It's not hard to find contradictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge_standoff#Trials_of_...
If by "courts" you mean appellate (precedent setting) courts, cases like these usually never get to that stage because cases like these are straightforward enough that juries can rule on them without lawyers getting into esoteric arguments.
"ALL UNMANNED ACFT ARE PROHIBITED FROM FLYING WITHIN A STAND-OFF DISTANCE OF 3000FT LATERALLY AND 1000FT ABOVE."
That is somewhat narrowly defined. I'm sure you can still effectively film them from 1100ft.
further:
"FACILITIES AND MOBILE ASSETS, INCLUDING VESSELS AND GROUND VEHICLE CONVOYS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED ESCORTS"
I think you'd easily beat this language in court. "Please show us where 'mobile asset' is legally and narrowly defined."
But also having to be 3000ft laterally which gives you a distance of about 3160ft which is probably beyond the useful camera range of most consumer drones?
So this isn't narrow, it's extremely broad. You can't read such rules in a vacuum without knowing their context.
I think the main implication is that you won't be able to use any drone recordings for legal action against ICE unless you can prove that you recorded from further than 3,000 feet (one hell of a camera) or that you did it "accidentally", e.g. I was just filming my friends and ICE agents suddenly busted out of an unmarked car that happened to be within the frame. Even then, you'd have to stop recording pretty soon because at that point they could argue that it becomes wilful recording.
Party of free speech, btw.
> Proposed new law could see Swedish media prosecuted for espionage
> Swedish media outlets who uncover news which damages Sweden's relations abroad could be charged with spying, if a controversial law gets the go-ahead.
https://www.thelocal.se/20171207/new-law-could-see-swedish-m...
First they can shoot down your drone. Second they can ban you from ever flying one again. All without any criminal prosection.
To prosecute you, it is not willfully and knowingly. It is willfully or knowingly.
If you expect there to be ice and put your drone in a spot where it will film them, well you didn't know. But it was willful.
So treat them as disposable.
> Second they can ban you from ever flying one again.
Thankfully I can purchase them at Costco last I checked. Good luck with that. (TBF don't actually do that as it will 100% be traced to you. The general principle still applies though.)
The correct answer here is to relentlessly use drones to film them in such a way that it isn't obvious who is doing it.
Anyway the idea that the FAA can have any jurisdiction so near ground level outside of regional airports is a blatant overreach that tramples state's rights and is almost certainly unconstitutional. The problem is that as with so many other areas (such as for example drug laws) the states seem entirely unwilling to take the federal government to task. Texas famously backed down regarding the TSA and we're all worse off for it IMO.
Why can't I just say "I didn't know I was speeding, prove I did it wilfully"
If I am flying my drone and an unmarked ICE vehicle drives within half a mile am I in trouble?
> The dual state is a model in which the functioning of a state is divided into a normative state, which operates according to set rules and regulations, and a prerogative state, "which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees".
I can't wait to see this tested in court. While IANAL the EFF sure has lawyers and their argument seems petty sound.
Really this just seems like a waste of government money. They can shoot down drones and arrest people but those people will get court cases and they'll win and the gov will (and has) have you pay out fines. I'm not a fan of paying people to harass others...
Today, yes, but if the fascist cancer is around for too long, more and more judges will be its appointed tools.
That depends on whether you support Dear Leader.
Land of the free/saviour of the free world.
(The answer is obvious - it's impossible to comply with it.)
Make no mistake, getting targeted by this will be severely punishing, even if the courts ultimately throw it out.
You're already living on the doorstep of fascism. Contemplating the right-thing-wrong-think of it all dressed up as legal debate. A discussion and debate you'll likely never fully and truly conclude for obvious reasons.
You can build a decent stealthy fpv system for under 1k including ground equipment. Use PrivacyLRS or OpenHD, Ardupilot or Betaflight, and an AM32 ESC board.
Do not use anything from DJI, non-AM32 ESCs (deeply painful to flash/configure/update), or older radios like spektrum. Disable all onboard GPS and video logging. Avoid ELRS beyond initial testing, it's painful to decode but not encrypted. PrivacyLRS runs on the same boards so you can reflash once everything else is tested.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
I am theoretically eligible to get 60% of my income for 3 months after losing my job, while I look for my new job. But if I actually try to claim that, they demand so many documents and meetings that it's not actually practical to receive that benefit. The only people who can receive benefits are the people who are experts at navigating the benefit system.
For instance, if you do not file a certain form on a certain exact day, then your benefits will not start until 3 months after you became unemployed. That is exactly the same time period this unemployment insurance benefit normally covers. By that time you should already have a job anyway and they will ask you to explain why you couldn't get a job in 3 months, since the benefit normally only covers 3 months.
Nobody will tell you how to navigate this. Nobody will tell you the correct form to fill out on the correct day. If you don't already know the arcane rules, you don't get the money. This is how most European social benefits work. They aren't actually provided to normal people.
As is, we have some middle class "hippies" finding ways to backpack travel across the world on the taxpayers' dime.
Here in the UK, it is amazing to follow just how much money has been pumped into the various 'right of the Conservatives' parties for the last 15 years, while it might seem like a grass roots movement, the majority of the cash has been coming from those with vast wealth inside and outside the UK.
It can’t actually solve societal problems, that requires progressives.
Perhaps, actions like that could have opposite reactions like… IDK… A majority of voters overwhelmingly selecting The Mass Deportations Guy?
It it generally legal in the USA to put a fence around my property, but it is not generally legal to put razor wire around my property, so even the US govt thinks there's a difference.
It's important to consider the words and the portrayal of events when discussing politically charged topics.
You should probably argue your actual position instead of “your guy bad my guy good”. This comment is more Reddit than HN.
I also note that this is not the first time Trump or one of his associates has been accused of sexual assault on flimsy evidence - I still remember the media circus around Brett Kavanaugh's supreme court nomination and the extremely flimsy rape accusations that huge numbers of people took seriously because they thought it might derail his nomination.
I frankly think this line of reasoning is backwards - some people want to prevent aliens from being deported so much, they're eager to let themselves be convinced that anyone actually doing deportations is a rapist or other equivalent evildoer.
Simple
Effective
Affordable
EthicalAnd unfortunately very common. I'm not sure what you think when posting this, but this wont endear people to your ideas.
I'm sure there are communities where this is a standard stance that gets cheered, which I'm sure a lot of people would find quite concerning.
The problem with political violence is that the other side will do the same thing, and you end up with an IRA situation where the country descends into sectarian violence.
Preemptive first strike logic[1] aside. This logic doesn't work because political violence never gets out of hand so fast that an entire political movement can be wiped out. On the other hand by starting/advocating for political violence you're almost certainly going to get the descent into sectarian violence before you can wipe out all the "fascists".
[1] Iran, anyone?
When is it warranted against you?
Let me guess, it never is because “your side” is never wrong and always “the good people”… right?
What an amazing coincidence!
That's the real problem: Fascists copy tactics, and most people are shallow. If you can call someone a fascist and murder them, fascists quickly learn to call everyone who isn't a fascist a fascist and murder them. There will not be a deep investigation into whether a person really is a fascist.
It seems pretty simple: Live a life where, if you get plugged, nobody's cheering and everyone's angry.
(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)
How many people died under the totalitarian regimes that preceded them? These oppressive regimes did not start in a vacuum.
You're proving my point. Political violence just leads to a cycle of more political violence and/or totalitarianism. The Chinese Communists, if you recall, were violently put down by the Nationalists in the civil war. Starting political violence to stop the "fascists", just condemns your society to that fate. Not to mention that people who engage in political violence aren't exactly the most sane people. What makes you think they'll stop at "fascists"? The Bolsheviks eventually turned against the Kulaks, once their allies, and Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to consolidate power and push out rivals.
The US has a problem with right-wing political violence; it's a long way off having a Baader-Meinhof.
Action against The Enemy replaces any action to directly address economic and social marginalization.
It's how we process information. Avoiding this cognitive glitch takes practice.
This is where the racism comes in. As long as you believe that the social safety net cuts are disproportionally hurting the "other" more than you, you have plenty of space for the cognitive dissonance required to support the cuts even when they are negatively impacting your own situation.
Combine this with the fact that the right has two tiers, one of them made up of wealthy asset owners who politically push for the changes (and benefit from them in the form of extremely low taxes) and the second made up of working class people who can be convinced the changes are good as long it allows them to think those they see as below them will suffer more than they will.
Get yourself a nice feedback loop going in the form of hurting the poor, convincing them the source of their oppression is the "other" to get them to support even more austerity, repeat and you can explain a lot about the politics of much of rural America.
Isn’t it the case anyway that if you add state, federal, local, property, capital gains, and sales taxes, add the money that you and your employer pays for healthcare, that you’re basically paying slightly more in taxes all-in?
Axios had good coverage of this. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/18/trump-national-emergency-de...
Brazen mis-governance. I think it's particularly insulting to call so many things emergencies, threats. This is the work of the rankest, lowest cowards, to sabotage our nation with such false lightly thrown around accusations, for such fake purposes. Exploitative creeps!
Edit: what timing! Oh look, new Constitutional crisis just dropped, with Trump again seizing the power of the purse from congress! He's declaring rule over OMB to fund DHS, because (you guessed it) National Emergency!! https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/libe...
The Constitution does not permit amendments to change the "equal" representation of states in the Senate, but we can even the playing field by making it easy for large states to subdivide for the benefit of the people.
Or did you perhaps have some gerrymandering-esque idea to limit these 'benefits' to liberal metropolitan areas?
What? It sounds like you're crowing over some kind of "gotcha", but what is it?
If we both agree on the same principle, what's the problem? Namely, that citizens being disproportionately (un)represented in their "democratic" government is typically bad, and especially when it's just from ancient quirks of boundary line development.
On reflection, I suppose there's another explanation: Some people go through life with no real principles, flip-flopping based on whatever is temporarily advantageous to "their team". Is that it? Are you projecting your lifestyle onto me, and feeling the thrill of "winning" at being badder?
________
In either case, more legislative details are in this older comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690336
How else would you describe the way populations grew more places labeled X and not places labeled Y over the course of 250 years?
> They were commitments made to your fellow Americans in smaller states. Commitments that were required to allow the formation of the country at all;
Is this just a complaint about phrasing, or are you claiming some commitment would be broken?
My proposal has no effect on any commitments made to states, neither in letter nor in spirit. It doesn't change the rules for Senate nor House representation, and it doesn't infringe on the sovereignty of any state. If anything is restores state-sovereignty in one narrow scenario, a scenario no signatory ever believed was an intended feature.
Namely, the betrayal which happens when when humans (residing within the borders of a high-population state) are partially disenfranchised, and coalition of low-pop states vows: "Even though it's entirely within your own borders, we will veto any attempts to fix it. No other states except us can be small, we are pulling up the ladder. In order for us to keep an advantage your residents must suffer."
Yammering on about unequal representation in the senate as though it's some great injustice is either partisan or ignorant. The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population and attempting to game the system by subdividing certain states but not others is no better than attempting to pack the supreme court or any other blatantly disingenuous behavior.
Oh, so you're against sneaky "some but not others" schemes? Great! Me too! So why are you going the opposite direction?
You're supporting a status-quo where a partisan bloc on the federal level can already go: "It's OK for Florida, but prohibited for New-York", or vice-versa.
You're opposing something that'd fix the-thing-you-hate by giving both of those states equal capability.
> The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population
So what? That doesn't change. It's non-changing was a core requirement in the proposal, and I've pointed it out several times now. That aspect literally can't change via amendment. Why are you suggesting it'd change anyway?
This is about enabling people (enough of them, anyway) to (re-)choose their states. It's always been an entirely different segment of the pipeline!
You are arguing that the current arrangement is somehow a "quirk" and that we should attempt a legally dubious end run around the constitution. It's a self serving line of reasoning directly equivalent to packing the supreme court.
> You're opposing something that'd fix the-thing-you-hate
What is this thing I hate exactly? Because I very much support the way the senate and house were set up originally prior to the house being frozen. I think that the disproportionate representation is a good thing provided that state's rights are respected and thus we really are a union rather than a monolithic whole. Unfortunately there are a number of issues in that regard such as the rampant abuse of the interstate commerce clause; I think we should try to fix those things rather than abandon the system.
For the record I'm not opposed to the subdivision or agglomeration of states in the event that there is a direct and legitimate reason for it. But such a reason must convincingly hinge on the internal politics of the state itself as opposed to being an end run around the constitution because a segment of the population doesn't like the way the system was intentionally designed to work.
If you split California into 10 states, most will be red.
Why do you assume the split should be fair? The rural areas can be one state, each city can be a separate one.
That would fly, right?
Imagine a big swing-state split between Yellow and Purple parties. It's legislature is controlled by Yellow, and they pull a sneaky: They partition into 10x Small Yellow states (5% pop each) and one Big Purple state (50% pop) Let's also assume the whole effort somehow evaded requirements in the state's constitution, referendums, etc.
At first glance, you might think Yellow has "won" by adding more/safer seats on the federal level, right?
Except now the folks in Big Purple are kinda pissed, and they control themselves now. They could choose to split again, leaving things as 10x Small Yellow and 10x Small Blue. That puts the partisan balance is back at square one, except for a shit-ton of disruption and pain and a bunch of Yellow politicians are out of a job. So did they really win? Knowing the likely outcome, would they have tried anyway?
In short, it's very different from district gerrymandering. For starters, every division becomes independent, and it won't even happen if residents are asking tough questions like "Then how do I get my water from the river!?" It'll be a very slow and very deliberate process stretched across multiple election cycles.
The Nazis couldn't even manage it with a smaller population in six years.
"How do you tell the difference between a protestor with a camera and a protestor with a grenade?"
Do you see how the assumption of extreme (and very unlikely) danger is bad excuse for violating people's rights?
Filming ICE is no longer allowed.
If you intended something different, it's not sufficiently obvious. The most-charitable twist I can come up with is: "In addition to the first amendment, could the second amendment also be a factor in striking down this policy as unjustified?"
> You can still film ICE / CBP from the ground.
The same logic, tomorrow: "How do you reeealy tell the difference between a phone and a weapon in someone's hand? It's too hard! It makes us scared! Don't film or else we'll jail you or kill you like Alex Pretti."
I think this specific regulation on drones is an overreach, but the Alex Pretti situation is an argument in favor it, not against it - it's a reminder that there are definitely people out there who consider it ideologically important to prevent illegal immigration enforcement using whatever tools they have at hand, including using drones to interfere with ICE arrests.
Today, it makes as much sense to worry about this as it does for me to worry about a tsunami hitting my home at 7200' above sea level. It's not happening, worry about it and implement policies when people start using grenade-drones.
You can't until the overlord(s) you've delegated all your thinking to tells you what you saw.
I guess my comment may have been received better if I framed it in the devils advocate / steel manning context.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/man-who-threw-sandwich-a...
Civilians being well organized and well equipped (?) is a problem why?
> and sometimes violent
And yet the videos coming out of the US, of protesters being shot by ICE where non violent.
> for the purposes of collecting intelligence on their targets (who are federal law enforcement agents).
What does "target" mean exactly, I haven't read anything other than doxxing agents, annoying, and verbally harrasing them?
Also, I'd be more wary about the state if things when there's plethora news circulating of US law enforcement buying up all kinds of data for flagging undesirable citizens. More so when Palantir is involved and the developed tech is any authoritarians wet dream.