Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees | Hacker News Reader

Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees

text.npr.org

282 pointsfirefax79 comments

ICE and DHS should be abolished, INS should be restored and immigration policy should be reformed to be far more humane. All of these employees should be barred from any and all future public service (and prosecuted where appropriate). There's no room for sympathy for an agency who routinely violates human rights, fires off tear gas by schools, kills civilians in the streets, fires their weapons into moving vehicles and on and on.

The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.

And they're still being identified, decades later and still getting into trouble for it which I love.

Speaking of which, I feel like ICE's next move is to start arresting people for not turning in their friends, neighbors, and coworkers. We know they're planning for it at least.

How do we know that?

They don't but it appeals to their imagination.

I wouldn't say "know", but it sure is what historical precedent suggests...

They really are turning into something like the Stasi:

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-running-one-of-the-larges...

i had a woman i met at a policy conference confide that many bad people made it through both the nazi period and the east german times -- there's a type of sadist who maliciously complies with the rules in any way they can to the detriment of others who i despise and saw much too much of in the policy context.

i haven't been there in a long time, but this hacker looking across the pond, it looks like germany has changed...

i worry too many hackers have not sufficiently studied history.

There was a guy from Japanese Unit 731 found working as a pharmacist many years after the war.

A monster hiding in plain sight.

> Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US between 1945 and 1959 for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe.

> Unit 731 was a secret biological and chemical warfare research unit run by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1933 and 1945. An estimated 14,000 people were killed by infecting prisoners with deadly diseases, conducting vivisection, performing organ harvesting, testing hypobaric chambers, amputating limbs, and exposing victims to chemical agents and explosives.

> maliciously complies

I think the concept you want here is "just following orders" or even "mindless compliance", rather than "malicious compliance". Malicious compliance refers to a sense of justice obtained from technically following rules, when you either disagree with the rule or the authority, in a way that is counterproductive to the goals of the authority.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/

Hanna Arendt coined the best term of all for it: The Banality of Evil.

i love that book -- i once rolled into an in school suspension with a copy of "eichmann in jerusalem" in my backpack, as i was a troll from an early age.

(happy halloween, orange site.)

The German communist party managed to destroy all of its records, so the people in charge of this hellscape managed to escape justice. Only the foot soldiers were exposed.

Not really a great example of justice.

> The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.

I thought it was quite the opposite: there were so many informants and records were shredded that it wasn't that easy to figure out. What was the mechanism for this identification? A public database records lookup?

It's worthy of a book length history: some records were shredded, and some undoubtedly lost forever, but German citizens occupied Stasi offices and preserved records. At least some of the shredded records were digitized and reconstructed. There are over 100 million pages of archived Stasi documents in German archives today.

Thanks for the context. I knew a little how people could review their own Stasi file but wonder how easily was for them to discover the mapping from the agent code names to people's names.

I found this blog https://zipser2018feb.wordpress.com/under-surveillance/ from someone who reviewed their Stasi file. They were visiting professor of German from University of Delaware. As a visitor from the "capitalist West" of course they had file on him.

He did discover the names of some of this informants https://zipser2018feb.wordpress.com/my-stasi-file/

> The file reveals that there were nine unofficial collaborators of one sort or another who reported on my GDR-related activities and gathered information on me for the Stasi. Three were writers: IME “Dichter” (Poet), Paul Wiens, a well-known, well-connected poet and communist party loyalist [...] Two informants were good acquaintances, a married couple I got to know while living in East Berlin: IMV “Kurt” and IMV “Julia.” [...] There is evidence that two American Germanists, “unofficial sources,” informed the Stasi about my GDR-related activities in the United States. Although they are unnamed, I was able to identify them from the information provided. The file also contains four surveillance reports (one stretching over a three-day period), which were authorized by the Ministry for State Security and prepared by Stasi operatives. In these I have a code name: “Adler,” eagle, the bird of prey.

The real importance of this is archival. Who knows what would have been burned and shredded to protect the masked brutes.

Trump will anyway throw them under the bus when he's done with them so it's a bit naive to expect their identities would be kept secret forever. And somehow they hoped those masks would do anything else beside terrorize Americans. As far as archival, yes that's a good idea. I'm sure the current admin will attempt to shred everything..

Unrelated to the content of the article, but what a wonderful site text.npr.org is. It looks like a slightly enhanced version of my iPhone's reader mode and it displays instantly, scrolling with no lag, stuttering, or dynamic loading of page elements.

I wish more of the web were like this.

Oath. Fantastic.

Zwounds. Marvelous.

Like text.npr.org - there is also a CNN "lite" version too: https://lite.cnn.com/

I agree whole heartedly I wish more of the web were like this.

Bring back WML sites?

note: WML/WAL was a way to enable browsing a web-like thing on low powered devices.

For a bit of time, popular websites were available in two variants, wml and html (more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol)

No who remembers WAP has any desire to see anything like it return. A 'lite' subdomain is far easier and more effective by not trying to reinvent the entire stack.

As for WML, I'd say transport-level compression made that pretty much academic.

See too: CBC lite[0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

In a similar vein, I've been using https://brutalist.report/ for a while just to browse headlines. All the links lead to the full regular pages, so the articles themselves aren't "lightweight" like the CNN Lite version is. I still like how it lets me quickly peruse many headlines from lots of different categories and only click through onto something I'm genuinely interested in.

I wasn't aware of CNN Lite, I will add this to my news bookmarks.

If only Brutalist had RSS. Especially the summaries page... a pity. Or maybe I'm too old school.

And no doom scrolling. There is a bottom of the page and no Next Page button.

Man, find of the day. This is such an refined way of viewing the news (and then stopping and going outside).

I came across this years ago. It is pretty much the only news I will look at. They only update like 3 times a day too, so no incentive to keep coming back.

a friend found it when fucking around with a DNS enumeration tool a while back.

lite.cnn.com is also useful on slow connections

(i post using tor.)

The Compuserve and Netscape ISP website husks also feature no-nonsense text-only news pages with 2000s-style renderings that are near-instant on any device.

68k.news also exists but has been broken for a long time. It's maintained by a retro computing youtuber who seems to have abandoned it or isn't paying attention to its brokenness.

It was created in protest to GDPR - "see how terrible the web would be if we followed GDPR" - and backfired a bit, but apparently not enough to delete it.

Discussion yesterday (330 points, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280864

The link is https://icepi.cx/ but they are currently fighting a domain takedown.

https://ddosecrets.org/article/icepick upstream coverage

You can also download the dataset there.

updated link (for now): https://icepicx.is/

They should all spend the next term in the prisons they're kidnapping people into. Going to be interesting explaining this to future employers who will now be more equipped to identify new hires, or current hires that don't align.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280864

Source urls only please, save the lite/archives for comments.

Full url: https://www.npr.org/2026/10/28/nx-s1-6021497/dhs-hack-ice (as submitted earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286722)

> exposing the names, phone numbers and addresses

> Ottignon, who has worked on similar data leak projects in the past, rejected suggestions that he and others connected to the Department of Peace or Distribution[sic] Denials of Secrets were doxing government employees.

Do words mean nothing anymore?

Unlike the SS, surveillance goes both ways now...

This gave me schadenfreude... Is it bad to feel schadenfreude?

chat what is the German word for person who feels guilty for feeling schadenfreude

im sure it is a spectacular word

Schadenfreude literally means "shameful joy", so it's kind of built into the word itself. Someone who doesn't feel at least a little tinge of wrongness is someone who's broken.

No it does not mean that. It's not "shameful joy". It's joy at someone else's misfortune.

"Schaden" means literally "harm". "Schamfreude" or "Beschaemende Freute" would be "shameful joy", but that's not a word or expression that anyone uses.

Huh, that makes more sense, thanks. Whodathunk that The Simpsons wasn't an authority on translation? Let down again... :-/

> It's joy at someone else's misfortune.

A pretty negative view towards fellow humans.

As the old saying goes, comedy is when someone else walks into the open manhole.

Good. Let them have a taste of their own medicine.

Dozens of the names, at least, correspond to J6 individuals.

maybe i'm just a pessimist but i don't see anything really coming from this. democrats win in 2028, ICE gets scaled down and returns to Biden-era size, maybe 5-10 agents go to prison. so what if the public has their addresses and phone numbers? what changes?

With the current state of the Democratic party, I think they'll just trip over themselves and fail. I wouldn't consider them a guaranteed win for 2028.

not guaranteed but i think it's the most likely outcome considering current polls, and i don't expect Trump/GOP to win back many voters over the next two years

You'd be surprised. The only things conservative americans that lives in their isolated suburbs care about are gas prices and whether or not they can buy the new iphone for cheap.

The US has no actual national security at moment.

Unless you're a rich pedophile. Those guys are super safe.

National security is about whether there will still be a USA, not whether any specific person will still live.

... and gainfully employed!

You conveniently forgot "J_____"

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