For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a system to report ICE sightings in a more reliable and I finally have something that’s ready for general public consumption. I built this system to solve several problems that I see in the current way sightings are reported and shared:

1. The sightings are reported to individual organizations. These organizations may have the resources to verify and filter these reports, but if someone who is a target of ICE’s illegal kidnappings doesn’t know about a specific one of these organizations, they won’t get the report.
2. I also noticed that the number of ways people can receive these reports is rather limited; being mostly SMS based with maybe a website. @weirdviolet has been doing a good job relaying some to a Signal chat, but even that isn’t a well-rounded solution.
3. The fragmentation of these organizations makes this reporting system especially vulnerable to targeted attacks, without any way to communicate and plan together, and in general be a group.

So I decided to build what is at this point a minimum viable product. It’s based off of Matrix, which is a decentralized chat platform. Matrix would allow for the system to be distributed across servers, staying functional even if an entire server goes offline. It’s fault tolerant, authenticated, and debuggable. “Producers” can add reports, and “consumers” can forward them to basically anywhere. I also have chosen to develop plugins on Maubot to make installing these producers and consumers easier. All of the code I have made is open source. You can also directly join the room I’m using in production here (regular accounts will not be able to send messages). There’s also a full technical write-up on the spec here.

A page for our implementation of the system is available here. Please do check it out. I hope that this blog post will get organizations who can provide reports, or who want to host their own Matrix server, to reach out to me.

There’s still a lot I need to do. Bug fixes, and general QOL stuff for some of the shared Maubot code (which will be coming soon.) But I’m very happy to have reached this point in development. It’s currently nearing 4 A.M. I’m very tired and in the process of completing the WordPress consumer. I accidentally sent some of our newsletter subscribers either 1 or 2 emails, so, sorry about that.

Until next time