alt.hn

5/21/2026 at 5:55:58 PM

Amazon, Facebook, FBI have access to a private intelligence-sharing network

 https://prismreports.org/2026/05/20/seattle-shield-private-companies-surveillance/

by root-parent

5/21/2026 at 7:41:55 PM

My thoughts as someone who doesn't know much about these types of things:

1. Terry Albury calling this list the "Panopticon" could have merit since he's a former FBI agent. However, I'd have to research more into him to figure out how credible he is, and why he is framing it like this.

2. Amazon and Facebook being in the title is most likely clickbait. They're literally only mentioned once in the article and the rest of it has nothing to do with them.

3. It's concerning that the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) can potentially cause this network to be used to label protestors as "far-left domestic terrorists", however, that is more of an issue with the NSPM than this network. Understanding the NSPM and the effects of it is probably worthwhile.

4. The article mentions that there's no oversight program for Seattle Shield. Is that a problem? Is it typical to have oversight for a program like this, or necessary? What would the program be like?

Overall, the article feels sort of sensationalized. It frames Seattle Shield as suspicious and questionable due to its secrecy and the fact that it performs surveillance. However, there aren't any strong facts or evidence of this program being abused in some Big Brother-type way. Terry Albury framing it in this manner might be the most credible point against it, but I would have to look into that to determine how credible it is.

by baddash

5/21/2026 at 7:50:41 PM

It's like you never heard of Snowden.

You don't need to try to force yourself to believe it not being that bad because it has been worse for like 20 years already.

by lstodd

5/21/2026 at 7:48:30 PM

I don't want any secretive surveillance, I don't care if you can prove whether its malicious or not.

by dakolli

5/21/2026 at 7:51:33 PM

ok. I don't know who you are and I don't really care what your surveillance preferences are.

by baddash

5/21/2026 at 6:07:04 PM

> For instance, the Church of Scientology, U.S. Navy, and the Washington State Military Department told Prism that they are no longer working with the network.

That first one took me by surprise. What a random hodgepodge of organizations.

by aliasxneo

5/21/2026 at 6:09:01 PM

4chan validated in their protests against Scientology was not in my bingo card.

by giancarlostoro

5/21/2026 at 7:10:28 PM

For people like me who had no idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology

by errendgame

5/21/2026 at 7:30:02 PM

That was amazing. I once witnessed a protest like that, in Hannover Germany I think. The idea of 4chan people actually going up the stairs and out of the house into the open air and talking to people, like with molecules and sound waves and all that stuff, it still blows my mind.

by skrebbel

5/21/2026 at 7:36:35 PM

[dead]

by picsao

5/21/2026 at 6:30:29 PM

At this point I'm waiting for the aliens appearance in the Epstein files.

by marcosdumay

5/21/2026 at 6:53:49 PM

Such a low level of expectation of ethical level for non human beings is not fair.

by psychoslave

5/21/2026 at 7:31:01 PM

At this point I'm waiting for the aliens appearance in the Epstein files.

There was an front page article about aliens and American pedophile leaders in the most recent issue of The Onion.

I don't see it online. Maybe it takes a while for the dead tree stories to appear there.

by reaperducer

5/21/2026 at 6:15:47 PM

Scientology is essentially a scheme to get private/incriminating information from very important people. Why the surprise?

by coliveira

5/21/2026 at 6:24:40 PM

Scientology is what happens when a science fiction writer acts out a dystopian plot in real life instead of writing a novel.

Read Stranger in a Strange Land, read about Hubbard and Heinlein's friendship, and look at the timeline of when Scientology started and Stranger in a Strange Land was published.

by colechristensen

5/21/2026 at 7:18:06 PM

That may be true however today it is 2026 not 1961, LRH fell off the earth in 1980, and it is feasible that after the raids in 1977 and/or upon gaining tax-exempt status in 1993, some sort of deal was cut with the US state/intel apparatus to co-opt the church for another purpose

by CGMthrowaway

5/21/2026 at 7:23:14 PM

No, shady deals and intel capture fits perfectly fine with the original dystopian novel in the real world.

by colechristensen

5/21/2026 at 6:27:04 PM

damn I wonder how many scientology believers in intel actually believe in scientology...

I mean, it shows how much intel agencies can "screen for high intelligence individuals" ?

by sysguest

5/21/2026 at 6:50:56 PM

people believe in scientology as much as they believe in a literature club. If you listen to someone like Tom Cruise's statements he says "I have gotten to where I am today because of Scientology". He doesn't name off specific procedures, treatments, practices, etc. Partially because they are barred from naming them.

But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo as anything else out there. In other words, it's more of a social function than a religion.

by sidewndr46

5/21/2026 at 7:46:31 PM

You get or used to get true believers working in hellish conditions[1] on the boats, paid ~nothing. It might be a quid pro quo convenience for the Tom Cruises, but there are also some suckers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Org#Lawsuits

by loeg

5/21/2026 at 7:10:55 PM

This is an interesting way of putting it, but matches my thoughts. I think most such organizations (political parties, religions, businesses, large organizations of many types) consist of true believers at the bottom of the pyramid, and moving up the ranks are folks who recognize that they can advance by understanding the game and utilizing the group mind to maintain credibility among the true believers, while displaying ambition to elites to advance the groups goals. At some point in the hierarchy are folks whose primary or only function is to advance the groups goals using middle ranks to maintain legitimacy with the believers.

by hydrogen7800

5/21/2026 at 6:56:46 PM

Religion is all about social function, at least from social science perceptives I guess.

by psychoslave

5/21/2026 at 6:09:07 PM

Scientologists being involved with intelligence agencies doesn't surprise me even a bit, it makes a lot of sense as a CIA cutout.

by QuercusMax

5/21/2026 at 6:48:56 PM

Those weirdos followed me around Ybor near Tampa when I said something negative about them online in public. IT WAS WEIRD! But I gave no Fs

by Deprogrammer9

5/21/2026 at 7:28:14 PM

Man, I wish something like this would have happened to me when I was younger and spunkier. For years, I've had so many scenarios planned in my head for how something like that would play out! Even today, I might not just ignore it even though my propensity to give fucks has waned over the years.

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 7:50:31 PM

[dead]

by retardkiller

5/21/2026 at 6:49:52 PM

It seems likely that every tightly clique is trying to infiltrate every other such clique - it's endless battle between mafias, political parties, cults (Tulsi Gabard's connections to Krishna cult), intelligence agencies and so-forth, each trying to use the other.

But naturally, there significant limits on how much and how long each of infiltration be effective. A infiltrator from X sent to gain control of Y and gaining complete control there of will often identify with Y since leading it give them more power (Stalin was likely a agent of the Czarist secret police before the revolution but he probably wasn't taking orders from them in 1935 etc).

by joe_the_user

5/21/2026 at 6:28:22 PM

Any belief system or club that validates sociopathy as a "higher" state of evolution or enlightenment will worm it's way into intelligence agencies.

by acidhousemcnab

5/21/2026 at 7:42:11 PM

the mormons are big in feddy gov agencies, for example

by red-iron-pine

5/21/2026 at 6:47:14 PM

Edited title to be more sensationalist - this is a Seattle local thing

> The Seattle Shield website states that its mission “is to provide a collaborative and information-sharing environment between the Seattle Police Department and public/private partners in the Seattle area. Seattle Shield members assist Seattle Police Department efforts to identify, deter, defeat or mitigate potential acts of terrorism by reporting suspicious activity in a timely manner.”

by whimsicalism

5/21/2026 at 6:54:02 PM

That network is shared with police departments in cities outside Seattle per the article.

by jedahan

5/21/2026 at 6:56:28 PM

I encourage people imagining this as some high-scale surveillance dragnet to look at the Seattle Shield website and form their opinions https://seattleshield.org/default.aspx?MenuItemID=53&MenuGro...

by whimsicalism

5/21/2026 at 7:47:10 PM

ah, yes, the little 8-line explanation there by the entity in question absolutely clears them of all suspicion, really.

i am sure that information obtained by seattle shield is not shared to anyone outside of seattle borders. police departments and the FBI are not known to share information, after all. police are especially cagey about sharing with other agencies when it comes to counter-terrorism.

by john_strinlai

5/21/2026 at 7:35:40 PM

Not sure if you meant to reply here?

by jedahan

5/21/2026 at 6:53:13 PM

You have Trump. You see how he is surrounded by the superrich.

You have Palantir.

You still think this is "sensationalist"? I don't think so. The assumption here is that you wish to isolate this onto Seattle only. I think this is global instead. By focusing only on Seattle we lose the wider picture. Anyone remembers how people were surprised that Facebook connects offline-data to accounts? It's why they are more accurately called Spybook.

by shevy-java

5/21/2026 at 6:54:46 PM

Interesting. You should write an article about this and post it on HN. This article is about an unfunded website run by someone at the Seattle PD.

by whimsicalism

5/21/2026 at 6:56:00 PM

Reminder if you work for any of these companies (not unlikely on this site) you are actively enabling this. If your first reaction is doubt, deflection, rationalization or discomfort, there are ways out.

by jedahan

5/21/2026 at 7:11:44 PM

If you make open source used by any of this companies for this network, would you also characterize it as actively enabling this?

If your retirement fund owns stocks of the s&p 500, does that make you an enabler?

Are there really ways out?

by 6thbit

5/21/2026 at 7:33:16 PM

> Are there really ways out?

Not with that attitude

by Barbing

5/21/2026 at 7:39:12 PM

Its very personal and situation dependent, but I truly believe that if you work at Amazon or Facebook and do not want to support this, you can.

by jedahan

5/21/2026 at 7:16:57 PM

Are those things you are personally struggling with (if you are considering quitting open source contribitions wholesale: don't let this make you) or is this a showcase of rationalization?

by pamcake

5/21/2026 at 7:14:40 PM

No

Yes

Maybe

by croes

5/21/2026 at 7:24:00 PM

Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?

This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.

by Manuel_D

5/21/2026 at 7:48:25 PM

> Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?

If only there were a way to address people doing destructive or harmful things.

We could even make it reachable using a telephone, with a very convenient to dial, short, easily remembered number sequence.

I don't know about you, but in my area, NextDoor is mostly "I saw non-white errrrr I mean, uh, 'someone who doesn't look like they belong here' person in my neighborhood" and general witch-hunting any time it's mentioned someone gets arrested for

Also, we have concepts like "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" for a reason. Corporatizing law enforcement is not a good thing.

If Amazon wants to work with the PD they can show up to a community relations meeting like everyone else?

by KennyBlanken

5/21/2026 at 7:31:55 PM

If you work for any company, you're actively enabling injustices against someone, so just make a living and don't worry so much.

by stronglikedan

5/21/2026 at 7:49:54 PM

> ...he said, shovelling orphans into the crushing machine

by ishouldstayaway

5/21/2026 at 7:37:18 PM

This is the kind of rationalization I am referring to.

by jedahan

5/21/2026 at 7:39:50 PM

So work for mercenaries, and tell people “it’s just a job?”

Maybe there are shades of gray between black and white.

by ozozozd

5/21/2026 at 7:43:59 PM

this is the high quality content that I come to HN for

by red-iron-pine

5/21/2026 at 7:49:15 PM

Holy false equivalency / whataboutism, Batman.

by KennyBlanken

5/21/2026 at 7:38:34 PM

I don’t understand. This seems like some version of NextDoor / neighborhood watch but for companies and larger interests in the Seattle area that might have their own security apparatus.

Why are folks jumping to some conclusions that this is some illuminati threat to democracy? Why is the article so breathless?

by sailfast

5/21/2026 at 7:48:03 PM

It might be a purposefully sensationalist framing in order to increase KPIs. It works because a lot of people have strong opinions things without thinking much.

by baddash

5/21/2026 at 6:57:28 PM

> All suspicious activity reported must be behavior based. It is important to keep in mind that suspicious behavior, such as taking photographs or videos, is not a criminal act by itself, but may be a precursor to criminal activity.

  the number of times I've been harassed by police for taking photos... even in small towns in the middle of nowhere people are paranoid.

by tinix

5/21/2026 at 7:50:32 PM

Unfortunately we have to live in the reality that any unusual thing is a suspicious thing. There’s a whole entire concept that has been popularized around the concept of “see something, say something” and it would be expected that such vague concepts generate paranoia. I am not in a touristy or scenic area so seeing people out taking photos is unusual here and I could see how at least talking to the photographer isn’t a bad idea from a security standpoint.

by conductr

5/21/2026 at 6:04:59 PM

archive that won't hijack your back button https://archive.is/Td9AR

by ensen

5/21/2026 at 6:51:15 PM

archive.is is one of the domains of archive.today, which used its end users for a DDOS attack on a blog. This caused English Wikipedia to deprecate it with the end goal of blacklisting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

by andrybak

5/21/2026 at 7:41:58 PM

Complaining about bad people is fun, don't get me wrong... but your post doesn't contain an alternative archive link. You're just siphoning people into your soapbox.

by arcanemachiner

5/21/2026 at 6:46:36 PM

Huh, it seems to try to take my back button and it pretends that there is history if I open it in a new tab, but if I click on it from HN it lets me go back. But I can also see it trying to create history. Maybe it's a Brave feature idk.

by Cider9986

5/21/2026 at 6:35:26 PM

Why do our browsers even allow that?

by PcChip

5/21/2026 at 6:38:50 PM

When done properly you don't even notice! It is very beneficial when needed. But, as we know, very awful when done improperly.

by herpdyderp

5/21/2026 at 6:36:50 PM

For websites like Gmail when you open an email

by sheept

5/21/2026 at 6:43:48 PM

To enable JavaScript crapware

by hkt

5/21/2026 at 7:25:31 PM

“ The notice lists a few examples of attacks on Jewish targets in other U.S. cities last year; it does not mention widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian attacks throughout the country.”

Why would it mention it on an anniversary of an attack on Israel?

Bias alert!

by Zhenya

5/21/2026 at 7:36:45 PM

Why would an attack on Israel warrant spying on US citizens? We are not Israel and our government should not be working for Israeli interests.

by lorecore

5/21/2026 at 7:44:32 PM

you're not gonna believe this

by red-iron-pine

5/21/2026 at 7:46:49 PM

Random Idea:

Make a tool/browser extension that submits suspicious queries to Google, Facebook, Amazon on behalf of the user like "how to make a bomb", "How to make an explosive drone" or whatever. Have it run several times a day and use a lightweight abliterated llm to create unique queries that would match the kind of heuristics these programs are filtering for.

Hopefully 10s of thousands of users use it and poison the ETL of these intelligence gathering operations. This kinda creates a prisoner dilemma for the first set of users, perhaps the tool would only start making queries once there was enough of a user base so that the first few users aren't signing up themselves for unnecessary scrutiny.

by dakolli

5/21/2026 at 6:43:39 PM

Where is the "I did that" sticker with trump pointing at this article.

:(

by rc_kas

5/21/2026 at 7:09:04 PM

Established in 2009. Who started as president that year?

by jp_sc

5/21/2026 at 6:50:01 PM

established and operating since 2009- "Why did Trump do this?"

by 1234letshaveatw

5/21/2026 at 6:56:27 PM

How bad are things in Seattle that they are resorting to this? What the hell happened to my hometown?

by zuzululu

5/21/2026 at 6:36:44 PM

Having a coalition of mega corporations all allied with each other isn't any better than having a strong government. Both are dangerous to personal liberties. I think we're due for a break up of these companies. No more Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. We the people need to start taking power back.

by booleandilemma

5/21/2026 at 6:53:42 PM

No one is going to save us. I've recently been moved to direct action and started participating in a local indivisible.org group. It's had untold positive impacts on my personal mental state being with people trying to make things better, or at least slow the damage for now. Much of that is from going out and talking to random people on the street, handing out information and having conversations. Also quitting social media at the same time, save one exception for HN.

https://indivisible.org/get-involved/find-a-group/

by verdverm

5/21/2026 at 7:39:39 PM

This just seems like a progressive PAC. Which, okay that's fine, but not exactly giving "weaker government" vibes, just "we want our team in charge for a bit" vibes. Happy to be proven wrong, though.

by pc86

5/21/2026 at 6:11:05 PM

Looks like a nothingburger? It's unfunded. An email describes a protest without giving a framing that the site would prefer. Then it turns out that nobody knows what it does, but it might do something bad.

I'm all for transparency and accountability but my assumption is that the bad things being done by LEO and intelligence are far worse than this.

by shermantanktop

5/21/2026 at 6:16:02 PM

My take away from the article was that this likely isn't the only public-private intelligence network propped up by local PDs; that was pretty alarming to me.

by Shalomboy

5/21/2026 at 7:40:32 PM

Most large businesses do this for hundreds if not thousands of years. Large open source projects do it too.

Basically any organization that does any attempt to analyze threats of any sort will have a need to collaborate with law enforcement.

Walmart does it for theft rings. Canonical does it for hacking threats targeting Ubuntu. Your bank does it for people trying to steal money.

by kube-system

5/21/2026 at 6:46:53 PM

Would it shock your conscience to learn that Microsoft security operations probably have contacts with the Redmond PD and that they occasionally discuss concerns?

The existence of a mailing list or something of that sort isn't particularly worrying. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a firewall between police departments and local businesses any more that it would be reasonable to expect one between PDs and local residents.

I would be alarmed if it turned out that Amazon was giving the Seattle PD direct, warrantless access to data about their consumers, or something like that. But there's no evidence presented here of anything particularly sketchy going on.

by lacewing

5/21/2026 at 6:48:13 PM

Yes, large businesses have contacts with local PD in the area. This is what BIDs basically are as well

by whimsicalism

5/21/2026 at 6:18:52 PM

I think this is a good point: this is what they're letting us on.

by erxam

5/21/2026 at 6:30:08 PM

[dead]

by nikhilpareek13

5/21/2026 at 6:18:35 PM

Do you mean unfounded?

by LoganDark

5/21/2026 at 6:56:12 PM

Unfunded. It's in the article

by 1234letshaveatw

5/21/2026 at 6:21:34 PM

There were a lot of articles describing Snowdon / Manning and Wikileaks releases as exactly "nothing burgers", in those journals of note that people read to tell them what to think about matters - but I'm not sure what a "nothing burger" means - pulverised cattle flesh flattened into an oval, that doesn't exist?

by acidhousemcnab

5/21/2026 at 7:41:55 PM

Is there a term for this weird autistic pseudo-nerd-sniping where someone pretends not to understand a very common expression and takes it absurdly literally to try to prove a point?

by pc86

5/21/2026 at 7:10:05 PM

The validity of the term should be separate from the pernicious use by people who would like you to stop paying attention to things that matter.

I think there’s lots of stuff in this space that is worth paying attention to, including for example just how complete a profile companies like Experian have assembled on US citizens, or Flock and LPR generally.

This just seems a lot of fluff with nothing substantial, hence a nothingburger.

by shermantanktop

5/21/2026 at 6:15:45 PM

As an American, I genuinely trust my data with China more than I do with the United States.

by kittikitti

5/21/2026 at 6:48:50 PM

That's actually a very logical stance: China is much less interested in what you're doing as an individual citizen—and much less able to act on what they know—than the United States is. For the same reason, Chinese citizens should trust the United States with their data more than China.

by organsnyder

5/21/2026 at 6:51:41 PM

Please tell me they're using Workplace.

by ethagnawl

5/21/2026 at 6:51:31 PM

Not so surprising - we kind of suspected this. Anyone remembers Snowden or Assange?

We have to accept the fact that presently all democracies are merely simulation of a democracy. At the least in the USA; other countries may be a bit better, e. g. Switzerland or the scandinavian countries are somewhat better (though also not to be trusted - see how Sweden pursued Assange).

Perhaps this is how things always end? Democracies are kind of like an obsolete model when you compare it to authoritarianism (assuming the USA would still be a democracy rather than a tech-corporate-fascist country run by a corrupt elite of superrich).

by shevy-java

5/21/2026 at 7:45:52 PM

Authoritarianism didn't work in the past because it was too hard to control that many people. You simply didn't have the scale unless you were willing to roll tanks down city streets, and even then all it did was buy you an extra couple years, maybe a decade or two. Eventually, someone always got close enough to end you and then it started falling apart.

Technology has made it not only possible, but easy, to control a lot more people. Freedom generally, and democracy specifically, are the exception. Might-makes-right authoritarianism is the default human condition and I think we're seeing a regression to the mean. I don't even mean in the last few years or whatever, I'm not making a comment on any country's government today. But look at the last 30-40 years, and imagine what the next 30-40 might look like, and I think we're going to look back on today fondly as when we had more freedom.

by pc86

5/21/2026 at 6:36:05 PM

I'm convinced Meta is a cult with Total control. It will go to any lengths to make money.

by sidcool

5/21/2026 at 6:08:58 PM

So what you're saying is that everyone that works at Amazon and Facebook are now at grave risk because the bad guys now think they're informants?

by bigbuppo

5/21/2026 at 6:18:01 PM

You've got the good guys and the bad guys mixed up. No Meta "engineer" knows what morals or ethics even are, much less actually apply them in real life.

by erxam

5/21/2026 at 7:22:36 PM

Come to think about it, the one person I know that works at Meta is the absolute worst person I know.

by bigbuppo

5/21/2026 at 6:27:03 PM

I love this comment, I just couldn't ever frame it so well :)

by srameshc

5/21/2026 at 6:16:12 PM

Not any more than the average citizen of East Germany.

by GolfPopper

5/21/2026 at 6:19:35 PM

It's bad guys all the way down.

by kgwxd

5/21/2026 at 6:05:23 PM

Ah the new dark pool. Does anyone remember those from the trading? I still remember ARCA (good rebate back in the day), ECN (very fluid and very cheap), and a few dark pools that I used to get out of a trade quickly.

by markus_zhang

5/21/2026 at 7:22:40 PM

Interesting they have not contacted me about how they are going to be paying their subscription fee

I hope they dont think im doing all of this for free

by mrobot