Every day, people log in to an online forum for current and former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers to share their thoughts on the news of the day and complain about their colleagues in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“ERO is too busy dressing up as Black Ops Commandos with Tactical body armor, drop down thigh rigs, balaclavas, multiple M4 magazines, and Punisher patches, to do an Admin arrest of a non criminal, non-violent EWI that weighs 90 pounds and is 5 foot 2, inside a secure Federal building where everyone has been screened for weapons,” wrote one user in July 2025. (ERO stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations; along with HSI, it’s one of the two major divisions of ICE and is responsible for detaining and deporting immigrants.)

The forum describes itself as a space for current and prospective HSI agents, “designed for the seasoned HSI Special Agent as well as applicants for entry level Special Agent positions.” HSI is the division within ICE whose agents are normally responsible for investigating crimes like drug smuggling, terrorism, and human trafficking.

In the forum, users discuss their discomfort with the US’s mass deportation efforts, debate the way federal agents have interacted with protesters and the public, and complain about the state of their working conditions. Members have also had heated discussions about the shooting of two protesters in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the ways immigration enforcement has taken place around the US.

The forum is one of several related forums where people working in different parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) share experiences and discuss specific details of their work. WIRED previously reported on a forum where current and former deportation officers from ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) similarly complained about their jobs and discussed the way the agency was conducting immigration raids. The HSI forum appears to be linked, even including some of the same members.

People do not need to show proof of their employment to join these forums, and the platform does not appear to be heavily moderated. WIRED has not confirmed the individual identities of these posters, though they share details that likely would be known only to people intimately familiar with the job. There are more than 2,000 members with posts going back to at least 2004.

DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

Following the killings of both Good and Pretti, the forum’s members were heavily divided. In a January 12 thread, five days after Good was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, a poster who has been a part of the forum since 2016 wrote, “IMHO, the situation with ICE Operations have gotten to an unprecedented level of violence from both the Suspects and the General Public. I hope the AG is looking at the temporary suspension of Civil Liberties, (during and in the geographic locales where ICE Operations are being conducted).”

A user who joined the forum in 2018 and identifies as a recently retired agent responded, “This is an excellent idea and well warranted. These are organized, well financed civil disturbances, dare I say an INSURRECTION?!?”

In a January 16 post titled “The Shooting,” some posters took a more nuanced view. “I get that it is a good shoot legally and all that, but all he had to do was step aside, he nearly shot one of his partners for Gods sake!” wrote a poster who first joined the forum in March 2022. “A USC woman non-crim shot in the head on TV for what? Just doesn’t sit well with me … A seasoned SRT guy who was able to execute someone while holding a phone seems to me he could have simply got out of the way.” SRT refers to ICE’s elite special response team, who undergo special training to operate in high-risk situations. USC refers to US citizens.

If you’re interested in going paperless, you probably think you need a scanner. It’s true that hardware scanners make turning multipage documents into PDFs very simple. But most of us don’t have easy access to a scanner.

What we do have are phones, and those phones have very good cameras. That’s where scanning apps come in.

These apps allow you to take photos of each page of a paper document, crop out the edges of the photo and straighten everything, then combine those photos into a PDF file. A scanning app is handy, but there’s a catch: a lot of the apps out there are a mess.

That’s what makes FairScan stand out. It’s an app for scanning documents using your Android phone that just … scans documents. That’s it.

FairScan creator Pierre-Yves Nicolas wrote in a blog post last year that he had previously tried several Android apps for scanning documents. “All of them exhibited behaviors that I certainly don’t want,” he says. These behaviors included obvious things like ads, hidden privacy violations, and shady practices such as storing your documents in the cloud—then using them to train AI—with only a tiny text prompt notifying you this is happening.

FairScan, which is both free and open source, doesn’t do any of that. It scans.

To get started, simply install the app. And yes, it’s Android-only for now, but you can download it from the Google Play Store as well as F-Droid, the repository for open source Android apps.

Get the document you want to scan ready, placing it on a flat surface in a well-lit room. Then aim your camera at the first page. A green box will surround the page—adjust until it’s surrounding the portion of the document you want to scan. Take the picture when you’re ready.

If you have more pages you can click the plus button to add them; this allows you to repeat the process with the next page. You can do this as many times as you want, allowing you to scan a multipage document.

When you’re ready, you can export the scanned pages to either a single PDF or multiple JPEG files.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind while scanning. First, lighting is going to matter a lot. You don’t want the shadow of your phone to be in the image, so make sure your phone isn’t positioned between your light source and the document you’re scanning. I find the app works best in a room with diffuse lighting, whether that’s multiple lights illuminating your work surface, or several windows letting in a great deal of natural sunlight. It’s also worth trying to get the paper document as flat as possible, to avoid distortions.

Businesses that use virtual private networks (VPNs) to secure their computer systems are concerned that they could be inadvertently caught by government plans to restrict their use to people under the age of 16.

The government’s announcement to limit the use of VPNs by under 16s is part of a wider proposal to restrict the use of social media by school-age children unveiled by the UK prime minister on Monday.

However, it is unclear how the proposals will affect businesses, including small companies, that rely on VPNs to secure their computers and to communicate securely.

TechUK, which represents more than 1,000 tech companies, told Computer Weekly that the proposals didn’t appear to have been fully worked out yet and that it was hoping more details would emerge in a government consultation due to be published next month.

James Baker, a programme manager and campaigner at the Open Rights Group, said that cyber security authorities including the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, advocate the use of VPNs to enhance online safety.

“Implementing age verification for VPNs could undermine their privacy benefits and pose challenges for legitimate users, including young individuals seeking online privacy and security. We risk trading one risk posed to young people for another,” he said.