> Search is investigative; not punitive.

Let's be real, it can be both. A legal, valid and justified search can be done in a manner calculated to inflict maximum pain. Raiding in the middle of the night instead of when they step out their door in the morning, ripping open walls when all they're really looking for is a laptop, flipping and trashing the place in a excessive manner, breaking things in the process, pointing guns at children, shooting the family retriever, etc. I don't know if they took this raid too far in any of these ways, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I agree that's what GP wrote, but I think GP's point is that it's not illegal for journalists to have classified documents, so it does not qualify as probable cause.

Most likely securing information/evidence about the leaker, who likely did break the law or connected to someone who did... the first party leaking classified materials broke the law, while other intermediaries may not have. In an investigative process, this isn't at all inappropriate... Journalists aren't sacrosanct, though policies may have varied as to the level investigations will go.

> Some countries do give journalists extra legal protection against this, but I do not know US law in this regard.

Something worth noting at least for pedantic purposes, since practice is quite different; technically speaking every person has the same rights and laws to follow as a journalist. Fundamentally, there are really no differences between a journalist and a regular person engaging in the same activities.

It's an indication of the unique system architecture that differentiates the USA from all other societies on the planet.

It has been attacked, infiltrated, poison pilled, and really rather devastated in especially the last 100 years, but it is still standing, for better or worse, whether it can be restored or it just needs to die in order to give others a chance to rebuild something improved on the core characteristics of the Constitution.

#1 and #3 are the problems it works out to a trust us bro situation.

...they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.

Could you litigate to recover the costs and repair any damage done? Is there case law around what is a reasonable level of dishevelment?

I appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:

> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”

> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”

> the government routinely searches the personal property of innocent people if they think that search will yield information about a suspect.

If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So, wait, the administration cares about people illegally retaining classified information now?

They have duty to not take documents with them when they leave office. And they have duty to protect the documents while in the office.

Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).

> Explain why they pursued Julian Assange then.

There is a difference between someone essentially just handing you a pile of classified documents and you going around soliciting and encouraging people to break the law and mishandle the documents to give to you.

They had a flimsy argument that Assange actively conspired with Manning to hack government machines based on some chat logs.

Trump was requested to return the classified documents several times. He said he returned them all, then said he didn't need to return them all, then said he actually declassified them with his mind.

And yeah, it's not a great situation with terrible optics. It would've been better for everyone if he just didn't steal the classified documents to begin with or, once requested, he returned them.

It doesn't. Different rules de facto for the ruling class and the peons. That's one of the failures in American society Trump has been exploiting his whole life.

We are - but it's important to not allow our standards to be shifted. This is unacceptable and while there is plenty of stuff happening today that's unacceptable it's still important to call it out. The past year has been a test of our endurance as illegal actions are piled up (in imo an intentional effort to overwhelm) and our minds must ping pong from foreign leaders being kidnapped to murders to threats against our closest allies all while legal demands from congress specifically passed against the administration are blatantly and illegally ignored.

It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.

Maybe this is too idealistic, but Waltz the IR Realist, frames this as 2 types of situations.

You have your anarchic situations, International Relations, non-law breaking situations like having a conversation with a friend/stranger, and everything not covered in (signed) (legal) writing.

You have your hierarchy. When the police get involved, when your boss can fire you, legal, etc.. In this case, you still need 4 things to happen: There needs to be a legal basis(Legislature), they need to be caught(Executive), they need to be found guilty (Judicial), it needs to be enforced (Executive).

I wouldn't give up in hierarchy yet. But know the limitations.

But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617645

comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.

They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.

At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.

At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.

Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.

So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:

"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".

I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.

We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.

Soap box > ballot box > jury box > ammo box

We are on step 3

I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.

There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech

Don't be ridiculous. Charging someone can be fraught. They will simply and quietly disappear.

Denaturalize and deport?

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...

Or they'll have ICE take them and they'll be deported or made to disappear. Some might even end up dying.

That's how the US is right now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resign...

If you've got a way for us to not just passively sit by and watch it happen, well, we'd all love to see the plan.

Charging with a crime is so last decade. Nowadays they just shoot people they don't like.

Ironic that the orange man is telling Iranians to risk their lives.

That's always the country we've lived in.

If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.

Shouldn't this be basic knowledge for journalist?

>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.

How would those advice have helped?

>an encrypted email provider

Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)

>FileVault enabled

That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.

>password manager

Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?

None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.

I don’t have to accept any assertion in the absence of evidence directly supporting it.

This isn't hyperbole. They literally went to the king with gold in hands. There's no WAY they didn't open up their platforms to him.

Counterpoint - if they have full root access to any phone, why did they need to do the raid?

I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.

"Oops, sorry, your postal votes were kept in this warehouse over there. Yeah, the one that went on fire.". There's even a documentary about it called "Succession".

> Do you think the Minneapolis National Guard are willing to fire on ICE if ordered to do so?

As curretly constituted, no. But it doesn't hurt to start contingency planning to build a force that is eventually loyal to its state and the Constitution over the men who hold the office at that time.

There is a lot of room before that. Rather that the Guard would intervene illegal searches etc, and the inevitable tense ICE - National Guard interaction would change the dynamic, temper ICE's behavior. Moreover, the expected outcome would actually be Trump trying to nationalize that guard, then a constitutional crisis/emergency supreme Court intervention. The most power move that Democrats could make right now is the Republican one: state's rights/ sovereignty

I think that is becoming a less and less ridiculous scenario over time and I hope blue state governors have had long conversations with their national guard leadership about it.

I think the Minnesota National Guard might be willing to fire on masked goons trying to abduct voters from polling stations, regardless of what agency they claim to be from. Even if they're not, their presence might deter the goons from showing up, which I think is a significant risk in the status quo.

When the militias can earn big dollars with zero requirements doing what they already wanted to do by joining ICE, the differences is meaningless.

> They are just as politically radioactive as they've always been

J6ers attacking cops is currently being celebrated. That's an ad hoc militia. (Tarrio built an actual one.)

No and yes. The first sentence paraphrases certain someone blabbering about the lack of freedom of speech in the EU. The second is from Shrek :-)

Apparently. If you're scared of the government, this would be an entirely rational thing to do to safeguard the privacy of other people you know on Signal.

mentally unstable people can hold down jobs sometimes, too. Like, those under treatment, but a stressor can cause "relapse" and now you got a predicament at work.

Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.

It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):

> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.

One final resolution is the guillotine, dangling upside down on a meat hook, or a bunker fire. Those are extreme but we have to wonder what will stop a specific leader from pushing so far that they meet such a fate. This personality type does not stop unless they have to.

It’s somewhat hopeful to assume that it is a cycle.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.

Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.

Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.

> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.

Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.

Wouldn't it be easier to just fire the journalist, like what he did with the editorial?

It takes an act of Congress to change the name. Trump just made one of his dictatorial proclamations.

Kind of ironic that there's a big overlap in the venn diagram between 2nd amendment enthusiasts and the crowd that is cheering on the government's authoritarian actions.

With the government harassing, attacking, and now killing innocent American citizens, I'm not so sure if the second amendment is working out so well.

With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.

"Don't tread on me, tread on them"

>It feels like all of the "patriots" joined ICE.

That's certainly possible. Maybe even likely. Fortunately, we now have more information[0] to correlate whether or not that's true.

Perhaps soon we'll see a "Show HN" with a searchable database of those folks with links to known "patriot" groups. That would be interesting.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whistleblower-leaks-person...

It was never principled opposition to anything, just a power fantasy that the current admin lets them live even more viscerally.

Not asking adversarially at all here: what do you mean by resisting with "real numbers" without media campaigns, social media, or protesting? What do the vested parties actually do to secure their second amendment rights? Do you just mean having large voting blocs?

Huh? Are you saying that if Gavin Newsom is elected, rather than turning down the rhetoric, restoring the rule of law, and taking the pressure off of the immigrants and brown people who are scapegoats of the current administration, he instead wants to commit violations of the 4th amendment under the color of searching for immigrants but _actually_ in order to find firearms that are legally owned by US citizens? Presumably in preparation for a mass violation of the 2nd amendment (aka "round 'em up boys")? And your source for this is ... you're friends with someone who works "in the Newsom camp" and you go out for lunch with them?

I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.

Of course the actual implementation is much easier. Just repeal the laws that prevent digitizing the existing records and building a database. That will cover the majority of individuals even if there is a long tail of untracked firearms.

In your “it would be fun to see people I don’t like being killed” you have conflated legal gun ownership that you don’t like to illegally crossing the remaining the borders of a country… and you can’t see it huh?

I don't know whether you've noticed, but being armed is simply giving the Federales more reasons to kill you first. The woman shot in Minneapolis was shot on the pretext of using her car as a weapon.

How do people really expect this to work? In detail? You show up with an armed militia at a school and the ICE guys just drive on past (and then raid someone else)? Or are they expecting more of an Amerimaidan situation? Jan 6th situation?

>Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.

One dude in his home with a gun or two versus a 50 billion dollar ICE force that has complete immunity and a massive media and political empire ready to spin any bad incident into an us-versus-them narrative.....

Yeah, it is a fantasy. Oh, and if anything really gets out of hand, that political empire also has nuclear weapons.

It took me 15 minutes to buy an AR-15 and a pistol in 2025, how did the left do this?

You'd have to be pretty insane to see opposing raids on journalists as supporting "The American Left".

Adding this on as a separate thought:

If you genuinely think we're at the point that we need to start shooting, the onus is on YOU to get armed, get trained, and take action. Don't expect anyone else to come and fight for you, especially those you perceive as your political enemies.

> Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?

We may have the most armed citizenry in the world. If the second amendment advocates cared as much about our protected rights as they claim, they’d be all over this. All you’re saying is that our liberties only matter to them as regards people who agree with them politically. Which is absolutely true.

The American left is very much in favor of the second amendment. You seem to confusing it with liberal centrists, the sort of people who say 'violence is never the solution' and wrings their hands wondering why someone doesn't arrest bad actors in government.

> Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?

Forget the left. Why don't they stand up for themselves?

> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment, limiting firearms ownership, and portraying gun owners as paranoid losers. That would drive many on-the-fence gun owners away from supporting them.

No we didn't. Promoting safe and conscientious gun ownership is a good thing, and it's the right thing for society. It's actually a pretty common feeling among gun owners. But gun lobbies has polluted people's minds into believing that the "left hates guns." Which isn't really true.

For sure, there are people whose opinion is colored by the frequency of mass shootings and having their kids deal with active shooter drills, etc. But this isn't always a political issue - my hard right-wing grandma hated guns and forbade their ownership in her house.

I frequent a gun club with a bunch of the leftest, gayest, socialistest, DEIest people you could meet, and we always find like-minded people to chat with. We are a minority, sure, but not a small one.

> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.

And I still believe this - more than ever. You'd have to be insane to stand up to the current government right now. They will disappear people to gulags or just shoot them in the face for practically no reason. Imagine what they do to people they genuinely believe are threats.

You’re right, owning a hand gun will be effective means to rebel against the most militarized government in the world.

> The American Left has spent the better part of the last century attacking the 2nd Amendment

That's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I know Republicans who unironically say shit like "We can't do background checks. What if I'm trying to buy a gun really quick for a hunting trip?" I would imagine your idea of "attacking" the second amendment is just common sense laws.

> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.

In your heart of hearts, do you really believe this has anything to do with it? If we were to take your comment seriously, it just illustrates the right never actually cared about standing up to oppressive governments, they just wanted to be the oppressive government. That is actually pretty consistent with how the left clocked them.

But in reality, it has nothing to do with what you wrote. The biggest 2A fanatics, as someone related to quite a few of them, just have a fantasy of shooting people. They are openly celebrating the death of Renee Nicole Good because that's the kind of thing they want to do.

Most of which is downstream of 9/11 and the War on Terror. That provided lots of bipartisan support for state sponsored killings.

Not sure why this is being downvoted when it's quite an obvious trend in American politics. The executive has been getting stronger and Congress has been getting weaker and more dysfunctional for many years.

We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.

Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.

They raided Trump's wife's underwear drawer too so Trump is a victim of this FBI overreach as well.

Indeed, don't blame the individual (all thought the individual has plenty of individual blame going their way, rightfully so), blame the system.

Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.

Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?

To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?