twincities.fyi

The problem

ICE agents are horrible for schools. In my neighborhood, ICE agents will show up to recess why kids are out. They will drive around the school and shout to students that they are going to get them and their parents. When the students were planning a walkout, several people from the neighborhood had to plan for the possibility that ICE agents would use tear gas on them, which they had done before at a high school.

Even more sinister is they have been abducting students and sending them to detention centers out of state. Or kidnap parents and leave the kids behind.

One way forward

In Minneapolis, we are organizing neighborhood patrols to protect students and to create a feeling of safety for students and parents on their way to school. This usually looks like parents and volunteers from the neighborhood stationed at corners surrounding the school, as well as along any common thoroughfare that students use to get to school. These parents watch out for ICE and respond to threats when they happen.

Patrols

Patrols are 30 minutes to an hour, depending on what your school needs and how many people are available.

A patroller needs:

• a whistle
• a charged phone
• earbuds or headphones
• optionally, a mask that covers your face for ICE encounters

Patrollers stand on corners surrounding the school and keep an eye out for ICE activity.

The call

At the start of the shift, all the patrollers get on a Signal call to have audio communication. In addition to patrollers, two other important roles for the call are the dispatcher and the plate checker.

The dispatcher is the brain of the call. They join the call with a map in front of them and place everyone on the call on the map so they have a good idea of coverage and what areas need more people. As people join the call, they should check in with the dispatcher so the dispatcher can put them on their map.

The plate checker will check license plates. Ideally, your group has access to a spreadsheet with confirmed ICE license plates. The plate checker will have this spreadsheet open and check plates against known ICE license plates. Patrollers will ask for a plate check in the chat and say the plate using the NATO phonetic alphabet to avoid confusion. The plate checker will respond with a "negative" or confirm that the plate belongs to an ICE vehicle.

The communication

Communication should follow radio best practices. When joining the call, announce who you are. Generally, you want to wait for the recipient to acknowledge. So you might open with "Dispatch, this is Coco" and the dispatcher would respond with "Go for Dispatch." Keeping things concise is important because sometimes multiple ICE vehicles may be in play at once, and if communication is not efficient that leads to a more confusing and less organized response.

The schedule

We cover the hour up to the morning bell (with some overlap for late arrivals) and the hour after dismissal. We also have some ad hoc patrols if there are some after school events.

Responding to ICE

When you spot an ICE vehicle or ICE agents at your school, you should make noise to alert parents, students, and teachers. This may be blowing a whistle or honking your horn. You should also start recording their activity.

The goal with all of these actions is for ICE to leave. In my experience, their presence at the school is not part of a targeted action, but rather an attempt to intimidate the school community. I regularly see taunting parents and students and driving in circles around the school. I have also seen them abducting students who have legal status.

Their objective is cruelty.

Our objective is to scare them away from our community and to collect evidence for their future prosecution. With an organized group of patrollers, we can make our schools safer.

If you would like me to help you set up your school patrol, please get in touch.

Yesterday ICE dragged a man from his shower into the frigid temps just to discover that he is a citizen and has no criminal record. Mayor Kaohly Her said she knows ChongLy Thao and that ICE was offered information that they had the wrong person, but they ignored it and brought him out into the snow anyway.

ICE is still out terrorizing children.

The CS gassing of children continues, this time with Greg Bovino CS gassing a playground.

Today, they detained two minors after rear ending them. ICE seems to get into a lot of accidents where the resolution is to detain the other car.

ICE continues to taunt the schools near me during recess. They will circle recess where kids are out and we respond by putting more people out on patrols. Kids shouldn't have to be terrorized by their government when they are out to recess.

Finally, ICE detained a five-year-old and used him as bait to lure his family out of their home.

Abolish ICE.

Every place on the main street of my neighborhood is either closed indefinitely or posts a guard at the door to keep it locked and unlock it for patrons. Volunteers often stand outside during opening and closing to keep people safe on their way to and from their cars.

People are scared to go outside if they think they'll be stopped. Sundays they go after churches. It feels like a military occupation every day. Several news outlets are reporting that the administration is reading 1,500 additional troops for the event that the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

However, every neighborhood has several Signal chats to coordinate rapid response and mutual aid and there are literally thousands of people per neighborhood working together to make things happen. It’s incredible.

Today

If these losers spend the rest of their lives in the Hague it won't be enough.

I'm thinking about kids the past few days. Kids are not showing up to school. St. Paul and Minneapolis are offering virtual learning. ICE has tear gassed and green gassed children on the North side. I marshalled a high school walkout this week where we had to prepare the students for the possibility that ICE would show up to their walkout and tear gas them. It breaks my heart that these high schoolers have to protest a government occupation, and then worry about that government attacking them while they protest.

I am hearing about a lot of good wins from friends chasing ICE off of routes or chasing them from intimidating people in houses.

However, today there were some big losses. I woke up to a military helicopter flying low in the neighborhood. Later, a message came that there was an abduction happening on one of my usual routes. I got out onto the street as fast as I could but no one was there by the time I got there. They were kidnapped. Maybe if there was an observer there on that corner, ICE would have been scared away.

Later on the neighborhood call, an observer was following an ICE vehicle when the vehicle drove up to and parked in front of that observer's home. I've heard of this happening elsewhere: ICE wants to make sure you know they know who you are and they want us to feel scared.

Elsewhere, ICE is denying non-citizens access to their lawyers. This is a basic right every person has in the United States. Not every citizen. Every person.

Finally, ICE is not only endlessly cruel, but they are also bad at their jobs. They conducted a search warrant in the wrong home, tore it to shit, and left the residents to clean up their mess.

Tomorrow

Ask your neighbors about:

patrolling your neighborhoods. food delivery and assistance in your neighborhood. *rent assistance programs in your neighborhood.

Contact your local schools and see if they need help getting kids to school safely.

Talk to a person not on patrols and get them into patrols.

Today

Writing this post one day late on January 16th.

I keep seeing posts of people saying ICE is driving erratically. In my neighborhood Signal group that is enough for grounds of ICE suspicion. I haven't verified this story about an abduction after an accident, but it aligns with all the dangerous driving and the abducting people indiscriminantly. ICE agents are breaking windows, dragging people through those windows, and leaving the car where it is.

It's now very common to hear reports of ICE going door to door asking for papers from neighborhood chats.

Ken Klippenstein also published some leaked documents about ICE's programs which include investigating political groups and placing plainclothes agents in transport vans and detention areas to gather information. Pretty classic secret police stuff.

Finally, I recommend checking out Suz Clark's account of the shooting that took place Wednesday night. It is an account of horrible cruelty and tragedy.

Tomorrow

Keep patrolling your neighborhoods.

Contact your local schools and see if they need help getting kids to school safely.

Talk to a person not on patrols and get them into patrols.

Find an organization doing food delivery in your neighborhood.

Contribute to rent assistance programs in your neighborhood.

Why lock down your iPhone?

If law enforcement have your phone, it is legal for them to unlock your phone using your fingerprint or your face. However, if your phone has a numerical password on it, it is illegal for them to compel you to tell them the code access your phone.

To me, this is absurd. Like, it should always be illegal to enter my home regardless if my door is locked. However, we live in a judicial system run by judges who don't understand technology.

What needs to be locked?

The most important thing is to take off your face or fingerprint for unlocking your phone. Personally, I don't even set it up when I get a new phone. That way, there's no danger of me accidentally turning it on.

This means that you will be using your code to unlock your phone. This can seem really inconvenient at first, but once you get the muscle memory down it will take one or two seconds.

I have a six digit code on my phone, because in the event law enforcement want to illegally try to crack the code it will take them longer than a 4 digit code.

Additional steps

I also take some additional steps: I turn off Control Center, Siri, and Wallet from the lock screen.

If Control Center is on, law enforcement can turn on Airplane Mode without unlocking your phone. If you are detained and you are sharing location or streaming video or recording and uploading audio, putting your phone in Airplane mode can stop those activities immediately, putting you in a more dangerous position.

I disable Siri so that no one can as to read messages or other private data from the lock screen. I don't know exactly the threat model here, but I certainly feel better without Siri on my lock screen.

Then Wallet is disabled because sometimes I buy too many oat milk lattes! Sue me!

Today

There was another shooting in North tonight. It seems not life-threatening to the victims. DHS is responding with armored vehicles, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Last night there was a group of people in front of every business still open on Central. We stayed until closing and made sure people got home safely. So many people out and there was still an absolutely horrible and heartbreaking abduction in our neighborhood.

Every day the schools around me are on code yellow at dismissal, meaning students are kept locked in the building. The ICE agents outside will stick around circling in their cars a while to taunt the students and teachers, until the neighbors chase them away. I'm so sad the students have to have the neighborhood show up to get them home safely.

In talking with others doing patrols people are reporting more camera crews with ICE, some with professional cameras. I heard that this is possibly Fox News or right wing YouTubers. Either way is pretty bleak to think that this is entertainment to some people.

People are still outside the Graduate hotel making sure ICE doesn't get a good night's sleep. I still can't believe the university signed that contract. It's such a betrayal to their entire community and the principles of a university.

Tomorrow

Keep patrolling your neighborhoods.

Contact your local schools and see if they need help getting kids to school safely.

Talk to a person not on patrols and get them into patrols.

An introduction to the Internet's phone book.

The Internet was built on older networks: namely, the phone network. In a phone network, you can call anyone who is connected so long as you have their phone number. Let's imagine a simple phone book:

If you call one of the numbers in this book, you get the person associated with that number. If you don't know someone's number, you can use this phone book to look the number up.

The Internet also has a phone book. It's called the Domain Name System, or DNS. In DNS, each website is associated with a number: its IP address. An IP address is like a website's phone number.

On the Internet, there are DNS servers that store lots of records like the ones in the table above. When you type in a web address into your browser, your computer makes a request to a DNS server to find the IP address of the website you'd like to visit. It finds the record, and you can connect to the website by making requests to its IP address.

DNS and privacy

This system of making a request to a DNS server presents a privacy problem. DNS requests are largely unencrypted, so that means the websites you lookup with the DNS server are public to interlopers such as your internet service provider, any system in transit between you and the DNS server, or anyone on your Wifi network (think a Wifi network at a coffee shop).

This means that any one of those parties can see what sites you go to and infer what you were doing. For example, if I was eavesdropping on DNS requests and I saw that a user was making a lot of DNS requests for sites on beekeeping, I could infer that they were getting into beekeeping (or already a beekeeper! Imagine!). When combined with location data such as where your network is physically located, these inferences can become very powerful.

What is a VPN?

A VPN stands for virtual private network. When you turn on a VPN, your computer connects to a private network and makes requests from that network instead of the network that you're connected to.

This means that your DNS traffic looks different. Anyone monitoring your traffic, such as an interloper on the coffee shop Wifi network or your internet service provider, does not see your DNS requests. Instead, your requests get routed first to the VPN and then to the larger Internet.

For example, let's say that your VPN provider allows you to select a VPN in Chicago. First, your device will establish a connection to this Chicago VPN. Once that connection is established, Internet traffic will appear to come from that address in Chicago rather than the Wifi that your device is connected to. This means that DNS requests are also sent from that VPN and are much harder to trace back to you.

Safety considerations

When using a VPN, you want to select a VPN provider you trust. If I wanted to get a lot of information about network traffic, I could create a virtual private network myself and advertise free VPN access. Then when users joined my VPN, I could save their device information and all their DNS requests, effectively duplicating the privacy problem they were trying to avoid by using a VPN. Be sure to only use VPNs from trusted providers like Proton or NordVPN.

Adding a VPN you your phone.

Engadget has a good guide on adding the VPN to your iPhone. I don't have an Android, but this support article seems to be what you'll need for that platform.

Today

ICE will eventually have to face whatever justice the community decides, but on top of that everyone who has ever known them will be ashamed to have even the most tenuous connection with them.

Today at Wrecktangle a crowd intimidated an agent into leaving. Small wins are good and I love a crowd yelling you're not welcome here.

On a similar note, I heard from a friend neighbors stopped an abduction at Longfellow Park by being loud and coming out.

These two events may be nothing, but I think when connected to the national context of deep unpopularity of ICE and the Trump administration, ICE may scare easily.

They might even be moving hotels for the third time since December, but no news coverage on that yet. If that's true, that would be a result of the incredible negative public perception of ICE and pressure on hotels who house them. Who wants to spend money at hotels that house the Gestapo?

Also today Aliyah Rahman was detained by being pulled out of her car. She was on her way to a doctor's appointment, passing through the area with ICE activity. She is a US-born citizen. They will detain anyone.

Here's a friend of a friend's account of being detained. They were able to go home, but there are many at the Whipple building that will not be able to.

I also heard of several heartbreaking abductions happening in my neighborhood today. I won't get into them because I think the action is the same: keep getting out as much as possible and get more people to show up.

Tomorrow

Keep patrolling your neighborhoods.

Contact your local schools and see if they need help getting kids to school safely.

Talk to a person not on patrols and get them into patrols.

Today

This is truly the biggest bunch of losers ever assembled. Imagine having so little going for you that you resort to terrorizing a city in Amazon Basics fatigues to grasp at a feeling of importance.

The incident yesterday wherein ICE broke down a door with a battering ram was confirmed by the AP to be warrantless. This could mean that they are trying this tactic elsewhere. Make sure you know the difference between a real warrant and a fake warrant and know your rights if someone shows up to your door.

State Senator Doron Clark, Council Member Jason Chavez, and Council President Elliot Payne are reporting that we are getting 1,000 more ICE agents. They're asking for 10,000 more volunteers to patrol and be out on the street. Ask to get on your neighborhood Signal chats for patrols, or head to the Resources to find a guide on how to patrol.

Minnesota is suing the federal government, saying the government is “terrorizing Minnesota with widespread unlawful conduct.” I think anyone in the twin cities would agree with that.

Tomorrow

Keep patrolling your neighborhoods.

Contact your local schools and see if they need help getting kids to school safely.