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

While your question is meaningful and well intentioned, let me point out that it may be inconsequential. The legality of an action is moot when the regime ignores and defies the entire basis of those laws - the constitution. It's like trying to evaluate yourself against a standard that is no longer followed.

Instead, evaluate yourself on the basis of your standing with the regime. If they dislike you for any reason including your skin color, they will find some sort of national security threat in your actions. Or they may punish you first and then claim the inability to correct it. On the other hand if they need you, they will completely ignore your actions, including even leaking of extremely sensitive information to unauthorized individuals.

IANAL

Flashing your headlights to warn others of cops or anything else is generally considered free speech. IIRC, this has been ruled on several times in pretty high courts.

So double check with a lawyer, but I'm like 99% confident there's nothing illegal about these types of Apps. I mean Waze has been doing it for years and even Google maps notifies you about speed traps.

If some new ruling makes it not free speech, we're in danger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight_flashing

Only if you knew by virtue of something like access to secret information (the things you'd have a security clearance to access).

If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.

If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).

If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.

Worth pointing out that the question of legality is besides the point if you are purposefully antagonizing the police state.

It’s not about legality. It’s about compliance.

If you become a target, they will arrest you and drop charges later. They will make you miss work and lose your job. They will set up surveillance on you to catch you doing anything else they want to continue harassment.

You don’t have to look hard to see reporting of officers using official databases to settle personal scores. 404 media just did a big expose on ALPR Flock DB abuses

Since Waze still has their speed trap reporting feature, I’m guessing it’s still legal.

Waze in NZ removed this feature after threats from police.

If you post to local social media groups about DUI checkpoints or mobile speed cameras you’ll be scolded by about 30% of people.

Absolutely not illegal.

That reinforces the idea of police state

Civil war, obviously.

I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs, but retaliatory violence is (1) still immoral and (2) self-defeating.

You aren’t realistically going to overpower them, so any violent resistance just helps them DARVO harder and excuse escalating their brutality. That’s why they’re always so eager to find or create violent one-offs within non-violent mass protests.

Please follow your convictions so you can be removed from the internet and placed in jail for a decade or two once you are processed through the legal system and found guilty of assaulting a police officer. The internet will be better off without your calls to violence.

No, your post shouldn’t be allowed because you’re inciting violence.

They are officers and they are racist mercenaries.

This is not a new force, they have no new powers. They didn't need to hire new people willing to perform these actions nor train them how to do so.

If you haven't considered this before it should hit you like a hammer to the forehead: where are the resignations? Where are the "good cops" we keep hearing about, what are they doing?

The other federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that are assisting in these actions, where is their principled refusal to violate their oath to uphold the constitution? What statements are their powerful and normally very vocal unions making about all this?

Unlawful presence on US soil is a civil offense. It's literally the same class of offense as a parking ticket.

Are there any other civil offenses that you think should be dealt with using masked police and concentration camps?

My wife was just naturalized as a US Citizen a year ago. You can bet she doesn't want to be anywhere near that mess. Her legal status provides her basically no protection from any ICE rookie with a chip on his shoulder.

I'll take immigrants in my neighborhood over ice agents in my neighborhood every day of the week.

So you're saying 2 previous presidents were more successful without using a campaign of threats and violence? And they didn't have to ignore court orders either? Makes you wonder...

Why is ICE slated to have a higher budget than the USMC if they're only removing ~40k people per month?

I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.

Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".

Masked agents. You have masked unidentified agents snatching people from the street, some of them targeted specifically for their wrongthink.

Note this is even orthogonal to the actual issue of immigration policy.

>> will never make your day better

> the benefits are limited

So, which is it?

Nobody forgets that, it’s just that abuse and misconduct sour that. In many communities, people have to weigh the odds that reporting a crime will lead to more problems for them than it will help, with consequences ranging from lack of help to theft to rape or even being shot by mistake. American police departments have largely set themselves above the law, so the average person doesn’t know whether they’re getting a good cop who is genuinely trying to help them or the bad cop whose behavior has been covered up by their fellow officers for years. Anyone concerned about public opinion of police should be focused on accountability and oversight to rebuild public trust.

> Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim.

I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.

I've only had to call the cops a few times, but they usually put me on hold. 50/50 if they actually do anything or just give me the law enforcement equivalent of this meme- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-aint-reading-all-that (aka "please don't file a report because it makes our metrics look bad)

I have not been unusually lucky in that way, though. I can think of half a dozen occasions when the kind of people who call the cops would have done so, but I didn't, because I expected they would do no good - if they bothered to show up at all - and might well have caused a lot of harm.

People forget that calling the cops as a victim also costs lives. There have been more than enough cases of someone calling in a wellness check on someone who ends up getting murdered by police instead of helped, or victims who call the police and end up getting shot or arrested by them.

The police as they are now in North America are not a good option, they're just the least worst option. You call them and they show up and you hope that they cause more problems for the offender than the victim, but that's never guaranteed.

Sometimes, maybe, and increasingly rarely. I live in Texas. Ask me about Uvalde.

I called the cops as a victim of a violent crime. They put me in handcuffs because I was the person on the scene who best fit the profile of a perpetrator, despite the actual perpetrators standing there next to me. I gave them a video and audio recording of the crime being committed. I did not get my cellphone back. Later, I went to court with the perpetrators, and their only penalty was paying me a fine which was slightly less than what I paid in legal costs.

Cops are not your friends, even as a victim; neither are lawyers or judges. Treat the whole justice system more like a Linux server with an SQL injection: amoral, and can be made to do anything you want, if you're evil and happen to know how which levers to pull and how to not get caught.

Since it's relevant here, I am a white man.

Consider yourself lucky that you've never called the cops as a victim and then been further victimized by the police.

Arrest my ass. If they don’t mirandize, give you a phone call and immediate and consistent access to a lawyer, then it’s abduction.

>"who will hold them accountable

Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.

So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.

There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.

I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.

So there’s this thing called the judiciary…

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> Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK.

That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.

> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.

Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.

For sure. I think I'm reasonably well connected and could make a political nightmare for anyone who deported me illegally, but that's slim consolation if I'm trying urgently to learn the language of whatever prison I'm in.

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Indeed - but even if you have a license, there is no expectations to carry it when you drive. If the police request they can give you a 'Producer' which historically was where you had to attend a police station with your license and insurance documents - but they can check insurance online via ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) before they've even stopped you.

Getting into clubs as a teenager was comical - as there is no standard ID most people had 'work ID' that was just a laminated bit of paper. Or would carry a paper drivers license with no photo on it.

I’m a latino in Germany of all places and for years I didn’t carry any identification because the only one I had was my passport, the german work permit was just a sticker in one of the pages. I am obviously not gonna risk losing my passport, so it was home.

Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.

Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.

History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.

It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.

That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.

If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.

No they shouldn’t.

In an ideal world police are helping tourists find their way to their destination, helping grannies cross the street and writing the occasional traffic fine.

Where I live, violent crime is rare.

thanks. and yikes! I've been a motorcycle rider for over a decade, many thousands of miles, now on my 3rd bike -- and somehow I'm just now learning this.

That was public ass kissing but it didn't work. Tarrifs hurt apple. Trump is fixated on making iPhone in USA which is not good for apple's business.

You misspelled "Tim Apple."

3x more than the Marine Corps, for those at home keeping score.

A military branch (either de facto or de jure) that exists for the majority purpose to directly target, round up, and imprison or deport individuals on U.S. soil - especially with a proven record of limiting due process - should have NEVER happened. I cannot stress enough, we're a few bad days - and more and more likely 1 executive action away - from at-scale "Tree of Liberty" stuff.

> ...but meanwhile the government should not just give up the rule of law.

Isn't due process a rule of law? How about laws against bribery?

The self-unware irony...

I don’t believe we will have another free and fair election in this country.

Apple has resisted pressure from law enforcement in the past. That gives me a real reason to believe that they will not fold in the future.

If there is any silver lining in any of this, it may be that people will finally start taking privacy as not completely irrelevant trade-off to convenience. I am not really holding my breath, but if people do not have that level of self-preservation in relatively clear instances, it probably does not matter anyway.

The issue is much older than the current US administration : Apple has been listed as participating to PRISM since 2012, and considering the whole opacity of the Patriot Act (and its derivatives), the secret courts in particular, it makes whatever they (or any other US company) might say about their commitment to privacy (when the opponent is the US government) rather irrelevant.

(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)

ICEBlock is actively lying, is not open source and is confidently misleading many.

While I don't want to assume regular fed honeypot, we can at the very least be certain that it's an app made by an Apple Kool-Aid drinking person. iOS is, in many ways, more susceptible to governement subpoenas than an Android app would ever be. Sideloading, UnifiedPush, maintaining a connection to a server to handle notifications yourself are all more secure than just trusting that Apple will not just hand you over to the cops.

In addition, if the author is worried about a subpoena, it means that they're US based. Which is an absurdly stupid thing to do if you're going to make a fascist-reporting app while living in a fascist country.

Apple tracks user location too. If you log into your iCloud from a country you've never been to, you're going to have to need to provide your 2FA code even with a valid session token. They're not stupid.

Apple is very much in favour of user privacy, as long as that privacy means "protecting your data from third parties". When it comes to the data Apple itself collects, they're far less conservative. They don't share information derived from their massive databases per se, but they do keep track.

Thanks to Apple and Find My, stalking people is easier than ever. The company can look up where you are and where you've been. They'd probably fight a court order to provide live location data to ICE, but who knows what that'll mean with the current American government.

Even on iOS, user data ends up in the hands of data brokers through ads. They're not supposed to collect all that data, but that's not stopping an unethical company from trying.

Android's privacy issues are there, but only if you're protecting your privacy against companies. If you're trying to protect your privacy against the government, there's no difference, really.

But Google doesn't have to be involved! GrapheneOS is specifically a de-googled Android. Even for normal Google-y Android, you could provide the APK to side-load, so it doesn't go through the Play Store or Google's FCM at all, an option you don't have with Apple.

I think this is what the Graphene posts are trying to say.

As others mention, having a web app would make a lot of sense.

I think this is a very good question to ask, along with why the Trump admin is threatening the developer rather than Apple. Forcing Apple to take it down is the only way to get rid of it now that it’s been published. Combine that with the fact that most people had never heard of this app before Trump made it go viral. I think we’ve all had enough conspiracy theories to last a lifetime, but it would be wise to exercise caution here.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114783982297156136