The new program, called “masked engagement,” allows homeland security officers to assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists and more.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official tells me that over 6,500 field agents and intelligence operatives can use the new tool, a significant increase explicitly linked to more intense monitoring of American citizens.
More importantly, with this permission now ICE can make you do terrorism then charge you for their idea. There’s a long pattern of this.
I’m not saying you have to agree with the ideology of everyone on this list. You just gotta understand that entrapment isn’t really a defense so you have to be super fucking careful about any hothead in your circle that might talk about illegal shit. Now that the real domestic terrorists that were mostly law enforcement for the past three decades are in law enforcement you can 100% expect the same treatment for people just trying to organize a food bank or get basic worker protections.
And before I have to defend it, yes, Randy Weaver was a fucking shithead but the federal government actively coerced him into breaking the law. Yes the Whitmer kidnappers planned to do some idiotic stuff but it turns out they were unorganized potheads with big mouths who got arrested because an ex-military informant railroaded the plot for them. Yes Flaviu sounds sketchy but the Glomar response exists. I don’t think I have to defend my distaste for Mickey here.