ICE agents exposed in DHS hack

It's war on everyone. Digital surveillance and penetration is the new trench warfare on every side.

Hack Wars! The Info Wars are real – hat tip to Ben Collins and Tim Heidecker, and fuck Alex Jones.

As you know, social media platforms have been throttling leftists, liberals and progressives online.

Now there's been a flurry of hacking – and all sides are active and affected.

First up, the U.S. Federal Election Commission was hacked this week. Reuters reports the agency's electronic filings system has been disrupted.

Reminder: There's kind of a big election coming up on Tuesday next week.

The FEC does not run elections – that's done state by state – but it does record and display political spending. As of this week, $11 billion have been spent on advertising across the country, a record. Over the past week, $50 million a day has been spent – with more than $250 million spent on October 20 alone, according to Reuters.

As you know, Elon Musk alone has donated more than $500 million to Republican candidates and groups this cycle, the largest single political donor in history – all to one side.

And this is new: The Department of Homeland Security was hacked and that data was dumped – with at least 41,000 individuals exposed. These include ICE agents, Homeland Security Investigation agents, and other Customs and Border Protection employees.

The hackers call themselves the Department of Peace.

A nonprofit group called Distributed Denial of Secrets published a database this week listing these records.

The info dump includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles and work assignments and operations details.

As a general guiding principle, I'm against doxxing. I'm opposed to unauthorized access to and public distribution of one's personal and private information – as an intimidation tactic, or really for any reason, though what else would it be.

But in this instance, I'm perfectly fine with it.

These are ostensibly public servants on the government payroll. The right to privacy is a different standard when you're a cop or a politician. It's not gone, but it's a different level of expectation when you sign up for that job.

On top of that, these ICE thugs absolutely deserve – every single one of them, on the front lines and in support roles – to be exposed, after nearly two years of violent, masked gang assaults and abductions of immigrants and U.S. citizens across the country, including several murders.

Check out any interaction with these jackbooted gestapo nazis recorded on video on the streets, and the arrogance, disrespect for individual rights or the rule of law, and their sheer glee in inflicting this cruelty, is evident and appalling.

I hope these men and women never experience of day of peace for the rest of their lives, and I'm actively rooting for public shame and humiliation of each and every one of them following this document drop.

Consequences.

But of course – social media platforms are doing their best to strangle it. Images and links are disabled across the Big 5 social platforms.

So ... you can find that database yourself at the Distributed Denial of Secrets website – https://ddosecrets.org 

This DHS hack follows a different hack of the FBI in September, when 60,000 FBI employees were exposed by a group called Shiny Hunters.

You can also take a look at The Ice List dot org, which keeps a running database of details about agents and operations. They reported today that they got a humongous surge of traffic this week, appearing to show agents searching their own names – and showing their own asses.

Now, Wired just published an article exposing a domestic spying operation run by Homeland Security against Americans, targeting leftist and progressive groups in Minnesota and other areas of the country including Seattle, Chicago and New York City.

This is shades of the FBI's CoIntelPro in the 1970s– that's for another post, but look it up for context.

That was 50 years ago. Now DHS has been using tools of the Patriot Act to surveil email, Signal chats, online activity and in-person undercover infiltration of activist groups – who have to be clear have been suspicious of undercover feds since the days of CoIntelPro. They're even using military drones to spy on group activities they don't like.

This was all spurred by an executive memo released last year that launched the National Security Presidential Memorandum, aka "NSPM-7." That was 15 days after Charlie Kirk made his final public speaking tour stop at Utah Valley University.

In other tech interference, as you know, Meta's Instagram interfered with No Kings organizers two weeks ago on the day of nationwide demonstrations.

The documentary on Musk by Alex Gibney, called "Musk," has been stifled online – TikTok, Meta and Twitter, and even here on Youtube – would not run paid advertisements for theater showings across the country. After public outcry, Meta and Youtube reversed themselves, but Twitter didn't, and TikTok appears to have blocks still in place.

Then, mysteriously, the film's distributor yanked the flick from theaters – it was already notoriously difficult to find even in a big city like L.A. The distributor – Bleecker Street Films – was just bought out earlier this month! How curious that timing! Hm.

The movie is scheduled to be available On Demand to stream next week. Stay tuned.

Incidentally, Musk also just invested a billion dollars in David Ellison's Skydance after its hostile takeover of Warner Bros. That's a lot of oligarchy in a lot of our daily and hourly media consumption. If you work for any companies under that Skydance umbrella, my condolences ... and please watch yourself about what you do on work computers, and what you talk about and to whom at work. That's not paranoia, that's capitalism – the bosses are looking at you.

In other digital interference news: 

Angie Nixon, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Florida, held an outreach to voters in Osceola County earlier this month – specifically to Hispanic voters – and Instagram took down their organizing page. Instagram reinstated the page after hours of unwanted attention for that action.

Meta also reportedly messed with Brazil's Lula da Silva election campaign – he won anyway – and there are dozens of other examples across the globe of Mark Zuckerberg absolutely selling out to Right Wing action – but our primary concern here is with the U.S.

Don't spend all your time on social media. The internet's infrastructure is hopelessly mutilated compared to decades past, but for now, it's still possible to get good info online and organize. For now.

In other good indications, Your President and his Chucky Doll sidekick have been on a tear lately, holding campaign rallies in various states in recent weeks – in Republican strongholds.

Trump is visiting South Carolina today – South. Carolina. – to try to rally support for Lindsey Graham's sister Darline. Vance is going to Texas to gin up support for Ken Paxton.

South Carolina and Texas. Historically two of the brightest red states on the map. Instead of spending time in swing states, they're spending time, money and energy defending bastions of one-time support.

To be sure, Ken Paxton is an all-time shitty candidate – he was impeached by his own party for corruption and bribery in Texas, he's been busted more than once cheating on his wife. His campaign has been on bare-minimum autopilot and his personal charm is repulsive. But he's been getting a ton of that Musk money, so apparently he thinks he can coast his way in. But the fact Trump is stumping, well, that's a problem for the deepest of red states.

South Carolina's Darline Graham – well, she's kind of an empty suit. Her main qualification for the job of United States Senator? Her brother was Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly this summer, and she was appointed to his seat by South Carolina's governor. 

Speaking of Lindsey – it's OK, Halloween and the Day of the Dead are upon us, the veil is thin, he can hear well enough to defend himself – we all fondly remember his 2016 quote about Trump and the Republican Party: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it." 

Apt. 

Then he spent the last decade in full suck-up mode, turning about face and becoming an attack dog and Trump's loudest apologist.

I was going to dive deeper into a just-released documentary with some lurid and apparently well-researched claims about Lindsey, but that's not really the focus of this channel.

The point is: defending these states is a flashing warning light on the GOP dashboard. 

Reminder to vote by next Tuesday. Do it. Get others enthusiastic about voting too. Do the true patriotic American thing.

Perusing today's headlines, there's some reports like this one from NPR: "With days to go before the midterms, data shows the U.S. economy is doing well." ABC News, The Associated Press, even The Guardian go with this faulty framing.

It notes U.S. Gross Domestic Product is growing, largely because of A.I. companies continuing to spend on tech development and investments in more and more "data centers" – which the American public overwhelmingly and viscerally rejects. 

NPR reports big spending by high-income Americans ... and then notes everyone else – the vast majority of working adults – is struggling not to drown, financially. There are roughly 160 million working Americans, according to most estimates.

These are the same outlets that downplayed monthly jobs averaging 300,000 new jobs added month to month during Biden's term ... and focusing on inflation, which was dropping after the pandemic ... which was exacerbated by the first Trump Administration's utter failure to properly respond to the biggest public health threat in a century.

In September last month, U.S. employers added just 29,000 jobs.

NBC News reported 31,000 jobs were created in June, and 21,000 jobs in July ... and said the numbers "will likely give economists significant added confidence in the stability of the labor market."

What. Horseshit. I'm no Biden enthusiast, but this shit is egregious, and it certainly wasn't limited to NBC News.

And then – for some reason, didn't make huge headlines in September – the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised some numbers from Trump's first year of his second term – first reporting 68,000 jobs were lost over the past year ... then declaring it was actually 108,000 jobs were lost.

Again – 120,000 to 160,000 jobs added monthly on average the year before Trump took office – down to 40,000 to 60,000 jobs per month since he returned.

I'm not a numbers guy, and I'm not rah-rah economy guy either ... but these statistics do matter, and it matters how they're reported. And clearly you can't trust the headlines. 

This news media trend of "reporting what the numbers show" is similar to the reflexive dutiful requirement to report on whatever Trump or Elon Musk says that day as official or serious or reality-based – decidedly not – or when statements from police are taken at official face value. Stenography.

The truth is this is a house of cards, and the A.I. overreach and inevitable bubble burst is going to be much worse than the crash of 2008 or the dot com implosion in the early 2000s. Lots of economists and think-tank analysts – even those who are sympathetic to A.I. development – know this, and are telling anyone who will listen that the global economy is threatened – including, notably, Michael Burry, the guy who accurately predicted the real estate crash of 2008, the guy who was played by Christian Bale in "The Big Short." He's got a good track record.

So, I regret to report that I am very pessimistic about the country's objective reality about really ANYTHING that's going on. 

But don't take my word for it.

Be Safe. Be Good.