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Comment by NaomiLehman | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna steelman an argument I don't hold: What about CIA? Revealing the identity of a CIA operative is a crime.

I'm just responding to the part "Don't they serve us?"

> Intentionally disclosing the identity of a U.S. intelligence agent, including a CIA officer, is a federal crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), which can result in up to 10 years in prison and fines. This law applies to individuals with authorized access to classified information and those without access who intentionally expose agents, knowing their actions could harm U.S. foreign intelligence operations.

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But intelligence and law enforcement aren't the same thing, and the CIA is specifically prohibited from operating domestically. Valiant attempt, but talking about law enforcement (again, as opposed to intelligence) activities that take place in public is a matter of settled law. We decided that you're allowed to warn people that the police are around, even if it will help people get away with crimes, as a first amendment matter when we decided that police can't make it illegal for you to flash your lights at an oncoming driver to warn them (https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/headlight-flashing/). There's no steelman for this, Apple is just trying to preemptively comply with an administration that considers civil rights inconvenient.

Revealing the identity of a CIA officer is not a crime unless you hold/held a clearance or it is part of a 'pattern of activities' designed to reveal such identities. Regular people have freedom of speech.

Such a law protecting ICE would not withstand scrutiny by the courts.

I mean sure, but ICE is not an intelligence agency or holds classified information.

They're some kind of law enforcement agency that is on a mission to capture people breaking laws.

If your local sheriff is on their way to serve a warrant of some kind, and you call the person and warn them to leave or alert them to destroy evidence, is that going to go well? I don't think it should.

Please stop calling ICE law enforcement. Yes, they enforce something but it's not the law.

What is it they are enforcing then? I once showed up in Vietnam without my tourist visa approved correctly (long story). Let me tell you, they take that stuff very seriously. Canada won't even let you visit Canada if youve had a DUI in recent years. A semifamous comedian wasn't allowed entry into Canada 20 years after he got charged with some form of statutory rape at 18. (He and two friends, 18 to 20, pressured a 16 year old into sex. Heavily contested). Yet we are supposed to let people in without documentation? Without background checks? What kind of insanity is that.

Let's also talk about the how of the enforcement not just the what.

Would you be saying the same thing if you HAD a valid Vietnamese tourist visa and was snatched off the road and detained for several hours without access to a lawyer in terrible conditions by unbadged masked "agents"?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawyer-us-born-citizen-detained-ic...

The examples you mentioned would not fall into ICE scope of action, but CBP.

> Yet we are supposed to let people in without documentation? Without background checks? What kind of insanity is that.

Let me tell you that, in my experience, the US very much enforces all these requirements, to the point where foreigners have to pay the US government hundreds of dollars for the _chance_ of getting a temporary visa. And again, ICE has nothing to do with the process.

The analogy doesn't quite match up –

– Parent is talking about making public the identities of ICE employees, doing things in public, which is by far and large true of your local sheriff;

- Individuals are reporting the presence of ICE in the area. A deliberate ambiguity is maintained about what ICE does beyond "detain people" -- whether as "collateral damage" or targeted. Intervening with the two gives us two very different circumstances.

Everybody knows the sheriff, their face is everywhere, and they actually get voted in, and out of office.

What does this have to do with calling a criminal telling them that the sheriff is on their way to their house to serve a warrant?

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