ICE Built a Surveillance Machine to Spy on Anti-Trump Activists
ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History
Court filings in the Minnesota 15 case expose ICE's Homeland Security Investigations running sweeping domestic surveillance on left-wing organizers. Under Operation Keyhole and Project Whipple Shield, roughly 120 agents—11 of them undercover—infiltrated Signal chats, churches, and marches, deploying Reaper drones and Patriot Act tools to map dissent nationwide. Former officials call it the largest such campaign since COINTELPRO, and one defense attorney describes HSI as the FBI's replacement as the administration's investigative secret police.
What we saw during the immigration surges last year was that ICE is the administration's paramilitary force, the projector of strength. Here, we see that HSI are taking the FBI's place as the investigative secret police—it's the classic one-two punch of authoritarian regimes around the world.
- multiplegeorges
> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool
on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an
infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS
queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a
commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session
logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s
signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that
had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with
Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson-
Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license
nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address
history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly
registered vehicles.
Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!
The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.
- techteach00
My comment should not have been flagged.
You will fail to achieve anything if you mentally approach these things from a partisan view (like all the comments, general public).
ICE should not be running surveillance Ops on Left activists or immigrants and the FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters.
The tools violate all of our rights full stop. Please don't support this garbage again when Dems sweep into power, trying to debank ppl for X tweets etc.
- uxp100
Not clear how central the patriot act was to this operation, but it does pop up here.
Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.
- derwiki
https://archive.is/2026.10.28-130224/https://www.wired.com/s...
- cogman10
ICE is rogue* agency. They need to be disbanded. Fine if we still have an agency doing ICE work or whatever, but every single person employed by ICE needs to be fired, potentially prosecuted, definitely black listed from federal government work, and their funds returned for the blatant unconstitutional and dangerous use they've been put towards.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
* Misspelled initially
- Zigurd
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
- austin-cheney
Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
- gherkinnn
Where are all the Don't Tread on Me people who prepped for decades for precisely such cases?
- ProllyInfamous
Fun-fact™ Wednesday:
One person has appointed every single judge to the current US FISA Courts (whose jurisdiction includes domestic surveillance rubberstamping).
You can thank the concessions of Bush v. Gore (2000) for giving this executive-level privilege to the hoNoRAblE [SCOTUS Chief] Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
- adjejmxbdjdn
It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.