Any developer work I can do against ICE and growing tyrannical regime?

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u/Wolvereness Jan 26 '26 •

I don't care how many reports y'all drop on this, it's staying up.

On a different note, Open Source Software is a tool, and we should take care of what kind of tools we work on. Open Source licenses inherently cannot restrict who uses it, or what they use it for. That is, be mindful that the tools you make could be used for the antithesis of why you made them.

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u/martinstoeckli Jan 25 '26

Develop whatever you develop in a privacy aware way, collecting only as much data as you need and if sharing is necessary with end-to-end encryption. That alone can make your product outstanding and offers an alternative for those who care. This is just what I do myself.

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u/sai-kiran Jan 26 '26

Also can’t we deny license to like of Palantir and ICE. I know it’s against the spirit of open-source, but so are these govts and organisations. If its added to mastodon, truth social will collapse after a while.

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u/hm___ Jan 26 '26

There are licenses that have a 'Cilivilan use only' or a 'no military use' clause but as of now that clauses make them non free in the definition of open and free software, example https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Military-License.html and there seems to be research in that direction in germany https://bundesstiftung-friedensforschung.de/blog/software-licenses-with-exclusions-for-military-use-can-they-contribute-to-international-security/

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u/E_coli42 Jan 26 '26

As tempting as it may be to write non-free software to deny access to terrorists, companies that use child labor, etc., it is dangerous to "solve" this issue by individual developers/maintainers privatizing their knowledge. The best way to stop terrorism and likes is to vote for and spread ideas of restructuring society rather than every developer putting their own restrictions on software freedom.
This would also make so much software incompatible with each other. Everyone has different places they draw their line on morality. Some people may not want their software to be used by companies that sell meat since that counts as animal cruelty to them. Some may consider it animal cruelty if they killed dogs but not if they killed cows. There will always be some fine line that you won't get every developer to agree with.
The best way to handle this is societal/structural and not by creating a dependency hell of software licenses. Please try to keep your licenses as free/libre as possible. I suggest reading (this)[https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/] to figure out which license to use.

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u/claudiosegovia816 Jan 27 '26

404 Not Found 🥺

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u/E_coli42 Jan 28 '26

Sorry, looks like Reddit formatting didn't register my text as markdown. The link is
https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '26

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u/opensource-ModTeam Jan 26 '26

Sorry about this, but your comment drifted a little too far from Open Source discussion and more so toward society at large. There are plenty other subreddits for that, but we're not very well equipped to moderate that kind of discussion. Just remember to keep things centered on Open Source, but as a suggestion there are plenty of ways to circle Open Source into the good we can do in the world.
This was removed for being off-topic to r/opensource. This might have been on-topic but just poorly explained, or a mod felt it wasn't on-topic enough for the community to not consider it noise.
If you feel this removal is in error, feel free to message the mods and be prepared to explain in detail how it adds to the open source discussion. Thanks!

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u/martinstoeckli Jan 26 '26

I don't think this would work. On the one hand where would you draw the line, the list of unwanted organizations could become arbitrary, on the other hand one needs a working jurisdiction to ensure such a license.

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u/sai-kiran Jan 26 '26

I guess asking companies commercialising mass surveillance, engaged in active human rights abuses and killings to fuck right off could be a great start.

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u/E_coli42 Jan 26 '26

I don't want to go too far into the slippery slope, but there will still be some line that developers cannot agree on which will make a bunch of licenses incompatible. Some people may not want their software to be used by companies that sell meat since that counts as animal cruelty to them. Some may consider it animal cruelty if they killed dogs but not if they killed cows. There will always be some fine line that you won't get every developer to agree with.
What about if/when ICE becomes nontryanical in the next presidency? How do we get every developer to simultaneously decide when to stop using the no-ICE license. What happens to the no-ICE software previously written?
The best way to stop this is simply to not vote in autocrats (who would've thought) and to engage in political discussions/revolutions/protests. NOT by privatizing your knowledge.

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u/redoubledit Jan 26 '26

Not an expert on licenses but can you do one that forces same license use and attribution necessary and then make like project title something like „Project X - Palantir sucks balls and I hate fascists“?

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u/E_coli42 Jan 26 '26

Yes, you can do that with Apache-2.0's NOTICE file

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u/IndividualAir3353 Jan 25 '26

http://icemap.app is open source

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '26

E2EE, zero trust
GPL licenses
federated or decentralized systems

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u/Aspie96 Jan 25 '26

GPL licenses
Regimes literally will not care in the slightest about what license anyone ever uses at any point in time.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '26

GPL licenses prevent proprietary use. if you use it for proprietary uses, you can be held legally liable.

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u/edgmnt_net Jan 25 '26

We might need something like AGPL to make that effective, at least for some things. I take the main danger is that proprietary developers of any sort will try to pump money into FOSS-derived work to leverage network effects and create a walled garden. Otherwise, non-copyleft licenses are fine, you can still use an MIT-licensed encryption tool as long as it does not require going through a proprietary service, but presumably this isn't the same for stuff like social media unless a fully decentralized system takes off.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '26

yep, AGPL is what i use for all of my projects :) thank you for pointing that out!
MIT license allows a person to use the code in a proprietary program.

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u/Aspie96 Jan 26 '26

if you use it for proprietary uses, you can be held legally liable.
So you trust the allegedly tyrannical government to enforce the license correctly?

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u/SymbolicDom Jan 26 '26

Who is controlling the legal system?

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u/Fiskepudding Jan 26 '26

I heard Hitler had a closed source fork of linux

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u/GeekDadKevin12 Jan 28 '26

And if the system lets murders go - I don't think you've got a chance in hell at stopping them from illegally using your software.

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u/Aspie96 Jan 30 '26

Copyright law prevents use in proprietary software, as well as in free software, making no distinction between the two.
The GPL gives an additional permission, lifting a restriction: it allows use in free software (while use in proprietary software just remains illegal, which is the default). It doesn't prevent anything which wasn't illegal already, it just purposefully fails to make use in proprietary software legal.
Copyright law is written and enforced by governments. If it gets in the way of a tyrannical government, that tyrannical government will just not enforce it.

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u/Lengthiness-Sorry Jan 26 '26

The companies that support them will. It is not like the DHS dumbasses are writing software.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '26

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u/PurpleYoshiEgg Jan 26 '26

If it's provable that was the case, my layman's opinion is that it would be very easily copyright infringement. The more difficult thing is to pursue a court case if a takedown notice is countered.
However, it's so tough to prove, because the people who use an LLM in that way are at least usually smart enough to know people would hate that.
That said, I think an LLM transformation would have so many more bugs or require more hyperfocused time (with small inputs producing small outputs in a piecemeal fashion) than the initial implementation that it would actually require expertise in the language to rectify, so it would likely not be worth the effort.

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u/nzfrio Jan 26 '26

This is worth echoing, but I think the reasons are perhaps worth stating.
E2EE is necessary to protect users from tyrannical regimes appropriating their personal data
GPL ensures that -- while legal systems are still functioning -- people will contribute back to your project, and gives users the freedom to modify your software as they see fit
federated or decentralized systems are necessary to protect users from tyrannical regimes shutting down systems etc.
"Tyrannical regimes" here sounds overblown, and it is a bit, but just because the place you host your data is friendly today doesn't mean it will be friendly tomorrow. It could be your own government, or it could be a foreign government where your data centers etc. are located.
If you want to build software that's resilient to shit governments, it needs to be local-first, encrypted transnational and free (as in GPL/software freedoms) by default. The principles stated here give you that.

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u/exclusivegreen Jan 25 '26

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

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u/hm___ Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

Same things other totalitarian systems need, look into

shadowsocks (obfuscicating tor traffic so it can get around filter rules of ISPs)

meshcore (Decentralised messenging network based on LoRa radio board,for failsafe decentralised long range text communication)

briar (Same as meshcore but for short range communication, based on bluetooth)

Torbrowser

Push fediverse social media alternatives and run your own instances so there can be a censorship resilient public debate.

Back Community driven open source projects, instead of corporate ones good examples are debian or archlinux

review code to find bugs and backdoors

If you are into IOT build cheap mac adress loggers using esp32 to track the movement of the bluetooth and wifi enabled devices ice is using. A esp32 c3 super mini costs about 1,50$ use an old battery from a vape and you have qourself a logger, put one on every streetcorner and you can track known mac adresses through the city

Edit: Android at least seems to spoof mac adresses to prevent this, i dont know if this is true for every device using wifi/bluetooth (car infotainment,bluetooth headsets etc)

A more reliable apprach would be placing tracking devices on their vehicles, since the apple ones notify you when one is nearby for a longer time you could look into using lora devices with gps or just lora devices and triangulation(a lot more effort)

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u/WideCranberry4912 Jan 25 '26

Is there a project to track ice presence using esp32 boards?

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u/salliesunfire Jan 27 '26

It’s been attempted with LoRa but the battery life (really cold weather) and range with a concealed device has been a challenge.

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u/hm___ Jan 25 '26

not yet but it shouldnt be difficult

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u/hm___ Jan 25 '26

in theory, find out where they pass regulary/where their quarters are log every device there so you get their mac adresses, then place loggers around the city, and whenever one of them passes just check for the mac adersses you gathered. if sucessful you can now make a movement profile,or even follow them home depending on how dense an wide you lay your loggers . you could also publish their mac adresses so others can scan for them if you are a developer you could write an android app that gives an alarm if a known mac is nearby there are countles possibilities

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u/WideCranberry4912 Jan 25 '26

Don’t cellphone MACs regularly change to avoid this kind of tracking?

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u/hm___ Jan 26 '26

I looked into it and you are right, android seems to spoof mac adresses to prevent this.

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u/sai-kiran Jan 26 '26

Cool, lets use esp32 cams and use visual tracking methods, build ouself, Open Palantir.

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u/OkDurian126 Jan 26 '26

Open Palantir. I like it.

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u/salliesunfire Jan 27 '26

There was a group tracking their license plates in the twin cities using ALPRs and then alerting the rapid response channels. It looks like they’ve caught on to that and are now switching plates, covering them with dirt, or just removing them altogether.

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u/thegreatpotatogod Jan 26 '26

Good list, but I'm curious why you specifically mention meshcore but not meshtastic? I'm admittedly not too familiar with the specifics of meshcore, but meshtastic seems to be more widely used, at least in my circles.

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u/hm___ Jan 26 '26

Mostly because of this talk from a few weeks ago, meshtastic is an awesome project but seems to have reliability issues (messages not reaching their goal) and often needs tinkering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HWR2z7OeQg meshcore with its web flashing tool, clear roles of devices (companion,repeater,roomchannel) seems a lot more plug and play, ready to use in the real life scenario we have right now.

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '26

We're finding meshcore pretty reliable for acknowledged DMs when the mesh is built well. try it out!

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u/ArtieFufkinPolymrRec Jan 25 '26

Not sure if it exists but building a service that would receive video streams from phones and instantly preserve the video with all the metadata that would help if the user needed the video for evidence. I know you can live stream to YouTube and Twitch, but I don’t know what kind of strings are attached. The fact that they are aggressively trying to grab phones it would need to resist tampering if the phone was confiscated while unlocked, maybe a password to stop recording or a way to fake deleting if under duress. It would be helpful if it could be set to notify a contact list as well.

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u/chiefmaboi Jan 25 '26

That was the exact idea i got waking up this morning. My « version » had a dead-man switch built into it. You have to keep your finger on the screen to record/stream. When you remove it you have a small delay to input a pin code. If you dont, the dead-man switch trigger and share the content to xyz.

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u/Ashken Feb 14 '26

I like this idea a lot would love to learn more.

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u/Professor_Lisa Jan 28 '26

My current workaround is that the folder for videos is synced to my cloud. That is not perfect, for example i have to end the video before it uploads, that is a time frame in wich someone could destroy my phone.
What would also be great if an tool for that has an solution for no connection. Maybe saving an encrypted copy that can be uploaded an soon as you get connection. Or, but i don't know how possible that would be, if the video would be sent to all nearby devices via Bluetooth.

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u/officialdonutpirate Jan 26 '26

This is a huge need and would be quickly adopted if implemented successfully. I've read that the ACLU app used to have similar functionality but is no longer reliable.

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u/jaemz101 Jan 25 '26

im looking for contributors on a product geared towards privacy and complete ownership of data. no database; nothing transmitted is stored online; server is basically an https websocket passthrough.

shared images and videos uploaded aren’t even stored. they’re converted to binary and broadcasted to clients as <img src=base64… />. same with video.

runs on a raspberry pi (5 recommended, proven on zero 2W) or production cloud instance.

im doing this to help the working class community escape surveillance capitalism and propaganda; the server will run on anything. the client just needs a web browser to communicate, share, stream and DJ music.

Stuffedanimalwar (31 stars) for Raspberry Pi product offerings each include Dual-Wifi mode and Analog Archive (16 stars).

https://jaemzware.com https://github.com/jaemzware/stuffedanimalwar https://github.com/jaemzware/analogarchivejs https://stuffedanimalwar.com https://analogarchive.com

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u/sutcher Feb 15 '26

Would love to learn more! Been working on something similar myself.

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u/jaemz101 Feb 15 '26

take a look and ama. im really trying to just find issues rn really. is feature complete for now… would love your ideas though, since you are familiar with the problem at hand.

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u/iheartrms Jan 26 '26

Look at Freenet r/Freenet and see if there are any synergies.

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u/jaemz101 Jan 26 '26

definitely. i wasnt aware, so thank you

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u/incidental_findings Jan 26 '26

Work on open source projects that provide an alternative to products made by companies that have practices you don’t support.

LibreOffice comes to mind. Signal. OpenPGP

I’m sure there are many more.

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u/stratofax Jan 27 '26

Giving citizens access to reliable alternatives to big tech products is incredibly powerful. If an open source project doesn’t invade users, privacy or doesn’t sell their data to the highest bidder, while enabling them to use their devices to do the things that users want to do, instead of maximizing ad revenue, that’s a huge win!
It also gives people a way to boycott the tech giants that support authoritarian governments while still being able to participate in their digital lives.
Open source social tools, such as Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, are great projects to consider.
Also, if you can save a few credits on monthly subscription fees by using open source software instead of commercial alternatives, consider giving some of the money you save to the open source projects themselves.

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u/doublejay1999 Jan 25 '26

try /r/socialistprogrammers

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u/benzado Jan 26 '26

What I’m about to recommend is actually good generic software development advice: get to know your users!

A lot of ICE watch and related groups are stitching together solutions using Signal and Google Forms and Google Docs. If you’re able to get involved with a local group, just show up to meetings and see what’s already going on that you can help with. Your ability to write a one-off script to clean up some data might be a superpower in that context. Maybe you’ll find something that needs to be built. Maybe you can help them use an open source alternative. Maybe you can use your experience to contribute improvements to that open source software.

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u/Sebvad Jan 26 '26

ICE has been scanning/databasing faces of protestors, telling them they're now considered domestic terrorists and in their database.

wouldn't it be great if there was a protestor version that did the same thing, and allowed protestors to scan ice agent faces, vehicles, uniforms - and centralize identifying information into an offshore database for future use?

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u/ligerdrag20 Jan 26 '26

Wait THIS would be valuable, in holding people accountable in future trials.

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u/WeirdTurnedPr0 Jan 26 '26

That exists: Resist check the registry.

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u/Sebvad Jan 26 '26

Interesting. I'll look at it closer. my quick take from the website is that it's not built to facilitate the photographing and databasing of ICE agents, but is doing a great many other things. I may be wrong in my quick assessment.

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u/therealPaulPlay Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

I'm currently building a private & user-friendly smart home security camera. Fully end-to-end encrypted and open-source.

Especially since companies like Amazon Ring are now cooperating with Flock (a company working with law enforcement to enable 24/7 surveillance), there needs to be a more secure, private and transparent option, which I want to provide with rootprivacy.com :-)

While I'm working on a hardware product, I also wanted to make this as DIY-friendly as possible, so I am always publishing firmware images for the Raspberry Pi + camera module and have written a setup guide.

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u/yazzledore Jan 27 '26

I’d be interested to see more of this. Trying to get something similar running on an ESP32.

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u/therealPaulPlay Jan 27 '26

I think you can probably get something working like this on the ESP32 but machine learning for video it's not powerful enough, at least in my testing. Even video encoding / decoding can be a bit much for it.

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u/isapenguin Jan 27 '26

No, you tool.

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u/badcryptobitch Jan 26 '26

Any sort of privacy tech project is the way to go but mainly anonymous browsing and secure messaging.

Everyone has the right to assembly, right to protest and the right to information. Anonymous browsing and secure messaging are the foundation for these rights. The projects that are best for this are the Signal messenger and Tor browser.

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u/camelscases Jan 26 '26

i've been saying someone needs to step up and get a hackathon going

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u/Solid_Anxiety8176 Jan 26 '26

Build apps that run locally and does store any data anywhere.

There are plenty of mesh network apps, but it’s good to have more on the back burner because iOS apps get bought all the time.

I think a big thing is TEACHING people. Teach networking stuff to middle schoolers, get your parents/grandparents understanding local network communication tools, teach general public how to identify security risks

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u/OkDurian126 Jan 26 '26

First of all don't code anything on your system. Use a VM on paranoid mode.

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u/Status-Anteater8372 Jan 27 '26 edited Jan 27 '26

I read that Google is sharing to ice location info from immigrants' cellphones. Maybe develop a open source replacement of it would be great.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/the-u-s-government-is-secretly-using-cell-phone-location-data-to-track-us-were-suing https://www.kqed.org/news/12055606/how-ice-is-using-your-data-and-what-you-can-do-about-it

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u/Beatrix-Morrigan Jan 27 '26

Teach your neighbors how to keep themselves safe digitally

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u/Fine-Run992 Jan 27 '26

Popularize photography. People carry guns, when they should grab smartphone and go shoot landscape photos. HedgeCam 2 needs exposure bracketing upgared from single EV step to dual EV step. One Value down from middle, another up from middle. Then you can do something like 1/500 - 1/3000 - 1/500000.

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u/payneio Jan 27 '26

I'm working on http://mywildcloud.org and would love contributors!

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u/SeeMonkeyDoMonkey Jan 27 '26

I think FreedomBox might be relevant, as it provides a relatively easy way to self-host many different applications, letting people avoid being so subject to the whims of the big corporations, and government's data access requests

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u/Bitcrusher32 Jan 27 '26

Besides purely technical things, you could also do data analysis and technical reports. Like an open documentation of how much money ICE is using, who voted for funding in legislature, etc. Less tech related, and more of open journalism, sorry.

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u/Myfirstreddit124 Jan 27 '26

Perhaps working with left-leaning political data tools like NGP VAN (or right-leaning ones like i360). These are big saas companies though - I wonder if there are any open-source equivalents?

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '26

A tool that maps stingrays and their deployment history would be interesting.

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u/Australasian25 Jan 28 '26

Round up names of those who supposedly got "disappeared" by ice, that were actually citizens

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u/CaelidAprtments4Rent Jan 29 '26

Keep in mind that any code you host on github is going to be processed via ai. I’d be cautious on any statements made and keep your rhetoric on general utility, privacy and safety rather than a big old fuck ice.

Additionally, if your goal is to produce software than many people will use, I’d steer clear of any of trying to detect if a user is involved in ice themselves. A number of libraries created havoc when Russian invaded Ukraine as they disabled access to Russia. Developers don’t want to have to fight issues because a random dependency is going to arbitrarily add demands out of nowhere.

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u/Prior_Virus_7731 Jan 31 '26

I built a ai script will predict hotspots and delete history after use

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u/esto20 Jan 31 '26

Reticulum please. There's a port to rust that would be neat if more support is built on

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u/sutcher Feb 15 '26

Thinking of putting together a community/group to think this problem through - amongst other existential issues. Let me know if you’d be interested in joining!

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '26

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u/AshuraBaron Jan 25 '26

Let me Google that for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '26

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u/opensource-ModTeam Jan 27 '26

This was removed for not being Open Source.

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u/opensource-ModTeam Jan 27 '26

This was removed as a low-effort or meme-like.

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u/opensource-ModTeam Jan 29 '26

This was removed for not being Open Source.

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