So if you’ve been in contact with national news or social media at all in the last few days, you’ll have heard about this bullshit:

ICE enforces 400+ federal laws to ensure public safety and national security. 

💻Learn more about our mission: ICE.gov

And a graphic which was probably meant to evoke true-crime grittiness:

If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it’s our job to STOP IT.

PEOPLE
MONEY
PRODUCTS
IDEAS

ICE then deleted the tweet, maybe because they didn’t want to say the quiet part out loud like that. The explanation they gave, though, was:

“Ideas” should have said “intellectual property.”

(This last was from multiple sources, which assigned whatever credit there was in saying that to different federal PR flacks.)

Because I’m cynical, I resisted going down the obvious rabbit hole and looked for a different one to jump down: since when is ICE supposed to be in the IP enforcement business?

The answer I found was “for a while, actually” – here they are in 2012, for instance, bragging up something called “Internet Property Right Theft Enforcement Teams.”

And I might have believed they actually misstated “IP” as “ideas,” because they wouldn’t have been the first. A quick search showed me a mix of IP lawyers trying to explain that “intellectual property” has to be more than just an idea and a few other IP lawyers suggesting that yes, they can “protect” your idea and they’re offering what they probably call reasonable rates…

…wait, isn’t “products” on that list, right above ideas? So if policing “ideas” isn’t about seizing knockoff designer handbags and bootleg DVDs, what are they talking about?

Ideas, I guess.

Maybe my cynic senses need recalibration. This is the government that grabs people off the street for writing newspaper op-eds and scans new visa applicants’ social media for wrongthink, and ICE is also in the social media surveillance business, building Hoover-style dossiers on its critics. They’ve repeatedly shown an eagerness to police thoughtcrime, and I was wasting time by looking for a lesser, stupider evil.