I don't see what's so bad about wanting to avoid an area where there's police activity going on. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're doing anything wrong, it's as simple as not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint or get stuck in traffic because they need 8 squad cars taking up a lane to k-9 search someone. As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
There's barely any point examining the app on its merits.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
Genuine question: is sharing the location or distribution of information about police presence illegal? I assume this would be treated differently if it involved military positions, but I'm curious about how the law applies in this case.
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
> Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
>Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
In many states you’re required to identify yourself, but cooperation with law enforcement is otherwise never required. My sense is that ICE generally still releases citizens swiftly, and if they don’t think you’re a citizen for some reason you’re not going to win an argument about it on the spot no matter how much you cooperate.
And I grew up believing that America was 'land of the free'.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
The UK has a complicated relationship with IDs anyway, they don't have a national ID, no one's mandated to have a passport, and a driving license is also optional (only if you want to drive). The US is almost like that except that not having a driving license is an oddity there.
I'm not arguing against anything you've said, but this isn't as popular of a sentiment as you think it is. For example, people who post information about DUI checkpoints in local social media forums are typically pilloried in comments sections.
Speaking as a resident of the United States who does not happen to possess paperwork related to my residency, I think this ICE stuff is terrible. I do want to stay here in the US, I do have needs that require welfare for myself and my children. Food, housing, medicine, these are human rights, we all deserve them it's as simple as that. I thought the US supported human rights so that I could stay here and raise a family on the taxpayer dime because someone threatened me one time in my home country. Sadly, that is not the case, for shame.
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
Reporting traffic cameras/stops is illegal in many countries but not the US. That however does not mean that reporting police activity is automatically always legal there. Similar to how taking along a hitchhiker is legal but driving a getaway car for a crime is not.
This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
There are so many layers of crazy here but the one that strikes me most is attacking CNN for having a piece about the App. I.e. it's not just that reporting police activity is treated as a problem (it's not) but even an article discussing the way that some people are reporting police activity is a problem.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
> officers who put their lives on the line every day
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
Cops should be proud to put their lives at risk. It should be part of the job expectations. You should care so much about the community you're supposed to serve that you'd be willing to make that sacrifice, even for a total stranger. The fact that none of this pride or expectation exists highlights that cops are cowards who get into policing for bad or selfish reasons and perpetuate systemic problems that harm millions.
This reminds me of how we have articles and handwringing about “our soldiers were attacked” in a country they had no authorization to even be. It is never discussed what they were actually doing there, but this is usually framed as in “we need more money to defend our men and women overseas”.
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
>"...we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not a protected speech. That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country."'
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
Retaliation against free speech is completely normalized at this point. Primarily this administration has gone after large targets (recent Paramount case, the universities) and symbolic targets (students, a mayoral candidate). The circle of targets is going to continue to expand. Soon enough everyone’s speech will be tightly controlled under an AI-powered surveillance apparatus.
> That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers
It sounds like he's suggesting the app is intended as a way to target officers for assassination or something? That does seem like it might make a difference if it were true, but it also doesn't really seem like the intent of the app at all.
> wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned
Trump pardoned felons who attacked law enforcement on January 6th. Bondi has no credibility calling out anyone for endangering law enforcement. If a Democrat were to match Trump’s rhetoric, they’d be promising pardons for anyone who physically assaulted ICE. They’re not. This entire shitshow is posturing.
>The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
Actually pretty decent tech reporting if true. This is a non trivial task that can take some time to setup and analyze. If the app is secure and uses certificate pinning it would require reverse engineering it to patch over the pinning before you could MiTM the traffic and actually see it decrypted.
the author has specified why, in a pretty detailed post about it (https://www.iceblock.app/android). they quote your exact concern as the reason they only support Apple:
> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
I believe apple has only the metadata of the push notification, if implemented properly. The payload of the push notification itself can be end-to-end encrypted.
Because law enforcement officers have so much more power than an average citizen, they must be held to much higher standards and have even more accountability. Law enforcement radio should be unencrypted, there should be public databases of officers for facial recognition, and their vehicles and persons should be publicly trackable. The same techniques they use to surveil the citizenry should be applied to them.
https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.
I disagree. Every single criminal is going to have a scanner the next day, and it'll become impossible to apprehend genuine criminals.
On the other hand, I would support mandatory recording and archiving of law enforcement radio, just like we are already doing with air traffic control. Combine this with independent incident investigations with public disclosure, and you've essentially achieved the accountability you are asking for.
Such a genuinely odd comment. You must realize that encryption of police radio is a recent thing and that, yes, police were capable of apprehending criminals prior to the adoption of encrypted communications.
Americans give criminals way too much credit. Policing in many countries is way less extreme and dystopian than it is in the states and they tend to have less crime (part of that is that they actually give a shit about their citizens and have funded healthcare, and do reasonable things like ban guns etc)
Interesting that Apple even allows ICEBlock on the App Store given that 13 years ago they blocked the publication of an app that notified users of American drone strikes abroad as "objectionable" content: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/apple-drone-stri...
> “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” the statement said.
I think Apple hates the current American leadership enough that they'll take their sweet time to take down this app.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
Tim Cook was at Trump's inauguration, and donated $1 million to it. While I don't know what his private views are, his public ones are to cozy up Trump.
> Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
You know they could be going for the Streisand effect. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to add false incidents to reduce the effectiveness of the app. Nothing will get those people riled up like a court ruling in favor of the app. In the end, it could work to the administration's favor to have the app up and running. Nothing like acting all offended in public then celebrating privately as unnecessary fear and confusion sets in with false reports.
Readit News
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
oh great, stealing my idea?
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Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
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Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights
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I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
There are zero known exceptions to this principle.
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Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
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No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
We don’t get this in NZ. Waze has removed this feature after threats. I don’t like cops either, but it is super fair and logical to me.
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
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https://www.thelocal.dk/20240529/what-happens-if-you-board-a...
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
Example: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/23/politics/niger-troops-law...
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895401/iraqi-parliament-vo...
Even when a country’s leaders unanimously tell us to withdraw our troops, we say nah:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-withdrawing-iraq-agreemen...
They just need to do enough to trigger others off.
That sounds like the opposite of what they should want.
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
It sounds like he's suggesting the app is intended as a way to target officers for assassination or something? That does seem like it might make a difference if it were true, but it also doesn't really seem like the intent of the app at all.
Trump pardoned felons who attacked law enforcement on January 6th. Bondi has no credibility calling out anyone for endangering law enforcement. If a Democrat were to match Trump’s rhetoric, they’d be promising pardons for anyone who physically assaulted ICE. They’re not. This entire shitshow is posturing.
What do you mean by this? I don’t use the app in the article (or Waze or any others, so they don’t let _me_ know).
What does ICEBlock do differently?
Actually pretty decent tech reporting if true. This is a non trivial task that can take some time to setup and analyze. If the app is secure and uses certificate pinning it would require reverse engineering it to patch over the pinning before you could MiTM the traffic and actually see it decrypted.
They can hand it over to the government real quickly.
The author does not provide a Android version and does not specify why.
Edit: ok, the author does specify why, see the replies below.
> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
edit: however, GrapheneOS disputes this: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w
They say they'd have to maintain a DB of device info and user accounts to send push notifications, whereas Apple devices do not require this.
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https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.
I disagree. Every single criminal is going to have a scanner the next day, and it'll become impossible to apprehend genuine criminals.
On the other hand, I would support mandatory recording and archiving of law enforcement radio, just like we are already doing with air traffic control. Combine this with independent incident investigations with public disclosure, and you've essentially achieved the accountability you are asking for.
> “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” the statement said.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
So they're not even trying to disguise the fact anymore that they're a bunch of goons? And this, coming from a person that went to law school.
Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
You know they could be going for the Streisand effect. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to add false incidents to reduce the effectiveness of the app. Nothing will get those people riled up like a court ruling in favor of the app. In the end, it could work to the administration's favor to have the app up and running. Nothing like acting all offended in public then celebrating privately as unnecessary fear and confusion sets in with false reports.