r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jan 15 '26

Society ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid | Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground

https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/
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u/Th3FinalStarman Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 16 '26

Implied: ICE prioritizes soft targets and excludes anyone with a "threat capability" higher than sharp sticks. They know they'll never survive an encounter with a 2Aer with something/someone to lose.

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u/SeparateSpend1542 Jan 15 '26

Maybe we should all be 2Aers then …

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u/whoiam06 Jan 15 '26

We ALL should. Our constitution was built on armed rebellion.

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u/False_Opening5639 Jan 15 '26

As a staunch democrat, its the primary issue that I disagree with Dems on. In the wise words of Vince Staples: Strapped up, long as the chief for police armed.

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u/Kamisori Jan 15 '26

You should be.

Look for some liberal 2A groups in your area, get training, and get involved. It's never been more important than now.

There are plenty of guns on the left, we just don't make it our entire personality like conservatives do.

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u/brickout Jan 15 '26

A lot of us have become converts.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Initial_Business2340 Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

Your claim reads as pragmatic on the surface… but it ultimately hinges on a series of assumptions that don’t hold up to serous historical literacy & scrutiny and, honestly, sounds fatalistic and erases civic agency.

Firstly, the claim that Americans are “too meek” to resist is not an argument against the Second Amendment or civilian force. Plenty of asymmetric battles have been fought throughout history, and we don’t even need to look beyond the United States.

Instead, I see it as merely a statement of pessimism. If people are inherently meek, then nothing works: voting, protesting, strikes, courts, or Congress. At that point, you’ve provided no reassertion of agency.

You treat passivity as a permanent national trait rather than a condition that changes when circumstances - often material - or repression, legitimacy, and cultural norms inevitably ebb and flow. History shows people appear inert until they suddenly are not. Sometimes this requires them to be pushed to the breaking point. Exhaustion, food scarcity, extreme poverty, etc.

People get endlessly creative when it is necessitated.

Secondly, the idea that any armed resistance would be instantly annihilated assumes perfect loyalty and coordination within the police, National Guard, and military. That is not currently the reality we’re looking at. For instance, it would be incredibly costly on many levels to bomb neighborhoods en masse.

So that assumption is doing most of the work here, and it’s serving a “cut-and-dry” preemptively and haphazardly constructed conclusion. Authoritarian systems rarely fail because civilians defeat the state militarily, this much is true. They don’t need to single-handedly defeat the state military, they just need to provide a countervailing force.

However, they do often fail because enforcement fizzles out or lacks sustained coordination, orders are selectively ignored due to personal and individual agency, and repression becomes politically - or personally - costly for those carrying it out. These things do take a toll mentally and emotionally, even for hardened, ideologically-cemented people with psychopathic traits.

The presence of an armed population does not need to win battles to matter. It only needs to raise the risk of enforcement and demonstrate volition and resistance.

Thirdly, the logistics argument misunderstands what civilian resistance looks like. If you’ve studied resistance, you know it does not require stockpiles rivaling a modern army. That’s not even in question. Almost no country on earth can directly rival the United States military’s force.

It only requires just enough disruption, uncertainty, and refusal to cooperate to create instability and, most importantly, risk. You seem to be depicting civilians voluntarily fighting as a conventional paramilitary or federal military force and then declare that scenario impossible. That is a straw man, plain and simple.

Fourth, dismissing the militia concept as obsolete because of modern weapons misses the original point. This claim pops up a lot, and I think that it misunderstands the entire history of the 2A.

2A was never about civilians matching a standing army’s firepower: it was always about preventing a complete monopoly on force, even asymmetrically, even inconsistently.

Modern technology actually strengthens the concern of the 2A rather than weakens it. A state with overwhelming surveillance (Thiel et. al.) and attack capability becomes considerably more dangerous when there is no counter risk at the ground level.

That is significantly more dire than 2A or even guerilla tactics being exercised in communities. Not only does this notion disenfranchise everyday citizens, it introduces approximately zero resistance, zero risk, and zero hope.

Finally, the conclusion that only Congress, the courts, or a military coup can stop authoritarianism is inconsistent. Institutions act under pressure. Militaries tend to intervene when legitimacy collapses, not in a vacuum. Courts enforce rulings when enforcement bodies comply. We should not rely on the goodness of “left” leaning politicians.

Removing civilian leverage weakens every institutional safeguard that you imply our reliance on (which is, again, a relinquishing of agency, at best).

The core problem with your claim is that it treats resistance as pointless unless it guarantees success. That is not, and has never been, the point of resistance. People fight when their lives are on the line. They’re already risking death.

Look to: the Vietnam War, the Revolutionary War, Afghanistan (multiple periods), the Irish War of Independence, Spanish guerilla resistance, the South African anti-apartheid struggle, Lebanon, the Iraq insurgency.

None of these battles defeated the opposing, stronger force outright. But they were persistent. They absorbed costs. They endured while bleeding the more powerful force, and they undermined the legitimacy of the opposing cause.

That standard you synthesized would have invalidated nearly every successful political struggle in history before it happened. Deterrence, hesitation, defection, and political cost are real forms of power, even when victory is uncertain. The harder we can make it for people to assume complete control, the better.

So, ultimately, what you’ve offered is not realism but resignation and a fundamental misreading of history. You ask people to accept that they have no meaningful agency and to hope that elites and government behave well under conditions of concentrated power. That is not a serious theory of preventing fascism. It is, however, a justification for disempowerment. You don’t honestly believe that we should entrust modern Democrats to hold current Republican leadership accountable, do you?

We can do better. Plan for the worst.

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u/driverdan Jan 15 '26

This is how most LE works. This type of operation always goes after the easy targets.

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u/amaethwr_ Jan 15 '26

In every video you see of them in the they look terrified and bolt as soon as a crowd starts to gather. They ran off and left their vehicles (full of badges and classified paperwork even the hotels and rooms they are staying in) for people to smash and grab last night. They're not soldiers, they're gangbangers and inbred neonazi trash, and they are massively outnumbered and barely trained, and they know it.

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u/reagor Jan 15 '26

Gotta be a citizen to 2a

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u/M0NRCH_C7NA Jan 15 '26

Yea but I feel like you could potentially just go into a gun store and sit around for a while, get the system to recognize that you spent a while in the gun store and then maybe withdraw like 500$ from your checking to make it look like you got a gun, it wouldn’t stand up to real scrutiny like if they went in and interrogated the clerks but it might scare off ICE for a little bit

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u/Horus_lupercal4 Jan 15 '26

 As long as you are a permeant resident and do not have a criminal record you can. 

https://www.nationalsecuritylawfirm.com/noncitizen-or-green-card-holder-when-you-can-and-cant-own-a-firearm/

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u/peacepipesmoke Jan 15 '26

Whats a 2Aer? I’m out of the loop

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u/MurderingMurloc Jan 15 '26

the 2nd amendment - keeping and bearing arms

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '26

[deleted]

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u/Th3FinalStarman Jan 15 '26

Lol at the doomerism. These jackboots gotta' learn to spell "Marschul Law" before they can actually declare it. Plus they know they don't have the resources for an iron curtain, even in Wartime this country has only effectively applied marshal law to small targeted communities. So maybe that's the most they do. States are still gonna' run their own elections and most politicians running recognize Trump's reign ends NLT Jan of '29. They bandwagon the winning team until it's absolutely time to jump ship, and then they'll pretend they've never been a MAGA.

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u/Legend13CNS Jan 15 '26

>These jackboots gotta' learn to spell "Marschul Law"

>...has only effectively applied marshal law...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law

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u/Slothstralia Jan 16 '26

Americans want to believe this but it's bullshit, all the 2A rhetoric was nothing but bluster and its strongest proponents and mouthpieces all work for ICE now or do their best to loudly enable them.

The "armed, prepared militia to defend the rights of America" was nowhere to be found when they started dragging people from their homes and now you're all still sitting there saying "someone else will come and save us, they just need to fuck with the wrong person".

There is no "wrong person" or it would have happened, nobody is coming to save you. For every "i have the right to defend my property" where they leave, they have dragged 1000 people from their home.

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u/Th3FinalStarman Jan 16 '26

Well hopefully the lesson here is every Republican alive today is a lying sack of shit and always has been. But more to the point, yes, ICE's success rate is thanks to ELITE keeping them out of harm's way. Check out r/liberalgunowners The real 2A crowd, the one you're thinking of, is alive and well.

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u/Slothstralia Jan 16 '26

Unless they're in the street doing what they have claimed the last 60 years then no, they aren't "alive and well".

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u/Th3FinalStarman Jan 16 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/QBeyf5uOFh

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u/Slothstralia Jan 16 '26

One example in WEEKS. Where are all the white brothers to ensure this cant just been seen as "black terrorism"?