ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117
ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117 - Jan 2026 (941 comments – 18 hours)
We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.
These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.
This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.
So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.
It has happened before and it will happen again.
* https://www.wired.com/story/us-judge-rules-ice-raids-require...
* https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2026/01/judge-orders-release-...
> A federal judge in Minnesota on Thursday ordered the release of a Liberian man four days after heavily armed immigration agents broke into his home using a battering ram and arrested him.
> U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan said in his ruling that the agents violated Garrison Gibson’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.
Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.
I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way.
Until it did.
What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?
I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it:
> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
There isn’t a data-retention issue with HHS having home records, there is an abuse issue with DHS giving it to Palantir to VLOOKUP addresses out of.
Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe...
I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.
...according to an unsubstantiated claim by the CEO of Palantir while on a PR tour.
It's bad for both reasons. Palantir is the IBM of our time, using scaled data engineering to handle the tracking and incarceration of ethnic minorities, who are quickly shipped off for worse persecution, including torture, at government-run camps, all without any due process.
> he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis
Anyone can say anything absurd, counterfactual, and unconvincing, regardless of circumstances. For us to consider it true, we'd need some evidence that it is at least more true than the opposite.
> Say thank you," Karp added.
Thanks for the link. Wow, I didn't realize that he was such an insufferable, sociopathic, abusive douchebag as a person. Like a wife-beater who insists his victim thank him for it.
These kinds of mass surveillance data ops should be illegal, regardless of who is doing it.
Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.
Does this imply that undocumented aliens subject to deportation have been making claims on Medicare/Medicaid monies?
No. HHS is broader than CMMS.
Like, if these data were being used to audit the CMMS roles for illegal immigrants, that would be something. That’s not what DHS is doing because I suspect they don’t want to have to produce a report that says this was a made-up bit of electioneering.
Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.
Do we know what is happening to these people? What their conditions are? Why do we not hear from them afterwards?
https://humanrightsfirst.org/the-trump-administration-is-for...
That's incorrect. A concentration camp is a place where a government or authority detains large numbers of people without normal legal process, usually because they belong to a particular group rather than because of individual crimes.
Historical examples:
- Nazi Germany (1933–1945)
- British camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902)
- Imperial Japan
- United States (1942–1945)
Similarly, Nazis did this with census machines so they knew how to scale concentration camps.
In 2001, Edwin Black published a book about strategic partnership of IBM with Nazis since 1933 til end of WWII.
E.g. US camps holding Japanese immigrants during WW2.
Sure, it might be somewhat hyperbolic (arguable, because ICE/current administration has few qualms dismissing constitutional rights whenever convenient), but the term is definitely not Nazi-exclusive (even the Germans had concentration camps long before Hitler, in Namibia)
And it has nothing to do with Jews.
Jews were removed from public life at first, over-punished for minor infractions and deported or pushed toward self deportation. The thing to notice here is that Germany did not had that many Jews in the first place, they were rather small minority. The tens of thousands thing was possible only after Germans conquered foreign lands and started to kill non German Jews. The WWIII did not started yet, so yep, we are not there, but it is actually OK to comment on similarities before that.
Also, tens of people have already died in those concentration/detention camps.
The Federal Bureau of Instigation
In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative.
The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care.
We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast."
This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.
If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.
You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.
> This is a devil's bargain
Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?
Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight.
When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse.
The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.
None of that is relevant to the article. It’s about HHS data being queried to give ICE probable addresses. What you’re doing is indistinguishable from whataboutism.
I don’t think that’s your intent. But we have an actual abuse of public data at hand here. Going on a tangent about dragnet surveillance is off topic and misleading.
They are and should be separable. DHS hoovering up government data is orthogonal to private data collection. They could become related. But they aren’t, and muddling a hypothetical problem with a clear, present and actual one is a good way to normalize the latter.
Keep in mind that DOGE made off with a huge stash of data, which combined with other data, such as voter registration data, twitter messages (public and private) and other such datastores could become an extremely efficient tool in messing with elections. The whole system is predicated on that being hard and so we trust the outcome of elections but with todays tools in the hands of the large US companies currently in cahoots with the Trump administration this is childs play.
The data we’re talking about here are home addresses. HHS (or the IRS) having home addresses isn’t what most Americans would or should consider problematic.
Totally agree. Where I disagree is in saying the government shouldn’t have these records. Like, no. The government knowing where I live is not only fine but also sort of necessary. Just because it has some data doesn’t mean it can abuse it.
Sure. Again, we agree. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that it was inappropriate for any branch of the government to have these data, or that any of this has anything to do with private dragnets.
They’re addresses. This isn’t a possession problem, it’s one of access.
> the USA does not have the equivalent of a GDPR
You could have super GDPR that bans all private dragnets and HHS would still have home addresses. This is a Privacy Act and HIPAA problem.
The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control.
Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.
... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.
It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.
Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring.
It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects.
Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.
DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019.
Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.
I work in fintech, at a market leader. We are wildly inefficient, but there is little interest in fixing it, because we’re making money hand over fist.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain.
We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.
The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
Non-state actors can't easily use violence to throw me in jail.
The surveillance non state actors are already doing anything this administration wants.
The argument isn't that it's good these companies are doing this - it's not. The argument is that it would be even worse if the state was doing it directly. There are more avenues to stop, nullify, and avoid this when it's a private enterprise than when it's the state.
Are you insane? When if ever are the agents of the state held responsible. If anything the civil suit against the business is more likely to go somewhere.
The fact that the state may "pay out" does not mean it has any serious incentive not to shoot the person dead so long as such payouts don't become too regular.
I owe Comcast $200, according to them. I've "owed" it for years. Can you imagine if I owed any government agency the same sum for the same time. I'd be arrested and thrown in jail for non-payment and/or some sort of quasi-contempt charge if I refused.
Let me rephrase: why wouldn’t state actors be scary?
The state might have a monopoly on legal physical violence, but I think it is naive to think private interests can’t harm you just as much, with or without state connections. See my previous examples.
The go-to example is recording. Watch any "First Amendment auditor" video on YouTube (prepare yourself, most of them are a struggle to watch). I can walk into any government building, and as long as I'm in a publicly accessible area, I can record almost whatever and whoever I want. This includes otherwise private property that the government is leasing. I essentially cannot be kicked out unless I cause a disturbance as long as the location is open for public business. This is true for DMVs, county administrative buildings, police offices, jails, any government service with a public area and public hours.
On the flip side, if Target wants to ban recording in their stores, not only can they do so with zero risk of litigation, but if you get trespassed you can be fined or go to jail for a violation. The penalties get even harsher for the same trespassing crime if it's a private residence and not a business.
I'm sure we can come up with counterexamples, and maybe surveillance is the best one, but philosophically it's pretty easy to see why it's worse for the government to do a Bad Thing than for any individual or private enterprise to do the exact same Bad Thing.
Edit: I'd love to hear a justification as to why this is being downvoted because nothing in the content warrants that.
This was not the claim though, the claim is that it’s not scary to be surveilled until that information reaches state actors.
States acting against citizens can be worse in a moral/political sense, but a victim is not more or less harmed depending on the aggressor.
(I didn’t downvote, if it matters, I just saw the message).
If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.
This has been going on forever, everywhere.
Laws have always applied selectively, particularly when it comes to whatever group is responsible for enforcing them.
The TikTok rationale essentially came to ‘we want genz voters’
> This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point
What would that mean? Do you expect the government to put their hands back on the wheel, does the US "crash" and become a dictatorship and/or does it lead to WW3?
Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.
Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.
The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.
US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.
I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.
Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.
From https://archive.is/E6zXj :
> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.
This is the unitary executive theory. It’s a novel Constitutional theory that even this SCOTUS seems reluctant to honestly embrace.
Read the Fed case transcripts.
HHS says “under the Immigration and Nationality Act, ‘any information in any records kept by any department or agency of the government as to the identity and location of aliens in the US shall be made available to’ immigration authorities.” If that’s true, they’re following the law.
I’m honestly curious if this would be a Privacy Act or HIPAA violation. The article seems to be unsure on this.
If that EO was legal, then sharing the data is, too. If it wasn't, then it's probably a privacy violation, but the CMS isn't allowed to make that call themselves, they have to rely on court decisions for it. And challenging EOs is not trivial.
It’s not. Palantir “receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)” [1]. That’s broader than Medicare or Medicaid.
If you’re on a legal visa and have to get a prescription filled, I think you’ll wind up in those data. (Same if you are legally on Medicare with a spouse who overstayed their visa.)
> does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
Not necessarily. As I said, these data are broader than CMMS. And the targets of the current ICE are not undocumented migrants. (I live in Wyoming, near the Idaho border. The farm workers are fine.)
[1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
“Several federal laws authorise the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make certain information available to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),”
> > does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid? > Not necessarily.
Not necessarily, but probably. I was told explicitly that undocumented migrants weren't getting Medicare and Medicaid services, but at this point, I don't know who to believe.
I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.
As a general rule, the first amendment protects the right to say, e.g. "John Doe lives at 123 Main St." John may not like that people know that, but that doesn't generally limit other peoples' right to speak freely.
If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.
'Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime'. - Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin secret police)
If only there was an independent Judikative or something idk...
It's dehumanizing and it leads to a path where you can justify humiliating, torturing, and murdering other humans. Which is already happening with ICE.
It’s the legally-correct term.
For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.
This is an unsubstantiated slippery slope. We can categorize people, even sort them by desirability for some purpose, without resorting to dehumanization much less genocide. (Citizenship and immigration necessitate an us-them delineation. So do team sports, families and like club memberships. Us and them are fine. Us versus them is dangerous.)
> There is no data sharing agreement between CMS and DHS on “US citizens and lawful permanent residents,” they added.
I’m confused by this shoehorning.
This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.
So, before it's too late, we, the people potentially enabling this data abuse, must think about consequences and morals.
Also: today they come for Latinos, tomorrow can be your turn.
The article is about feeding a giant pile of metadata to a service and getting results. That pile was collected in a mundane manner as a part of everyday actions. People probably didn't think much of it at the time. Even if the potential for abuse occurred to them, clearly the vast majority swept the concern aside and went on about their day.
That's exactly what's happening with the internet giants as well. People embed analytics and bot detectors and fonts and who knows what else from major third party providers with hardly a second thought. Other people then navigate to those websites with little to no awareness of the potential for abuse.
This article is about a concrete example of such potential abuse that went on for many years before blindsiding a great many people when it was abruptly weaponized overnight.
From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I think inefficiency, data siloing, politics and lack of communication between departments and also internally not communicating between teams. Not withstanding a lack of cooperating and willingness to change.
Did Palantir have a political mandate, or can they just cut through the bureaucracy or bypass it with technology?
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
It's also kind of a problem to say "Oh well, we've got no concrete data, let's continue to let them deport whoever they like and shoot anyone who gets in the way".
This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.
In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.
The U.S. government almost certainly has intimate health data on every Briton as a result of these deals.
Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Government departments, military. They are happy to take credit for all the "conniving" allegations because it makes them look like they have a plan, and anybody with purchasing power involving with them knows it corresponds very little to the company operationally, i.e. what the company does.
It's the privatization of what started as an intelligence program.
Recommended watching (The REAL Story Behind Palantir's Dystopian Pre-Crime Takeover (w/ Whitney Webb)):
What are you using to conclude their effectiveness?
It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP.
On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget.
[1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
* They are going after people legally here on temporary visas such as SIV that give them access to medicaid
* They are going after people that are not on medicaid and have no insurance but received care (either emergency care or charity care) at a hospital or clinic that takes medicaid (I don’t know if hospitals capture this information for CMS).
* ?
They’re literally just pulling up addresses (404 Media). Replace Palantir with McKinsey and making an app for VLOOKUP makes more sense.
For example I see zero freedom difference between my ath10k with its firmware loaded from disk by libre software, and my x520 with firmware stored in onboard flash. Neither undermines the freedom or security of my workstation user domain, and both are unfree if I get the itch to dig into modifying my network cards.
Of course, now washing machines connect to the Internet, so the obvious lines have blurred
Even without the Internet connection, the firmware in your washing machine can be updated whether by service call or DIY by seeing what chip it uses and how it gets programmed.
Which is why I think it makes sense to talk in terms of software freedom for specific devices / security domains. For example, it's perfectly fine to just admit that your washing machine, wifi card, mouse, network switch, etc doesn't respect software freedom, rather than trying to define one's way out of it. And then if and when you do run into an issue that is made frustrating by a lack of software freedom, you can then opt to remedy this.
Hell, you would probably have bipartisan support for nationwide crackdowns on employers who are employing anyone here illegally. They are undercutting American employees and dodging taxes. Who wouldn't be for that kind of law enforcement?
Instead we get unaccountable masked men with guns murdering citizens and terrorizing an entire populace. Imagine if an "ICE raid" meant a team of accountants showed up at a business and gave them a hefty fine for employing anyone here illegally. It seems like that would be much more effective, which makes me genuinely wonder if the demonstration of strength through cruelty that we currently have hasn't been the goal all along.
Cause consider the previous status quo. It was considered somehow scandalous for Bill Clinton to have an opinion on what his AG Janet Reno was doing
Laws and protections do not just apply for citizens. They apply anyone in the United States.
Yes. That’s how we lawfully deport them. You can’t run out and start serial killing illegal immigrants and then claim you aren’t a murderer.
> It started out that way. At the beginning of 2025, 87% of ICE arrests were immigrants with either a prior conviction or a criminal charge pending, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.
> But the criminal share of apprehensions has declined as the months have gone on. By October 2025, the percentage of arrested immigrants with a prior conviction or criminal charge had fallen to 55%. Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.
* https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mass-deportat...
Under Obama 3M illegal immigrants were removed, and there wasn't all of this drama.
(Hint: this isn't about public safety or illegal immigration.)
It’s also a little interesting that Obama was able to be against illegal immigration without a ton of pushback. Why was that?
Maybe because under Obama agents didn't go around smashing windows:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/ice-detentio...
Note: the above person was an asylum seeker, so following the official process (AFAICT).
Or under Obama they didn't pull away people who were in line to take the Oath of Allegiance:
* https://people.com/immigrants-approved-for-citizenship-pulle...
Or take US citizens out of their homes, in their underwear, in the middle of winter:
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...
Perhaps under Obama due process was followed, or not going after / grabbing people randomly based on the color of their skin:
He got tons of pushback from the left. He was just able to weather his party’s fringe in ways Republicans have not.
If you wanted to make a more detailed point, then do that but as your comment stands, it is just a useless bothsides-ism.
The data shouldn’t be shared unless comsent is provided. But I’m unsure of why Palantir is the bad person for developing software.
I don’t work for Palantir or hold their stock.
Now, where are all these 'I don't have anything to hide people?' I don't see them anywhere...
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
In countries where the police and government officials can be bought for pocket change by the middle class, the masses have relatively more power vs the elite who control the central government.
That's a real-world difference that gives the middle class more freedom to start a business that is really only feasible for the wealthy in the US.
You’re comparing permitting processes. That’s orthogonal to corruption. You can set up a beach bar in most of America without a permit and without getting cited for months on end, too, and plenty of people do it. (The pot-brownie sellers in Dolores Park aren’t licensed.)
The main point of this thread that I found very poignant was the accessibility of corruption. In the USA, only the rich get to be corrupt.
Not to be flippant, but morals are variable.
Two of my kids are into investing, and some of their choices are 'morally indefensible', to me.
We've had the discussions since they were old enough to be taught 'right' from wrong.
Their aims are to increase the money they have, not to make anyone feel better, or judge others' choices.
It was obvious and happened in broad daylight in front of everyone. But much the ICE assaults, there isn’t much Americans can really do about it.
Sounds like Americans are in general fine with all of it. Voting patterns hold. General sentiment still remains aligned with the status quo. There does not seem like there are any consequences for the representatives to not represent the people.
The classic example of the mental gymnastics do won't punish any of this is civil asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft. The Fourth mandment quite literally starts with:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...
You might think if you are stopped by police and you have cash on it, that it is your "effects" and it can't be seized without any crime but you'd be wrong. The legal theory surrounding this is that it is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against its owner, even though the basis for the civil action is a crime that not only doesn't have to be proven, it doesn't even have to be alleged.
Medical info is just one prong of a massive effort to acquire all sorts of personal information, seemingly to build a database so citizens can be targeted. If you think it's going to stop at immigration enforcement, you're crazy. Examples:
- AG Pam Bondi has sought voter rolls from the majority of states [1], which most recently came up as a random demand to end ICE terrorism in Minnesota [2], which has so far refused to hand over that information. Consider where Minnesota sits in the estimated number of undocumented migrants [3]. Why is ICE there and not, say, Texas or Florida?
- DOGE previous accessed (and alleged copied) all the data from the Social Security Administration [4]. Why? What's happened to it? Who has it now?
I personally believe this has long reached the point that in a just world, Palantir employees would be prosecuted and sent to jail. Palantir is (allegedly) knowingly providing the means to kill journalists and target people while they're at home so a missile strike will also kill their entire family [5][6].
This "immigration enforcement" goes well beyond undocumented migrants. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident married to a US citizen, was targeted for organizing peaceful protests against Israel's genocide.
At this point if you don't see how all these things are interconnected, you're burying your head in the sane.
[1]: https://stateline.org/2025/07/16/trumps-doj-wants-states-to-...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/26/pam-bondi-mi...
[3]: https://immresearch.org/publications/50-states-immigrants-by...
[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whistleblower-responds-aft...
[5]: https://www.972mag.com/ai-surveillance-gaza-palantir-datamin...
There are literally 20x more illegal immigrants in Texas as compared to Minnesota:
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
There are 12x more in Florida:
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
If you want to go fishing, the Mojave Desert is not the place you should be going. If they want to go after illegal immigrants go to where they actually live and work.
* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-unauthorized-immigra...
(Hint: this is not about illegal immigration.)
I haven't lost any of my rights yet. Certainly not in the past month. All the mechanisms to deport people were already there.
Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did, and Obama wasn’t blowing Saudi Arabia’s military budget every year on his numbers.
Maybe learn grammar before giving grand politic lessons.
I guess they just needed a Dumb Fuck to do whatever they wanted, Lifelog and whatever
Why won't you protest against current citizenship rules, since it's clear you want them to be changed?
edit: I see it's just a simple "f** ice" and "you need to go" case. I'll show myself out
Not sure how you concluded this. Particularly for unskilled labour.
No. I’m anti-murder.
This logic is like saying someone who objects to the Nazis is racist against Germans.
Also, to be fair, nazis were Germans. Not aliens from outer space. Those were german people who identified with NSDAP party.
Edit: I understand (well, kind of...) why people downvote me, but I'm really lost when trying to understand why they downvote you. I don't think I'll ever understand what's going on.
I want it to be done without murder. Murder is bad.
I don’t care if it’s done by ICE or the Pink Pony Friendly Airlift Service. They should do it per the law. They should not have to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars per deportation. And they should do it without murder, with murderers in their ranks being charged per the law.
> to be fair, nazis were Germans
…yes. That doesn’t make being anti-Nazi racist against Germans.
This is nonsense. Given the same tendency is shared by large private organisations, this is throwing one’s hands up with extra steps.
Regulations and laws work. The fact that a section of the INA seems to compel pretty ridiculous amounts of inter-departmental data sharing is the issue.
The heuristic is to not participate in modern medicine?
Which is practically useless when we’re discussing HHS data.
I bet that if all conspiracy theorists will be more worried that their neighbors become crazy and would try to do something positive about it (talk to them, befriend them, influence them, etc.) the outcome might be better for everybody.