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This is a bonus episode of the Tyler Woodward Project for this week. I wasn't planning on doing this one, but with everything happening right now in Minneapolis and in the Twin Cities, federal raids, two people shot and killed by agents in less than a month, parents pulling kids from school, people standing outside mosque in minus twenty degree wind chill just to keep watch. It felt wrong not to talk about it. So I mean this is an extra urgent episode for the week. We're stepping a little outside of the usual tech lane and talking about how federal agencies are using technology here against American citizens, and how you and your neighbors can use that same technology to protect each other and push back.

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What would you do if Ice showed up on your block? Most of us have never been trained for that.

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Federal agents on your street, people grabbed off of sidewalks, an ICU nurse shot dead, parents quietly pulling kids out of school because they're afraid immigration agents might show up at the door. Across the Twin Cities and in cities around the country, thousands of people are answering that question every day now. They're building systems, real systems that warn neighbors and minutes, connect families with lawyers, and sometimes slow or stop deportations and violence.

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I want to start with a little bit of honesty. I went back and forth on whether to make this episode.

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This show is usually about technology, broadcast engineering, and the nerdy guts of how things work. It's not a politics show, and I don't want it to turn into one. But watching what's happening in Minneapolis right now, the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer, the killing of an ICU nurse, Alex Predy, by a federal agent, the way this quote unquote operation has flooded the city with thousands of officers, it stopped feeling like a policy debate and started feeling like something is fundamentally broken here. Minnesota governor Tim Wallace called the whole thing, quote, a campaign of organized brutality, unquote, against Minnesota and said the federal narrative about these shootings is, quote, nonsense and lies. When a sitting governor is saying that, and when state investigators are literally being blocked from investigating a shooting scene, that's not just background noise. That's not business as usual. That's the environment your neighbors are living in.

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At the same time, there's something else happening here that you won't see in official briefings. People are stepping up for one another.

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There are underground networks of folks giving rides to and from work, school, and medical appointments, so nobody has to travel alone and risk getting scooped up at a stop.

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Parents are coordinating to keep kids safe. Sometimes pulling them from school entirely because they're terrified, federal agents will show up.

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Volunteers are standing outside mosque in brutal sub zero wind chills, minus twenty, minus thirty. Just to keep an eye out during prayer so people can worship without a federal raid crashing through their front door. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on at this point. Rapid response toolkits, digital right guides, reporting from Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets, and documentation from immigrant rights and legal aid groups. And the through line is pretty clear. The same technology that's being used to track and intimidate people can also be used to protect them. So that's what this episode is. Not a partisan rant, not a news piece, just my opinion and my advice on what you can do to help yourself, your family, and your neighbors. It's going to be a walkthrough of how people are using phones, apps, and networks to watch out for one another, and how you can join in on that. Here's what I'm going to cover today how IceWatch and Rapid Response Networks are working with what we're seeing in Minneapolis as a live example. What the app Signal is, why I don't recommend WhatsApp for this kind of work and how to use Signal more safely to protect your communications. A practical game plan for using your tech to watch out for your family, your friends, and your neighbors and to push back, even a little against what's happening. A rapid response network, or ice watch group, is basically a neighborhood emergency system for immigration enforcement and federal crackdowns. If you look at the raid toolkits and local reporting from places like California, Virginia, and now Minnesota, you see the same pattern over and over. The flow goes like this. Someone spots ICE or a federal agent doing immigration enforcement house raids, street stops, or a cluster of unmarked SUVs around a mosque or a school. They call a hotline number or send a message into a dedicated reporting line. A trained volunteer answers and runs through a script. Where exactly is it happening? What time? How many agents? What uniforms? What kind of markings? What vehicles are people being taken? And are there kids there? That report goes into a small trusted signal coordination group where a verification team cross-checks it. Maybe by calling back, looking for a second witness, cracking or uh checking known plate numbers or comparing to what's happening in nearby neighborhoods. If it looks real, observers are sent out to film and document from a safe distance. Alerts go out to neighbors via signal broadcasts, SMS trees, and yes, literal whistles and car horns so people can stay inside or reroute around that area. Families are being connected to lawyers, bond funds, childcare, and emergency support. In Minneapolis, right now, you can see pieces of this everywhere. People streaming into Witter Park and other gathering spots after the shootings, observers following convoys, neighbors tracking ice vehicles near schools and volunteers who stand watch outside mosque so worshipers can pray without staring at the door.

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It's messy, sure, because the whole situation is messy. But there's a pattern, and there is a system.

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These networks do a lot, but it's important to be honest about its limits. They do get information out fast so people can make safer choices, stay home, avoid a certain intersection, or move kids out of harm's way. They document officers' actions, faces if they can get them, badges, vehicles, and sequence of events. That's how we end up with video that contradicts official claims, like Alex Petty's shooting, where multiple angles show him filming and trying to help with traffic before agents swarmed him. They connect families to legal help and mutual aid when something goes wrong. They put a layer of community visibility around operations that would otherwise be happening in the dark.

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Here's what they don't do. They don't physically block arrest.

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Legal observer training is crystal clear. You're there to witness, not to tackle agents or create new danger.

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Guarantee that nobody gets hurt. We're watching the opposite right now. People are still being shot and killed, even in front of cameras. And they don't replace legal strategy.

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They buy time and gather evidence, but they don't argue cases in court. Think of it the same way you think about a tornado siren. Sirens obviously don't stop the storm, but they mean you're not gonna be blindsided.

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A nice watch network is the siren system your community builds for itself. If you're sitting there thinking, okay, but where do I even start? Here's the practical side.

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First, see if something already exists in your area. Search Rapid Response Network plus your state or nearest large city. Search Ice Watch plus your city. Look for immigration rights hotline for your state. You'll often find something run by immigration rights coalition, legal aid groups, and maybe faith communities. If you find one, email or call and say, Hey, I want to volunteer. What's the process? How do I get started? Expect some kind of training on what observers can do, what the hot screw hotline script looks like, and some basic security. If you don't find anything nearby, your next move is to talk to an anchor organization, local immigration rights uh organizations, legal aid clinics, churches, mosques, unions, school-based groups. If a new network is going to form, it should live there with people who already have trust and some legal support, not in a random signal group with no plan or structure. Let me give you some concrete roles because join a network can sound a little abstract, I know. Here's what they need. They need hotline volunteers. If you can stay calm on the phone, think like a 911 operator, you can take calls when someone sees ice. Ask the right questions and pass that info over the coordinators. They need language support. If you speak Spanish, Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Arabic, or anything else, you can help make sure alerts and resources reach the people who need them the most. They need tech helpers. If you're comfortable with apps, settings, technology, you can set up and manage signal groups, help people install it and configure it, and keep volunteer lists reasonably organized. They need legal observers. With training, you can show up to film and take notes, focusing on officers and vehicles, not the panicked families. They need drivers and chaperones. This is big in Minneapolis right now. People quietly giving rides so coworkers and neighbors don't have to walk or drive alone past checkpoints or patrols. And they need support roles like child care for someone who has core uh food runs, helping keep visuals safe and organized. You don't need a law degree or a perfect politics scorecard.

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You just need to show up in one of these roles and be consistent. Now let's talk about that app piece because that's where a lot of this lives.

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Signal is a free messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption. In simple terms, what you type on your phone gets scrambled, so only the phone you're sending to can understand it. The servers in between can see that something went through them, but not what it says or what the message contains. So on top of that, Signal is designed to collect as little as possible. It basically knows that your account exists and when you last connected, but it doesn't keep a big graph of who talks to who, and it doesn't log your messages or call history in some giant data warehouse. That's why people who do high-risk work think, you know, journalists, organizers, whistleblowers, that's why they keep recommending this. Now I've heard conversations and comments and recommendations, you know, for people to use WhatsApp. And WhatsApp also encrypts message content, but you have to remember it's owned by Meta. And Meta's whole business, their whole business model, is built on data. Even with encryption, WhatsApp still collects a lot of metadata. Who you talk to, when you talk to them, how often, your phone number, your contacts, your device info, your rough location, thanks to IP and GPS, end usage patterns.

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That metadata can be combined across meta products. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.

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On top of that, WhatsApp metadata is shared with Meta itself and can be provided to law enforcement. It's not protected the same way your message content is. If you haven't explicitly turned on encrypted backups, your chat history can live in iCloud or Google Drive in a way that's accessible to those companies when they get a warrant or a legal order. For everyday family chatter, people might accept the trade-off. For organizing around ice raids and federal violence, it's a terrible deal. So my recommend, you know, my recommendation is simple and it's going to be firm. Use signal for anything related to rapid response ice watch or protest coordination. Don't treat WhatsApp as, quote, good enough just because it's convenient or familiar. At best, keep it only as a bridge for people who haven't moved yet, maybe are too stubborn, and you know, work to bring sensitive conversations over to Signal. Let's do two more low energy settings that are going to make a huge difference here. First is disappearing messages. In Signal, you can set a timer so messages auto-delete after a certain amount of time. 24 hours, a week, whatever makes sense for you. That way, if your phone ever does end up in someone else's hands, there's less history sitting there waiting to be pulled out of it. Second, your lock screen. ICE and other agencies have spent millions of dollars, millions, on phone hacking tools like Celebrite and Gray Key. Short pins are easy for those tools, but longer passphrases are much harder and sometimes practically out of reach. So do this before you get anywhere near a protest or a rapid response event. Switch from a four-digit pin to a long passcode or passphrase. Turn on disappearing messages for your sensitive signal chats. Turn off message previews on your lock screen so your notifications aren't readable at a glance. I know these are boring settings. They're not glamorous Hollywood hacking tips, but they move you out of the easy mode for anyone trying to get your information from your phone or piece together your network from uh from a CS device. Let's let's do a checklist here.

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Let's let's pull this into a simple before, during, and after checklist.

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Before set a strong passcode, disappear messages, no lock screen previews. Strip location access from any app that doesn't absolutely need it. Turn off ad tracking IDs in your phone's privacy settings. ICE's not just relying on cell towers anymore. They're buying bulk location data from ad tech brokers and running it through analysis tools.

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Tell someone you trust where you're going and when you expect. Expect to be done. During the events, don't go alone if you can help it.

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If you're acting as an observer, keep your camera on officers and vehicles, not terrified neighbors. You want badges, logos, license plate, context, not close-ups of kids' faces. Don't physically interfere. Be present in documenting is already significant. Use signal groups or check-ins to report what you're seeing. Assume that anything you post publicly, especially live, can end up in some federal monitoring feed. Afterwards. Get key videos backed up securely or handed to a trusted legal aid group or network coordinator. Don't leave the only copy on your phone. Think hard before posting raw footage that shows people their faces or license plates. Ask whether it helps or whether it paints another target. Debrief with your group. What worked? What didn't?

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What needs to what needs to change for next time? Here's what I hope you walk away with out of this.

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There are already people in places like Minneapolis, San Jose, and LA running IceWatch and Rapid Response Networks. They're not they're not superheroes. They're your neighbors who decided to organize. You can plug into that. Even if you've never thought of yourself as an activist. Hotline shifts, translation, uh tech help, observing rides, child care, visuals, there's a there's a role that fits your skills and your bandwidth. For communication, signal is the right tool here. WhatsApp encryption doesn't cancel out the amount of metadata that Meta collects and can share. If you're trying to stay off of ICE's radar, you want a tool that doesn't build a giant data trail about who's talking to who. And a strong phone lock. Disappearing messages and cleaned up app permissions won't make you invisible, but they do make it a lot harder to casually turn your phone into a surveillance device against you and your neighbors.

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I want to end with why this really matters, especially here and now. When people talk about ICE in these raids, they often frame it as just enforcing the law on illegals. That's not how this is playing out. We've seen legal, permanent residents detained.

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We've seen U.S. citizens held and even deported. We've seen U.S. citizen kids, children sent out of the country with their parents, or sometimes without.

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Those are documented cases, not hypotheticals.

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In Minnesota, we've now watched two people, Renee Good and Alex Pratt, killed by federal agents in less than a month. Both were U.S. citizens. Both leave behind families and communities that that are absolutely shattered. So when I say watch out for your neighbors, I don't just mean some abstract group. I mean the ICU nurse who works nights at the VA and films a raid on his day off. I mean the mom who's already working two jobs and now pulls her kids from school because she's scared to death that federal agents will show up in the damn hallway. I mean the elders who stood outside a mosque in Minneapolis with wind chills brutal enough to hurt your lungs. Just to make sure people could pray without an ice raid crashing through the front door. ICE is able to do what it's doing at this scale because of technology, hacked phones, bought and sold location data, license plate cameras, doorbell feeds, and constant social media scraping. But those tools they cut both ways. We can use signal and phone trees to warn each other. We can use cameras to document abuse instead of just policing porches. We can use neighborhood chats not just to talk about potholes, but to make sure no one has to walk through this alone. If you've been listening to this episode and you're thinking, man, this is huge. I'm just I'm just one person. That's okay. So am I. Start small. Look up a rapid response network. Install Signal and learn your way around it. Ask your your mosque, your church, your union, your PTA what their plan is if ice shows up. When enough of us make those tiny, unglamorous decisions, we don't fix everything, but we do make it harder to quietly disappear people. We slow things down and we shine some light on these atrocities. That's worth your time and it's worth your tech skills. I started with the question: what would you do if ice showed up on your block? My hope is that after this episode, your answer is at least a little clearer. And that it includes watching out for your neighbors instead of looking the other way. If this episode helped, you think differently about what's happening in the Twin Cities or maybe in your own city. Share it with someone who might need to hear this. Visit Tylerwoodward.me. For more information about the podcast, follow at Tylerwoodward.me on Instagram and threads. That's where you'll find me. And please, subscribe and like the show on your favorite podcast platform. That helps this kind of conversation reach more people. At least I hope so. Thanks for listening. Watch out for your neighbors and stay safe out there.