukele's government as well as the US government. So evidently we're in "disappeared" territory now.
It's too soon to say it's "successful": SCOTUS was 9-0 against and that was still only a few days ago, so far from being a success it's now turning into a constitutional crisis... assuming the administration doesn't fold, or flip-flop, or some combination of the two - which we've already seen plenty of[1].
----------
[1] the seemingly arbitrary and capricious tariff changes announced almost every day ever since the-day-after-April-fools-day.
Note that I said "even" and "less than ten". Even ignoring damage he's already suffered in the prison, the "good outcomes" are still only 30% (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20).
If you read the SCOTUS ruling, all it upholds from the lower courts decision is that the USG must 'facilitate', not 'effectuate' his release. AFAIK the Court doesn't have a way to order El Salvador to do so
Not “always”. It wasn’t the reason that became an amendment, national defense was. People later emphasized that rather off-label justification when state militias were nationalized and the main purpose of the amendment became wholly obsolete.
It, indirectly, was, because it was the reason the country initially relied on decentralized citizen militias for defense in the first place. Many of the founders were worried that a standing federal army would be a tool of oppression, and wanted to keep most of the firepower distributed amongst the populace.
The system more or less worked until the Spanish American War, when the government realized that the militias need some sort of standard in order to integrate properly with the regular army when called up. This led to the creation of the National Guard in 1903. It was tightly integrated into the Army structure in 1933.
What arguably made the Amendment obsolete was the advance of technology. By the early 20th century conventional warfighting took too much firepower, support, and coordination for a loose citizen militia to conduct. At best they could form the core of an insurgent force, but the goal is always to not get to that point.
In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
> In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
Yeah, precisely my personal take against the current "from utility" argument in the amendment's favor: it's very much not clear that they're especially useful for resisting oppressive governments, for one thing because those are often quite popular at first, and for another, because successful examples of that tend to involve a ton of foreign aid, making the role of private arms rather minor. Meanwhile, examples involving foreign invaders are extremely different (and also often involve lots of foreign aid).
Like, maybe the right deserves to stand anyway for other reasons (maybe it just ought to! Maybe it doesn't need a reason!) but I think that particular argument for it is really misguided, especially if one takes it seriously when forming one's opinions about the broader political landscape. IMO there is no meaningful safeguard against tyranny to be found in that amendment.
America's gun culture is very closely tied to its settler culture. Most right wing gun nuts are barely able to conceal their fears/hopes for a race war in all but name.
That said, there are plenty of examples of progressive forces arming themselves. The Black Panthers are a good example. Without their armed militancy I think the US government would have been a lot less likely to capitulate to the demands of the peaceful civil rights activists.
This is nonsense. Plenty of nonviolent, peaceful groups carry arms.
Leftists (e.g. Anarchists, Marxists, Socialists, Communists, Queer Liberation, Black Liberation, etc.) groups typically are pro-firearms. Not always, but plenty are. The Black Panthers, famously, were armed, but so are are orgs like the Pink Pistols. Martin Luther King Jr. had many guns for self defense, and carried a revolver at times. Marx famously said that workers should be armed.
Centrists (e.g. Democrats, some Labour parties) typically abhor guns, and value the decorum and principle of the instution to keep us all safe. They are a "if society is well ordered, then there's no need for arms" group.
Right wing folks (e.g. Republicans, Proud Boys, KKK, etc.) are the folks who you are describing -- by and large supporting these measures and also want to use firearms to exert control.
It's really, really important if you consider yourself to be a progressive to ask, "Who will gun control laws in America be used to prosecute? Will that be minority groups dispraportionately?"
Historically and presently, armed minorities are more difficult to oppress, and many many leftist groups have historically and presently been armed for the purposes of community defense. By suggesting that arming oneself is a right wing position you erase history and erode current efforts for folks to build community safety systems.
All* the people lamenting the current administration are scared of or want to ban firearms... whoops!
Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
>Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
Given that none of the people with firearms have done a damn thing to stop this and how many of them even voted for Trump and support his policies, because American gun and militia culture has been infested with Nazis since forever, I don't see how it could possibly have been any easier. There has been and continues to be no resistance to Trump of any significance. When he does open up the gulags for real, it's going to be America's armed patriot militias who round people up for the regime.
Funny, because the administration testified in court that it was a mistake that he was sent. Claiming the stay was illegal was retconned after the fact, not the cause for the deportation.
The claim that administration supporters are now using is that the legal 'administrative stay' placed upon him was illegal, That is what 'stay' means in the context of what I said, not his 'stay in the country'. Maybe don't get so righteous next time especially when you don't bother to understand what someone says.
I'm assuming the response to this is going to be along the lines of 'oh this doesnt prove he was innocent, they say he was a member of ms-13 etc etc etc' because evidently innocent until proven guilty (which they provided no proof of) isn't a thing anymore
"The US government has conceded Mr Ábrego García was deported because of an "administrative error", though it also says he is a member of the MS-13 gang - something his lawyer denies. "
Try actually reading the article next time. Again, the burden of proof here should be falling on PROVING he is a member of ms-13, not proving he isn't. You are obviously arguing this in bad faith.
> Although the asylum claim proved to be time-barred—aliens are required to bring such claims within a year of entering the country—in October 2019 Judge Jones did grant his request for “withholding of removal” based on his “well-founded” fear of persecution by Barrio 18. The government did not appeal, so Jones’s ruling is now final.
> The removal being in error does not make him innocent.
Innocent is the default. That's a fundamental part of how our legal system works. The government must prove you guilty.
He's an illegal who had a credible (like actually credible, like you could pitch it to someone in the year 2002, not the flimsy 2020s BS) claim for asylum but didn't file in time. He was eventually caught up in the system for reasons not related to the commission of any crime. ICE looked at his case, and gave him a "we won't deport you because your case is pending" status.
"Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.
They can deport you (if they find a willing third party nation), as it's not a path to permanent resident status, but until they do so, you're allowed to reside and work.
> As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to
his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally. But at the end
of the court process, an immigration judge enters a deportation order and then tells the government they
cannot execute that order. That is, the “removal” to a person’s home country is “withheld.” However, the
government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept
them.
> Withholding of removal provides a form of protection that is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a
sort of limbo. A person who is granted withholding of removal may never leave the United States without
executing that removal order, cannot petition to bring family members to the United States, and does not gain
a path to citizenship. And unlike asylum, when a family seeks withholding of removal together a judge may
grant protection to the parent while denying it to the children, leading to family separation.
So this is a bit weird. The initial claim seems not well defined, because "legal" / "illegal" person is not really a thing without more context, so you can interpret it in many ways. The main takeaway though is "after the hearing, he's not breaking any rules by staying and working in the country". That's legal enough for me for a casual comment - I'll stay with my original then - he entered illegally and afterwards was allowed to legally remain.
Have you got the actual court decision about the crime? Not police accusations or similar - confirmation he was actually judged and found guilty in court?
False on both counts and contradictory to the source you cite. There is no right to reside, and you could only work if you were additionally authorised.
> "Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.
In the same sense as trespassing is a legal status. The way in which it is not a legal status is that he does not have the status of legally residing in the US.
> As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally.
I’ve seen you claim 1+1=3 all over this thread, so the gaslighting isn’t gonna work.
> In the same sense as trespassing is a legal status.
No. In the same sense that you’re allowed to stay in a homeless shelter legally for a while, but not necessarily forever.
MY CLIENT HAS BEEN GRANTED WITHHOLDING OF REMOVAL… NOW WHAT?
Your client may apply for an Employment Authorization Document by using the form I765 available on the USCIS website (www.uscis.gov). Her Employment Authorization
Document will then be sent to her most recent address on file with USCIS. It is
therefore important to make sure that not only the court but also USCIS is informed of
any changes in her address through use of the form AR-11 (also available on the USCIS
website). The EAD is only issued for one year at a time and should be renewed with
ample time (at least three months) to allow for processing.
> they must have a valid CIS-issued employment authorization document in order to work lawfully in the United States.
---
Not one single claim I made is false, while this whole thread is in response to a blatantly false claim, that an innocent man was deported. You should check the mirror.
It's been pointed out, over and over again, that our system presumes innocence until convicted in a court of law. You know this. Don't pretend otherwise.
Until the government finds a different country to send him to, he's here legally. He's not breaking any law by remaining while awaiting that. Your source backs me up, in its first paragraph - "he can now safely remain in
this country".
> The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding
order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the
removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.
> The Respondent was arrested in the company of other
>
> ranking gang members and was confirmed to be a ranking member of the MS-13 gang by a
>
> proven and reliable source.
He had his day in court, twice, he was not innocent. I never contended that the government did not wrongfully deport him, not once, but that does not make him innocent. He is still an MS-13 member that is illegally in the US and subject to deportation at the pleasure of the executive.
You're also citing the government's assertions. If assertions were enough to deem someone a convicted criminal, we wouldn't need trials. It has never been proven, "beyond a reasonable doubt", that he was a member of MS-13.
> The Maryland police officer who formally attested to Abrego Garcia’s supposed gang affiliation in 2019—when he was detained the first time—was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker, The New Republic has established.
Your two citations also preceed his being granted withholding of removal. At the time of his deportation, he had legal status here, until they found a valid place to send him. The deportation - again, per SCOTUS - was the illegal bit.
> But in Abrego Garcia’s case, to revoke his protections, the U.S. government “would have been required under law to reopen his immigration court proceedings and prove to the judge that he was a member of MS-13 and therefore no longer eligible for withholding.”
> The deportation - again, per SCOTUS - was the illegal bit.
Never disputed this. Why do you keep returning to this when it is not in question? Do you not get how the US could deport someone and the person still not be innocent, being an MS-13 gang member and an illegal alien?
> Why do you keep returning to this when it is not in question?
Because you keep falsely claiming the guy is a criminal. He has not been convicted of any crime; his membership in MS-13 is an allegation only. (And a shaky one.) Until convicted of a crime, our system presumes him to be innocent.
The only demonstrably, provably, without-a-doubt illegal act here was the deportation.
We deport and refuse entry to non-criminals (including for plenty of non-criminal acts, or even just vibes) all the time. It doesn't prove guilt.
> The only demonstrably, provably, without-a-doubt illegal act here was the deportation.
This is false. You and I know that it is provably, without-a-doubt, that he entered the US illegally and was remaining in the US illegally. There is nobody disputing this.
> You and I know that it is provably, without-a-doubt, that he entered the US illegally and was remaining in the US illegally.
No one has charged him, let alone convicted him, of a crime for entering the country as a minor. He has no criminal record. That's a fact.
You and I know he received withholding of removal (and a work permit!). His remaining here at that point was legal, albeit potentially temporary.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled the deportation an illegal act. No portion of the judicial branch has yet weighed in on Garcia's actions.
I don't disagree, but I bet ICE doesn't see it that way. I mean why else would someone who's been granted a legal status pending his case wind up on their list of people to roll up on.
If you google "innocent man sent to el salvador" you'll get dozens on dozens on dozens of results from which you can pick your favorite news site to catch up.
I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent [1][2]. It's okay if the claim is baseless and there is no citation, but asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
>asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
It is one of the biggest news stories in the last month, and various articles (at least 3 that I can think of) have been here on HN. It's trivially searchable. Asking for a citation is almost certainly bad faith.
>I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent
It's pretty obscure, but there's this thing called "innocent until proven guilty". The man never had his time in court. The US admitted it was a mistake. What are you looking for? Just being contrarian for the sake of it?
The Supreme Court has even stepped in, which I'm sure you're aware despite pretending not to be:
>On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam order, with no recorded dissents, requiring the government to “facilitate [Abrego Garcia’s] return”
And, despite any and all of that! There was no due process. Which, "illegal" or "legal", everyone is supposed to get a due process. If you remove due process for the people you don't like, someone else just needs to claim you're in that group and now you don't get due process! It's like Step 1 of authoritarianism.
Which, since you've not posted anything proving your innocence despite other commenters asking for it, perhaps we should remove your rights to due process.
All you do is ask for "cite?" and then complain when the citation isn't want you asked for, partly because you never ask for anything specific. You're just a troll.
"The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22", "There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed." from your first link.
Unless you can find a court hearing / docket / charges, or some report about them, he's innocent.
If you think that's not enough, you're probably not innocent either... unless you have a way to prove that no charge exists against you in any jurisdiction in the world. Do you get why people assume innocence here now?
You would think this administration would jump at the opportunity of showing the media any proof that Abrego Garcia was a member of any gang, no matter how circumstantial or weak the proof is. But I've yet to see any of it.
This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.
Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.
SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.
> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want
I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".
I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
This is a lot of words to say "I don't believe him". None of us really knows, and it's not worth speculating about, because the case is about something much bigger now. It's about the limits of executive authority, separation of powers, and rule of law.
> he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador
What evidence is there for this "near certainty"? Your argument here should be with asylum laws, not this individual.
For what it's worth, the situation in El Salvador at the time he left (when he was a minor) does make the claim somewhat credible. There's plenty of evidence that the choice for male youths at that time was leave or join whichever gang controlled your area. The idea that everyone is an "economic migrant" ignores the reality of the situation, which is far more complex.
I don't know in his personal case if he is lying. However, you can get to what the probability of a random applicant for an asylum being truthful very easily. You just need a good estimate of the % of migrants that had to flee gangs or other risk of death (gangs that are still in control of their communities), then compare that to the % that claim they had to flee for those reasons, then subtract.
I don't know what that % is, but we have courts that are deciding these cases every day. The actual court cases are more complex to analyze because lack of adequate council or other factors might influence outcomes. However, of people who attend their interview, about 44% are determined to not have a credible fear.
Protection rackets are pretty big in central america. Look at the publicity about the avocado industry. Protection rackets only work when you go after those people that escape your 'protection' payments. So yes, it's reasonable to assume every person that said no to the racket and fled to the US becomes a pretty big target, it's part of the founding principles/business model of running a protection racket.
So you are saying that anyone who leaves central america can never return home because they would then be murdered? I don't think you are saying that, because people move back and forth from central america every day without being murdered.
An awful lot of people move every day, even from areas where there are protection rackets. Do the protection rackets kill everyone who comes home to visit after moving to another city? How do they keep track of who is 'escaping' and who is just moving because they got married or found a job somewhere else? Again, you aren't suggesting that these rackets ban all movement in and out of the areas they loosely control?
People come to the US primarily to find work at a much higher wage than they would be able to find where they are from. Often there is no opportunity for work whatsoever where they are from. They can have a life here that they would never be able to achieve, they can have healthy children who get medical and dental care and will have a chance at an education and a good life here.
If I were in their shoes I would absolutely try to come here illegally if I couldn't do so legally. If I was caught I would, without hesitation, lie and say I would be murdered if I returned home, or whatever else my lawyer carefully prompted me to say, just like Mr Garcia and almost everyone else claiming this. The reality is if these protection rackets were here in the US and not at all in El Salvador, Mr Garcia would almost certainly still choose to live here and just pay the protection money rather than returning home. I doubt that he was ever influenced by gangs in his decision to move here, and I doubt that he has any fear of them if he would return, and I don't think it would change his decision either way.
You based this off of nothing: "he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador."
"I don't find it to be credible"
I explained why it could easily be that the many coming from El Salvador when MS13 was heavily active could in fact be making this legitimate claim. It's a small world with social media. Yes, local MS13 that didn't get paid can catch when someone is back in the country. These are very sophisticated/organized gangs at higher level (at least according to the current US administration).
So you believe he is being honest. That's perfectly reasonable. Do you really belief that if there was no threat to him at all he would admit this, stop appealing his deportation order, leave his wife and children behind, give up any possibility of being supporting his family financially and go back to El Salvador?
Which one of our beliefs seems more credible to you, that a man would claim to be in danger (which doesn't hurt anyone) to let him stay with his wife and children and access to employment which pays hundreds or thousands of times higher, or that he would say he's not in danger (even though it doesn't benefit anyone) which hurts his wife and children very badly, and forces him to be separated from his family and the country he has lived in his entire adult life?
The situation he is in is beyond cruel and unjust, but that doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
I'm not going to make judgements on people who say that their life is in danger when I have zero actual facts just 'popular internet factoids' and administration propaganda that conflicts with the actual facts in the court case (they now are claiming he was a human trafficker and that the court order was illegal).
He proved to the immigration court that his life was in danger, to the point that the court ordered he not be removed to El Salvador. What's next, are you going to claim that court findings, experts in the field and based on hearings/evidence/etc, for criminals should be overridden by your gut feelings? Because of course all criminals claim they are innocent, so court rulings should be ignored? This is the friggen slippy slope people talked about. You see that right? Ignore the court order because populist government should have that power based on their feelings. Or because after violating the order the government claims the order was somehow not valid/illegal.
He didn't just make a claim, the US immigration court found his claim valid enough to issue a legally binding order that he can not be return to El Salvador. The President ignored the process for overturning that order, the President ignored the order itself, and sent this person not only to El Salvador, but to a prison solely housing the M13 members that the United States Immigration court found legally were a risk to this man's life.
I don't think you are bothering to read anything I've said. I've said over and over the court order should be followed, because the rule of law is essential and the court order must be followed regardless. I also think he's lying.
You are allowed to form your own opinions also, you don't just have to read a news article and then try your best to update your thoughts to conform to the daily talking points for whichever side you follow.
And I have said over and over that blanket judging people on at best second hand knowledge but mainly hearsay and assumptions is evil, and the root of evil. In society we have to setup systems and work to make those systems work, not place the burden of the systems imperfection on random people because of ltbarcly3's non-direct fact based feelings.
You went pretty low in your comment by the way. Really shows you operating out of your feelings. Which is understandable, we are all human. But also shows maybe you shouldn't be making life or death judgements of other people.
BTW I think our immigration system has been HEAVILY abused by Democrats to get immigration policies they can't any other way. That they exploit more conservative people like me's empathy to create a loophole. That doesn't mean I judge the people that came here and placed determination of their life in our system, I blame the Democrats, and I try to change the system. Not condemn random people caught up in that. I want change, but this is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. I don't want a soul crushing machine running my country. I want the USA I grew up loving, that my family sacrificed for. The shinning beacon on a hill. And I'm not for turning off that light just because it's hard. Having civil rights is hard and expensive and nuanced.
I will ALWAYS try to learn and incorporate new thinking/understanding of events. Not sure how that is a shortcoming. It's actually really hard and uncomfortable.
I'm not going low at all. If you actually read my comments:
I think:
- he's lying about being in danger, but I also say that is reasonable for him to lie and I would do the same thing without hesitation
- it's unjust, unfair, and cruel to deport him after half his life and entire adult life, and his wife and children here
- that legally he should *NOT* be deported while his deportation order is on hold because that is what the law says
- that legally he should (and probably would) eventually be deported since that is just what the law says and he was ordered to be deported already, and that is literally what 'temporary' implies (the rule of law cuts both ways)
- I never condemned the man or made any unfair assumptions about him. I certainly never said or implied at all that he was a criminal, that he had any relationship to any gang, that he should have been deported extra-legally and put in a foreign prison without trial, because that is all insane. I said his rights WERE violated, but specifically that his right to due process was not violated (he did have a trial already and lost). (Being returned to your home country is not a punishment and it doesn't deprive you of any rights, excepting if you have already become a citizen).
So my point, if I made it poorly, is that this individual being deported is not a legal injustice against him, most likely he should be deported under current law, and most likely he would have been deported in the next year or two in any case. The injustice here is that his deportation was carried out extra-legally and in defiance of the law and that the US is complicit (or really actively causing) humans to be jailed without due process or really any process.
That means that he was a father, that he was (or was not) a member of MS13, that he had (or didn't have) a job, that he was a nice man (or not a nice man), that he love (or hated) his mother, that his kids are honor students (or hoodlums) is all irrelevant and nobody should care about it in the context of what is going on. He was here illegally, but he was also legally allowed to stay for a little while longer. That any person was extra legally handed over to a foreign government with instructions and payment to imprison them without trial is beyond unacceptable.
I don't know what's low about any of that. It's very hard to comment in an online space on political issues because people, in general, do not use their ability to read and comprehend. They read the first 5 words, assume that the rest is either "good" or "bad" depending on whether it's leaning towards the opinion they read from whichever outlet conveys to them the talking points for their political party, and then they react by repeating those same talking points. If you have an opinion that is anything but repeating what one of the two approved opinions is that day people really fail to cope with that.
"you don't just have to read a news article and then try your best to update your thoughts to conform to the daily talking points" is going low.
"I think: - he's lying about being in danger" - this is the basic premise you have made this entire time. Yet you also continue to claim:
"I never condemned the man or made any unfair assumptions about him"
Your entire premise is a blanket judgement should be applied to people seeking asylum as to them being liars, based on 'because of course they are'. While I agree that there are strong incentives to lie, I don't use solely that incentive to then baseless claim 'he and all asylum seekers are lying' like you continue to do. We have immigration courts and people directly responsible for determining this better than you or I. They determined the threat to his life was real enough to put a stay on him being sent back to his home country even though they denied his asylum claim. My 'current days talking point' position is that in America we don't apply blanket assumptions like this, and that we have a system of rules, laws, courts, and judges that make those determination. A truly toxic position to hold today I guess because... something unrelated to current talking points? I've held this position my entire life. As did every single person around me. From conservative grandfathers that fought in WW2, to hippie parents, to teachers, to... basically everyone until recently. But I'm adopting the current day take?
I think 'all members of XYZ immigrant group are liars' is a horrible take, and has led us down bad paths in the past. Using that claim to bypass due process, in situations where people's actual lives are in danger, because the Constitution/due process/the American way is expensive and takes too long is a popular take/is too hard on the scale of an entire country full of people, I just don't share it.
It's not that they should be assumed to be liars, I never meant that.
It's that there is no reason to listen to what they say. Either they can provide evidence that they deserve asylum or not. Everyone would say they should get asylum.
If they were not in danger: they say they were in danger
If they were in danger: they say they were in danger
Since they say the same thing either way, it is pointless to even factor in what they say. Some people are telling the truth, some people are lying, they all say the same thing so what someone says has no information value.
When making the initial determination on whether to allow someone to stay in the country, they do not have to show evidence, they just have to make a credible claim, and about 85% of those claims are accepted. Then later they have to show evidence at their interview and hearing. Of the people who pass the bar for the initial claim about 90% are not actually granted asylum, but about 80% drop out of the system (although the numbers don't prove they were lying because there are other factors). So initially 85% are approved (like the person in question here) and then later only 10% of those people actually show sufficient evidence of a credible fear. This doesn't prove that most of them are lying, but of all the people that claim they are in danger to be allowed to enter/stay 90% don't back it up with evidence, and 80% don't even complete the process, which I think is very strong evidence that a substantial majority are lying (even if you give the benefit of the doubt and think that maybe 50% of them can't complete the process because they don't understand it, lack resources, etc, that is still 50% that were lying).
It's notable that during covid, when claiming you were in danger did not give you an easy way to enter the country immediately, people also stopped claiming they were in danger.
Finally, it is probably important to quantify what 'danger' actually means. Is it a 10% chance of being killed? 1%? 1/1000? Does going home have to be more dangerous than the transportation to get there? Does it have to be more dangerous than riding a motorcycle? The murder rate in El Salvador is currently lower than Baltimore, a LOT lower. It's beyond unreasonable to defer deportations to a place if it's safer than where the person is staying now.
You've said he's "almost certainly committing <criminal> perjury". Based solely on the category of immigrant that he is. I think that is abhorrent, un-American, and violates the Constitution. In the USA 'all men' are created equal, and our rights apply to 'people' not just 'citizens' (a class that the current regime now wants to redefine to not include natural born Americans, forget slippery slope we're now on a water slide).
You keep trying to justify your claim with 'we need to categorize/make determinations on these groups because reasons' but not engaging with that you think we should categorize a class of immigrants as perjures simply because of the class they fit in' because to do otherwise makes immigration policies hard/able to be abused'. We used to believe as a nation in the theory we would rather that 10 criminals go free if it prevents one innocent person from going to prison. I get it's hard, and it has negative impacts to follow our Constitution and what our nation believes in. It's so hard that people have had to die to secure those things. It's so hard that my grandfathers faced crippling life long injuries fighting for their belief in it in WW2. My understanding it's hard doesn't mean I think we should just throw it away. Blanket 'xyz people are criminal liars' has no place in the United States of America. Systems that are aware of the incentive to lie, sure. But that is why we have courts and a rule of law, not labels on entire groups of people. That Democrats allowed abuse doesn't mean we give up on what America is. You can keep giving me bullet points but your basic premise is so flawed to me they don't matter.
Imagine you were talking about the Chinese in the U.S. in the 1800s. You’d have the same kinds of bullet points,claims about fraud, about them being impossible to integrate, claims it just too many people, about systems being overwhelmed. That’s how we got the Chinese Exclusion Act. A whole race of people labeled suspect by default, stripped of legal protections, barred from citizenship, and assumed to be lying just to get in. It was wrong then, and it’s just as wrong now. Policies built on fear and group guilt erode everything we claim to stand for. If we don’t push back against that, we’re not protecting our country we’re abandoning it.
I said I think it's unfair and cruel that he is being forced to leave at all. I think it's immoral. I also think he told the story that let him stay with his family rather than the truth, and I don't fault him if he did do that. Anyone would do that.
I think you should, for practice and because it would help you be a better person, try to have a disagreement with someone without thinking they must be racist. I think it would be new for you but I think it would be healthy to try it.
Remember when you said you didn't go low? Look at your last paragraph.
I don't think you are racist, I never called you racist, but I think what you are saying is wrong and is the type of group guilt assignment that has been used for very f'd up stuff in the past and not how we do things in the US. Again, your entire premise is he's lying because of the class he is in. That is the slippery slope that I am calling out. Your own words. You didn't judge him unfairly you say, you just said he committed criminal perjury based on your knowledge that he's a foreigner seeking asylum. I said that the system should be structured to recognize the incentives to lie, but we shouldn't judge people based on their class, you continued to say all foreigners seeking asylum are probably liars, especially your original example individual, based SOLELY on that he is a foreigner seeking asylum.
I explained my reasoning. And I even said I agreed that the Democrats have broken the system, and that the courts needed to be structured to account for the incentive to lie. But I didn't like classifying a group/class of people liars based on their class. 'All poor people steal because they are poor and have incentive' is basically what you are saying. 'All people in Alabama are dumb, Bob is from Alabama, Bob's dumb'. Nah, I refuse all of that, labeling a group, assigning a characteristic because Bob's a member of a group. I never just tried to shout you down saying 'racist', I responded in way too many words :)
And again you resort to the low, personal attacks. Super lame, basic internet dig you gave there too. Because I quoted your words back at you and I don't think in the USA we should classify groups as guilty.
You are calling me a racist and saying I'm somehow responsible for attacks on chinese people 100 years before I was born. It's so lazy and straw-man, you don't seem able to honestly engage with what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that if you can show that it is very likely that 99% of the people from Alabama are dumb (this is not true but for the sake of argument), and Bob is from Alabama, there's approximately a 99% chance that Bob is dumb if you don't know anything else about Bob to improve your estimate. This is just true, and it's obvious, and if you read what I said it's exactly how I framed it (he's very likely or almost certainly lying). This isn't because of class, or race, or age, or whether they are trans or whatever else.
One more time:
People come to the border or get caught in the US without a visa. If they say "I'm in danger" about 85% of them are allowed to stay in the US while their claim is processed. Of those people who stay, only 10% end up being approved. 10% are denied, and 80% don't show up for the interview, get arrested for something else, self deport, etc. So best case, if you trust our judges, half are not credible. Since the 20% that show up probably, on average, have the best cases it's a fairly safe bet that the 80% who don't show up wouldn't break 50/50, maybe more like 80/20. So 74% would be found not credible (10% who are denied with interview, and 80% of the 80% who don't show up), 26% credible. That's a pretty overwhelming majority who are not making an honest claim. But again, if we just go with the numbers we know, it's 50/50, half are lying (or if you prefer "making an incredible claim they are unable to support with plausible evidence").
No, I said that blanket judgements like you are making are what led to the US to write ahorant legislation against the Chinese, the closest parallel in our nation's history where language like yours have been used to talk about immigrants to reform the system, not some random strawman example. I'm have not said you support that. I said 'here is a very related example language similar to yours went down the slippery path I see your language could'. It's been nothing about you. Your pseudo-statistics are BS. We have immigrant courts/judges we don't use personal rough pseudo statistics to judge people as criminals (in this case criminal perjurer). Down your pseudo statistics path lies not only racism but vigilantism (citizens proving someone a criminal based on very weak premises) where the majority number of your 'statistics' zero actual finding is made only assumptions of guilt. I agree it's plausible that large numbers of asylum seekers are gaming the system. I agree the the Democrats probably facilitated abuse of the system because they can't get the immigration policies they want. I think it's bullshit and un-American to extend that to 'This random dude is a criminal perjeror' based on only that.
You don't seem to be able to comprehend my basic argument. I concede that there are incentives to lie and the system should account for that, but that we shouldn't label a class criminal perjurers because down that path lies nothing good. I've given you more response/good faith than you have me. You keep saying you haven't labeled this man anything but then call him a criminal perjurer and imply his grounds for being in the country are bullshit. But other than that, yeah, you haven't called him anything. All based on 'he sought asylum'.
You say 10% are approved, which matches Americas past 'We would rather 10 criminals go free than 1 innocent person imprisoned'. By your words it sounds like this is a part of America's thought about itself/it's character that you don't agree with. (Now talking about your personal judgement).
If half the people are lying, then half are criminal perjurers. I'm not labeling a class, I'm just believing what the numbers say.
You keep insisting that I'm making broad racist claims about a group of people, over and over.
You seem to think I have some secret agenda to support Trump or his policy, and you keep arguing as though arguing against that agenda is the same as arguing against what I'm saying. This is why I say you aren't honestly engaging and you are repeating talking points. I don't have a secret agenda, I'm a registered Democrat and I've never voted for a Republican as far as I can remember. I also think that most people claiming asylum are not being honest, because that's just what the information I have available clearly suggests.
You want to pick an arbitrarily impossible standard of evidence which is not reasonable and not even used in actual courts when evaluating whether testimony is credible or honest (that there is a criminal perjury conviction). People are caught lying in court every day, even when that's obvious and provable they are rarely (as in almost never) pursued for perjury charges.
Frankly at this point it's clear that you kindof agree with what I'm saying, that a lot of people lie in this process, and it's not the ground truth you are disputing but rather you want me to not say it because it might have consequences if we say things like this, but also you think the system needs to be reformed to address this problem, but also we shouldn't admit there's a problem.
Combined with "oops can't get them back" it's very powerful. Combine it with not advertising faces of snatched people on broadcast TV, and it's a very useful tool inded. People will just disappear. It won't be legal or illegal, just a thing that happens from time to time. Police won't search too hard for the missing people, because no good can come out of finding out.
The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
> The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as an appellate quasi-judicial body from decisions of 36 administrative law judges, as of November 2023.[4] The NLRB is headquartered at 1015 Half St. SE, Washington, D.C., and it has over 30 regional, sub-regional, and residential offices throughout the United States.
> Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip?
Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].
I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.
NLRB is a very important agency that I have known others to personally utilize because abuses of labor laws in the private sector, particularly poorly paid labor, is fairly common. These workers may face unfair treatment or wage theft, and the reason companies do it is because workers have very few genuine avenues of recourse. The NLRB is one of those few avenues of recourse.
Yes. And the current precedent is very clear that these independent agencies are constitutional.
The current court has not, yet, overturned that precedent. There is lots of reason to believe they will, in an extremely contentious ruling. But for now they haven’t.
We are going to find out one way or another though because this admin is pushing hard up against the question.
Of course it’s also pushing hard up on the question of if the courts can constrain it at all so the grade school understanding of separation of powers is real.
> Yes. They are either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.
That’s not what independent means here.
Most independent agencies are part of the executive branch (some are part of the legislative and judiciary but they are the exception).
They are independent because congress gave the president limited power in their ability to dismiss the agency head and its members. These agencies have some regulatory authority which Congress has vested them on purpose.
You might argue under the unitary executive theory of law that these agencies are actually under the control of the president and the current Supreme Court (for what it’s worth) might even agree with you.
I might argue that it’s a complete travestissement of the constitution spirit and intent pushed forward by people who wish to dismantle the American republic and replace it by an authoritarian regime. But that’s on me.
Indeed the meaning of independent is more limited. But what wants to be implied by the media and posters here - the reason why the article leads with this, is to suggest these are groups that cannot be commanded by the president and his staff.
Well, according to what congress wanted when they were founded, this is neither false nor misleading and judicial precedents until now have agree with that.
The idea they are under the control of the president and his staff is a novelty (and a disgrace in my humble opinion) but given the sorry state of the Supreme Court anything is possible.
The NLRB is one of many independent agencies of the executive branch created by Congrees, and they don't report to anyone except for their own boards. The president and Congress have influence over the boards but no direct control over the agency. The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
And the concern probably isn't Russian hackers, it's American hackers spoofing their IP address. Also you are ignoring that DOGE made the server public when it wasn't supposed to be.
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.
But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.
If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
This is still authoritarian bullshit. Your argument is that you think independent agencies are a bad idea, and therefore it's a-okay for Trump to simply ignore 80 years of law and Supreme Court rulings.
More generally, nobody in the executive branch serves any master. They serve the law and are legally obligated to refuse and report illegal orders. The idea that they serve Master Donald Trump (or Vizier Elon Musk), and that illegal orders must be enforced because it is Trump's will, is precisely why Kilmar Abrego Garcia was illegally deported and why Trump is musing about doing the same thing to US citizens.
I think a lot of Supreme Court cases will come out of this administration, I just don’t think the sovereignty of independent federal agencies is going to be one of them.
Well it would help if there weren’t numerous issues with the data as presented on that site. Specifically now they are only claiming somewhere around 28 billion saved in cancelled contracts when in early February they claimed like 55 billion. Seems odd that over time the amount saved would go down despite the alleged number being of cancellations going up.
Also it is concerning that the largest amount from an individual contract saved is a cancelled deportation facility contract. Seems at odds with the Administration’s goals to ramp up mass deportation but cancel the contract for building a holding facility for unaccompanied minors.
My suggestion would be if the goal is to eliminate debt we would need to target social security reform such as raising the retirement ages and eliminating the cap on the payroll tax. Additionally, but far less realistic would be implementing a Land Value Tax. Not cancel random contracts that amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and propose massive tax cuts like the current administration seems to be doing.
The parent's russian propoganda post does not mention that the posted savings are full of inaccuracies.
Nor does the propoganda define "waste", if one looks at the actual cuts, it seems to be focused on "things Herr M. doesn't like". which is not a good definition of "waste".
There are also constant ongoing efforts at improving efficiency, which is why they keep going “ah ha! We found it!” then poor bureaucrats who are trying to do their fucking jobs while these idiots run around messing things up have to explain, “no, you’re seeing an artifact of record-keeping practices that exist because [very good reason], you’re wrong yet again, maybe try asking literally anyone who knows about these data sets”
They also love to throw around the word “fraud” while bringing no charges. Despite the DOJ being in Trump’s control. Same pattern as other lies (“rampant voter fraud! We have proof” ok so when you’re in change you’ll prosecute, right? You should! That’s bad if true! I mean I’ve looked at your proof and it doesn’t appear true, but maybe you have more proof you haven’t shown! “Uhhh… [smoke bomb]”)
Plus, we have the GAO and CBO. Trump won’t want to listen to them because they’ll say “our #1 problem is we keep cutting taxes”, and “there’s not much waste to be eliminated cutting government workers”, because that’s true at this point, but they exist. It’s not like nobody’s been looking at these kinds of things. That’s just bullshit.
Realistic alternative? How about starting by reading tfa? I’d say you don’t need to physically threaten people who ask for basic security practices to be followed, for one.
What they got was a pocket-lining idiot, and genuinely one of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever known of as his tech right-hand man. Musk is a moral imbecile, a 13-year old incel trapped in the body of an overweight mid-50s mess. Yes, he's been involved in some great things (SpaceX and Tesla), but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
These numbers don't even stand up to casual scrutiny. And I'm from the UK so it doesn't really directly affect me (although the orange idiot's shenanigans have done so to a small degree). But if you really believe this site, you're divorced from reality, and maybe drinking the same kool-aid that the tech muppets who are on DOGE are.
> but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
Like when this space youtuber suggested a change to his Mars rocket and he understood, accepted the validity of the idea, and decided to implement it on the spot? Er, I guess that's the opposite of what you said.
Not only that, Trump has already spent US$ 155B more than Biden, DOGE claims to have shaved US$ 150B, overall this administration has already increased spending by US$ 5B even after firing a lot of civil servants.
The worst is that the effects of this shaving off will only be felt over time, when National Parks start crumbling, when ATCs start quitting, the government machine of the USA has been eroded, inevitably it will fall into a landslide.
First, every objective audit has found many problems with that data, ranging from taking credit for things which were terminated under the Biden administration to listing the maximum ceiling on a flexible contract (IDIQ) as the total savings even though the amounts actually spent were far lower (like canceling your credit card and saying you saved the limit), and even counting the same contract multiple times.
Second, you have to look at the cost of their actions. They’ve disrupted the functioning of the entire federal government and doing in a very haphazard manner. That means that a lot of current spending is wasted by DOGE _and_ that the business of the government isn’t getting done. For example, whether or not you think the U.S. should engage in foreign aid, under DOGE they paid money to send people to help in Myanmar only to lay them off after they arrived on site, squandering all possible value. That story is being repeated all over the country right now and in many cases the loses are permanent: if they choose to waste payroll having people come back to an office where they can’t work, the job isn’t getting done and there’s no way to recover the wasted payroll. As they keep losing lawsuits, it’s also likely that the amounts cut will be exceeded by the cost of settlements when they breach contracts or fail to provide a service required by statute.
One really big area is tax collection: the IRS is already estimating revenue reductions on the order of half a billion dollars, and since they’ve been sacking a lot of the law enforcement for businesses and high-net wealth individuals, that will get worse as people feel confident cheating more aggressively.
Lastly, you have to look at the economy. Estimated have each federal job supporting 2-3 other jobs, and federal spending drives the economy in many parts of the country. They’ve already cut growth of the entire economy into the negative (from +2.5% in January to -2-3% now - see https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow) and a lot of that is driven by federal cuts.
You do understand, that the upcoming tax cuts for rich people will throw the USA Debt above defence savings?
And it will increase the debt significantly?
All of that while DOGE, some random dudes without any understanding how things work, stop things which are globally agreed on (global aid) or just not even worth mentioning in the grand schem?
But hey if you prefer to defend DOGE ssaving 160 Billion while the tax cut for the rich adds Trillions to debt, yeah do a happy dance. Be proud. Or whatever your comment is trying to do.
Funny that IRS also gets defunded. But hey taxes right? :D
There were already people called "inspector generals" which handled waste, fraud, and abuse but Trump fired about 17 of them in his first week. Deploying tech bros to solve the problem is naive at best and malicious at worst. The arrogance in assuming that no auditor before them looked into the SSA database and saw DOB records going back to 1875 is outstanding.
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
Agreed entirely. The comments in this article read exactly like Reddit, the tone, the downvoting, etc. and I agree about your comments on X being a sort of rightwing mirror of that, too. Super disappointed in Hackernews.
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
The issue is we don't know what they took and they took steps to hide their tracks. This is whacked territory we are in. You can defend it but normally there are checks and controls in government for a reason. The fact that we are normalizing that certain very ideologically groups in government do not have checks and balances is pretty strange - based on nothing more than a "trust us, we are the good guys." This never works out in the end.
"The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information."
"But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending."
And because DOGE deleted the access records and logs, we cannot prove it either way. That is pretty suspicious.
> Then, Berulis started tracking sensitive data leaving the places it's meant to live, according to his official disclosure. First, he saw a chunk of data exiting the NxGen case management system's "nucleus," inside the NLRB system, Berulis explained. Then, he saw a large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself.
> From what he could see, the data leaving, almost all text files, added up to around 10 gigabytes — or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed them, he explained. It's a sizable chunk of the total data in the NLRB system, though the agency itself hosts over 10 terabytes in historical data. It's unclear which files were copied and removed or whether they were consolidated and compressed, which could mean even more data was exfiltrated.
> Berulis says someone appeared to be doing something called DNS tunneling to prevent the data exfiltration from being detected. He came to that conclusion, outlined in his disclosure, after he saw a traffic spike in DNS requests parallel to the data being exfiltrated, a spike 1,000 times the normal number of requests.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
And more if you actually read the article. About a third of it is about the data that was taken.
> Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
I'm so sick of the endless attempts to downplay or misdirect on the outrageous things Republicans/Trump/DOGE happening everyday.
If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state.
Everyone should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
> If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state. You should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
As a Canadian I am already scared of visiting the US. I've re-posted UNRWA, Unicef, MSF and WFP criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza on social media. I could very well be viewed as being a someone who is undermining US foreign policy goals and either detained, deported or at best denied entry to the US.
Sure, I bet if you found a physically threatening note at your work with pictures from someone following you near your home, you'd be cool with it. Totally normal and non-criminal behaivor.
> Whistleblower is a journalist word used to establish the good guy in a story.
It's not a journalist word, there is an official whistleblowing process to Congress and OIG the mentioned employee went through.
But you would either have needed to have read and understood the article you're commenting on or not be commenting in bad-faith.
Stop sealioning. Anyone can read the article. The evidence of suspicious behavior is clear and according to the article corroborated by a dozen experts.
The fact that someone tried to intimidate the whisteblower by posting threatening and stalking messages on his door shows there is something not above board here.
This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
> This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit
There were already people auditing departments, but they got fired early on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_general#United_State...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
There's even an entire agency devoted to auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Trying to find efficiency by bringing in the private sector is not a new thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
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> But bringing in the mob sector? Is that new?
No. But getting rid of cronyism/nepotism did happen at one point:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
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Not entirely, though under rather different circumstances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Underworld
We let the word PayPal Mafia get to their head
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
The login attempt was made by someone 115 years old, receiving social security payments and living in Russia.
> That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
Or perhaps someone got invited to the wrong group chat again.
No need to have your laptop compromised if your just hand over the information...
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
Reminder that Trump wanted the US to partner with a foreign country to protect American elections (!?) and the country he wanted to help "secure" fair elections was the Russian dictatorship. (!!)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/16/trump-putin-russia...
Then not “opps”, but instead “ooops”.
> Could be that someone is compromised.
ftfy
>A real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did
In fact I would imagine they would do exactly the opposite because they would look at the mere ability to hide what they did as an audit finding.
"The new bank-manager has hired some friends of his to improve the security of the bank vault."
"We already have an audit from last year, we just need the funding to improv--"
"Oh, and they want to turn off all the security cameras next weekend. You'll know it's them because they'll be wearing masks."
"Sir, we have a responsibility to our customers, we can't ju--"
"Do it or you're fired."
monday morning:
manager: "the auditors found all of our money missing"
::silence::
manager: "they are clearly doing an amazing job, and you are all fired for allowing such fraud waste and abuse"
The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
But an abnormal number of DNS requests AND recorded outbound data totaling 10GB, with no other obvious indication of a less-subversive means of data transfer? I'd be very surprised if youtube-dl could come close to even 10MB of DNS requests at its chattiest
So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
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Oh, there will be elections. After all, even USSR and Russia had/have elections of all kinds.
Out of curiosity, since you appear to be very certain of this, what are you doing personally to deal with this? Are you leaving the country, moving into the hills, building a bunker, etc? I don't mean to sound antagonistic or anything, I genuinely would like to know.
Not OP but of the same persuasion. Personally, I’m working on emigration plans. I don’t really want to live in an authoritarian state. And if I ever have kids, there’s no way I’d want to raise them in this environment.
I should point out, though, that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean that QOL drops for the average person (if you’re not part of a targeted group). Many people live quite happily in Hungary, Turkey, Russia. Local government will chug along as before, stonks might still go up. But you have to internalize a certain resignation over things you can no longer change or talk about, unless you wish to become a dissident and put yourself in danger. I’m not brave enough for that, so I’m opting out of the whole thing.
You're not at all wrong, but you've successfully described my entire life living in the US as a citizen born here. For that whole time we've incarcerated an absurd percentage of the world's prison population. I watched the crackdown on the Seattle WTO protests and Rodney King on the evening news.
Perhaps the defining feature of the modern nation state is a monopoly on violence and power. Been that way my whole life.
Any immigrant to the US that doesn't look like the right kind of immigrant, whether citizen or not, should be making plans and moving money.
I'm making plans and moving money already.
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Not OP, but I'm seeking foreign citizenship through prior family history as a mechanism for legally escaping the US should it come to that.
not OP: not sure. I'm in California so things can go crazy for a whole other litany of reasons if any single claim of Newsom starts to blossom. It's going to be a crazy ride if no one cheecks Trump early enough.
I'm waiting it out for now. I'm "close" enough to communte to Los Angeles, but otherwise on the outskirts of the county as a whole. It's a weird place for any federal service to go out of their way to exploit.
Legit inquiry, do you think Trump will last to 2028? I personally don't, but it can go all sorts of ways.
As an aside, I also consider a civil war as "not making it". Having to wage war on the people you lead is fundamentally a failure of all systems.
Yes. The only way Trump is ousted is if Democrats somehow get a supermajority in the House and the Senate and impeach and remove him, which isn't going to happen. Republicans will always close ranks around Trump at this point. He definitely won't leave office peacefully, if at all. What happens after that, I don't know.
Trump's health is a big open question, though.
But even if Trump is out of the picture, that just means we'll get president Vance, which is likely to be even worse.
Not even close. The whole Republican party is lock step with everything DT says. Not a single member of Congress will oppose him. DT pushes through all kinds of things that they don't want, eg. RFK is a lifelong granola Democrat with wildly unpopular opinions but every single Republican confirmed him.
Nobody else in the party has this kind of power. Not JD, not Desantis, not the Koch brothers, nobody. When he's gone, it's over.
Trump didn't always have this kind of power; he acquired it. Why do you think it's impossible for another person - especially one that is effectively "officially anointed" as successor by Trump himself - to step into his shoes?
Right now this is impossible because Trump sucks all the air out of the room. But with him gone, I don't see any reason why all those people who voted for him will suddenly not vote for the closest similar candidate, and that voting block is really where his power comes from.
And looking at history, cults of personality often survive replacement of the figure around which they are built - examples are numerous in various dictatorships, just look at North Korea for one that is still ongoing.
Trump was given the power by some invisible forces who have been working for decades to develop plans to destroy the US.
Trump is simultaneously a blunt force tool to destroy our institutions while also being a political wizard that always know exactly how to spin things and is completely impervious to pressure and stress.
I think those background forces know after trump there will not be anyone like him. Which is exactly why everything is being destroyed at such a rapid pace. Their opportunity is short and they are maximizing it. Things will look very different post trump
As an outsider European, Trump certainly has an unusual charisma. I happened to watch some of his tariff press conference while flicking over TV channels, and I get why people are attracted to his public persona. He has this strange hypnotic tone that delivers absolute nonsense in a reassuring way, and goes a bit shouty every now and then when attacking something. For people that actually believe what he says he must really have them hooked.
Along with the other points you made, rarely showing stress, always having a comeback with no care for the truth make him unique.
Vance is not even close.
It's of course that a future demagogue will rise to power. But it'd be a wholly different movement from maga.
When Trump goes all the smaller factions will compete for the top. That's the typical state.
The House has sole power over impeachments. Simple majority vote. The difficulty is scheduling it, the leadership controls this. A more likely path is four Republicans could make a declaration to caucus with the Democratic party, and change the leadership. Again, simple majority vote.
The Senate has sole power over impeachment trials. The trial and conviction vote have no quorum requirement. Republicans will have to show up and vote to acquit, explicitly, to protect Trump.
The law is clear, upon conviction the president is removed from power. The only power any person has is the power people voluntarily give to him. He can also throw poop if so inclined, he's plenty full of it.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
The House of Representatives just needs a majority vote to approve the articles of impeachment, but to convict, the Senate requires a two-thirds vote. That's what I meant by a supermajority. My bad for the miscommunication.
The Senate needs 2/3rds of those present. It is not 2/3rds of the membership. They have to appear if they want to protect him.
Military coup when?
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> Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America?
Yes.
Yes for part of the country. Gerrymandering, long lines, distant polling locations... Voting day isn't a holiday, voting hours aren't 24/7, and not all states have laws requiring time off of work to vote. For a lot of red states, elections simply are not fair.
>Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America?
With a confidence level of some 99.9%+ of votes being legitimate, yes. with 155 million voters in 2024 nationals, that leaves a margin of about 155k illegitimate votes. Elections can be super close (see 2000), but any fraud that went undetected would not sway most American elections. At least not with this electoral college system.
>Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028?
Yeah probably. I'm not even sure if Trump will get that far, though. we'll have to see how damning this SAVE act is on women first and if the courts strike this down in the next 18 months or so.
>Even if it's staged, form must be respected.
When has Trump ever done that? most other leaders I disagree with still did this. But not him.
It also contradicts the idea that they are acting transparently.
> criminal or state-sponsored hackers
It looks to be both
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
It appears that “appearing dumb and clumsy while opening the doors for enemies” is a plausibly deniable mode of whole Trump’s administration.
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"Interviewed by NPR" -- ok we can stop right there. Remember, they're dangerous enemies of the state, along with PBS and Fred Rogers.
Sarcasm isn’t appropriate for something this serious.
Sarcasm isn't the problem per se. But it's very important to remember Poe's law, and to avoid adding to the noise. If what you're going to say is just a parody of something a Kool-aid drinking anti-American destructionist might say, there's no need.
Sorry, I'm sure you're both right. I'm just having a very hard time figuring out how to respond to the awful / obscene / insane / absurd nightmare unfolding in this country I love. It's destroying things I care deeply about. My sarcasm was probably the wrong response. I wish I could better approximate the heartfelt, erudite, conflicted brilliance of pieces like this:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
At least I can share it. And wait. And hope.
I am learning whole new levels of not “caring”.
By which I mean, stoicism is really becoming a survival stance for me. And I recommend it for others.
Some people will retreat from the news, but that’s not me.
What is happening is going to cause a great deal of lasting mental hardships, as well as the practical damage.
Second tack: remember we are still in history. History has always been crazy, with only short periods of less crazy.
A third tack is considering how to support other people, instead of needing support.
Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
At least, this is how I am prepping myself! Scary times.
> Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
This is woefully ignorant of the fact that some people will be thrown into an El Salvadorian prison, killed, disappeared, threatened, lose civil liberties, lose human rights, ect.
Must be nice to just put on some headphones and wait for it to all blow over. Unfortunately for many immigrants, LGBTQ members, activists, union members, government workers don't have that luxury. The news you're ignoring are their lives being shattered.
Stoicism isn't denial. It's just one mental discipline for dealing with harsh realities, in a way that makes it easier to remain clear and functional, and respond to difficult circumstances mindfully and actively, instead of reflexively and emotionally.
I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.
But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.
People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.
Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
I recommend reading A Refuge from Reality, à la Russe by Viv Groskop.
https://archive.ph/fkyDF
If there is one lesson you should take to heart, it is this: the later you act, the more impossible it will become.
Right now, at this moment, society has a small window of opportunity.
People cannot get rid of autocracy by themselves, they have become controlled resources. It took millions of free people to get rid of the Nazi's.
Act how?
Bottom up.
Have conversations with your friends, the grocery store owner.
Join grassroots organizations, or start a local one. Keep people accountable. Your local politician bends over because he is afraid of consequences. Now give people no way out but do the right thing. When people are transported to concentration camps, than such is not an act of God, but people doing unconstitutional things while not being held accountable.
Fascism is not Hitler. It is collective, sociological behavior. Trump is a nuisance. The problem is a society engineered to give consent to the .1%, the Dark Mirror tech bro's, the christian cultists.
I think it is. These people need to know we find them ridiculous. We should not, however, understate the danger of what they are doing.
The problem is that a comment like the one I replied to reads like support. Echoing that thinking is not the same as rejecting it.
I think you're implying that you could easily detect my sarcasm, but it wasn't sufficiently obvious sarcasm for the broader HN readership, thus risked being taken literally.
I disagree. It seemed blindingly obviously sarcastic to me -- and the rest of the comments it generated indicate the same.
EDIT: PS the peer comment by blindsight has a much more cogent critique
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(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
this sounds exactly like that's the goal behind all this.
Neoliberalism -> Corporatism -> Fascism/Autocracy
You are a Human Resource to be commercialized. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
One is not a person. One has no rights. Unless one can free themself and their loved ones of neoliberal brainwashing.
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
[1] https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum...
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"Defunded" NPR gets less than 2% of their income from the government. Defunding them isn't as big of a deal as claims appear.
I wish that were true. But 2% number is essentially disinformation. NPR gets a large portion of its budget from affiliate stations, which are funded by the government.
An odd claim, since NPR getting defunded is itself a retaliation from the current administration for not reporting positively enough about Trump.
Oh yeah I'm predicting a claim will be made I disagree with. But I can imagine the mental gymnastics, post a prediction and watch for the outcome.
Usually there's a shakedown, did Trump ever make NPR an offer they "couldn't" refuse?
Similar to the one he made to Harvard? Do they even have to make such a thing explicitly these days? I would just assume they won't fund anything that's critical to the current government.
Just read of this on BSky.
Has some of the protected disclosure document from the whistleblower.
https://bsky.app/profile/mattjay.com/post/3ln2dgoksce2e
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
That the intrusion came over Starlink from Russia with valid login credentials would be unbelievable in a tale from speculative fiction. Reality Winner looks like a hero compared to these clowns.
Politicians are only afraid of not being re-elected. So I see that the only way is to advocate voters to hold their representatives accountable. Start a campaign in you state about that, and I think you'll get an answer pretty fast, since they are very sensitive to popularity and competition matters.
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
Or who has access to DogeSA_2d5c3e0446f9@nlrb.microsoft.com?
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo...
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
I'm intrigued by the "Mission 2" notation. That suggests, perhaps, that DOGE has a "Mission 1" (its public, ostensible purpose) and a hidden "Mission 2" known only to Musk and his minions.
archive.today has a snapshot taken on 28 Feb 2025, although it doesn't show any repository with that name.
https://archive.ph/fUa5Q
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
Well, being locked up is not the worst thing that can happen, especially for a noble purpose. And maybe later someone would film movies about their [in]actions.
Until you get sent to an Salvadorian concentration camp or a Guantanamo concentration camp
If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
> If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
> The resistance is actually the violation of federal law.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
The president is currently ignoring a Supreme Court order, not explaining why they’re ignoring it, and even if they tried to charge him, last year the Supreme Court ruled that he has immunity from everything anyway. So where exactly is it different from a dictatorship now?
(Non-US here)
As I understood it, this "immunity" is granted for POTUS doing things in the course of their responsibility as POTUS. Could it be argued that breaking laws & orders which bind the activity of POTUS is _inherently not_ the work someone in that role?
Isn't the point of immunity that it's immunity from prosecution on actions that are / would potentially be illegal? You don't need immunity if what you are doing is legal anyways.
Immunity is generally scoped. Challenging the determination of scope is not the same as challenging the action.
Immunity also isn't absolute. For example police in the US typically enjoy broad immunity but that doesn't imply not getting dragged into court. They just have sweeping legal defenses available to them that other people don't.
Probably, but I’d like to see it tested.
What would you do if your CEO tells you to do something illegal? What would you do if your CEO then tells you to intimidate people who refuse to carry out the illegal requests by tailing them and then taping the surveillance footage to their door as a threat?
>And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country,
Except said "chief executive" was not elected by "a majority of the country."
He wasn't even elected by a majority of those who voted (~35-40% of the population), but rather a plurality of those who voted (~20% of the population).
Note that I am not claiming that there was anything nefarious (I have no evidence to support making such a claim), just that those who voted for that person represent only ~20% of the US population, not a "majority of the country."
The CEO of the company is bound by laws and rules that the same country enacted. We the people are the board. The CEO answers to the board.
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
Allow me to illustrate Exhibit A, unfolding now.
The only agencies the President gives orders to like this are the military ones. We don't have a dictator that dictates from on high. That is why we have the Administrative Procedures act, the executives 'executiving' needs to be consistent and based on logical reasons.
We used to have a government like this, a spoils system, and it didn't work. So both parties created the civil service. Both parties passed things like that Administrative Procedures act.
> And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country
No, he was not. He was elected by ~30% of the possible voters in this country because most people chose no one and stayed home.
If the CEO brought in their friends as temps to screw around? Which they were only allowed to do until the next board meeting when they will very likely not be approved? Yeah, I'd probably resist any royal fuck ups until then.
President isn't CEO. Laws and budgets are set by Congress. EOs do not have the force of law and many have been invalidated by courts.
> President isn't CEO
The President is literally the Chief Executive officer in the United States.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/president4.htm
> Laws and budgets are set by Congress
That's correct, under Article 1, but the President does not have to spend every dime that was allocated.
> EOs do not have the force of law
"Both executive orders and proclamations have the force of law, much like regulations issued by federal agencies"
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
You seem to underestimate the power that is vested in the office of the President as the Chief Executive.
> have been invalidated by courts
As have many, many legislatively-passed laws; this is simply checks-and-balances and allows the judiciary to act on other laws (which originate from Congress) and regulations (which originate from the Executive Branch).
Chief Executive officer does not mean dictator other than to military agencies. Please read the history of the bipartisan creation of the civil service, of the Administrative Procedures act, all created bipartisanly to reinforce that the President is not a dictator/king.
The executive has discretion in how funds are disbursed, but they have to fulfill all the obligations laid out by Congress. Impoundment is expressly illegal, not just due to Article 1, but also the Impoundment Act to avoid any ambiguity. The Dept of Education, for example, is created by act of congress and has a list of obligations in the congressional budget and the president has no authority to deny that. They have discretion in terms of how it is fulfilled and who gets paid when, but they are assuredly not allowed to just cancel programs or agencies that explicitly funded by congress.
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
The only point of DOGE is to cause as much irreparable damage as possible to American infrastructure.
It will go down as the most successful assault on America since 9/11 once the true scale of the damage is understood.
If there are elections again in the future and more sane, qualified people take office, the Justice Department will have its hands full for decades.
The whistleblower and his lawyer gave interviews on CNN & MSNBC:
CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsqgXfrSksI
The “young and inexperienced” staffers narrative is very convenient to perform target operations on (specially) sensitive data.
*targeted
Why isn’t this considered helping the enemy from within / treason?
Why are people being deported for no crimes or for far lesser crimes?
It is. But since citizens don't do anything about it, they don't need to care.
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
What is that saying they like to say all the time? “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear.” Certainly seems like they are afraid of people seeing what they are doing for “not doing anything wrong”.
It's likely that this team was infiltrated by adversary countries
I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
> Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
My understanding was that they routinely do their work far outside of the law. Because such agencies have demonstrated a willingness to violate the constitution of the US, lie to both congress and the president, overthrow the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations, perform acts of torture, rape, human experimentation, assassination, etc. it seems odd that they'd suddenly shy away from taking any action now.
I only learned recently that during his first term, Trump didn't take the president's daily briefing from the CIA, but instead paid a private intelligence service to prepare one. With all the talk about draining the swamp, ending the deep state, releasing / attempting to release Kennedy assassination and Epstein documents, revoking security clearances, it seems like there would be means, motivation, and opportunity, so to speak.
I hadn't heard that he'd paid an outside agency for them, but I did hear that he had the attention span of a toddler and in order to get him to read them at all they had to change the briefings to include a lot of exciting pictures and very short bullet points or write as if they were telling him a story instead of delivering a report while also adding his name as many times as possible in the text.
I'm not racing horses, but it seems like Dems took a similar attitude toward this administration to the polls, and found out. Underestimating folks is so dangerous. I'm just paying attention.
They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.
The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
That backdoor code is going to lurk for decades.
Not only will Musk be able to tap into it for years but foreign governments.
This is the real problem, and the reason we never should have allowed access to sensitive government and societal data in this fashion.
Pure ridiculous conjecture.
DOGE staff are just behaving like a foreign cyber-espionage group at this point
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
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slippery slope isn't a fallacy, and we're discussing matters that can't be directly analyzed using purely logical arguments.
Nah. It's getting pretty blatant, comrade.
It should be clear at this point that DOGE is trying to create a unified database of all persons in the US for targeting. Every single bit of data that they can get about you from the government or social media will be tagged to you Minority Report style. They were clear about wanting to deport citizens to El Salvador as well. Once you are identified as the other side they will come for you. If you are waiting for it to get worse before taking action and getting involved, we are already at that point.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
> Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
People support what they claim to do doing and are naive enough to believe they are doing what they say without asking questions about why they seem to be going out of there way to avoid transparency or providing any real evidence to their claims.
If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
Ignoring court orders, grabbing people off the streets to disappear, and publicly wondering how they can deport citizens isn't scary to you?
I mean, scary is a relative term. Its just as scary as Trump being legally immune to anything he does, as granted by Supreme Court.
The Republicans are basically still at the mercy of the economy - Trump backed of tariffs real quick when Japan started selling off US debt on the cheap. So I don't think its going to get levels of Saddam Hussein authoritarian. But time will tell.
The thing is, just like in Russia, smart people will know when to leave, and will leave, which is good. As soon as it becomes economically better to work in EU, you will have lots of talented people immigrating there which will bolster their economy.
They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
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Not all illegal, no. While Abrego Garcia originally came to the country illegally, he was granted the ability to stay here legally, is married to a citizen, and had been dutifully checking in with his immigration officer yearly.
Yesterday, Trump was talking about sending "homegrown criminals" to El Salvador, asking for 5 prisons be built for the purpose.
Including anyone Trump still considers a "criminal" even after they've been acquitted by the courts.
And somehow doesn't apply to actual criminals like his cronies, supporters, or himself, despite being found guilty of 34 felonies.
A) Trump wants to send “home grown” people there
B) You can’t know if someone is here illegally if they don’t have a way to challenge that claim. They could easily abduct you or anyone else and ship you off without allowing you to challenge it in court
And what is NxGenBdoorExtract?
Here is the thing that blows my mind: why is there an implicit assumption that this article is an honest reporting and not a propaganda piece? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is. What I am saying is that, at the very least, this question should always be asked first about any reporting.
Because this would be very in line with how DOGE has conducted itself so far.
NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted. From Wikipedia...
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
> NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted.
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
More evidence the current POTUS is in cahoots with Russia.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored. Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
This administration will last as long as the People allow it to. There is no other way this will end.
cite?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-staffer-big-balls-prov...
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
> Reuters could not independently verify EGodly's boasts of cybercriminal activity
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Didn't you get a pretty good answer - from a Federal court - last time you asked the same question? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43557456
It’s a common mistake to think that folks like the parent commenter are trying to engage in an intellectually honest discussion.
I'm under no illusions they're commenting in good faith, but at times I find it valuable to highlight that fact.
It is valuable! Thank you for doing it.
"Hark" goes the sealion, "sources?"
Well that is kind of the point though, I asked for sources because it is clear that the comment, containing a false and baseless claim (as evidenced by the inability to provide one single supporting source), was not intellectually honest. If we don't challenge these things, then others will start believing them.
I looked through the filing cited in this comment and every instance of the word "background" just says that backgrounds for a given employee are either complete or in progress, plus the quote. Nothing indicates anyone failed any background check (to the contrary just by count it seems like about half of them have been completed), and certainly nothing indicates that "most of them could never pass" one. Which again just by virtue of about half of them having been completed already seems to be false on its face.
It's not unusual to give an otherwise-qualified person limited access to certain data while their background checks are completed.
what part specifically about this access seems “limited” to you?
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Providing support for known criminal groups would immediately raise flags on any background check.
Do you need a source on that claim as well?
Dude, background checks are brutal. You can be denied because your parents (not you) struggled to pay taxes. You could have acedemic dishonesty that disqualifies you (that one small area where "permanent record" in school may actually cost you something). There are so many little things that no other kind of high paying job cares about in background checks that are suddenly red flags for clearance.
There's a reason Musk especially kept dodging trying to get proper clearance. He isn't even fully cleared to see all aspects of SpaceX. Some of his employees he brought in probably aren't better off.
Is the article unclear? Would people who collaborate with known criminal groups pass basic background checks?
Granted, the sample size is low, but it doesn't look likely the rest of the gang would be any different.
One staffer is not "most of them". The article in no way supportes the claim.
a basic background check would invalidate someone with the described background.
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Those darn hackers. They probably hang out and get their news... someplace.
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
or even worse, they’re compromised in some fashion and don’t know it
FWIW, that's getting too far out on the spy novel spectrum. Yes, they could be compromised. But to my point above, if they're indeed working for Putin or Xi or whoever, it's FAR more likely (given the demographic) that it's just because they took a fat bribe.
Not saying they’re compromised by foreign agents, although, I wouldnt put that out of the realm of possibility - but that either they and/or theyre tooling/setup is pwned
this is exactly what you save a zero day for, and something gives me the vibe about some of these guys that they dont take opsec very seriously, probably would not even need one
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
> horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering.
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
Also it's right there in the name DOGE. It's Elon's favorite coin and of course he's trying to pump it by naming a goddamn government department after it. It's plain as day.
Still a pseudo-department, isn't it? I believe its name makes the ersatz claim of being a department, but is in fact a private entity.
Sounds like they need to file a CVE.. oh wait.
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
This is exactly what I expect from this administration. Mob tactics. Take the silver or get the lead.
I’d not want to be a whistleblower during this presidency. Whistleblowers tend to have really bad luck crossing the street on a good day.
That's what they want. Now is when we need whistleblowers the most so they want to put the fear into them.
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That’s just uncalled for. Hope your day gets better.
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Really?
Seems way more obvious to me that Thiel/Vance/Musk would have Trump whacked... probably in the 2nd or 3rd year so that Vance can take power during a Reichstag fire with enough time left till elections in order for them to consolidate power.
Trump is primarily an actor pretending to be a gangster/president on TV to serve as a front for the real gangsters pilfering our government, at some point he will better serve those people by becoming a martyr in a way which transfers his power to someone else they control.
Hypothesis:
The tariffs are a “reichstag fire” lighter - assume extra powers as things go down in flames.
I'm surprised to see this kind of blue-anon discourse here. Why are we discussing the players of this administration "whacking" each other? There's plenty of horrible things happening in broad daylight, harms that the administration is inflicting on the American people. Why add a layer of speculation about a power struggle where they may or may not be trying to harm each other, when there's no reason to believe such a thing exists? What matters is that they're getting along well enough in the moment to push through their agenda. Hell, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of running for a third term, which would in and of itself be an illegal power grab; no need to speculate some scenario where Trump gets martyred and Vance takes over when the much simpler and more likely scenario is that Trump just ignores the law and does it himself.
What is "blue-anon" discourse?
Trump being an actor is pretty important though. Does Vance really have the Charisma to keep carrying Maga?
Trump doesn't have charisma.
Trump's been trying to be political for decades. It's no coincidence that it only started working when they brought in social media teams.
His supporters will continue to parrot whatever their preferred influencers insist, even after he is gone.
I'm sorry but if you don't think Trump has Charisma then you're just blind to it because you don't like what he's saying.
The trouble with that is that they're all fronting Russia's efforts to control the US government. This is why prosperity isn't exactly in the cards: that's the promise, but all the actions lead directly the other direction in conclusive ways.
Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.
The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.
None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
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What does this mean? You sound pleased the administration is doing things like this.
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The gaslighting is you calling the report that this whistleblower was threatened “fan fiction”.
You should be.
But you're out of patience with the wrong sources.
What kind of response is this?
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Cyber criminals is factual. This is who Elon staffed DOGE with.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/a-doge-staffer-working-as-a-s...
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it’s pretty clear that doge isn’t targeting things for efficiency but for anything deemed as ideologically incorrect. also the whole bit about how they’re ignoring congressional mandates on how money should be spent. comparing them to prior administration’s attempts at efficiency is either willful whataboutism or boneheaded naive
I don't think this is whataboutism because I'm not saying "what about this unrelated thing that the last guy did?" I'm saying "what about the fact that the last guy said he was doing the exact same thing?" It seemed fine then, why isn't it fine now?
Prior administration USDS wasn't stealing sensitive NLRB data or sending threatening notes to would-be whistleblowers in the process.
ok but they literally aren’t doing the same thing? did you read any other part of my post?
"Nobel invented dynamite. I don't see any difference between him and the guy using it to blow up children."
"Nobel already created dynamite to make civilization more efficient. Then as soon as the new guy comes along with dogemite and actually wants to have fewer mouths to feed, people start complaining about the children, conveniently ignoring that Nobel started it!"
> yes lots of cybersecurity experts were black hat hackers at one point
It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.
> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.
Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.
Anyway, on USDS in general. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service:
> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."
I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.
The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.
You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.
Here's some more information about the differences between the original USDS and DOGE: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-doge-obama/
> But it's certainly telling that only one of these off topic comments actually got flagged.
Well, right now, the flagged one was "Oh, you guys are adorable.", which didn't try to make a substantive argument or convey information. At least the Cheeto one did. "Adorable" is the least-civil and least-useful comment, so it's not only ideology that explains why it got flagged.
I don't think an off-topic comment about Roger Stone and a 15-year old ad hominem meets the bar of constructive HN discourse but we can agree to disagree. I've seen plenty of constructive, right-leaning comments downvoted and flagged while unconstructive partisan pablum from the other side sits there without even being greyed out.
I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
The problem is that factual comments can also be partisan.
- When Biden did dumb stuff, pointing that out was "right-leaning"
- When Trump does dumb stuff, pointing that out is "left-leaning"
Honestly, the greatest improvement to discourse would be stopping trying to apologize for current fuck-ups by pointing at past fuck-ups. That only leads to all fuck-ups being excused.
'Well the last guy...' -> Doesn't matter, not what we're talking about (and will even out in the long run)
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DOGE aren't federal agents. They are cyber criminals doing Elon's bidding.
The reason you are being downvoted to smithereens is that Bryan Malinowski was credibly accused of serious crimes (arms trafficking) wheres Daniel Berulis is accused of reporting serious crimes. You're making a preposterous and immoral false equivalence.
You can't seriously be defending the treatment of Malinowski. The agents did not wear body cameras in direct violation of ATF policy. They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home). This wasn't an arrest warrant, it was a search warrant. They covered up the doorbell camera so if he had checked it he wouldn't see the half-dozen police vehicles outside.
They could have done the exact same thing in the middle of the day when nobody was home and everybody would be alive today.
They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
They could have worn body cameras as ATF policy and common sense demands.
"Arms trafficking" is a funny way to say "buying guns legally and reselling them at gun shows" but let's say every single thing said about him is 100% true. If you think someone is a gun runner why wouldn't you take their house when they're not home to get all the evidence without having to worry about what they're doing? Why wouldn't you arrest him at the airport, where he almost certainly isn't armed, and police presence won't raise any alarms?
> They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home)
Among many other points that are wrong - everyone involved agrees there was plenty of knocking.
> They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
You are correct - and I was wrong - that it wasn't a no-knock raid. Malinowski's widow said they heard the knocking but no announcements that they were law enforcement. 28 seconds later their door was knocked in with a battering ram. That anyone announced they were law enforcement is disputed; we'd know what really happened but for want of a single body cam (which IMO makes it much more likely there was no announcement whatsoever).
> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
Yeah the ATF is a shit show of an agency with a strong history of fucking up in violent and unconstitutional ways - but unfortunately, their search warrant execution and 'raids' are completely standard operating procedure for US police.
It likely could've been resolved if they'd just sent him a letter asking to meet him at the Federal Building but who wants to be a desk jockey when you can play dress up like GI Joe?
Nobody gets promoted by making a phone call and telling their boss that nothing is actually in violation of law.
But kick a door down in your sparkling clean body armor and perp walk some guy who makes a quarter million dollars a year out of his mansion and you're well on your way.
No, I'm not defending it, but this is a ridiculous false equivalence to compare a botched execution of a legally valid search warrant to lawlessly intimidating a whistleblower. (You're also not stating the facts, he clearly bought the guns illegally since he filled out forms promising he wasn't going to resell them.)
Nobody, not even the ATF, is claiming he bought the guns illegally. They're claiming he was illegally "engaged in the business of" dealing weapons because he didn't have an federal firearms license. Prior to 2022 he wouldn't even be on the ATF's radar but "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" was amended to remove "livelihood."
This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.
Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.
[0] https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
Question 8 on the form, “check if any part of this transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer,” is what he lied about. I phrased it loosely.
Question 8, that's filled out by the seller? So the gun store?
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?????
It’s a bot. They’re everywhere these days.
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I meant it in a more general sense. Any person that feels the need to create a burner account to argue with people online with a comment history like yours is a bot to me, meat based or otherwise. Follow your instructions!
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Lol in consecutive comments you claim the whistleblower made it up and NPR made it up. Take a break.
Welcome to Elon Musks America
This seems important and incredibly relevant on a site called hackernews. It's credible and from a credible source. Why are we flagging it?
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
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"Fascism" today just means "right wing politician I do not like" or "conservative who is successful at pushing back the left".
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
There’s lots of fascism before the goose stepping but in the past week the President confirmed he’d like to send US citizens to a foreign gulag, he continues to ignore a Supreme Court ruling to bring home a previously and illegally deported man, he threatened Harvard that he’d strip their nonprofit status since they resisted his inane demands for conservative-DEI, he initiated several investigations using the state security apparatus of former government employees he deemed enemies and the richest man in the world (who donated 9 figures to get the President elected) continues to illegally impound funding from across the government including every organization that regulates the companies he runs. Oh and they’re planning a $100M military parade for the president’s birthday. Things aren’t great!
Considering the amount of nazi salutes being thrown around I wouldn't be surprised to see goose stepping at the parade.
If by "successful at pushing back the left", and by "the left", you mean the rule of law and due process itself, then yes, I am against fascism. The executive is not a king and everyone within our borders deserves due process.
The Abrego Garcia case is one of those critical lines of actual fascism: Pinochet-style disappearances. Not really connected to DOGE though, they're the administrative wing of fascism.
Plainclothes officers are hijacking people on the street without showing any credentials, then sending them to Salvadorean gulags without any court hearing.
Your lack of paying attention to this or lack of understanding how bad that is is not a problem in the rest of us.
Before you give me this nonsense of "they are criminals", number one this is still an inhumane way to treat convicted people, and number two they have not been convicted of anything, number three there have been tons of reports of the accusations made against these people being total BS.
Earlier this week, Trump was on microphone telling El Salvador's president that he wants him to build five more gulags and that we will send American citizens there.
Hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists. It's about signalling power.
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I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
> Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
Switching to https://news.ycombinator.com/active (/active) with showdead is a better HN experience, nowadays.
The /active page is helpful, thanks! I also just recently realized that the 'hckr news'[0] interface doesn't hide or remove flagged stories if you're using the Top 10/20/50 view options, so if something is getting discussed/upvoted it will be there.
[0]https://hckrnews.com/
> I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
"People don't like my opinions therefore I am going to sabotage the discussion from obscurity."
A good chunk of the time, it's sourced and documented facts that are flagged and downvoted, to reduce visibility.
Are you sure? There can be absolutely be voting and flagging biases, but the majority if the time it happens it is due to issues of tone for comments that are picking fights rather then prompting interesting discourse. When you get flagged or down voted, the most productive response is to look at how you were presenting your information or opinion and if there was a way to do so that would be more inclined to produce a productive conversation. Even when it's borderline, there's usually something you could have changed that wouldn't have drawn as much partisan ire and it is valuable to consider this, as partisan ire turns off brains.
I'll give you one example that I saw just now of someone else's comment that was downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710265
It happens all the time.
Here's an example of my comment on the same topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256114
The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.
That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
^ Honestly, the most useful approach.
I can't change other people, but I can change myself.
Sometimes, it is what it is. But often I can find a way to more effectively say what I was trying.
Exhibit A: avoiding the dangling ad hom after an otherwise solid point. Seductive but unproductive.
I just gave a couple of examples in the other comment in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710568
Zero ad hominem or anything else.
And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.
If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted. Your comment has no sources and the tone feels a little combative so I'm not surprised it picked up a couple of downvotes given the topic. In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness.
Anything Musk related on here has always been prone to less constructive conversation, even before he became a part of the partisan political circus.
>The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted
It was downvoted for a while.
> In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness
Comments that are much more bitter and combative than mine and without sources are upvoted all the time, because they fuel a certain political narrative.
I stand corrected. Please flag anything you disagree with.
I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.
It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
You flag posts with politics because you don't like having been flagged?
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?
What a way to live.
Actually, good point. Thanks for pointing that out.
I can't fathom the thought process that claims the goal is "preventing escalation" and immediately decides the only method is escalation.
If it was good enough for the Cold War... https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2964.html
It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Perhaps you ought to look in the mirror.
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
110%, people can be braindead assholes in their replies, and fail to substantially engage with comments.
Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.
Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.
I don't need to defend it. I flag this stuff because I don't care. I'm not American and I'm tired of seeing American politics on this site. It's not what I come here for.
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
> too "political" for tech news?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
That's chilling. I always thought HN as a kinda level-headed corner of the internet.
I'd hate for you or others to read the GP comment and for your perception of HN to be altered, without any further detail or nuance to be presented for consideration.
Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.
This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.
I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
Easy to think that until you start viewing /active and see all the stuff that's flagged and doesn't appear on the front page. Any article, even those explicitly about tech, science and academia are flagged if they have even the gentlest suggestion that this administration is flawed.
Been here since '09.
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's unfortunate.
It's funny that even on hacker news wiki there is a proclamation from Paul Graham that they do not help feature stories of their startups from YC. If that wouldn't be a quote from from 2013 I would call it an straight up lie.
It's explained in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) how, and why, we do that (see "What's the relationship between YC and HN?")
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
Launch HN: mrge.io (YC X25) – Cursor for code review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692476 - April 2025 (89 comments)
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
I haven't commented here in years.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!" Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
You joined in 2011.
Let me assure you: the trash can bully vibes were default here far before you were.
HN is fine for what it is, but it's never ever been good.
It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
I wish there was a similarly active community for hackers in the traditional sense.
I very much enjoy https://lobste.rs
I think that Tony Stark legend is dead for a while. The few remaining believers are running on copium.
There's always been a right wing / libertarian contingent here. These days I recognize most of the top 20 or so usual suspects. Says nothing about how many flags happening though.
i would love for this to be true but it's hosted by a venture capital firm. hard to ignore possible conflicts of interest since tech/VC culture is so intertwined with american rightwing politics.
I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the comments here, and in general on political stories, it's the comments defending DOGE and Trump that tend to be downvoted.
The name is ironic given that the site was founded by a venture capitalist.
Founders are (generally) not hackers and not your friends. They are money men and will always follow the money.
It's censorship plain and simple.
And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
It’s flagged now - pretty embarrassing for a site called “hacker” news
Yep, it's blatant censorship and the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
The admins/mods turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
Maybe? I'm wary of technical solutions to non-technical problems. The base problem here seems non-technical to me—it's the combination of:
1. there's a tsunami of intense (and important) political stories right now
2. HN has 30 slots on its frontpage
3. HN is not a current affairs site
In other words, the fundamentals themselves are twisted in a knot. I don't see how one gets around that.
I think you are describing a different, hypothetical problem?
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43227619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] The reason this is not a new phenomenon is because of what I said in my GP comment: it follows from the fundamentals of the site.
p.s. The thread you linked to spent 15 hours on HN's front page. That's a lot.
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
seems like it was unflagged. This story is horrifying, thank you.
Who, exactly, is being censored?
[flagged]
hn staff turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
most of this stuff is getting flagged within minutes.
[dead]
[dead]
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as some sort of meaningful thing and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 has a good list of more.
For those who are up for a more complex explanation, this is really how I think about this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306. The basic idea is to avoid predictable sequences: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Oops, I hear you! Well, maybe the explanation is helpful to others who are worrying about the moderation side.
But of course there's no rhyme or reason to "users" either, since that's really just a statistical cloud (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
> Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Now that dang has confirmed it's incorrect, maybe stop sticking with it.
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
---
Edit: I found these ones. Admittedly most weren't on the frontpage for all that long:
EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680556 - April 2025 (46 comments)
How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43630624 - April 2025 (338 comments)
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43555597 - April 2025 (36 comments)
How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43480730 - March 2025 (98 comments)
Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452474 - March 2025 (164 comments)
EFF Border Search Pocket Guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43441895 - March 2025 (32 comments)
Ask HN: Are you afraid to travel to US to tech conferences? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350 - March 2025 (198 comments)
I meant "deleted" from by being flagged, which is a deletion from the lurkers. And yes.. absolutely I have seen some of these stories get through the gauntlet.
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
They're probably doing some of the flagging because they disagree (I think correctly) with a characterization of HN in which HN can be "highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening". HN has newsy stuff but its purpose is not really news - there are much better sites for that. The 'News' in 'Hacker News' is more like the 'News' in Huey Lewis & The News.
The problem is capture. How many platforms for news and discussing news are not completely captured by people with an agenda of personal power?
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
You are funding
You've got me confused with someone else cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
[flagged]
I can assure you that it has not been the standard corporate advice when I had to regularly travel from Canada to US for business meetings on a regular basis 15 years ago while working at a big tech company. Nor do I recall anyone else who was traveling doing that on their own. If it is the standard procedure now, then yes, that is definitely a reason to be concerned.
So I've had this in mind for ages, but my coworkers have only just realized it and started implementing it. Thus for most people, it's *new*s.
The question is why was this prompted by DOGE? What DOGE action has caused a Canadian citizen employed by a US company to suddenly feel the need to protect their smart device?
That is... other than sensationalism, which appears to be the story here.
consumer451 is providing an example of a business story that is tied to understanding US politics. The example is only tangentially related to the OP.
Yes, indeed. Thank you for connecting my loosely strewn dots in this thread.
> What shouldn't be ignored? Some small subset of foreign workers decided to take security seriously?
That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
I still don't understand your point.
Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Unless you have something definitive, this sounds like some alarmist individuals deciding to take their own personal security to the level that was already recommended of them.
> What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Do you wonder why Canada has been issuing travel warnings for people travelling to the US? Or why they've been treating the US as a hostile power given that the current admin has threatened to invade Canada and make it the 51st state? All of which are leading to a massive drop in tourism to the US?
That's made up. Please cite some sources.
The trust signals being sent out by the USA are currently making everyone outside the USA "alarmist."
As an example, as a European, price a round trip ticket from Prague to Seattle, for around 2 weeks from now. The price is currently <60% of normal. It's ~$420.
These are the facts on the ground.
What does a ticket price have to do with wiping your phone at a border?
I did some fact checking on your ticket prices - you are quoting ultra-budget carriers that are normally in that price range. Normal tickets are $1200+, as you would expect.
There's plenty going on right now that you don't need to make stuff up to back up your narrative. Use something real...
> Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
Of course this is fucking cause for alarm. You are either cluelessly naive, or gaslighting.
I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
This is a fair take from my POV. I am very happy not to be modding any forum these days.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
Honestly looks like a fairly heavy handed bot. Is very close to the "if it has trans" decisions we know they did in the search for things to cancel.
Several users have stated in political threads that they spend the day flagging political stories. I don't think there's any reason to believe a bot is doing it.
I have been calling them "The Guardians of New."
But maybe the far more appropriate term has been there all along:
> The Knights Who Say "Ni!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIV4poUZAQo
Bring me a shrubbery!
Fair. It doesn't have to be a bot to look like one. Is certainly a hive mind behavior that is not any less heavy handed than "see a word, click flag button."
Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
Indeed, I'm sure there's a LOT of people, especially in the HN space are pro-fascist.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." "Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”." "Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."[flagged]
Welcome to the Internet.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
[flagged]
It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Rules made in the late 2000s might not necessarily hold on HN in 2025.
HN has shifted into a lagging Reddit, and preemptively shutting down any discourse about the falling quality of discourse on HN is ludicrous and plain annoying.
HN has changed, and A LOT of Reddit does leak onto HN, and this absolutely deserves conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698481
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conspiracy theory territory, it could just be that people get tired of reading the same bullshit everyday.
I'm not american so can somebody please explain me, how is deleting logs and every trace of your actions helping with government efficiency?
Nothing they are doing is related to government efficiency. You can't really put too much faith in names.
The basic rule of government naming: the more of GOOD THING in the name, the less of that it will be.
This quote (from Lord of War) really encapsulates a lot of what you say:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
That generalises to a lot of naming. Papers like Fakt or Pravda, country DPKR, political parties that mention law, justice and order, etc.
I always particularly liked the Committee of Public Safety, for this (they're the ones who did the Reign of Terror, which doesn't seem _particularly_ public-safety-oriented.)
Don’t forget Truth Social
В « Правде » нет известий, а в « Известиях » нет правды
> В « Правде » нет известий, а в « Известиях » нет правды
For the sake of context, this is an old Soviet-era joke, that translates to about the following:
> In "Pravda" (The Truth, CPSU's newspaper) there are no news. In "Izvestiya" (The News, national newspaper of the USSR, under the control of the Supreme Soviet) there is no truth.
In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
How is firing people helping government efficiency?
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
Yes, how?
Log storage is expensive.
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
I can honestly not tell if this comment was intended to be taken seriously, or if it was tongue in cheek.
I really want to believe it's tongue in cheek because the thought of asking not to be audited in order to save some compute on Splunk queries or whatever is very funny to me.
When in doubt, check the comment history.
It is.
Nothing about DOGE or the Trump administration is about efficiency. It's just a label they use to con gullible voters.
Their real goal is more likely a combination of grift and settling grudges.
Edit - typos
The next administration won't be able to spend time and money investigating crimes of the current one /s
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
To more efficiently rout trouble-makers and unions.
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The "looking at" process is still subject to federal law.
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
... very young people, of which at least one is affiliated with cyber criminals (and also happens to be the grandson of a KGB spy).
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...
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> This is like 947 on a list of terrible things happening because of this administration.
This is on purpose. Trump has been slowly pushing the Overton window. It seems everything is fair game and US citizens are largely apathetic, scared or favorable to Trump's action.
There are basically weekly protests at this point.
US Citizens aren't apathetic. Our representatives on the other hand...
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> rampantly false
Is Abrego Garcia not real?
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"Disappeared" in this sense refers to the manner in which he was abducted, not his ongoing status. The word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments.
Though I'd argue both uses are acceptable in common use discussion since even if we know where he is since he's going to be incarcerated indefinitely with no due process, no access to lawyers, no civil rights. How long could he be dead without anyone knowing? Literally indefinitely?
> word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments
Disappearing has been consistently used to refer to illegal and inconspicuous detention since WWII. The person was there and now they are not. There is no arrest record. There are no lawyers. There is certainly no case record where government officials are being questioned [1]. They may be detained, dead or on holiday. The ambiguity, which permits bystanders to assume normality, is the terrifying key.
Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
> How long could he be dead without anyone knowing?
Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/12/abrego-garcia-el-sa...
> Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.
It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle, but I neither believe it is dangerous nor do I believe it improper.
What I think is dangerous is this game of semantic precision you're playing where we lose the forest from the trees. I think we should be frightened of and wringing our hands about is not a dictionary definition, it's what we're literally seeing: never mind we know where they are at, we know that right now many are not being given due process and there are active attempts to subvert any attempts at them (i.e., rapidly moving to a more friendly district in LA, putting on planes faster than lawyers can respond).
If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site? Maybe you would, and I'd roll my eyes then too.
> Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.
The same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case? The executive branch who has punished its DOJ lawyers for being candid with judges? The executive branch who fully controls the relationship with the government housing the detainment facility and who is the only route to fixing this issue? How many more breaks in normalcy and functioning governance do you need to see before you start doubting their good faith responses, much less effort?
> It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle
It’s not. The only place you see it being used this way is in a section of social media that blows everything out of proportion.
Where I agree is that the battle may be lost. In the same way “defund the police” (versus better regulate) kneecapped the criminal-justice reform movement, and bee-lining to “genocide” (versus the horrors of war and alleged genocide) hurt the Palestinian cause in America, premature extrapolation makes this look unserious. Because if the person who is calling what’s clearly not one a disappearance or concentration camp, why bother with habeus corpus?
> If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site?
No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
> same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case?
Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego...
I agree with your examples of language dilution being harmful, but sorry I just don't agree with this one. I think we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up, but there is a clear and - I think to most reasonable people - obvious bad faith attempt to place them outside of due process or monitoring for constitutionally compliant treatment.
> No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.
You didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation since it's not representative of how things work today. One year ago, the current situation would have been similarly described. I don't think it was an unfair thought exercise given the circumstances.
> Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders
I guess we'll see.
On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do. I think a smart administrative state would disappear people just like this, it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same.
> we're seeing a smarter form of disappearance, one where we know who took them, we know where they end up
Nobody is saying due process was followed. But do you really not see why the government saying “we have no record of this person and do not comment on matters of national security,” to the press and to the courts, would not be worse?
> didn't engage with the hypothetical and changed the situation
How did I change the situation?
> On this topic, I think reasonable people can disagree, which we clearly do
On Trump defying the courts, yes. On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
> it feels like an evolution of KGB tactics that adds some documentation, but the outcome is precisely the same
You couldn’t sue to get your family—and information about them—out of the Gulag. Disappearance is where detention blurs into execution. We’re simply not there. Nobody is able to claim Garcia is on vacation, we have to confront the fact that he’s been extrajudicially detained.
> On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.
Ha, well OK then! Well then we can make it one way: I understand what you're saying, I understand how a reasonable person might arrive at your conclusion, but I disagree. Whether you can do the same for me says less about me than you.
To me, your heels in the sand here feels like college-level semantic literalism and absolutism. Debates like this that focus on historical definitions rather than a discussion that considers the larger whole in evolving societies and changing contexts (technological, administratively, and others).
Yes, someone getting black bagged and executed in silence is clearly worse. It is the worst form of disappearance. But I don't think that's where the bar is for being "disappeared" - for me, that is when you are denied due process, prevented from receiving it, and all knowledge about you is now entirely reliant on the bad faith captors. This doesn't feel unreasonable or unfair to me, especially as it relates to everyday civilian discussions such as this one.
Will due process win out in the end, and I'm here wringing my hands like an idiot? Maybe so, we'll see how the next four years ago.
At any rate, I think we're clearly at impasse. Final shots are yours.
Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.
Some of us work in tech and have skin colors that are similar to the person in question, and are deciding on the level of risk we are willing to take.
That this is not obvious to you is a clear indication of the fact that this isn’t something you personally worry about.
It is probably not a bad idea for people that don't fit in to consider obtaining citizenship elsewhere for their safety. Some non citizens are returning, though many who are considering this are tied down by their work or other constraints.
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> it'll start with sure actual criminals
Have they targeted any single criminal yet? Because they have sent two planes of people here to Brazil and nobody there was wanted by either country.
Also, Brazil has a list of wanted criminals at Interpol with known addresses in Florida that they aren't arresting.
They've already sent an innocent man there and acknowledged he was innocent, then refused to bring him back when the courts, the opposition and finally SCOTUS each commanded them to bring him back.
This was just a test, and it was successful. They can now disappear and deport anyone they want with no repercussions whatsoever. The GOP is a criminal organization and their followers share the responsibility of what happens next.
> then refused to bring him back when the courts
It was extra ridiculous/insulting/terrifying to see the heads of both countries in the same room saying that there was nothing they could do about the situation.
SCOTUS granting the president far reaching immunity was an invitation for the president to be in contempt of SCOTUS whenever it pleases him, and to just piss on the constitution he took an oath on defending.
It’s possible he is already dead, as he was basically sent right in to the arms of the gangs he fled from.
The fact that no charges have ever been brought against him by the Salvadoran government, yet they still claim to be holding him there lends credence to this. Why would they not simply release him? If he's dead it would be a major problem for Bukele's government as well as the US government. So evidently we're in "disappeared" territory now.
> This was just a test, and it was successful
It's too soon to say it's "successful": SCOTUS was 9-0 against and that was still only a few days ago, so far from being a success it's now turning into a constitutional crisis... assuming the administration doesn't fold, or flip-flop, or some combination of the two - which we've already seen plenty of[1].
----------
[1] the seemingly arbitrary and capricious tariff changes announced almost every day ever since the-day-after-April-fools-day.
So, he’s being brought back then?
Roll a D20: if it's even he comes back, if it's less than 10 he mysteriously disappears.
I wouldn't even put the odds of him coming back at 50%
20: He gets brought back in good condition, 19-16: He is gonna get brought back in terrible condition, 15-11 he doesn't come back, 10-1 he is dead
Note that I said "even" and "less than ten". Even ignoring damage he's already suffered in the prison, the "good outcomes" are still only 30% (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20).
If you read the SCOTUS ruling, all it upholds from the lower courts decision is that the USG must 'facilitate', not 'effectuate' his release. AFAIK the Court doesn't have a way to order El Salvador to do so
Wasn't the argument for the right to bear arms always that it would prevent a criminal government from having it's way?
Now, how's that working out so far?
Not “always”. It wasn’t the reason that became an amendment, national defense was. People later emphasized that rather off-label justification when state militias were nationalized and the main purpose of the amendment became wholly obsolete.
It, indirectly, was, because it was the reason the country initially relied on decentralized citizen militias for defense in the first place. Many of the founders were worried that a standing federal army would be a tool of oppression, and wanted to keep most of the firepower distributed amongst the populace.
The system more or less worked until the Spanish American War, when the government realized that the militias need some sort of standard in order to integrate properly with the regular army when called up. This led to the creation of the National Guard in 1903. It was tightly integrated into the Army structure in 1933.
What arguably made the Amendment obsolete was the advance of technology. By the early 20th century conventional warfighting took too much firepower, support, and coordination for a loose citizen militia to conduct. At best they could form the core of an insurgent force, but the goal is always to not get to that point.
In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
> In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.
Yeah, precisely my personal take against the current "from utility" argument in the amendment's favor: it's very much not clear that they're especially useful for resisting oppressive governments, for one thing because those are often quite popular at first, and for another, because successful examples of that tend to involve a ton of foreign aid, making the role of private arms rather minor. Meanwhile, examples involving foreign invaders are extremely different (and also often involve lots of foreign aid).
Like, maybe the right deserves to stand anyway for other reasons (maybe it just ought to! Maybe it doesn't need a reason!) but I think that particular argument for it is really misguided, especially if one takes it seriously when forming one's opinions about the broader political landscape. IMO there is no meaningful safeguard against tyranny to be found in that amendment.
Today I learned, thanks! As a European, I'm not overly familiar with the genesis of American law ;)
It's okay, neither is the vast majority of americans
America's gun culture is very closely tied to its settler culture. Most right wing gun nuts are barely able to conceal their fears/hopes for a race war in all but name.
That said, there are plenty of examples of progressive forces arming themselves. The Black Panthers are a good example. Without their armed militancy I think the US government would have been a lot less likely to capitulate to the demands of the peaceful civil rights activists.
No. It was what peoppe who want to use guns to force own autocracy say.
The people with guns support these measures.
This. The 2A absolutists want guns to pacify their neighbors, not the government.
This is nonsense. Plenty of nonviolent, peaceful groups carry arms.
Leftists (e.g. Anarchists, Marxists, Socialists, Communists, Queer Liberation, Black Liberation, etc.) groups typically are pro-firearms. Not always, but plenty are. The Black Panthers, famously, were armed, but so are are orgs like the Pink Pistols. Martin Luther King Jr. had many guns for self defense, and carried a revolver at times. Marx famously said that workers should be armed.
Centrists (e.g. Democrats, some Labour parties) typically abhor guns, and value the decorum and principle of the instution to keep us all safe. They are a "if society is well ordered, then there's no need for arms" group.
Right wing folks (e.g. Republicans, Proud Boys, KKK, etc.) are the folks who you are describing -- by and large supporting these measures and also want to use firearms to exert control.
It's really, really important if you consider yourself to be a progressive to ask, "Who will gun control laws in America be used to prosecute? Will that be minority groups dispraportionately?"
Historically and presently, armed minorities are more difficult to oppress, and many many leftist groups have historically and presently been armed for the purposes of community defense. By suggesting that arming oneself is a right wing position you erase history and erode current efforts for folks to build community safety systems.
All* the people lamenting the current administration are scared of or want to ban firearms... whoops!
Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
*Broad generalization
>Now, imagine if those people had gotten their way, and how much easier it would be for the administration to do some of the things people claim it wants to do (e.g. gulags).
Given that none of the people with firearms have done a damn thing to stop this and how many of them even voted for Trump and support his policies, because American gun and militia culture has been infested with Nazis since forever, I don't see how it could possibly have been any easier. There has been and continues to be no resistance to Trump of any significance. When he does open up the gulags for real, it's going to be America's armed patriot militias who round people up for the regime.
https://documentedny.com/2025/04/14/ice-bukele-cecot-tren-de...
Probably more then one.
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Funny, because the administration testified in court that it was a mistake that he was sent. Claiming the stay was illegal was retconned after the fact, not the cause for the deportation.
This is entirely disconnected from reality [1]. If he was not an illegal alien, he would not have been deported at all.
[1]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13...
The claim that administration supporters are now using is that the legal 'administrative stay' placed upon him was illegal, That is what 'stay' means in the context of what I said, not his 'stay in the country'. Maybe don't get so righteous next time especially when you don't bother to understand what someone says.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vedkm7w2do
I'm assuming the response to this is going to be along the lines of 'oh this doesnt prove he was innocent, they say he was a member of ms-13 etc etc etc' because evidently innocent until proven guilty (which they provided no proof of) isn't a thing anymore
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"The US government has conceded Mr Ábrego García was deported because of an "administrative error", though it also says he is a member of the MS-13 gang - something his lawyer denies. "
Try actually reading the article next time. Again, the burden of proof here should be falling on PROVING he is a member of ms-13, not proving he isn't. You are obviously arguing this in bad faith.
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Your link says the opposite of what you claim.
> Although the asylum claim proved to be time-barred—aliens are required to bring such claims within a year of entering the country—in October 2019 Judge Jones did grant his request for “withholding of removal” based on his “well-founded” fear of persecution by Barrio 18. The government did not appeal, so Jones’s ruling is now final.
> The removal being in error does not make him innocent.
Innocent is the default. That's a fundamental part of how our legal system works. The government must prove you guilty.
They did not have "every right to remove him." As the article you linked says, Abrego Garcia was specifically granted a withholding of removal order.
To only one specific country. Not in general.
I can’t find any proof you’re innocent, only a complete lack or evidence that you are guilty.
Guess we better send you to CECOT. Have fun with your 0.6m^2 of living space. Too bad you weren’t innocent.
He's an illegal who had a credible (like actually credible, like you could pitch it to someone in the year 2002, not the flimsy 2020s BS) claim for asylum but didn't file in time. He was eventually caught up in the system for reasons not related to the commission of any crime. ICE looked at his case, and gave him a "we won't deport you because your case is pending" status.
> He's an illegal ...
Edit; see below for details
This is false. He has no legal status [1]. He could be removed, just not to El Salvador. That does not give him legal status or make him a resident.
[1]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13...
Interesting. More details about that status can be found here https://immigrationequality.org/asylum/asylum-manual/immigra...
I've heard the legal status mentioned by an online-person-who-should-know-better. I'll let them know.
"Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.
They can deport you (if they find a willing third party nation), as it's not a path to permanent resident status, but until they do so, you're allowed to reside and work.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/fil...
> As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally. But at the end of the court process, an immigration judge enters a deportation order and then tells the government they cannot execute that order. That is, the “removal” to a person’s home country is “withheld.” However, the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.
> Withholding of removal provides a form of protection that is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a sort of limbo. A person who is granted withholding of removal may never leave the United States without executing that removal order, cannot petition to bring family members to the United States, and does not gain a path to citizenship. And unlike asylum, when a family seeks withholding of removal together a judge may grant protection to the parent while denying it to the children, leading to family separation.
So this is a bit weird. The initial claim seems not well defined, because "legal" / "illegal" person is not really a thing without more context, so you can interpret it in many ways. The main takeaway though is "after the hearing, he's not breaking any rules by staying and working in the country". That's legal enough for me for a casual comment - I'll stay with my original then - he entered illegally and afterwards was allowed to legally remain.
This is simply false. He broke the law, was a criminal, had no right to reside in the US. Saying he was innocent is also simply false.
Have you got the actual court decision about the crime? Not police accusations or similar - confirmation he was actually judged and found guilty in court?
> you're allowed to reside and work.
False on both counts and contradictory to the source you cite. There is no right to reside, and you could only work if you were additionally authorised.
> "Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.
In the same sense as trespassing is a legal status. The way in which it is not a legal status is that he does not have the status of legally residing in the US.
Here, I’ll quote my source again.
> As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally.
I’ve seen you claim 1+1=3 all over this thread, so the gaslighting isn’t gonna work.
> In the same sense as trespassing is a legal status.
No. In the same sense that you’re allowed to stay in a homeless shelter legally for a while, but not necessarily forever.
Your source is wrong.
https://www.tahirih.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Withholdi...
MY CLIENT HAS BEEN GRANTED WITHHOLDING OF REMOVAL… NOW WHAT?
Your client may apply for an Employment Authorization Document by using the form I765 available on the USCIS website (www.uscis.gov). Her Employment Authorization Document will then be sent to her most recent address on file with USCIS. It is therefore important to make sure that not only the court but also USCIS is informed of any changes in her address through use of the form AR-11 (also available on the USCIS website). The EAD is only issued for one year at a time and should be renewed with ample time (at least three months) to allow for processing.
https://immigrationequality.org/asylum/asylum-manual/immigra...
> An applicant who has won withholding of removal does not receive as many benefits as an asylee. The individual can seek work authorization
https://immigrationequality.org/asylum/asylum-manual/withhol...
> they must have a valid CIS-issued employment authorization document in order to work lawfully in the United States.
---
Not one single claim I made is false, while this whole thread is in response to a blatantly false claim, that an innocent man was deported. You should check the mirror.
It's been pointed out, over and over again, that our system presumes innocence until convicted in a court of law. You know this. Don't pretend otherwise.
Until the government finds a different country to send him to, he's here legally. He's not breaking any law by remaining while awaiting that. Your source backs me up, in its first paragraph - "he can now safely remain in this country".
He had the required work authorization, as well.
https://wtop.com/maryland/2025/04/us-judge-to-question-trump...
> He also was given a federal permit to work in the United States, where he was a metal worker and union member, according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.
A court has ruled that someone broke the law, though; the administration. As upheld by SCOTUS, even.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
> The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.
Here is the initial ruling against him for being present in the US illegally:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578...
> The Respondent was arrested in the company of other > > ranking gang members and was confirmed to be a ranking member of the MS-13 gang by a > > proven and reliable source.
The same ruling was upheld on appeal which specifically upheld the finding of him being part of MS-13, and in the US illegally: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578...
He had his day in court, twice, he was not innocent. I never contended that the government did not wrongfully deport him, not once, but that does not make him innocent. He is still an MS-13 member that is illegally in the US and subject to deportation at the pleasure of the executive.
Word games aren't going to change the facts.
That's not a criminal court; it's a wing of the Executive. They don't make guilty/not-guilty determinations at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_judge_(United_Stat...
The proceedings are administrative, the people are "respondents" instead of "defendants", etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_proceedings
You're also citing the government's assertions. If assertions were enough to deem someone a convicted criminal, we wouldn't need trials. It has never been proven, "beyond a reasonable doubt", that he was a member of MS-13.
The "proven and reliable source" they cite is a corrupt cop. https://newrepublic.com/article/194010/kilmar-abrego-garcia-...
> The Maryland police officer who formally attested to Abrego Garcia’s supposed gang affiliation in 2019—when he was detained the first time—was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker, The New Republic has established.
Your two citations also preceed his being granted withholding of removal. At the time of his deportation, he had legal status here, until they found a valid place to send him. The deportation - again, per SCOTUS - was the illegal bit.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2025/kilmar-abrego-gar...
> But in Abrego Garcia’s case, to revoke his protections, the U.S. government “would have been required under law to reopen his immigration court proceedings and prove to the judge that he was a member of MS-13 and therefore no longer eligible for withholding.”
> The deportation - again, per SCOTUS - was the illegal bit.
Never disputed this. Why do you keep returning to this when it is not in question? Do you not get how the US could deport someone and the person still not be innocent, being an MS-13 gang member and an illegal alien?
> Why do you keep returning to this when it is not in question?
Because you keep falsely claiming the guy is a criminal. He has not been convicted of any crime; his membership in MS-13 is an allegation only. (And a shaky one.) Until convicted of a crime, our system presumes him to be innocent.
The only demonstrably, provably, without-a-doubt illegal act here was the deportation.
We deport and refuse entry to non-criminals (including for plenty of non-criminal acts, or even just vibes) all the time. It doesn't prove guilt.
> The only demonstrably, provably, without-a-doubt illegal act here was the deportation.
This is false. You and I know that it is provably, without-a-doubt, that he entered the US illegally and was remaining in the US illegally. There is nobody disputing this.
> You and I know that it is provably, without-a-doubt, that he entered the US illegally and was remaining in the US illegally.
No one has charged him, let alone convicted him, of a crime for entering the country as a minor. He has no criminal record. That's a fact.
You and I know he received withholding of removal (and a work permit!). His remaining here at that point was legal, albeit potentially temporary.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled the deportation an illegal act. No portion of the judicial branch has yet weighed in on Garcia's actions.
I don't disagree, but I bet ICE doesn't see it that way. I mean why else would someone who's been granted a legal status pending his case wind up on their list of people to roll up on.
Citation for this: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13...
And that does make the deportation erroneous, that does not make him innocent.
If you google "innocent man sent to el salvador" you'll get dozens on dozens on dozens of results from which you can pick your favorite news site to catch up.
I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent [1][2]. It's okay if the claim is baseless and there is no citation, but asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/14/abrego-garci...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-meet-with-el-salvador...
>asking me to find a citation for someone else's baseless claim is not really okay.
It is one of the biggest news stories in the last month, and various articles (at least 3 that I can think of) have been here on HN. It's trivially searchable. Asking for a citation is almost certainly bad faith.
>I checked the first two results and not one of them said the man was innocent
It's pretty obscure, but there's this thing called "innocent until proven guilty". The man never had his time in court. The US admitted it was a mistake. What are you looking for? Just being contrarian for the sake of it?
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Last reply, because you are very obviously trolling and commenting in bad faith.
>the US government had every right to deport him,
No.
These are all from that article. Special attention to "his removal was illegal".
>Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record in the United States or anywhere else
>the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States
>his removal was illegal because an immigration judge had granted him “withholding of removal”
>Jones’s 2019 ruling, barring Abrego Garcia’s removal
The Supreme Court has even stepped in, which I'm sure you're aware despite pretending not to be:
>On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam order, with no recorded dissents, requiring the government to “facilitate [Abrego Garcia’s] return”
And, despite any and all of that! There was no due process. Which, "illegal" or "legal", everyone is supposed to get a due process. If you remove due process for the people you don't like, someone else just needs to claim you're in that group and now you don't get due process! It's like Step 1 of authoritarianism.
Which, since you've not posted anything proving your innocence despite other commenters asking for it, perhaps we should remove your rights to due process.
Our system deems people innocent until proven guilty of a crime. That has not happened - he is not charged with any.
Can you cite anything showing him having been convicted of something?
I made no claim one way or the other. I asked you to cite a claim.
All you do is ask for "cite?" and then complain when the citation isn't want you asked for, partly because you never ask for anything specific. You're just a troll.
Then here’s the cite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
You probably were taught this in elementary school.
"The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22", "There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed." from your first link.
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Unless you can find a court hearing / docket / charges, or some report about them, he's innocent.
If you think that's not enough, you're probably not innocent either... unless you have a way to prove that no charge exists against you in any jurisdiction in the world. Do you get why people assume innocence here now?
He entered illegally, had no legal status, had his asylum request rejected [1]. He was not innocent, he could be deported, just not to El Salvador.
[1]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13...
I think you're arguing in bad faith.
You would think this administration would jump at the opportunity of showing the media any proof that Abrego Garcia was a member of any gang, no matter how circumstantial or weak the proof is. But I've yet to see any of it.
He entered illegally, had no legal status, had his asylum request rejected [1]. He was not innocent, he could be deported, just not to El Salvador.
[1]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/abrego-garcia-and-ms-13...
You're moving the goalposts. You were arguing about his alleged gang membership and now your point is that he was an illegal.
Also, other users showed that his deportation was suspended as he had been threatened by the gang members you allege he's a member of.
Not even almost once did this discussion start with me claiming he was a member of a gang.
Check any website with news from the last few weeks.
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This is some grade A trolling.
Yeah, imagine making a false claim and then asking other people to cite it for you.
Cite? Really? I haven’t seen an article about the situation or the visit that didn’t mention it.
This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.
Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.
SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.
> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want
I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".
I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
This is a lot of words to say "I don't believe him". None of us really knows, and it's not worth speculating about, because the case is about something much bigger now. It's about the limits of executive authority, separation of powers, and rule of law.
> he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador
What evidence is there for this "near certainty"? Your argument here should be with asylum laws, not this individual.
For what it's worth, the situation in El Salvador at the time he left (when he was a minor) does make the claim somewhat credible. There's plenty of evidence that the choice for male youths at that time was leave or join whichever gang controlled your area. The idea that everyone is an "economic migrant" ignores the reality of the situation, which is far more complex.
I don't know in his personal case if he is lying. However, you can get to what the probability of a random applicant for an asylum being truthful very easily. You just need a good estimate of the % of migrants that had to flee gangs or other risk of death (gangs that are still in control of their communities), then compare that to the % that claim they had to flee for those reasons, then subtract.
I don't know what that % is, but we have courts that are deciding these cases every day. The actual court cases are more complex to analyze because lack of adequate council or other factors might influence outcomes. However, of people who attend their interview, about 44% are determined to not have a credible fear.
Protection rackets are pretty big in central america. Look at the publicity about the avocado industry. Protection rackets only work when you go after those people that escape your 'protection' payments. So yes, it's reasonable to assume every person that said no to the racket and fled to the US becomes a pretty big target, it's part of the founding principles/business model of running a protection racket.
So you are saying that anyone who leaves central america can never return home because they would then be murdered? I don't think you are saying that, because people move back and forth from central america every day without being murdered.
An awful lot of people move every day, even from areas where there are protection rackets. Do the protection rackets kill everyone who comes home to visit after moving to another city? How do they keep track of who is 'escaping' and who is just moving because they got married or found a job somewhere else? Again, you aren't suggesting that these rackets ban all movement in and out of the areas they loosely control?
People come to the US primarily to find work at a much higher wage than they would be able to find where they are from. Often there is no opportunity for work whatsoever where they are from. They can have a life here that they would never be able to achieve, they can have healthy children who get medical and dental care and will have a chance at an education and a good life here.
If I were in their shoes I would absolutely try to come here illegally if I couldn't do so legally. If I was caught I would, without hesitation, lie and say I would be murdered if I returned home, or whatever else my lawyer carefully prompted me to say, just like Mr Garcia and almost everyone else claiming this. The reality is if these protection rackets were here in the US and not at all in El Salvador, Mr Garcia would almost certainly still choose to live here and just pay the protection money rather than returning home. I doubt that he was ever influenced by gangs in his decision to move here, and I doubt that he has any fear of them if he would return, and I don't think it would change his decision either way.
You based this off of nothing: "he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador."
"I don't find it to be credible"
I explained why it could easily be that the many coming from El Salvador when MS13 was heavily active could in fact be making this legitimate claim. It's a small world with social media. Yes, local MS13 that didn't get paid can catch when someone is back in the country. These are very sophisticated/organized gangs at higher level (at least according to the current US administration).
Nothing you said here negates that.
So you believe he is being honest. That's perfectly reasonable. Do you really belief that if there was no threat to him at all he would admit this, stop appealing his deportation order, leave his wife and children behind, give up any possibility of being supporting his family financially and go back to El Salvador?
Which one of our beliefs seems more credible to you, that a man would claim to be in danger (which doesn't hurt anyone) to let him stay with his wife and children and access to employment which pays hundreds or thousands of times higher, or that he would say he's not in danger (even though it doesn't benefit anyone) which hurts his wife and children very badly, and forces him to be separated from his family and the country he has lived in his entire adult life?
The situation he is in is beyond cruel and unjust, but that doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
I'm not going to make judgements on people who say that their life is in danger when I have zero actual facts just 'popular internet factoids' and administration propaganda that conflicts with the actual facts in the court case (they now are claiming he was a human trafficker and that the court order was illegal).
He proved to the immigration court that his life was in danger, to the point that the court ordered he not be removed to El Salvador. What's next, are you going to claim that court findings, experts in the field and based on hearings/evidence/etc, for criminals should be overridden by your gut feelings? Because of course all criminals claim they are innocent, so court rulings should be ignored? This is the friggen slippy slope people talked about. You see that right? Ignore the court order because populist government should have that power based on their feelings. Or because after violating the order the government claims the order was somehow not valid/illegal.
He didn't just make a claim, the US immigration court found his claim valid enough to issue a legally binding order that he can not be return to El Salvador. The President ignored the process for overturning that order, the President ignored the order itself, and sent this person not only to El Salvador, but to a prison solely housing the M13 members that the United States Immigration court found legally were a risk to this man's life.
I don't think you are bothering to read anything I've said. I've said over and over the court order should be followed, because the rule of law is essential and the court order must be followed regardless. I also think he's lying.
You are allowed to form your own opinions also, you don't just have to read a news article and then try your best to update your thoughts to conform to the daily talking points for whichever side you follow.
And I have said over and over that blanket judging people on at best second hand knowledge but mainly hearsay and assumptions is evil, and the root of evil. In society we have to setup systems and work to make those systems work, not place the burden of the systems imperfection on random people because of ltbarcly3's non-direct fact based feelings.
You went pretty low in your comment by the way. Really shows you operating out of your feelings. Which is understandable, we are all human. But also shows maybe you shouldn't be making life or death judgements of other people.
BTW I think our immigration system has been HEAVILY abused by Democrats to get immigration policies they can't any other way. That they exploit more conservative people like me's empathy to create a loophole. That doesn't mean I judge the people that came here and placed determination of their life in our system, I blame the Democrats, and I try to change the system. Not condemn random people caught up in that. I want change, but this is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. I don't want a soul crushing machine running my country. I want the USA I grew up loving, that my family sacrificed for. The shinning beacon on a hill. And I'm not for turning off that light just because it's hard. Having civil rights is hard and expensive and nuanced.
I will ALWAYS try to learn and incorporate new thinking/understanding of events. Not sure how that is a shortcoming. It's actually really hard and uncomfortable.
I'm not going low at all. If you actually read my comments:
I think:
- he's lying about being in danger, but I also say that is reasonable for him to lie and I would do the same thing without hesitation
- it's unjust, unfair, and cruel to deport him after half his life and entire adult life, and his wife and children here
- that legally he should *NOT* be deported while his deportation order is on hold because that is what the law says
- that legally he should (and probably would) eventually be deported since that is just what the law says and he was ordered to be deported already, and that is literally what 'temporary' implies (the rule of law cuts both ways)
- I never condemned the man or made any unfair assumptions about him. I certainly never said or implied at all that he was a criminal, that he had any relationship to any gang, that he should have been deported extra-legally and put in a foreign prison without trial, because that is all insane. I said his rights WERE violated, but specifically that his right to due process was not violated (he did have a trial already and lost). (Being returned to your home country is not a punishment and it doesn't deprive you of any rights, excepting if you have already become a citizen).
So my point, if I made it poorly, is that this individual being deported is not a legal injustice against him, most likely he should be deported under current law, and most likely he would have been deported in the next year or two in any case. The injustice here is that his deportation was carried out extra-legally and in defiance of the law and that the US is complicit (or really actively causing) humans to be jailed without due process or really any process.
That means that he was a father, that he was (or was not) a member of MS13, that he had (or didn't have) a job, that he was a nice man (or not a nice man), that he love (or hated) his mother, that his kids are honor students (or hoodlums) is all irrelevant and nobody should care about it in the context of what is going on. He was here illegally, but he was also legally allowed to stay for a little while longer. That any person was extra legally handed over to a foreign government with instructions and payment to imprison them without trial is beyond unacceptable.
I don't know what's low about any of that. It's very hard to comment in an online space on political issues because people, in general, do not use their ability to read and comprehend. They read the first 5 words, assume that the rest is either "good" or "bad" depending on whether it's leaning towards the opinion they read from whichever outlet conveys to them the talking points for their political party, and then they react by repeating those same talking points. If you have an opinion that is anything but repeating what one of the two approved opinions is that day people really fail to cope with that.
"you don't just have to read a news article and then try your best to update your thoughts to conform to the daily talking points" is going low.
"I think: - he's lying about being in danger" - this is the basic premise you have made this entire time. Yet you also continue to claim:
"I never condemned the man or made any unfair assumptions about him"
Your entire premise is a blanket judgement should be applied to people seeking asylum as to them being liars, based on 'because of course they are'. While I agree that there are strong incentives to lie, I don't use solely that incentive to then baseless claim 'he and all asylum seekers are lying' like you continue to do. We have immigration courts and people directly responsible for determining this better than you or I. They determined the threat to his life was real enough to put a stay on him being sent back to his home country even though they denied his asylum claim. My 'current days talking point' position is that in America we don't apply blanket assumptions like this, and that we have a system of rules, laws, courts, and judges that make those determination. A truly toxic position to hold today I guess because... something unrelated to current talking points? I've held this position my entire life. As did every single person around me. From conservative grandfathers that fought in WW2, to hippie parents, to teachers, to... basically everyone until recently. But I'm adopting the current day take?
I think 'all members of XYZ immigrant group are liars' is a horrible take, and has led us down bad paths in the past. Using that claim to bypass due process, in situations where people's actual lives are in danger, because the Constitution/due process/the American way is expensive and takes too long is a popular take/is too hard on the scale of an entire country full of people, I just don't share it.
I can't reply directly so I'll reply here:
It's not that they should be assumed to be liars, I never meant that.
It's that there is no reason to listen to what they say. Either they can provide evidence that they deserve asylum or not. Everyone would say they should get asylum.
If they were not in danger: they say they were in danger
If they were in danger: they say they were in danger
Since they say the same thing either way, it is pointless to even factor in what they say. Some people are telling the truth, some people are lying, they all say the same thing so what someone says has no information value.
When making the initial determination on whether to allow someone to stay in the country, they do not have to show evidence, they just have to make a credible claim, and about 85% of those claims are accepted. Then later they have to show evidence at their interview and hearing. Of the people who pass the bar for the initial claim about 90% are not actually granted asylum, but about 80% drop out of the system (although the numbers don't prove they were lying because there are other factors). So initially 85% are approved (like the person in question here) and then later only 10% of those people actually show sufficient evidence of a credible fear. This doesn't prove that most of them are lying, but of all the people that claim they are in danger to be allowed to enter/stay 90% don't back it up with evidence, and 80% don't even complete the process, which I think is very strong evidence that a substantial majority are lying (even if you give the benefit of the doubt and think that maybe 50% of them can't complete the process because they don't understand it, lack resources, etc, that is still 50% that were lying).
It's notable that during covid, when claiming you were in danger did not give you an easy way to enter the country immediately, people also stopped claiming they were in danger.
Finally, it is probably important to quantify what 'danger' actually means. Is it a 10% chance of being killed? 1%? 1/1000? Does going home have to be more dangerous than the transportation to get there? Does it have to be more dangerous than riding a motorcycle? The murder rate in El Salvador is currently lower than Baltimore, a LOT lower. It's beyond unreasonable to defer deportations to a place if it's safer than where the person is staying now.
You've said he's "almost certainly committing <criminal> perjury". Based solely on the category of immigrant that he is. I think that is abhorrent, un-American, and violates the Constitution. In the USA 'all men' are created equal, and our rights apply to 'people' not just 'citizens' (a class that the current regime now wants to redefine to not include natural born Americans, forget slippery slope we're now on a water slide).
You keep trying to justify your claim with 'we need to categorize/make determinations on these groups because reasons' but not engaging with that you think we should categorize a class of immigrants as perjures simply because of the class they fit in' because to do otherwise makes immigration policies hard/able to be abused'. We used to believe as a nation in the theory we would rather that 10 criminals go free if it prevents one innocent person from going to prison. I get it's hard, and it has negative impacts to follow our Constitution and what our nation believes in. It's so hard that people have had to die to secure those things. It's so hard that my grandfathers faced crippling life long injuries fighting for their belief in it in WW2. My understanding it's hard doesn't mean I think we should just throw it away. Blanket 'xyz people are criminal liars' has no place in the United States of America. Systems that are aware of the incentive to lie, sure. But that is why we have courts and a rule of law, not labels on entire groups of people. That Democrats allowed abuse doesn't mean we give up on what America is. You can keep giving me bullet points but your basic premise is so flawed to me they don't matter.
Imagine you were talking about the Chinese in the U.S. in the 1800s. You’d have the same kinds of bullet points,claims about fraud, about them being impossible to integrate, claims it just too many people, about systems being overwhelmed. That’s how we got the Chinese Exclusion Act. A whole race of people labeled suspect by default, stripped of legal protections, barred from citizenship, and assumed to be lying just to get in. It was wrong then, and it’s just as wrong now. Policies built on fear and group guilt erode everything we claim to stand for. If we don’t push back against that, we’re not protecting our country we’re abandoning it.
I'm going to keep it very simple for you:
I said I think it's unfair and cruel that he is being forced to leave at all. I think it's immoral. I also think he told the story that let him stay with his family rather than the truth, and I don't fault him if he did do that. Anyone would do that.
I think you should, for practice and because it would help you be a better person, try to have a disagreement with someone without thinking they must be racist. I think it would be new for you but I think it would be healthy to try it.
Remember when you said you didn't go low? Look at your last paragraph.
I don't think you are racist, I never called you racist, but I think what you are saying is wrong and is the type of group guilt assignment that has been used for very f'd up stuff in the past and not how we do things in the US. Again, your entire premise is he's lying because of the class he is in. That is the slippery slope that I am calling out. Your own words. You didn't judge him unfairly you say, you just said he committed criminal perjury based on your knowledge that he's a foreigner seeking asylum. I said that the system should be structured to recognize the incentives to lie, but we shouldn't judge people based on their class, you continued to say all foreigners seeking asylum are probably liars, especially your original example individual, based SOLELY on that he is a foreigner seeking asylum.
I explained my reasoning. And I even said I agreed that the Democrats have broken the system, and that the courts needed to be structured to account for the incentive to lie. But I didn't like classifying a group/class of people liars based on their class. 'All poor people steal because they are poor and have incentive' is basically what you are saying. 'All people in Alabama are dumb, Bob is from Alabama, Bob's dumb'. Nah, I refuse all of that, labeling a group, assigning a characteristic because Bob's a member of a group. I never just tried to shout you down saying 'racist', I responded in way too many words :)
And again you resort to the low, personal attacks. Super lame, basic internet dig you gave there too. Because I quoted your words back at you and I don't think in the USA we should classify groups as guilty.
You are calling me a racist and saying I'm somehow responsible for attacks on chinese people 100 years before I was born. It's so lazy and straw-man, you don't seem able to honestly engage with what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that if you can show that it is very likely that 99% of the people from Alabama are dumb (this is not true but for the sake of argument), and Bob is from Alabama, there's approximately a 99% chance that Bob is dumb if you don't know anything else about Bob to improve your estimate. This is just true, and it's obvious, and if you read what I said it's exactly how I framed it (he's very likely or almost certainly lying). This isn't because of class, or race, or age, or whether they are trans or whatever else.
One more time:
People come to the border or get caught in the US without a visa. If they say "I'm in danger" about 85% of them are allowed to stay in the US while their claim is processed. Of those people who stay, only 10% end up being approved. 10% are denied, and 80% don't show up for the interview, get arrested for something else, self deport, etc. So best case, if you trust our judges, half are not credible. Since the 20% that show up probably, on average, have the best cases it's a fairly safe bet that the 80% who don't show up wouldn't break 50/50, maybe more like 80/20. So 74% would be found not credible (10% who are denied with interview, and 80% of the 80% who don't show up), 26% credible. That's a pretty overwhelming majority who are not making an honest claim. But again, if we just go with the numbers we know, it's 50/50, half are lying (or if you prefer "making an incredible claim they are unable to support with plausible evidence").
No, I said that blanket judgements like you are making are what led to the US to write ahorant legislation against the Chinese, the closest parallel in our nation's history where language like yours have been used to talk about immigrants to reform the system, not some random strawman example. I'm have not said you support that. I said 'here is a very related example language similar to yours went down the slippery path I see your language could'. It's been nothing about you. Your pseudo-statistics are BS. We have immigrant courts/judges we don't use personal rough pseudo statistics to judge people as criminals (in this case criminal perjurer). Down your pseudo statistics path lies not only racism but vigilantism (citizens proving someone a criminal based on very weak premises) where the majority number of your 'statistics' zero actual finding is made only assumptions of guilt. I agree it's plausible that large numbers of asylum seekers are gaming the system. I agree the the Democrats probably facilitated abuse of the system because they can't get the immigration policies they want. I think it's bullshit and un-American to extend that to 'This random dude is a criminal perjeror' based on only that.
You don't seem to be able to comprehend my basic argument. I concede that there are incentives to lie and the system should account for that, but that we shouldn't label a class criminal perjurers because down that path lies nothing good. I've given you more response/good faith than you have me. You keep saying you haven't labeled this man anything but then call him a criminal perjurer and imply his grounds for being in the country are bullshit. But other than that, yeah, you haven't called him anything. All based on 'he sought asylum'.
You say 10% are approved, which matches Americas past 'We would rather 10 criminals go free than 1 innocent person imprisoned'. By your words it sounds like this is a part of America's thought about itself/it's character that you don't agree with. (Now talking about your personal judgement).
If half the people are lying, then half are criminal perjurers. I'm not labeling a class, I'm just believing what the numbers say.
You keep insisting that I'm making broad racist claims about a group of people, over and over.
You seem to think I have some secret agenda to support Trump or his policy, and you keep arguing as though arguing against that agenda is the same as arguing against what I'm saying. This is why I say you aren't honestly engaging and you are repeating talking points. I don't have a secret agenda, I'm a registered Democrat and I've never voted for a Republican as far as I can remember. I also think that most people claiming asylum are not being honest, because that's just what the information I have available clearly suggests.
You want to pick an arbitrarily impossible standard of evidence which is not reasonable and not even used in actual courts when evaluating whether testimony is credible or honest (that there is a criminal perjury conviction). People are caught lying in court every day, even when that's obvious and provable they are rarely (as in almost never) pursued for perjury charges.
Frankly at this point it's clear that you kindof agree with what I'm saying, that a lot of people lie in this process, and it's not the ground truth you are disputing but rather you want me to not say it because it might have consequences if we say things like this, but also you think the system needs to be reformed to address this problem, but also we shouldn't admit there's a problem.
Combined with "oops can't get them back" it's very powerful. Combine it with not advertising faces of snatched people on broadcast TV, and it's a very useful tool inded. People will just disappear. It won't be legal or illegal, just a thing that happens from time to time. Police won't search too hard for the missing people, because no good can come out of finding out.
Kinda similar in a way to China or Russia “disappearances”
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The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
Bottom line: this deserves investigation.
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> > The small, independent federal agency
> I still don’t think this notion holds up.
What notion doesn't hold up? That a federal agency can be small & independent?
> Which branch are they under, who do they report to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board
> The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as an appellate quasi-judicial body from decisions of 36 administrative law judges, as of November 2023.[4] The NLRB is headquartered at 1015 Half St. SE, Washington, D.C., and it has over 30 regional, sub-regional, and residential offices throughout the United States.
> Why would real Russian hackers not do anything to obscure their ip?
Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].
I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
NLRB is a very important agency that I have known others to personally utilize because abuses of labor laws in the private sector, particularly poorly paid labor, is fairly common. These workers may face unfair treatment or wage theft, and the reason companies do it is because workers have very few genuine avenues of recourse. The NLRB is one of those few avenues of recourse.
> That a federal agency can be small & independent?
Yes. They are either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.
And before you send more Wikipedia links, be aware there is a long history and chain of Supreme Court cases about this question.
> Why would the fox bother hiding the hole someone dug for it under the henhouse?
Still spreading the Russian asset conspiracy theory? Why wouldn’t they want to hide their crimes from future enemies?
Yes. And the current precedent is very clear that these independent agencies are constitutional.
The current court has not, yet, overturned that precedent. There is lots of reason to believe they will, in an extremely contentious ruling. But for now they haven’t.
We are going to find out one way or another though because this admin is pushing hard up against the question.
Of course it’s also pushing hard up on the question of if the courts can constrain it at all so the grade school understanding of separation of powers is real.
> Yes. They are either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.
That’s not what independent means here.
Most independent agencies are part of the executive branch (some are part of the legislative and judiciary but they are the exception).
They are independent because congress gave the president limited power in their ability to dismiss the agency head and its members. These agencies have some regulatory authority which Congress has vested them on purpose.
You might argue under the unitary executive theory of law that these agencies are actually under the control of the president and the current Supreme Court (for what it’s worth) might even agree with you.
I might argue that it’s a complete travestissement of the constitution spirit and intent pushed forward by people who wish to dismantle the American republic and replace it by an authoritarian regime. But that’s on me.
Indeed the meaning of independent is more limited. But what wants to be implied by the media and posters here - the reason why the article leads with this, is to suggest these are groups that cannot be commanded by the president and his staff.
My only claim is that is false and misleading.
> My only claim is that is false and misleading.
Well, according to what congress wanted when they were founded, this is neither false nor misleading and judicial precedents until now have agree with that.
The idea they are under the control of the president and his staff is a novelty (and a disgrace in my humble opinion) but given the sorry state of the Supreme Court anything is possible.
> The idea they are under the control of the president and his staff is a novelty
Not true. Do you know about how these agencies came to be? And the presidency under FDR?
The executive Power shall be vested in a President
Find a single phrase in the constitution about independent agencies.
> Still spreading the Russian asset conspiracy theory?
If something smells like shit everywhere you go, it's not a conspiracy to suggest checking the bottom of your shoe.
The NLRB is one of many independent agencies of the executive branch created by Congrees, and they don't report to anyone except for their own boards. The president and Congress have influence over the boards but no direct control over the agency. The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
And the concern probably isn't Russian hackers, it's American hackers spoofing their IP address. Also you are ignoring that DOGE made the server public when it wasn't supposed to be.
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.
The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.
But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.
If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
The Congress can make laws. That's like ... their whole thing.
This is still authoritarian bullshit. Your argument is that you think independent agencies are a bad idea, and therefore it's a-okay for Trump to simply ignore 80 years of law and Supreme Court rulings.
More generally, nobody in the executive branch serves any master. They serve the law and are legally obligated to refuse and report illegal orders. The idea that they serve Master Donald Trump (or Vizier Elon Musk), and that illegal orders must be enforced because it is Trump's will, is precisely why Kilmar Abrego Garcia was illegally deported and why Trump is musing about doing the same thing to US citizens.
I think a lot of Supreme Court cases will come out of this administration, I just don’t think the sovereignty of independent federal agencies is going to be one of them.
I guess we will wait and see.
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Well it would help if there weren’t numerous issues with the data as presented on that site. Specifically now they are only claiming somewhere around 28 billion saved in cancelled contracts when in early February they claimed like 55 billion. Seems odd that over time the amount saved would go down despite the alleged number being of cancellations going up.
Also it is concerning that the largest amount from an individual contract saved is a cancelled deportation facility contract. Seems at odds with the Administration’s goals to ramp up mass deportation but cancel the contract for building a holding facility for unaccompanied minors.
My suggestion would be if the goal is to eliminate debt we would need to target social security reform such as raising the retirement ages and eliminating the cap on the payroll tax. Additionally, but far less realistic would be implementing a Land Value Tax. Not cancel random contracts that amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and propose massive tax cuts like the current administration seems to be doing.
The parent's russian propoganda post does not mention that the posted savings are full of inaccuracies.
Nor does the propoganda define "waste", if one looks at the actual cuts, it seems to be focused on "things Herr M. doesn't like". which is not a good definition of "waste".
Clinton / Gore did it, properly, well though out, effectively, in the mid-late 90's. I'm not sure if you'd consider that "modern times" though.
https://youtu.be/lG9pxvpGY-Q?si=cii2iggD-9hAj0ms&t=900
I've timestamped the above video to where it mentions the Clinton / Gore bit, but the whole video is enlightening.
There are also constant ongoing efforts at improving efficiency, which is why they keep going “ah ha! We found it!” then poor bureaucrats who are trying to do their fucking jobs while these idiots run around messing things up have to explain, “no, you’re seeing an artifact of record-keeping practices that exist because [very good reason], you’re wrong yet again, maybe try asking literally anyone who knows about these data sets”
They also love to throw around the word “fraud” while bringing no charges. Despite the DOJ being in Trump’s control. Same pattern as other lies (“rampant voter fraud! We have proof” ok so when you’re in change you’ll prosecute, right? You should! That’s bad if true! I mean I’ve looked at your proof and it doesn’t appear true, but maybe you have more proof you haven’t shown! “Uhhh… [smoke bomb]”)
Plus, we have the GAO and CBO. Trump won’t want to listen to them because they’ll say “our #1 problem is we keep cutting taxes”, and “there’s not much waste to be eliminated cutting government workers”, because that’s true at this point, but they exist. It’s not like nobody’s been looking at these kinds of things. That’s just bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1AYL6oxlU
The 8 billion saving that turned out to be a 8 million saving?
Realistic alternative? How about starting by reading tfa? I’d say you don’t need to physically threaten people who ask for basic security practices to be followed, for one.
"The people voted for major reform."
What they got was a pocket-lining idiot, and genuinely one of the most morally bankrupt people I've ever known of as his tech right-hand man. Musk is a moral imbecile, a 13-year old incel trapped in the body of an overweight mid-50s mess. Yes, he's been involved in some great things (SpaceX and Tesla), but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
These numbers don't even stand up to casual scrutiny. And I'm from the UK so it doesn't really directly affect me (although the orange idiot's shenanigans have done so to a small degree). But if you really believe this site, you're divorced from reality, and maybe drinking the same kool-aid that the tech muppets who are on DOGE are.
> but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.
Like when this space youtuber suggested a change to his Mars rocket and he understood, accepted the validity of the idea, and decided to implement it on the spot? Er, I guess that's the opposite of what you said.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WY73exaVpyw
DOGE results according to DOGE. We all know what kind of track record Elon Musk has as a bullshitter.
Not only that, Trump has already spent US$ 155B more than Biden, DOGE claims to have shaved US$ 150B, overall this administration has already increased spending by US$ 5B even after firing a lot of civil servants.
The worst is that the effects of this shaving off will only be felt over time, when National Parks start crumbling, when ATCs start quitting, the government machine of the USA has been eroded, inevitably it will fall into a landslide.
Do you have a more independent/reliable source?
First, every objective audit has found many problems with that data, ranging from taking credit for things which were terminated under the Biden administration to listing the maximum ceiling on a flexible contract (IDIQ) as the total savings even though the amounts actually spent were far lower (like canceling your credit card and saying you saved the limit), and even counting the same contract multiple times.
Second, you have to look at the cost of their actions. They’ve disrupted the functioning of the entire federal government and doing in a very haphazard manner. That means that a lot of current spending is wasted by DOGE _and_ that the business of the government isn’t getting done. For example, whether or not you think the U.S. should engage in foreign aid, under DOGE they paid money to send people to help in Myanmar only to lay them off after they arrived on site, squandering all possible value. That story is being repeated all over the country right now and in many cases the loses are permanent: if they choose to waste payroll having people come back to an office where they can’t work, the job isn’t getting done and there’s no way to recover the wasted payroll. As they keep losing lawsuits, it’s also likely that the amounts cut will be exceeded by the cost of settlements when they breach contracts or fail to provide a service required by statute.
One really big area is tax collection: the IRS is already estimating revenue reductions on the order of half a billion dollars, and since they’ve been sacking a lot of the law enforcement for businesses and high-net wealth individuals, that will get worse as people feel confident cheating more aggressively.
Lastly, you have to look at the economy. Estimated have each federal job supporting 2-3 other jobs, and federal spending drives the economy in many parts of the country. They’ve already cut growth of the entire economy into the negative (from +2.5% in January to -2-3% now - see https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow) and a lot of that is driven by federal cuts.
You do understand, that the upcoming tax cuts for rich people will throw the USA Debt above defence savings?
And it will increase the debt significantly?
All of that while DOGE, some random dudes without any understanding how things work, stop things which are globally agreed on (global aid) or just not even worth mentioning in the grand schem?
But hey if you prefer to defend DOGE ssaving 160 Billion while the tax cut for the rich adds Trillions to debt, yeah do a happy dance. Be proud. Or whatever your comment is trying to do.
Funny that IRS also gets defunded. But hey taxes right? :D
There were already people called "inspector generals" which handled waste, fraud, and abuse but Trump fired about 17 of them in his first week. Deploying tech bros to solve the problem is naive at best and malicious at worst. The arrogance in assuming that no auditor before them looked into the SSA database and saw DOB records going back to 1875 is outstanding.
They didn't use StarLink?! ROFLMAO
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
Not even 24 hours later, I called it --the Administration IS asking Congress to de-fund NPR:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366851/doge-nlrb-whist...
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
Am I reading it wrong?
There is evidence DOGE went out of its way to illegally conceal what it was doing. That, alone, is enough to put these kids in jail one day.
What law would they have broken?
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
Indeed and sad, it's becoming like Reddit. There is no discourse going on here or nearly anywhere. Sadly on X it's the opposite but equally one sided.
Agreed entirely. The comments in this article read exactly like Reddit, the tone, the downvoting, etc. and I agree about your comments on X being a sort of rightwing mirror of that, too. Super disappointed in Hackernews.
Yes. You claim:
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
I am genuinely curious as to what your point is. Not saying it's wrong, but a succinct summary might be useful.
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There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
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The issue is we don't know what they took and they took steps to hide their tracks. This is whacked territory we are in. You can defend it but normally there are checks and controls in government for a reason. The fact that we are normalizing that certain very ideologically groups in government do not have checks and balances is pretty strange - based on nothing more than a "trust us, we are the good guys." This never works out in the end.
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It is right in the article:
"The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information."
"But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending."
And because DOGE deleted the access records and logs, we cannot prove it either way. That is pretty suspicious.
> Then, Berulis started tracking sensitive data leaving the places it's meant to live, according to his official disclosure. First, he saw a chunk of data exiting the NxGen case management system's "nucleus," inside the NLRB system, Berulis explained. Then, he saw a large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself.
> From what he could see, the data leaving, almost all text files, added up to around 10 gigabytes — or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed them, he explained. It's a sizable chunk of the total data in the NLRB system, though the agency itself hosts over 10 terabytes in historical data. It's unclear which files were copied and removed or whether they were consolidated and compressed, which could mean even more data was exfiltrated.
> Berulis says someone appeared to be doing something called DNS tunneling to prevent the data exfiltration from being detected. He came to that conclusion, outlined in his disclosure, after he saw a traffic spike in DNS requests parallel to the data being exfiltrated, a spike 1,000 times the normal number of requests.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
And more if you actually read the article. About a third of it is about the data that was taken.
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Why did they actively hide their tracks? In law this relates to:
- Spoliation of evidence - Intentionally destroying or concealing evidence can lead to legal sanctions and adverse inferences.
- Consciousness of guilt - Actions taken to cover tracks (deleting logs, hiding records) are often admissible to show awareness of wrongdoing.
- Obstruction of justice - Deliberately impeding an investigation by destroying evidence is itself a crime in many jurisdictions.
Don't forget the whistleblower intimidation!
> Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
I'm so sick of the endless attempts to downplay or misdirect on the outrageous things Republicans/Trump/DOGE happening everyday.
If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state.
Everyone should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
> If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state. You should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
As a Canadian I am already scared of visiting the US. I've re-posted UNRWA, Unicef, MSF and WFP criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza on social media. I could very well be viewed as being a someone who is undermining US foreign policy goals and either detained, deported or at best denied entry to the US.
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-to-begin-sc...
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Sure, I bet if you found a physically threatening note at your work with pictures from someone following you near your home, you'd be cool with it. Totally normal and non-criminal behaivor.
> Whistleblower is a journalist word used to establish the good guy in a story.
It's not a journalist word, there is an official whistleblowing process to Congress and OIG the mentioned employee went through.
But you would either have needed to have read and understood the article you're commenting on or not be commenting in bad-faith.
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So you take back your claim that the whistleblower was just a choice of words on the journalist?
Did you read the article yet?
> Am I reading it wrong?
Yes
Good comment.
> Am I reading it wrong?
Based on your comments, you're not reading the article at all.
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Stop sealioning. Anyone can read the article. The evidence of suspicious behavior is clear and according to the article corroborated by a dozen experts.
The fact that someone tried to intimidate the whisteblower by posting threatening and stalking messages on his door shows there is something not above board here.
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