Hacker News

Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees(text.npr.org)

260 points by firefax 18 hours ago | 75 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.

[–] Zigurd 17 hours ago

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

[–] GolfPopper 16 hours ago

They really are turning into something like the Stasi:

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

[–] barbazoo 17 hours ago

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

[–] rdtsc 13 hours ago

> 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?

[–] Zigurd 11 hours ago

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.

[–] rdtsc 10 hours ago

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.

[–] firefax 16 hours ago

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.

[–] pcthrowaway 14 hours ago

> 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/

[–] chuckadams 13 hours ago

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

[–] ourmandave 14 hours ago

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

A monster hiding in plain sight.

[–] lioeters 14 hours ago

> 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.

[–] nickdurfe 9 hours ago

> 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.

[–] sixothree 16 hours ago

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.

[–] qtk8 15 hours ago

How do we know that?

[–] vrganj 12 hours ago

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

[–] justinhj 14 hours ago

They don't but it appeals to their imagination.

[–] stephbook 14 hours ago

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.

[–] MSFT_Edging 18 hours ago

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

[–] onemoresoop 15 hours ago

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..

[–] rmah 14 hours ago

"And somehow they hoped those masks would do anything else beside terrorize Americans"

As an legal american immigrant, I don't feel terrorized.

[–] R1D3R 11 hours ago

As a natural born US citizen I feel terrorized. If you don’t then you aren’t paying attention.

[–] hightrix 10 hours ago

Yet.

[–] thunderfork 14 hours ago

What bearing does this anecdote have on the discussion?

[–] wilkystyle 18 hours ago

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.

[–] hatradiowigwam 17 hours ago

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.

[–] Uncle_Brumpus 14 hours ago

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.

[–] soco 13 hours ago

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

[–] amenghra 17 hours ago

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)

[–] chuckadams 13 hours ago

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.

[–] bch 16 hours ago

See too: CBC lite[0]

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

[–] tocs3 17 hours ago

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

[–] onefiftymike 17 hours ago

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.

[–] cowlevel 15 hours ago

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.

[–] firefax 16 hours ago

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.)

[–] forestry 17 hours ago

Oath. Fantastic.

[–] lioeters 14 hours ago

Zwounds. Marvelous.

[–] VCFundedGenYer 16 hours ago

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.

[–] cellsstudio 17 hours ago

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

[–] gnabgib 17 hours ago

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

[–] smallerize 18 hours ago

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

[–] florkbork 18 hours ago

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

[–] cowlevel 15 hours ago

You can also download the dataset there.

[–] diomedes 12 hours ago

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

[–] RRRA 13 hours ago

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

[–] b0rtb0rt 12 hours ago

enforcing laws is like racist and sad and stuff

[–] lioeters 10 hours ago

What you're saying is that you support the state terrorizing the public as long as you are not personally bothered by it. Coward and a traitor. Wrong side of history, buddy.

[–] onemoresoop 15 hours ago

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

[–] zzzeek 13 hours ago

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

im sure it is a spectacular word

[–] chuckadams 13 hours ago

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.

[–] chihuahua 13 hours ago

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.

[–] isolay 17 hours ago

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

[–] syngrog66 18 hours ago

The US has no actual national security at moment.

[–] giantrobot 16 hours ago

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

[–] cowlevel 15 hours ago

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

[–] Jerrrrrrrrry 10 hours ago

You conveniently forgot "J_____"

[–] ethagnawl 13 hours ago

... and gainfully employed!

[–] arduanika 15 hours ago

> 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?

[–] ChrisArchitect 16 hours ago

[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)

[–] diomedes 12 hours ago

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?

[–] lp92 12 hours ago

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.

[–] diomedes 11 hours ago

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

[–] hurricanepootis 5 hours ago

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.

[–] ranger_danger 17 hours ago

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

[–] ethfan 17 hours ago

Fwiw the SSO angle is what gets me, one federated identity provider means one compromised path exposes every agency hanging off it.