OPERATION SWIPE RIGHT

The Department of Homeland Security would like you to know that it is very serious and very powerful and you should be very afraid of it. It has a $60 billion annual budget. It has military-grade surveillance equipment. It has helicopters — actual helicopters — which it deployed over residential Minneapolis neighborhoods to intimidate people whose primary offense was living there.

It also, as it turns out, has agents who will tell a woman they met on Tinder exactly where tomorrow’s raid is going to be if she seems interested enough.

This is the story of how the most expensive law enforcement apparatus in human history got its operational security dismantled by approximately 20 women, a private Facebook group of a thousand people running background checks, and a civil rights attorney in a Honda Fit with a bad transmission. The agency is calling it a felony. We’re calling it Operation Swipe Right. DHS has not addressed the embarrassment, because there are no words in the English language to adequately describe it.

HOW IT WORKED

A woman in Massachusetts organized roughly 20 women into a two-track intelligence operation. The front-end team went on dates with suspected ICE agents. The back-end team — a thousand people in a private Facebook group — ran background checks and built dossiers. The agents, for their part, talked about upcoming raids to women who had already decided what to do with that information.

Federal agents. The ones who train immigrant families to say nothing to anyone ever. Talking about their jobs. On dates. That they got on Tinder.

The intel served three purposes. First: unmasking — because agents had been conducting detentions in masks with no visible identification, making it impossible for families to know who took their person or where. The dates produced photographs of their actual faces, which went directly into the folder. Second: operational leaks — raid locations and schedules, pillow-talked directly into the resistance network. Third, and most magnificently: if a honeypotter got burned, the chat logs went to the agent’s wife.

They came for people’s families. The women sent the receipts to their families. There is a poetry to this that no one at DHS is currently in a position to appreciate.

THE GRINDR SITUATION, BRIEFLY

It wasn’t just Tinder. Minneapolis activist “Nina” noticed that Grindr was, in her words, “blowing up with visitors from out of town” — meaning deployed federal agents, on a gay hookup app, on their off hours, in a city they had come to occupy. She called on gay Minnesotans to collect everything and share it widely.

Fox News had a complete breakdown over this, with co-host Joey Jones asking gravely whether protesters were trying to shame agents “who may be homosexual.” This from a network that has spent a decade suggesting gay people are a threat to civilization. The concern for federal agents’ Grindr privacy was, in this moment, apparently Fox News’s most urgent civil liberties issue.

We will leave that there.

WILL STANCIL, ACCIDENTAL SPYMASTER

The alleged coordinator of the Minneapolis honeypot network is Will Stancil, a 40-year-old civil rights attorney previously best known as, per Slate, “the most harassed man in the history of Twitter.” He lost a state house race. He compared himself to Poland in 1939 over an economics argument. He drives a 2011 Honda Fit with an iffy transmission.

He was also, allegedly, running a distributed counter-intelligence operation against the United States Department of Homeland Security out of that Honda Fit while getting tear-gassed every other day.

Economist Noah Smith described the situation as Stancil “running a Tinder honeypot network in Minneapolis to break ICE’s opsec, LMFAO.”

The LMFAO is the only appropriate response. Frame it. Put it in a museum. It is the epitaph of an era.

WHAT THIS IS

When you send masked agents in unmarked vehicles to take people away — no names, no badges, no agency confirmation, no indication of which facility or which state or which country — you have made a choice. You have decided that accountability is optional and that the people left behind can simply wonder. ICE detained American citizens. It transferred people across international borders without due process. It separated parents from American-born children and then argued with federal judges about whether it felt like following court orders.

The women on Tinder understood what that means for a family trying to find someone. So they built a better intelligence network than ICE had. With a Facebook group. In their spare time.

Somewhere in a DHS field office right now, someone is drafting new guidelines on dating app usage during active deployments. That sentence exists in reality. It is a real thing that is happening because it needed to happen, because the agents required guidance on this, because they did not previously understand that operational security applied when a woman on Tinder seemed into them.

The memo. Sixty billion dollars a year.

They did not get the memo.

Keep swiping, gentlemen.

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Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor of Closer to the Edge.