GitHub, Medium Remove Public ICE Employee Data Repository (obsceneworks.com)

owenferguson shares a report from Obscene Works: Medium.com and GitHub have today quashed the release of a set of data comprising of all the ICE employees who openly list themselves on LinkedIn.com. All the data released was gathered from publicly listed LinkedIn profiles. The data was assembled by Sam Lavigne of http://lav.io/ and was published as a repository on GitHub, and announced via an article on Medium.com.

Comments

I'm as lefty as they get

[rsilvergun]

and I'll grant the story, touching on Github as it does, has some potential validity. But what the hell is up with that headline? "Willfully Destroyed"? They didn't destroy anything. They took it off their servers. Probably because there's a lot of emotions running high and they're rightfully worried some nutjob is going to go off half cocked and hurt somebody.

I'm grateful to Github for nipping this in the bud. Crap like this is exactly the sort of response that our countries current extreme immigration policies are meant to solicit. We're being trolled; probably as a point of distraction from economic issues that otherwise would dominate the mid-term elections (the economy's doing crap with poor wage growth despite full employment). Now is the time to calm the heck down and apply appropriate and legal pressure. Not dox a bunch of poorly paid gov't employees who most likely took the job out of desperation (and yes, I know folks who work in some of the less upstanding law enforcement jobs and believe me, it's not by choice).

Re: I'm as lefty as they get

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys all seem to forget that Reagan ran up the debt because it was the way to end the Cold War. We outspent the USSR on military expansion/upgrades and they broke their fragile command economy trying to keep up, leading to the fall of the Soviet Union.

So yeah, he spent billions short term to save trillions long term - and liberated Eastern Europe. Compared to our return on the 8 Trillion in increased debt from the Obama years with no real benefit to be shown for it - yeah, totally a bargain.

And if it were an ANTIFA supporter database ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets create a database of all people on facebook who made a post supportive of the pro-violence wing of antifa. Would there be a different reaction to its deletion?

So, scraping is supposed to be OK

[jtara]

They scraped content from LinkedIn (or used an API?) to compile a directory, almost certainly in violation of TOS.

How was that OK?

Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Microsoft owns Github. Put two and two together. They are enforcing their TOS, and happen to have the ability to do so in this case without having to convince another site to take down the illegally-obtained material.

Re:Didn't take MS to start fucking up github

[The Cynical Critic]

If you've been paying attention to what's been going on over there since they decided their "In Meritocracy We Trust" parody of the oval office carpet in the CEO's office was offensive and had to be removed you'd know the place has let the lunatics run the asylum for years already. The only surprise here is that they decided to remove this particular doxxing case as it conforms really well to their particular bent so some semblance sanity may actually be returning to the madhouse.

The far left lunatics they've let run the company have removed projects and banned people on purely political grounds, made it very easy to add extremely broad codes of conduct with a focus on "If someone claims they've felt slighted the guilty one must be punished reality and plain sense be damned" types and implemented loads of asinine "diversity" policies like restricting certain positions based on race and putting an end to mentoring new hires because of how their diversity drive has lead to to many cases of minorities and women being mentored by white men.

Re: They also probably weren't expecting threats

[danbert8]

Do they have an asylum case? Do they know what the classifications and definitions of asylum are? Or were they told "just say asylum when you get there"? These asylum seekers not only don't have a case or evidence, they are often illiterate. They come across the border, not at a designated crossing, don't voluntarily seek legal officials, and have no prepared case for asylum. They just either know when they come in that asylum claims will allow them to stay longer or they get legal council that tells them asylum is their only option for legally staying.

Did they flee a country that sucks? Yes. Is their case special and meeting the three criteria for asylum (from Wikipedia)? First, an asylum applicant must establish that he or she fears persecution in their home country.[3] Second, the applicant must prove that he or she would be persecuted on account of one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or particular social group. Third, an applicant must establish that the government is either involved in the persecution, or unable to control the conduct of private actors.

If someone comes across the border illegally, doesn't immediately seek legal means of declaring asylum, and doesn't have a prepared case for the three criteria, then how are they asylum seekers? Sounds to me like they are using legal language to ride the legal bureaucracy as long as they can because the USA has a reputation for a broken immigration system that is overwhelmed with people. Throwing children into the mix adds to the complication and the difficulty in caring for the people caught.

Re:They also probably weren't expecting threats

[TFloore]

I agree that we should end the drug war. It has gone worse than Prohibition.

Prohibition was, at least nominally, a moral stance that alcohol was bad and should be totally banned. The War on Drugs (also called "The War on (Some) Drugs" if you are trying to smear the pharmaceutical industry) was a law enforcement and social control program, really. You can make the argument that it, like criminalization of maurijuana, was to allow the government to lock up black people easier. There's a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because FBI Director Hoover wanted to lock up the Black Panthers, and they weren't otherwise actually breaking laws that he could pin on them (not to say they were innocent, just the drug dealing was a lot easier to prove and convict). There's also a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because Dow Chemical's new miracle nylon ropes couldn't compete against hemp ropes, so they got maurijuana (and hemp) made illegal.

If we want to stop immigration, we simply need a national employment database and fine the hell out of any employer employing people not approved to work.

Look up the E-Verify system. Employers can already verify citizenship/immigration status, but it is not currently required, and businesses don't want to do it, because it loses them access to cheap labor. It will especially impact small farms, and lots of agricultural and meat processing facilities. Also lawn services, construction, and plenty of other businesses where people work hard physical labor, usually outside. You know, the kind of jobs that most Americans want their kids to get good educations so they won't have to do, but that still need to be done.

But many of the people losing their children are not coming here simply for work. They are facing being murdered in their home country.

This is where I show I don't fit well into either Democrat or Republican columns. Coming to America for a better life, or a life where you can live the way you want with less government control, is a big part of how this country grew over the last 200 years. I'm a big believer in that. And that's what we have our normal legal immigration laws to cover. We also have the asylum immigration laws, and I don't know as much about that as I feel I should, but I've never agreed that "There is a high violent crime rate in my home country" is a good enough reason for an asylum claim. Government persecution, yes, organized crime, maybe, my spouse beats me, no, I don't think that should qualify. Bear in mind, I've always considered "asylum" to really be more about "political asylum" which is obvious in my thinking there, isn't it? Can you tell I don't acutally know the law there?

And Sessions is quoting the bible while ignoring Jesus and all the tales relating to being a good samaritan, kind to strangers, etc. And he's using the same verse used to justify slavery and many other heinous crimes.

If you look at the history for Paul's letters to the Romans, he wrote several of them while IN JAIL. You know, being imprisoned for breaking the law. He was a big believer in obeying a government's laws that represented the will of God, but not so much a government that did not represent God's will.

There's a saying that goes with this... "The Devil quotes scripture too". Simply finding a line in the Bible that seems to support your position is not enough to claim the moral high ground. You still have to make the case that what you are doing is right, and I don't think they've done that successfully yet. Half the Trump administration isn't even trying to do that, because they don't think what they are doing *is* right. They *may* believe it is the least bad of several very bad options, but that is not at all the same statement as "is good and right".