The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter.
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.
I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"
Its not just ICE, its clear Trump intent for law enforcement (and not just federal) from even very early on in his first term, where a highlighted priority was terminating then-active federal enforcement actions against state law enforcement agencies for violations of civil rights. Lawless “law enforcement” has been one of the most consistent overt priorities Trump has had.
Yes, but ICE has been fast and loose with the law for a long time so they’re starting without something like the military’s culture about lawful orders, appropriate use of force, etc. As in so many areas, past presidents ignoring the problem left it ready for scaled up abuse.
I think ICE's expansion + their massive legal discretion that goes beyond typical law enforcement is just he perfect place to put thugs. ICE by design is just the spot to have those folks, sadly.
Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)
They are. BIPA is top rate. I looked at the statute, which excludes Illinois state and local government entities, but does not talk of federal bodies. I don't know enough about the supremacy of federal statutes to know how that works, and most discussions note that the statute excludes "the government" which is not totally accurate.
Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle.
Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.
In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
The supreme court has effectively removed all of the possible mechanisms to sue ICE or DHS and hold them accountable, with the sole exception of having the DOJ prosecute them on your behalf, which is of course never going to happen. The only remaining possibility to hold them accountable for crimes appears to be within the states judicial systems- but most are currently setup to not allow this, deferring to the federal mechanisms which only very recently stopped existing.
Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava?
The Netherlands has a law that makes it illegal to cover your face. Officially this is to help the police but its also a great tool against religion. Constitution>god
We now know why people had such weird makeup/facial modification attachments in dystopian sci-fi.
Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.
But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?
It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.
Theres also a bunch of of digital camo, most seem to target IR cameras [1] here's a homebrew version.
> It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.
I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.
Agreed there are definitely a lot of Libertarians and Republicans that definitely object to random use of facial recognition as presented.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.
Beyond this, state law may not supersede federal authority. This will likely go to the Supreme Court before it's actually decided, short of congressional action (unlikely).
I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.
While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.
I'd say it's nice to see that particular demographic at the business end of this 1984 crap since they're usually the ones pushing it but I don't think the rest of them are smart enough to have the "that could be me" reaction.
Also, this app uses photos from a combination of government databases, but there are millions of citizens without photo ID who won't show up in any of them.
My friend (who has an identical twin) was joking about scanning himself into Cameo mode on Sora and making some goofy videos and saying they were his brother.
I think the scientific consensus is that they are NOT unique. I seem to recall there’s something like a one in five million chance of collision. (Recalling from memory so please verify, I recall thinking that in a large city there’s likely to be another person who’s fingerprints could be mistaken for yours)
IIRC, someone was accused and arrested for murder who lived across the country and couldn't have possibly committed the crime based on fingerprint match.
Birth certificates and driver's licenses can be and are routinely faked by everyone from high school students to foreign agents. Faces cannot be faked.
You're making the unreasonable assumption of good faith on the part of the app developers.
It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.
Faces can’t be easily be “faked” in person but they can definitely be misrecognized or recognized correctly against mistagged data. Anything like this needs to be designed with the assumption that errors will be frequent enough that the finding has to be validated before doing something serious.
Seems like this would be to collect faces of what they consider "dissedents" rather than verify citizenship which can be done much more accurately through a mobile fingerprint reader.
Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.
AFAIK only if you are booked into jail, and also for some licenses. For example, a beer and wine license for a restaurant requires fingerprints, at least in my state, not sure how it varies. Probably some types of firearm licenses as well. Not typical driver's licenses though.
Joining a program like NEXUS or Global Entry is the only time I’ve had my fingerprints taken by the govt. When I worked for a couple highly-regulated financial institutions I was fingerprinted as part of a background check but that was done by a private party who (allegedly) was just checking for matches with known criminals.
In half an hour, Gregory Bovino, who heads some ICE operation in Chicago, is supposed to appear before a Federal judge to be questioned on what ICE did to whom today. Let's see if he shows up.
I assume the agents are using their own phones. One of their phones is going to be left in a bar and end up on eBay at some point and then the APK can be extracted at least.
It should be an assigned/signed device with biometric and passcode access configured... At least it was in a couple proposals I helped define for credentialing emergency responders... though the contract definitely went with a different supplier than the one I was working with.
Palantir isn't collecting it, they are storing it and processing it after it has been collected by ICE.
Their defacto scan everyone isn't to determine citizenship, it is to collect the data in the first place. They want to get as much data into their system as possible.
I remember in college my magazine journalism prof surprised me by pointing out that Vogue a bad-ass journalistic enterprise in its own right. That was 35 years ago and it's cool to see they still have it.
A seriously good idea which I can find no prior art for! Also, worth checking out this pro-privacy/anti-surveillance artist/activist - Adam Harvey. His site and his work is a fantastic intro into the anti-surveillance scene. (Check out his DataPools).
Wow this is going downhill fast. I don't have access to the article but I'm assuming this is what Palantir is all about right? Or are we not quite there yet, is this the CBP face scanning they have at border crossings too?
Don’t fall for the lie that this is at all about illegal immigration- that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism operating completely outside the law. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa, while firing all federal immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum claims from brown skinned people.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.
I stopped hearing claims that it was about illegal immigration almost instantly after the debate where he claimed “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It was eerie.
That dehumanizing rhetoric is so weird and surreal, it boggles my mind that it seems to actually work... there was a horrific video on Facebook of the Wilder raid in Idaho, and many people were basically commenting things like "this isn't great, but it's really our only choice because these people are killing so many of us." We're talking just a regular peaceful small farming town where people were out watching a horse race with their families- people that were mostly US citizens of Hispanic descent. Obviously none of them are killing anyone, it's completely absurd.
In Wolfenstein, the main character shot Nazi soldiers. It was made back when we had shared societal values like fascism is bad. Today, such a game would be called a product of tHe rAdIcAl lEfT.
Biden's CBP goons stripped me naked, imprisoned me, ran up an ER bill for which I'm still being chased for by debt collectors, and tranported me by prisoner van all over the state, while they were enforcing Biden's (and now continue with Trump) insane war on drugs. I did not have drugs, I am not involved with drugs.
Of course nothing was found, and the allegation was hearsay by an HSI detective that some unnamed dog alerted to an unnamed officer, neither of which I have any idea what they were even referencing.
Yes, ICE has been a bad actor since the day it was created, which is why "shutdown ICE" has been a thing on the left for a while now. But it's now operating as the private military of Donald Trump and the executive branch on a scale never before seen in America. Its upcoming budget is greater than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. We see videos every day of their gleeful assaults on anyone they like, while their leadership has explicitly stated there will be no repercussions, and that they should be as abusive as they want.
What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later? Osama bin Laden had a fairly specific immediate poltical goal, resisting US military influence in Muslim countries and US support of Israel. His broader goals involved revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim countries of the middle east. None of this was related to Latin American immigration to the US, legal or otherwise.
> What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later?
The centralized security apparatus in the Department of Homeland Security being leverage here exists entirely as a result of the reaction to 9/11.
I wasn't aware that Trump coordinated 9/11 with Bin Laden (through the Saudis?), but at this point it wouldn't really surprise me. (tongue in cheek, of course)
But please let's stop framing recent developments as if they are merely continuations of existing trends. The surveillance state and federal "law" enforcement were definitely out of control well before Trump, and both authoritarian parties share responsibility for that. But it hadn't been being used to launch a frontal assault on domestic civil society. Responsibility for that rests solely on Trump (and his enablers/supporters).
Very much so. There's multiple videos of them standing in Walmart parking lots and as shoppers walk out with their carts, anyone vaguely Hispanic is being questioned. "Where were you born? Are you American?"
Probable cause is out the window. This is, firsthand, Steven Millers White America policy starting to take effect.
I expected a lot more pushback on here for calling this out as terrorism than I got… I took a several month hiatus from this site and before I left it was all “you’re just being hyperbolic, Trump is just going to enforce the immigration laws exactly as written.” It seems that nearly all of those people have rethought their opinions in light of recent events- which I guess/hope bodes well for the chances of our country coming together in a unified way to stand against this.
The unfortunate reality is that lots of those people were agents of propaganda, such as Russian bots. The goal was to get the authoritarian elected and the ball rolling - so they're all gone now.
I took a vacation from this site many years ago because it was clear that the moderators of this site were at the very least complicit in the rise of bad faith user moderation, from both bots and so-called "fellow travelers."
The only thing I can't decide on is if YC let this rot take hold because they were also fellow travelers, or if they made the wrong choice that a good number of failed internet social spaces make in following their own stated guidelines to the exact letter at the expense of all common sense and decency.
Not that it matters much in the end - the end result is what we got.
Seems very plausible but how can we be sure of that? There definitely were two groups, one had thoughtful counterpoints, and also histories of insightful comments on other topics, and could usually be persuaded eventually with some extended discussion. The other group had usually no post history and literally just posted things like “cry harder libtard.”
The latter were probably just bots/scripts but I’ve often thought it hilarious to wonder what their lives are like if they were real people that spent their day responding “cry harder” to genuine concerns over human rights violations and atrocities. Do their partners and family know about it? Do they have some sort of personal narrative that makes them a hero for being like that? Is that just how they relax and blow off steam after, what I can only assume was a long hard day of strangling hookers and shooting puppies?
I saw many people expose shallow, hateful views that had account creation from 2017 and earlier with a comment history to then sort of come out the wood work here and basically say, "mandate, this is what the american people want." There is a large support for DOGE on this site.
It is absolutely insane that the party who tried on the Libertarian mask less than 20 years ago and rode high on a wave of "don't tread on me" individual liberty is now suddenly ok with masked thugs scanning everyone's faces for their master database of enemies of the state.
It makes more sense when you frame it as "party of shameless self interest and racial stratification acts in shameless self interest while racially stratifying". You can draw a straight line back to even before the US civil war of the anti-federalists using their station to undermine the republic and liberties it stands for.
Frankly, I don't think this is a party thing. Our elected officials are mostly party line. There are a few who have actual ideals that they adhere to but the rest of them are weather vanes.
You basically have to be a party loyalist to get campaign funds so, unless you can self fund, you gotta toe the line.
The generous part of me says this is an example of "you become what you hate". The ungenerous part of me says that all their talk about freedom, liberty, state's rights, etc., has always been a lie.
You should go to rumble and watch the Charlie Kirk show. It is a huge stream of jingoistic fallacies, fear and hate mongering and a bald faced usurpation of what it means to be an American. Anyone they that disagrees with them is an unpatriotic unamerican leftist that hates all that is good in the world. Their words.
As a libertarian, I had given Republicans the benefit of the doubt figuring they earnestly wanted freedom, but were just terrible at understanding the details of how their freedom gets taken away. But I still had figured that conservatism actually meant something - trusting institutions / "the system", believing America is a force for good in the world, slow measured change, etc.
But the point we've arrived at, with so many of them complicit in these wanton attacks on our freedoms and our society, it's hard to see that there are any sort of ideals or values behind their party. People are going about their days, getting accosted by unaccountable masked gangs, having their face scanned, then getting sent to a concentration camp when some buggy app claims they aren't a citizen? How can one possibly look at that and think anything but "this could easily happen to me or my family" ?
The only answer I've been able to come up with is that it is straight up racism. They believe they could never possibly be on the pointy end of this fascist dystopia, because they look "American" (ie white), and so would never possibly be scanned in the first place? I earnestly hate this "racism everywhere" chant the Democratic party has fallen into for the past decade. But I'm having a real hard time finding any other explanation, so I'm reluctantly coming around to that. Someone please convince me I am wrong.
I'm coming from the same basic perspective as you describe, and always tried hard to see people in the best light and sympathize with their concerns, but am no longer finding that possible in this situation, and it is disheartening.
The only explanation for the core MAGA supporters that I can come up with is that it is a sort of loose coalition of people that feel disaffected and judged by society for various reasons and want acceptance - and vengeance. It includes many people that are, e.g. sociopaths and racists, and want someone to tell them that being like that isn't bad, it's actually "protecting American from inferior people" or some such thing.
There is just no way that people don't realize that Trump is a malignant narcissist that lies every time he speaks, and tries to sadistically harm anyone that doesn't support him. The only explanation is that people don't like him despite that, but because of it- him being so awful, and proudly like that with no hint of remorse, absolves them of the lifelong guilt and fear that they might be bad people also, and instead frees them to also be proudly like that themselves.
Recently I've been reading a book about the history of the Jim Crow era in the south, and the extremely widespread brutal terrorism and mass murder, and I can't really reach any other conclusion than that those people just laid low for a while while they regrouped and strategized, but they're just as prevalent, violent, and racist now as they ever were, and they're done hiding. They see the Confederate/Nazi/Fascist dream of a totalitarian white ethnostate in their grasp, and they are ready to make it happen - they aren't ashamed for wanting that, and they aren't afraid anymore.
I get that this is a really dark view of current events, and I really hope it is not true, but at this point, I think it is delusional to pretend that it's anything but the most likely explanation and prepare accordingly.
The GOP uses fear and hate to spread their message and scare people into voting for them. The flavor they use changes, but the fear and hate are always there.
You can expect the party to vote along party lines. The real funny one here is all the Rogan libertarians who made a conscious choice to vote for this.
It's not insane when you recognize the animus behind both is white nationalism and racism. Tea Party was a response to Obama being President, not so much the taxes as they claim.
You’re right in general but it has been striking to see how much the current Republican response has flipped from what we heard for years after the Elian Gonzalez case, where Giuliani described the BORTAC agents as “storm troopers” and the outage is credited with flipping Florida for Bush in 2000.
> that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism
This sounds like some nonsense white people say to defend their own choices and exclusive clubs. Black Americans have always been under this level of surveillance, and you couldn't pry stop-and-frisk from Democrats. They love it. I've had guns drawn on me for walking down the street at least four times in my life, and at least fifteen times have been searched while multiple cop cars pulled in to surround me. Once, in Arkansas, they all pulled in around me while I was walking down the street with white friends, and their harassment of me was so drawn out and boring that my white friends just left. The cops didn't even look over at them while they left; they weren't interesting.
They don't remember when they were calling Giuliani America's mayor; I do, and I remember it was because he was mean to black people. They don't remember Laquan MacDonald; I do, and I see how that wasn't career ending.
So what you mean is that they're harassing people who are obviously immigrants (or at least English is obviously their second language), and trying to find out if they're legal immigrants. If you mean that, just say it and stop bringing black people into it. The KKK isn't about them. It would be nice if everyone would stop characterizing their problems as them being like black people's problems. They just got here, they're nothing like us. America doesn't even think it owes us anything for centuries of birth to death slavery, it certainly doesn't owe them anything. They don't even like us, they're statistically more racist than the natives (who also don't like us.) They only want to be us when they think they can get something out of it.
Here's the question: pretend that a majority of people want illegal immigrants (not just criminal illegal immigrants, like Trump propaganda makes them all out to be) deported, and that majorities consistently say that in polls, and that they voted for a presidential candidate who has always clearly advocated for that.
How exactly can they do it if every Democratic-run state and city refuses to comply? How can the democratic will of citizens be carried out? If we're not going to do democracy anymore, do we have a country at all? What benefit is there to citizenship? An illegal immigrant erases their past, how can a citizen do the same? Why can't citizens drive, work, get loans from banks, or even in extreme cases vote and hold office without identifying themselves?
If you're going to answer all these questions with "Screw you!" do you see how you're ushering in a police state with popular support? How it's inevitable? And they'll just take off and go home, while we have to live in it because we don't have anywhere else to go.
Western elites are stupider than they have ever been. They're just going to usher in nativist demagogues who will administer the totalitarian states they've built, and suffer no consequences. They'll be richer than they ever were, and having stupid taste arguments about their consumption while what they've ushered in is immiserating the vast majority of people. Feudalism is coming, and the landlords and their children are cosplaying as workers.
“How exactly can they do it if every Democratic-run state and city refuses to comply? How can the democratic will of citizens be carried out?”
If a candidate makes campaign promises that do not work in the framework of our constitution or civil rights that is the candidates problem to figure out, you don’t get to throw away those things because your side won and they make your job hard, that is not how this is supposed to work.
What I wrote isn’t about democrats vs republicans- it’s about calling out terrorism from white supremacists for what it is- the fact that plenty of democrats are also extremely racist does not change what is actually happening here. They are not selective in only targeting black people- they have expanded that to include middle eastern, hispanic, and LGTBQ people simply because more of them are now visible in this country, with no reduction in their hatred and targeting of black people. We’re talking about the same groups of people doing the same things, now with a BUFF and a tactical vest instead of a white hood. Trump was raised in a KKK household, his dad was arrested at a KKK rally, and both he and his dad were sued and lost for racial discrimination in housing against black people and then ignored the rulings and continued the discrimination. He launched his political career by stoking hatred for a black president. His core supporters are a group of people that never accepted that they lost the civil war, and have been able to continually derail the reconstruction and the civil rights movement to this day. They are putting back up confederate pro slavery statues, and flying confederate flags. The KKK itself is mostly organizationally defunct, but these people are not simply “like the KKK,” they are literally the same people. However, for the first time in US history, they now have essentially complete control over the federal government.
What's ironic about it? That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench. They're doing things unto others that they would not have done unto them.
> That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench.
ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement.
Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
It’s ironic that it’s brave to uncover your face, it’s brave to verify your identity, but these officers’ policy actively avoids the brave choice. Then, we’re supposed to accept that they’re operating in war zones like Portland.
Absolutely. But they are trying very hard to not throw all brown people with an accent into detention centers as Joe and Erik would have done. This very, very scary tech is exactly what is necessary to catch the right people with a minimum of inconviense for the wrong ones and without wasting exorbitant resources.
> But they are trying very hard to not throw all brown people with an accent into detention centers
Are you sure about that? There's quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, starting with the really high false-positive[0][1[[2][3][4][5] rates of facial recognition, especially among people of color.
In fact, as the studies linked below show, people of color are misidentified (i.e., false positive) more than 1/3 of the time. That's not nearly accurate enough to round folks up if 10 of every 30 arrested, detained and potentially deported actually aren't the folks you're looking for.
People voted for a bait and switch. Nobody wanted to destroy the rule of law. Nobody wants corruption (except the corrupt). The farmers didn’t vote for a trade war destroying their livelihoods. I don’t think people wanted a militarized force accountable to no one attacking their own communities.
If we give them room to say “this isn’t what wanted” we give them room to say “next time I want something different.”
The only way to preserve democracy is to preserve our ability to say “regardless of how the last election went, I want something different next time”
There was no "bait and switch." Nothing Trump is doing now should be a surprise to anyone who paid attention to him or the Trumpist movement over the last decade.
>If we give them room to say “this isn’t what wanted” we give them room to say “next time I want something different.”
The problem is, this is exactly what many of them wanted, and now they're just trying to cover their ass because the revolution didn't work out the way they expected.
>The problem is, this is exactly what many of them wanted, and now they're just trying to cover their ass because the revolution didn't work out the way they expected.
That's as may be, but if you give these folks the room to act differently next time, at least some of them will. Which might well be enough to turn the tide in the next elections.
As such, writing off everyone who didn't support exactly what you support as a racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbag who should be put down isn't the best strategy.
I'm incensed by what's been going on and I never supported Trump or his (now) hangers on. That said, I'm sure that you and I disagree about a bunch of things. Does that make me an unredeemably evil human being?
In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree about much more than they disagree. Your "othering" of folks is just as bad as those who "other" folks who believe what you do.
No. This isn't a "both sides" argument. Rather it's a "your fellow Americans are humans too and mostly want the same things. Why don't we agree on those things and work to come to amicable resolutions where possible?" kind of argument.
>As such, writing off everyone who didn't support exactly what you support as a racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbag who should be put down isn't the best strategy.
I never did any such thing. I don't believe anyone should be put down for their beliefs, I'm not like them.
A lot of them are racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbags. That isn't even controversial, a lot of them will admit it openly.
>I'm incensed by what's been going on and I never supported Trump or his (now) hangers on. That said, I'm sure that you and I disagree about a bunch of things. Does that make me an unredeemably evil human being?
I never said anyone was an unredeemably evil human being. I just have no interest in their redemption.
>In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree about much more than they disagree. Your "othering" of folks is just as bad as those who "other" folks who believe what you do.
I'm not "othering" anyone, I'm expressing skepticism about the motivations behind the stated regrets of some Trump supporters and the narrative that they "never voted for this."
>Rather it's a "your fellow Americans are humans too and mostly want the same things. Why don't we agree on those things and work to come to amicable resolutions where possible?" kind of argument.
Because many of my fellow Americans want masked, armed troops in the streets kidnapping brown people. They want the government to police "degenerate" art and erase "woke" ideology. They want to send trans kids to mandatory conversion camps. They want to normalize Christian nationalism and fascism. They want to tear down science and medicine and replace it with conspiracy theories and nonsense.
If I'm not talking about you, I'm not talking about you. But I am talking about a lot of people.
If Trump supporters want to reconsider supporting him and his agenda, great. It's a little late, but I guess late is better than never. I'm not stopping them from acting differently, I'm just a guy trying to survive here. No one is stopping them. I don't need to "make room" for them - they're the most politically and culturally powerful demographic in existence. If they want something different next time - assuming there is a next time, they can just vote for it. They believe in the will to power don't they?
But I'm under no obligation to forgive and forget when the brownshirts are in the streets.
> The irony of doing this while covering their own faces
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy
as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things
they are doing to people were never meant to be
equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent
to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t
just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or
an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself
the thing you’re able to deny others, because
you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue—the greatest.
Or, put more succinctly, Wilhoit’s Law (which is framed as about “conservatism” rather than “fascism”, but the latter can be viewed as, within the context of the description, a complex of ideas which includes the former as its central element):
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
While pithy, public intellectual/academic conservatives like David Frum and Tom Nichols would disagree, and say the rule of law should apply equally to everyone.
Frum (IIRC, though it may have been Applebaum) wrote articles years ago that the direction of the GOP was going was similar to that of Hungary: using public office to enrich family and friends and not prosecute the same when they broke the law. There have been numerous conservatives aghast at what the GOP was becoming / has now become, and were ringing the alarm for years.
This. There's exactly nothing conservative about MAGA. Quite the opposite, it's overtly and proudly radical and extremist, and views actual conservative values with as much contempt as it views actual liberal values.
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
This is from David Frum, a conservative himself:
> Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
Even leftist Latin American politicians use ample doses of hypocrisy. They demonize the rich, and promote austerity, while them, their family, and friends/conspirators enjoy a subsidized life of luxuries.
Not all of them are fascists, or conservatives, but they're world-class hypocrites.
That conservatism (including fascism) foundationally rests on something that involves explicitly unequal standards does not mean that every hypocrite is a conservative, correct. (p implies q) does not imply (q iimplies p).
Also, though, a lot of groups with some degree of leftist rhetoric are substantially right-wing hierarchy-promoting groups (even promoting fascist-style leader-centric structures) that are simply trying to replace one heirarchy with another rather than eliminate hierarchy, a tradition of deceptive rhetorical positioning which has included fascists as far back as the early days of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
They're covering their faces due to the left wing terrorism that has targeted ICE agents and facilities. If you were concerned that terrorists would show up at your house and harm you and possibly your children (for having the nerve to do the will of the American people), you'd probably mask up, too.
You know this, of course. It's pretty sick to pretend that ICE agents' fear of left wing terrorism is actually somehow evidence of their malevolence. But non-tech threads on HN are just reddit-tier, low-effort prog slop now, so it's sadly not surprising.
The evidence of their malevolence goes far behind face coverings (which let's face it, is probably to avoid embarrassment in their community the next time they teargas a children's Halloween parade).
That's fine, as long as they aren't making anyone remove face coverings. People are allowed to cover their faces in public places. And we can't tell from this biased article whether they had probable cause to stop anyone that they did.
What they have said previously is that they consider someone looking hispanic as probable cause. I don't see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I am struggling a bit personally with how to grapple with the fact that the career I have chosen has ended up bolstering all the horrible inclinations of those in power. I think we need some kind of tech workers collective and some version of the hippocratic oath to start pushing back against this bullshit.
I think a lot of tech needs to go through that struggle.
From the perspective of a long career in infosec, what’s occurring now was enabled a longtime ago by broad-based industry consensus. Concerns then, which == awful stuff occurring now, were robustly dismissed by many many many devs with s/strong viewpoints/paychecks.
The only silver lining I can see is we’re taking our medicine now, but there’s a lot more to go through still, on the back of many significant tech capabilities.
For example, Flock was kept out of many cities, but Amazon was not, Flock just signed a data sharing deal with Ring. That’s a no-nonsense, nationwide, warrantless vehicular and pedestrian tracking network mechanism.
Not great, Bob! But RSUs for building it all sure was great.
It's true now as in the past. Technology or science aren't inherently good or bad, just a matter of how you use it. Personally I enjoyed much more working on medical devices at a university than typical commercial software, simply because there's an ethical component to that software that was quite fulfilling.
How certain are we that the photos being taken are going to a Palantir database?
Asking because the FBI has been assembling biometrics databases since the mid-20th century and providing access to other law enforcement agencies since the 1990s.
I wonder if this is a portend to an American social credit score, like where China uses facial recognition to identify criminals at concerts[1], and jaywalkers, etc. which severely impacts a person's ability to get a job, housing, etc.
I can't help but assume this is already being used at retail establishments, but now it could be tied into law enforcement databases, and .. communicate..
I think the post's argument is that we are on the way to something akin to China's social credit system (but not there yet).
> What we have aren't unified social credit systems…yet. They're fragmented behavioral scoring networks that don't directly communicate. Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems. The question isn't whether we have Chinese-style social credit now (because we don't). The question is whether we're building toward it without acknowledging what we're creating.
Those systems depend on enforcement. If a private system keeps score and gate keeps you usually have alternatives (utilities excluded), if it’s the gov and they decide to enforce it, then things get dire…
But what if Target security cooperates with the government, and they share capabilities, so that a facial recognition inside of a Target location would notify law enforcement who also has an interest in that person? In such a scenario.. Target would freely give its data but not necessarily acting an agent of the government.
People need to work to reverse the Bush and Obama initiated and then continued practice (setting precedent) of bypassing direct surveillance by buying data from data brokers. The Biden and Trump admins just continue this practice. That’s where people need to reverse the practice. I mean you had the FBI and probably others wiretapping Congress folks so… it’s like they don’t care.
Or we need to focus on making data brokers illegal, period. Taking a page from the GDPR would be a good start. As long as the surveillance databases continue to exist, they will be juicy targets for anyone attracted to the power. And not just for the de jure government, but also plenty of "private" businesses that adopt them nearly in lockstep. If you get blackballed in the one used by say Target, it's not like Walmart is going to make it a point of competition to serve the small fraction of people who would be good customers but for getting tripped up by Target. Rather they will all use the same databases, shutting you off from most commerce. That's effectively creating a de facto government, independent of any de jure government adoption.
"American" "social" credit scores were instituted long ago. Distracting from this was the whole reason the media added the word "social" to the term - to other the idea as something that happens over there, never here.
That was the carrot. This new development is the stick.
Can you go into any detail on what technologies you used? Is there enough differentiating data in their attire to actually match agents? None of them are showing their faces so I wonder how many false positives would occur
I'm using a YOLO-WORLD-XL object detection model. Lets me detect objects using text. This is the initial filter that scans for agents - once those are detected and outlined with bounding boxes the entire image and each cropped bounding box are then sent to chatgpt to confirm if the image looks legit. Once image passes those checks - I create image embeddings of each agent using CLIP and those are stored in a vector DB, and each agent is then compared to the DB and matched.
The matching system isn't perfect - but I think good enough to get the point across and can be easily tuned with more data! Happy to take suggestions here - I just spun this up over the weekend
Ignore them? Operate outside of US reach. The tubes are global.
EDIT: Legally, you have no right to privacy in public, if your photo is captured in public (US centric), broadly speaking. You have the right to record law enforcement officers exercising their official duties in public.
So avoid being subject to the US jurisdiction, if applicable. Do not store data or operate the system from within the US, or any country within US reach.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
I wonder why people downvote. Many western countries now couldn't be more obviously fascist. State responsibilities are being offloaded to multinational corporations, de facto private policing is around the corner, surveillance (digital ID tracking your movements and what you talk about, chat controls and whatnot). It's creeping in and people pretend it's not happening.
I’ve gone from thinking people are oblivious to thinking that people are willing to sacrifice a lot (democracy, individual liberties, food safety, etc.) out of fear, selfishness, and greed. It is surprising with the HN crowd though given how much less innovation and entrepreneurship there is under fascism.
Because "The rest aren't doing enough to push it back out" is the same old, tired victim blaming that comes up every time anyone points out that one American political party seems to have different policies and priorities than the other.
I mean they are flashbanging houses, teargassing residential neighborhoods, dragging parents away from their screaming children outside of elementary schools, shooting people, all in chicago right now. The things you mention were serious problems we needed to address 5, 10, 20 years ago. We did not and now we have a very different problem to solve. We will still have to address those things but we have to deal with this first.
When I saw them do iris scanning during Iraq War I instantly knew that was coming to US police sooner or later, I guess this is the new easier method
The crazy thing is though these people don't even have an identifying badge number and their license plates are often fake, zero repercussions for anything and they know it
Imagine by 2028 what's going down if this is still the first year
My understanding is that the only thing keeping this from happening is that the data is far more valuable for traffic monitoring than law enforcement. As a trivial example, these cameras can already determine is a vehicle is speeding based on its number plate sightings between any two cameras. They can hence start issuing tickets, no radar or police needed.
However, they've not gone down this path because they are (rightfully) concerned that there would be an instantaneous and severe backlash that could lead to those cameras being banned entirely, which would cripple traffic control.
And you do have the right to contest the ticket in court, before a judge.
Unless you have the free time, and some evidence that doesn't involve the fringe around the courtroom's flag, you're probably better off just paying the ticket.
If only it was this bad. REAL ID only proves you were at one point allowed to be here. It doesn't prove you're allowed to be here right now (which can change arbitrarily and at any time apparently)
The state should avoid giving a REAL ID to anyine who isn't at least a permanent resident of the US (and the distinction between cirizen and non-citizen IDs should be very obvious). A lot of illegal immigrants are people who legally entered the US on a temporary visa, and overstayed; and it would be good if basically every American bureaucracy was quickly, consistently, and legibly checking for that status.
Instead, the situation we have now is that many bureaucracies deliberately avoid making any citizenship or legal residency distinction on official documents because the polticians who determine the rules for those bureaucracies think immigration enforcement is immoral and want to make it easier for illegal immigrants to access American bureaucracies and harder for other bureaucracies controlled by less immigration-friendly polticians to detect illegal immigrants.
> The state should avoid giving a REAL ID to anyine who isn't at least a permanent resident of the US
REAL ID or certain alternative federal ID is required to enter federal buildings and domestic flights. The only immigrants who are issued federal ID that is usable in place of real ID are permanent residents. Ergo, your plan would have states effectively ban legally-present non-citizens who are not permanent residents from federal buildings and domestic flights. This is a bad idea; and, absent a specific federal mandate, probably unconstitutional for states to do.
States could, as some do, issue restricted term REAL IDs to aliens who are not permanent residents, but REAL ID isn’t intended as proof-of-status but an identity document, so while that's doable, it doesn't seem to be particularly necessary.
(Yes, foreign passports are also permissible “federal ID” in place of REAL ID, but there are legally present aliens who may not have passports—particularly refugees—and who are also not issued federal ID by the US government because, except for permanent resident aliens, the US has generally declined to have national ID and given ID functions to the state; REAL ID nationalized standards for some uses instead of nationalizing the ID itself.)
I'm not sure what documents you think entail getting a REAL ID but they are typically proof of permanent residence, such as US passport, birth certificate, or green card. Its requirements are actually stricter than what entails getting a passport, because you also have to prove you actually live in the state you're applying in.
As for the rest of your post, I don't really know what you're babbling about has to do with what I wrote.
I checked the State of California website for REAL ID eligibility before I wrote my above comment, and it confirms that people with temporary legal immigration status are eligible for REAL ID cards, specifically mentioning DACA recipients as an example of a category of people who are eligible. This is exactly the sort of thing I think should not be allowed by the federal framework governing REAL IDs, non-permanent residents should not be able to get a REAL ID at all under any circumstances and the one for permanent residents should look obviously distinct from those for citizens. The point of this is to make it extremely obvious that a REAL ID holder is definitely a legal citizen, and therefore make it actually useful for proving citizenship or legal permanent residency.
You're effectively saying non-permanent residents should be prohibited from using commercial flight to move around the giant country that is the US. I'm not sure if that's your intention.
I've personally flown domestic commercial flights in at least two foreign countries (China and Mexico), that I have no legal permanent residency in, using the same American passport I used as ID to enter these countries to begin with; and there was no issue. I don't even know what the Chinese or Mexican equivalent of a REAL ID might be like. I'm sure the US could create a similar legal ID framework for domestic air travel.
California is an outlier here. I am a permanent resident in Washington and Washington will only issue REAL ID-compliant Enhanced Drivers Licenses to US citizens, not to LPRs.
Maybe it is, I don't know the rules as they exist in every state - but that's also a problematic aspect of the REAL ID system: because the rules vary somewhat from state to state, authorities in one state who are used to one system for who can be legitimately given a REAL ID might make bad assumptions about someone from another state with different rules. And in any case, California is the most populous state by far, so even if it's an outlier, that still affects a huge percentage of the entire US population.
We really should have one, federally issued ID system, that works uniformally everywhere in the country for demonstrating citizenship and legal permanent residency, and that no other category of person can be able to legitimately obtain.
Washington is one of a handful of states (all bordering Canada) that offer enhanced driver's licenses, which are by definition meant to prove US citizenship so you can use it to travel back to the US from Canada.
Could we please not criticize the administration on Hacker News? Hacker News is not the place for ideological criticism of the surveillance state. Hacker News is meant to be a safe space for the hacker ethos of maximizing money, and this administration has been good for Silicon Valley, as judged by our leaders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen.
Regarding the specific issue of using facial recognition apps to identify criminals, and using those apps as justification for detention/arrest - has this ever been challenged in court? I know there's caselaw that supports using cameras in public, but I'm wondering about the apps that are used to "recognize", and then the decision to detain/arrest based on those apps. If I'm a lawyer challenging this, I wanna see the source code for the app; I want verification that the app is working as it's intended, the false positive/negative rate, and that there's no way for someone to "put their thumb on the scale" to get a desired outcome, etc. I'm also gonna want access to the phone that was used to take the picture(s).
The funny thing is these heavy handed tactics don’t scale. ICE’s own statistics show that deportations are down from the Biden Administration’s numbers last year. So what’s the point? To scare people? To set a precedent? To normalize civil rights abuses? Any right-leaning people who support this should understand that it could easily be used against them.
Life in the US is turning like one of its sci-fi movies. Now it's playing the first half where the bad suppress the good, before the reverse will happen for a happy ending.
By saying such I might come up as part of The Resistance in the future, like German people that resisted the Nazis are considered heroes after the war.
They would call and say what? "Go home you crazy weaponized narcissist, you're drunk on power and delusions of techo authoritarianism." If you're challenging someone who can hurt you, you should not approach until you are highly confident you are going to win, whatever that looks like.
I hope the folks mentioned are, and continue to remain, somewhere safe while this plays out.
More like they'd come out publicly against what Thiel and Palantir are doing, given that they are members of, and colleagues within, the same communities of moneyed tech leadership.
Bovino says they do profile people on how they look:
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
Absolutely. I'm a legal immigrant, but delays in processing and other things when I had to adjust status after divorcing from my US citizen wife (I moved here on a K-1 fiance visa) had me involving an immigration attorney, who made the comment, "I hate saying this, but it's true. You're the right color, and with where you're coming from (Australia), nobody cares about checking up on you."
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
I can't help but blame this on the performative lack of cooperation of every Democratic Party run city and state on illegal immigration (but mostly, the wealthy constituency that supports it.) I wish I could blame the administration actually doing it, but the fact is that both parties would happily usher in this level of surveillance, and Democrats are handing Republicans an excuse to do it over a nonsense issue that didn't exist for them before they were wielding it against Trump during his first term.
If anything, this is a cooperation between the two most powerful and destructive political parties on the planet to turn the US into a police state trying to conquer the planet.
There is no right for illegal immigrants to stay in the US, it hurts working people, and the rights that are being claimed by illegal immigrants are real but purely being used in a dilatory manner. The problem has also been exacerbated in a predictable manner by bipartisan attacks on their home countries, followed by legal encouragement for them to come here.
Right now, Trump is driving more Venezuelans to the US while pretending that he's trying to keep them away, by keeping the US acting as a thief in Venezuela. War for theft. They'll be here just in time for the Democrats to throw the doors open again, we'll have all the cheap, leverage-less labor back, and now facial recognition cameras everywhere. Bipartisanship!
Huge numbers of Venezuelans would want to leave Venezuela and immigrate to the US if they legally could, regardless of anything Trump does or doesn't do, because the US is a much richer and better-run country than Venezuela is. Working illegally for poor wages in the US is a better deal for many people than physically being in Venezuela. There's also nothing special about Venezuela in this respect, much of the world is so much poorer and badly run than the US that many people from many different places would prefer to live in the US compared to their own countries.
'Katz v. United States' was quite clear - you have no expectation of privacy in public. Anyone may photograph you and use said photos. Do I like it? No. But that is the current caselaw in USA.
"What a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." - Justice Potter in 'Katz v. United States'
Frustratingly, the BIPA might exclude these offensive actions. It was really designed to protect customers from bad businesses. This sort of action probably didn't factor into it.
Katz jut said "what a person knowingly exposes to the public" IIRC. We'd need a new SCOTUS case to clarify whether data derived from physical features that can be used to identify you still counts as such
All, I recommend you familiarize yourself with relevant state laws regarding your protections when assisting folks that are in immediate danger, e.g.:
https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_161.200
I'm not a lawyer. So, if you have counsel on retainer and can stomach the bill, get clarity there first. But know that many states have such protections on the books.
The veil of immunity for DHS agents may soon be pierced. Apathy and ignorance are no longer acceptable for this situation.
You can be arrested and charged with a federal criminal law, 18 USC 111 "assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees." The judge wont entertain your arguments about state law.
Fines and up to 8 years in a federal prison, 20 years if you use a deadly or dangerous weapon or actually inflict injury. You can get up to 15% off for good behavior, there is no parole.
One on hand, I'd really love to punch a neo-nazi to interrupt them disappearing people to concentration camps. On the other, ooooh scary federal charges.
lovely ideas that no longer work in america given that SCOTUS is now a branch of a political party so all the suing leads to nothing but time-wasting unfortunately
I am not a lawyer, but might it be possible to do entirely within a state using state law, in a way that fundamentally cannot be escalated to the supreme court because it does not involve federal law in any way? I expect this might require some changes to state laws to make it possible in the first place.
> I am not a lawyer, but might it be possible to do entirely within a state using state law, in a way that fundamentally cannot be escalated to the supreme court because it does not involve federal law in any way?
No, any arrests of federal agents notionally doing what they are assigned by the federal government will have an easy route for the federal government to raise justiciable questions of federal law regarding state interference with exercise of federal powers. The feds may not always have a good case—they won't always win in a fair court—but it's hard to imagine them not being able to actually get in the door with a federal court in that basis.
OTOH, when you have armed agents of the state attempting to forcibly arrest armed federal agents, you also have a very real risk of creating the kind of conflict that is resolved kinetically—and in a way that rapidly speaks out of control in scale—rather than in court.
Sort of. You have to look up if your state has "necessity/choice-of-evils” defense and the standard defense-of-others rule - and what scopes it has.
I'll tell you this much, most judges will regard a circumstance for you to exert force against a peace officer - seeming or actual - as an extralegal action, and will very rarely affirm it as a protected action from the books. And even if you beat such a case, it ruins your life in the process. Their qualified immunity will remain longer than you can remain solvent.
I asked a similar question elsewhere, but in states like Texas you can have a jury trial for just about any offense. Could federal charges go before a grand jury allowing nullification to be an option?
If you want to take a bet that enough of your peers have varying degrees of distrust in police AND that they are aware of jury nullification in procedure or in principle, sure.
Do people think they are clever and can have defacto open borders? Maybe stop the goon squads and enforce at the employer level though it would probably work too well…
Most of these people have SSNs and work permits. We let them in and let them work legally and now have suddenly changed our collective mind and are violently letting them know. It's absurd.
Actually there are at least ten million with no legal standing in the country at all. Did you actually just claim everyone in the country is here legally?
The poster did not say everyone in the country is here, you're putting words in their mouth. Presumably in bad faith.
Even non-citizens are entitled to due process and the 4th amendment. ICE is violating that left and right, citizens and legal residents included. Fuck ICE.
Minors do, in fact, have biometrics. Identification with them may be less reliable for some kinds of biometrics, but... reliability isn’t a hallmark of the current regimes “immigration enforcement” mechanisms.
> They are not obligated to have any sort of ID, especially citizens.
This is also true of adults, who are not obligated to have or carry ID if they are citizens (immigrants, both minors and adults, are a different story, are required to have ID, and are required to have biometrics taken unless they are under 14.)
Obviously, it can’t rule out citizens (though it could compare to databases available to the feds, which I would assume state ID databases are), since not all citizens will have biometrics of any kind, or even ID photos on file, but if they have presumed that the targets are immigrants, then scanning can be used to compare to records of documented immigrants, reinforcing (note I do not say justiying) the conclusion tha they are illegally present if it fails to match.
They can also be used to build intelligence databases of contacts even if not used to support immediate detention.
> Also, what in the fuck would CBP be doing in Chicago?
CBP, and more specifically Border Patrol, the main enforcement agency within CBP, is everywhere the Administration’s immhration crackdown is beig executed, and much of the most violent “immigration enforcement” attributed to “ICE” is actually Border Patrol, not ICE.
No, this entire encounter is illegal. It is a crime, being committed by the republican administration running the federal government and endorsed by every republican in congress who has declined to reign in the illegal behavior of the trump administration.
It is, however, very real. If you reside in American, then this is the reality you live in, imposed upon you by republican voters. You don't get to just plug your ears and cover your eyes.
What are you talking about? CBP has been in Illinois for weeks. Greg Bovino, their commander, has been hauled before a judge this week to testify about how CBP (and he, personally) have violated the judge's TRO against unjustified use of tear gas [0].
This is very basic factual stuff that's in the news every day. How do you not know this is going on?
https://archive.is/UReW9
The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter.
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.
I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"
I think ICE is in fact setup / groomed to be ... lawless. Just thugs for the federal government.
Its not just ICE, its clear Trump intent for law enforcement (and not just federal) from even very early on in his first term, where a highlighted priority was terminating then-active federal enforcement actions against state law enforcement agencies for violations of civil rights. Lawless “law enforcement” has been one of the most consistent overt priorities Trump has had.
Yes, but ICE has been fast and loose with the law for a long time so they’re starting without something like the military’s culture about lawful orders, appropriate use of force, etc. As in so many areas, past presidents ignoring the problem left it ready for scaled up abuse.
I think ICE's expansion + their massive legal discretion that goes beyond typical law enforcement is just he perfect place to put thugs. ICE by design is just the spot to have those folks, sadly.
Also they operate in the constitution free zone of 100 miles from a border.
Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)
They are. BIPA is top rate. I looked at the statute, which excludes Illinois state and local government entities, but does not talk of federal bodies. I don't know enough about the supremacy of federal statutes to know how that works, and most discussions note that the statute excludes "the government" which is not totally accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...
Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle.
Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.
In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
The supreme court has effectively removed all of the possible mechanisms to sue ICE or DHS and hold them accountable, with the sole exception of having the DOJ prosecute them on your behalf, which is of course never going to happen. The only remaining possibility to hold them accountable for crimes appears to be within the states judicial systems- but most are currently setup to not allow this, deferring to the federal mechanisms which only very recently stopped existing.
This Vox article and the podcast with the same name does a good job of explaining how it is now effectively impossible to hold ICE accountable to the law: https://www.vox.com/politics/464962/supreme-court-ice-no-law
Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava?
New norms go both ways.
The people who like mass surveillance also like laws against public face covering.
The Netherlands has a law that makes it illegal to cover your face. Officially this is to help the police but its also a great tool against religion. Constitution>god
We now know why people had such weird makeup/facial modification attachments in dystopian sci-fi.
Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.
But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?
It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore. Theres also a bunch of of digital camo, most seem to target IR cameras [1] here's a homebrew version.
[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
[1] https://www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie
> It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.
I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.
That makes sense, the CV dazzle styles for designed for a specific algorithm that went out of use around a decade ago.
There have been some updated styles for CNN based models, but never tried them, the originals did work back in the day
Totally forgot this gem [0].
Done hide. Overwhelm.
[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/hyperface/
Agreed there are definitely a lot of Libertarians and Republicans that definitely object to random use of facial recognition as presented.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.
Libertarians and 90s republican are about as politically impotent as the democrats these days.
The Hannity and Infowars fans will be written off as crazy when no longer useful.
I'm assuming the joke is that what remains of them seem to be entirely on board with this.
Beyond this, state law may not supersede federal authority. This will likely go to the Supreme Court before it's actually decided, short of congressional action (unlikely).
I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.
While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.
Why would you believe any clarifying statements they'd give?
They'd just tell you they are only going after pedo-terrorists.
What are we going to do? Call them liars? They don't care.
I'm somewhat morbidly curious how many citizens we're going to deport to random countries. It happened fairly often before this administration.
Cops be cops: https://denverite.com/2025/10/27/bow-mar-flock-cameras-accus...
In that case it's Bow Mar, a small town in Colorado, relying on flock cameras to issue tickets for petty theft.
We as a society just aren't capable of using these toys right.
I'd say it's nice to see that particular demographic at the business end of this 1984 crap since they're usually the ones pushing it but I don't think the rest of them are smart enough to have the "that could be me" reaction.
Lots of lawsuits forthcoming. Who’s going to pay for them? We are.
At this point, the US is a failed democracy and a facist state. I would definitely advice people from other countries to leave ASAP.
The facist American government is even sending their dissident citizens to detention camps in Africa .
Good luck to Americans that cannot go somewhere else.
People can look identical, that's the reason we started using finger prints. Faces are not unique.
Also, this app uses photos from a combination of government databases, but there are millions of citizens without photo ID who won't show up in any of them.
Social media datasets are likely in use.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202509/ice-awards-clearview-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
My friend (who has an identical twin) was joking about scanning himself into Cameo mode on Sora and making some goofy videos and saying they were his brother.
There is no scientific proof that fingerprints are unique, either. Like a lot of forensic science, it's just accepted wisdom.
I think the scientific consensus is that they are NOT unique. I seem to recall there’s something like a one in five million chance of collision. (Recalling from memory so please verify, I recall thinking that in a large city there’s likely to be another person who’s fingerprints could be mistaken for yours)
IIRC, someone was accused and arrested for murder who lived across the country and couldn't have possibly committed the crime based on fingerprint match.
> the person is an alien
The dehumanizing language is absolutely disgusting and it's use is an important milestone towards genocide.
Alien has been the legal term since the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
This particular word has been in official use for ages. I agree that it's disgusting.
> This is completely lawless.
They don't give a **.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-rule-of-law-i...
Birth certificates and driver's licenses can be and are routinely faked by everyone from high school students to foreign agents. Faces cannot be faked.
You're making the unreasonable assumption of good faith on the part of the app developers.
It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.
Faces can’t be easily be “faked” in person but they can definitely be misrecognized or recognized correctly against mistagged data. Anything like this needs to be designed with the assumption that errors will be frequent enough that the finding has to be validated before doing something serious.
Seems like this would be to collect faces of what they consider "dissedents" rather than verify citizenship which can be done much more accurately through a mobile fingerprint reader.
Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.
Fingerprint is individual surveillance, face scanning is mass surveillance. I'd expect governments to always favour the latter if given the choice.
When are citizens’ fingerprints normally put on file, in the US? Or, for that matter, noncitizens who entered irregularly?
Anyone going thru the process of getting licensed as a stockbroker is fingerprinted (Series 63, 7 test)
Its possible that insurance broker license is the same. Same for pharmacist.
I think a lot of US trades have fingerprinting as requisite, particularly if they require a background check.
AFAIK only if you are booked into jail, and also for some licenses. For example, a beer and wine license for a restaurant requires fingerprints, at least in my state, not sure how it varies. Probably some types of firearm licenses as well. Not typical driver's licenses though.
Joining a program like NEXUS or Global Entry is the only time I’ve had my fingerprints taken by the govt. When I worked for a couple highly-regulated financial institutions I was fingerprinted as part of a background check but that was done by a private party who (allegedly) was just checking for matches with known criminals.
When you get a driver's license, for one.
I don't recall getting fingerprinted when I got my Driver's license or renewed, or even when I had to switch to a national id version for travel.
I did get fingerprint registration while considering adoption with my ex-wife as part of the background check.
Texas takes the fingerprints of everyone who is issued a drivers license. In other states its usually only for commercial licenses.
In half an hour, Gregory Bovino, who heads some ICE operation in Chicago, is supposed to appear before a Federal judge to be questioned on what ICE did to whom today. Let's see if he shows up.
Didn't happen. A frantic appeal by the Administration to the 7th circuit court of appeals postponed it.
The frustrating thing is the judge originally requested 1630 but then acquiesced to 1800.
The legislative just love getting slapped in the face by the executive. Repeatedly.
In this case, this is a federal judge.
Anyone who doesn't think this won't be used against regular citizens is living a very sheltered life. Vote out the clowns every time you get a chance.
I wonder who is storing this data, I would bet Palantir. Possibly Oracle too.
Did some research, biometrics specifically for facial ID for DHS/CBP seems to be awarded to NEC and Thales.
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/biometrics/face/neof...
Very likely an array of hackers, soon.
I assume the agents are using their own phones. One of their phones is going to be left in a bar and end up on eBay at some point and then the APK can be extracted at least.
It should be an assigned/signed device with biometric and passcode access configured... At least it was in a couple proposals I helped define for credentialing emergency responders... though the contract definitely went with a different supplier than the one I was working with.
It should not exist at all.
Not Palantir. Their CEO has explicitly said that they don't collect data on US citizens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-IH7EVrBbQ
Do they partner with Clearview or Flock or anyone else? "Collect" seems like a weasel word that still leaves lots of options on the table.
Palantir isn't collecting it, they are storing it and processing it after it has been collected by ICE.
Their defacto scan everyone isn't to determine citizenship, it is to collect the data in the first place. They want to get as much data into their system as possible.
I wonder if Oracle is going to become the next IBM with respect to their Nazi past.
With no consequences whatsoever?
There as a scathing book! https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/about-ibm-and-holocaust
what is the database being compared against?
a skin tone chart
Anti-surveillance makeup anyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision_dazzle
One of that article's top sources is Vogue (https://www.vogue.com/article/computer-vision-dazzle-anti-su...).
I remember in college my magazine journalism prof surprised me by pointing out that Vogue a bad-ass journalistic enterprise in its own right. That was 35 years ago and it's cool to see they still have it.
Can we do stickers that people can print out and wear?
A seriously good idea which I can find no prior art for! Also, worth checking out this pro-privacy/anti-surveillance artist/activist - Adam Harvey. His site and his work is a fantastic intro into the anti-surveillance scene. (Check out his DataPools).
https://adam.harvey.studio/
Wow this is going downhill fast. I don't have access to the article but I'm assuming this is what Palantir is all about right? Or are we not quite there yet, is this the CBP face scanning they have at border crossings too?
It's about this app, they won't tell anyone who developed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fortify.
Don’t fall for the lie that this is at all about illegal immigration- that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism operating completely outside the law. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa, while firing all federal immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum claims from brown skinned people.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.
I stopped hearing claims that it was about illegal immigration almost instantly after the debate where he claimed “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It was eerie.
That dehumanizing rhetoric is so weird and surreal, it boggles my mind that it seems to actually work... there was a horrific video on Facebook of the Wilder raid in Idaho, and many people were basically commenting things like "this isn't great, but it's really our only choice because these people are killing so many of us." We're talking just a regular peaceful small farming town where people were out watching a horse race with their families- people that were mostly US citizens of Hispanic descent. Obviously none of them are killing anyone, it's completely absurd.
This reality feels like someone had their monkey paw wish granted.
“I wish I could play Wolfenstein in real life.”
In Wolfenstein, the main character shot Nazi soldiers. It was made back when we had shared societal values like fascism is bad. Today, such a game would be called a product of tHe rAdIcAl lEfT.
Unironic antifi training material.
Always has been.
Biden's CBP goons stripped me naked, imprisoned me, ran up an ER bill for which I'm still being chased for by debt collectors, and tranported me by prisoner van all over the state, while they were enforcing Biden's (and now continue with Trump) insane war on drugs. I did not have drugs, I am not involved with drugs.
Of course nothing was found, and the allegation was hearsay by an HSI detective that some unnamed dog alerted to an unnamed officer, neither of which I have any idea what they were even referencing.
Scale matters. Once is a bad actor; this is a bad executive branch, with seriously bad supporting turns by the highest court and congress.
Yes, ICE has been a bad actor since the day it was created, which is why "shutdown ICE" has been a thing on the left for a while now. But it's now operating as the private military of Donald Trump and the executive branch on a scale never before seen in America. Its upcoming budget is greater than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. We see videos every day of their gleeful assaults on anyone they like, while their leadership has explicitly stated there will be no repercussions, and that they should be as abusive as they want.
>Yes, ICE has been a bad actor since the day it was created,
100yr ago you could've said the same about the FBI. They're still bad, but they've got better marketing these days. I am not hopeful.
In a way, the 9/11 terrorists have brought much more damage to the USA than they could have ever hoped for.
What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later? Osama bin Laden had a fairly specific immediate poltical goal, resisting US military influence in Muslim countries and US support of Israel. His broader goals involved revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim countries of the middle east. None of this was related to Latin American immigration to the US, legal or otherwise.
> What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later?
The centralized security apparatus in the Department of Homeland Security being leverage here exists entirely as a result of the reaction to 9/11.
I wasn't aware that Trump coordinated 9/11 with Bin Laden (through the Saudis?), but at this point it wouldn't really surprise me. (tongue in cheek, of course)
But please let's stop framing recent developments as if they are merely continuations of existing trends. The surveillance state and federal "law" enforcement were definitely out of control well before Trump, and both authoritarian parties share responsibility for that. But it hadn't been being used to launch a frontal assault on domestic civil society. Responsibility for that rests solely on Trump (and his enablers/supporters).
Very much so. There's multiple videos of them standing in Walmart parking lots and as shoppers walk out with their carts, anyone vaguely Hispanic is being questioned. "Where were you born? Are you American?"
Probable cause is out the window. This is, firsthand, Steven Millers White America policy starting to take effect.
I expected a lot more pushback on here for calling this out as terrorism than I got… I took a several month hiatus from this site and before I left it was all “you’re just being hyperbolic, Trump is just going to enforce the immigration laws exactly as written.” It seems that nearly all of those people have rethought their opinions in light of recent events- which I guess/hope bodes well for the chances of our country coming together in a unified way to stand against this.
The unfortunate reality is that lots of those people were agents of propaganda, such as Russian bots. The goal was to get the authoritarian elected and the ball rolling - so they're all gone now.
I took a vacation from this site many years ago because it was clear that the moderators of this site were at the very least complicit in the rise of bad faith user moderation, from both bots and so-called "fellow travelers."
The only thing I can't decide on is if YC let this rot take hold because they were also fellow travelers, or if they made the wrong choice that a good number of failed internet social spaces make in following their own stated guidelines to the exact letter at the expense of all common sense and decency.
Not that it matters much in the end - the end result is what we got.
Seems very plausible but how can we be sure of that? There definitely were two groups, one had thoughtful counterpoints, and also histories of insightful comments on other topics, and could usually be persuaded eventually with some extended discussion. The other group had usually no post history and literally just posted things like “cry harder libtard.”
The latter were probably just bots/scripts but I’ve often thought it hilarious to wonder what their lives are like if they were real people that spent their day responding “cry harder” to genuine concerns over human rights violations and atrocities. Do their partners and family know about it? Do they have some sort of personal narrative that makes them a hero for being like that? Is that just how they relax and blow off steam after, what I can only assume was a long hard day of strangling hookers and shooting puppies?
I saw many people expose shallow, hateful views that had account creation from 2017 and earlier with a comment history to then sort of come out the wood work here and basically say, "mandate, this is what the american people want." There is a large support for DOGE on this site.
They've pivoted to "Well, we don't agree with everything he does, but we still support him."
It is absolutely insane that the party who tried on the Libertarian mask less than 20 years ago and rode high on a wave of "don't tread on me" individual liberty is now suddenly ok with masked thugs scanning everyone's faces for their master database of enemies of the state.
It makes more sense when you frame it as "party of shameless self interest and racial stratification acts in shameless self interest while racially stratifying". You can draw a straight line back to even before the US civil war of the anti-federalists using their station to undermine the republic and liberties it stands for.
Nicely said. That’s right up there with Wilhoit’s Law for being a clarifying perspective.
Frankly, I don't think this is a party thing. Our elected officials are mostly party line. There are a few who have actual ideals that they adhere to but the rest of them are weather vanes.
You basically have to be a party loyalist to get campaign funds so, unless you can self fund, you gotta toe the line.
The generous part of me says this is an example of "you become what you hate". The ungenerous part of me says that all their talk about freedom, liberty, state's rights, etc., has always been a lie.
“States rights” as a slogan has a very clear history of that; for that one, there isn’t really doubt to give it the benefit of.
The others may not be much better, but aren’t quite as unmistakably clear.
As someone who grew up in a deep red area full of people with Gadsden flags treading on other people: 100% was always a lie.
You should go to rumble and watch the Charlie Kirk show. It is a huge stream of jingoistic fallacies, fear and hate mongering and a bald faced usurpation of what it means to be an American. Anyone they that disagrees with them is an unpatriotic unamerican leftist that hates all that is good in the world. Their words.
As a libertarian, I had given Republicans the benefit of the doubt figuring they earnestly wanted freedom, but were just terrible at understanding the details of how their freedom gets taken away. But I still had figured that conservatism actually meant something - trusting institutions / "the system", believing America is a force for good in the world, slow measured change, etc.
But the point we've arrived at, with so many of them complicit in these wanton attacks on our freedoms and our society, it's hard to see that there are any sort of ideals or values behind their party. People are going about their days, getting accosted by unaccountable masked gangs, having their face scanned, then getting sent to a concentration camp when some buggy app claims they aren't a citizen? How can one possibly look at that and think anything but "this could easily happen to me or my family" ?
The only answer I've been able to come up with is that it is straight up racism. They believe they could never possibly be on the pointy end of this fascist dystopia, because they look "American" (ie white), and so would never possibly be scanned in the first place? I earnestly hate this "racism everywhere" chant the Democratic party has fallen into for the past decade. But I'm having a real hard time finding any other explanation, so I'm reluctantly coming around to that. Someone please convince me I am wrong.
I'm coming from the same basic perspective as you describe, and always tried hard to see people in the best light and sympathize with their concerns, but am no longer finding that possible in this situation, and it is disheartening.
The only explanation for the core MAGA supporters that I can come up with is that it is a sort of loose coalition of people that feel disaffected and judged by society for various reasons and want acceptance - and vengeance. It includes many people that are, e.g. sociopaths and racists, and want someone to tell them that being like that isn't bad, it's actually "protecting American from inferior people" or some such thing.
There is just no way that people don't realize that Trump is a malignant narcissist that lies every time he speaks, and tries to sadistically harm anyone that doesn't support him. The only explanation is that people don't like him despite that, but because of it- him being so awful, and proudly like that with no hint of remorse, absolves them of the lifelong guilt and fear that they might be bad people also, and instead frees them to also be proudly like that themselves.
Recently I've been reading a book about the history of the Jim Crow era in the south, and the extremely widespread brutal terrorism and mass murder, and I can't really reach any other conclusion than that those people just laid low for a while while they regrouped and strategized, but they're just as prevalent, violent, and racist now as they ever were, and they're done hiding. They see the Confederate/Nazi/Fascist dream of a totalitarian white ethnostate in their grasp, and they are ready to make it happen - they aren't ashamed for wanting that, and they aren't afraid anymore.
I get that this is a really dark view of current events, and I really hope it is not true, but at this point, I think it is delusional to pretend that it's anything but the most likely explanation and prepare accordingly.
It turns out that the 'basket of deplorables' was, in fact, calling a spade a spade.
The GOP uses fear and hate to spread their message and scare people into voting for them. The flavor they use changes, but the fear and hate are always there.
You can expect the party to vote along party lines. The real funny one here is all the Rogan libertarians who made a conscious choice to vote for this.
It's not insane when you recognize the animus behind both is white nationalism and racism. Tea Party was a response to Obama being President, not so much the taxes as they claim.
> suddenly ok with masked thugs scanning everyone's faces
The point is it is brown people's faces.
They have always been OK with that
You’re right in general but it has been striking to see how much the current Republican response has flipped from what we heard for years after the Elian Gonzalez case, where Giuliani described the BORTAC agents as “storm troopers” and the outage is credited with flipping Florida for Bush in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jim_Goldman_and_Elian_Gon...
> that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism
This sounds like some nonsense white people say to defend their own choices and exclusive clubs. Black Americans have always been under this level of surveillance, and you couldn't pry stop-and-frisk from Democrats. They love it. I've had guns drawn on me for walking down the street at least four times in my life, and at least fifteen times have been searched while multiple cop cars pulled in to surround me. Once, in Arkansas, they all pulled in around me while I was walking down the street with white friends, and their harassment of me was so drawn out and boring that my white friends just left. The cops didn't even look over at them while they left; they weren't interesting.
They don't remember when they were calling Giuliani America's mayor; I do, and I remember it was because he was mean to black people. They don't remember Laquan MacDonald; I do, and I see how that wasn't career ending.
So what you mean is that they're harassing people who are obviously immigrants (or at least English is obviously their second language), and trying to find out if they're legal immigrants. If you mean that, just say it and stop bringing black people into it. The KKK isn't about them. It would be nice if everyone would stop characterizing their problems as them being like black people's problems. They just got here, they're nothing like us. America doesn't even think it owes us anything for centuries of birth to death slavery, it certainly doesn't owe them anything. They don't even like us, they're statistically more racist than the natives (who also don't like us.) They only want to be us when they think they can get something out of it.
Here's the question: pretend that a majority of people want illegal immigrants (not just criminal illegal immigrants, like Trump propaganda makes them all out to be) deported, and that majorities consistently say that in polls, and that they voted for a presidential candidate who has always clearly advocated for that.
How exactly can they do it if every Democratic-run state and city refuses to comply? How can the democratic will of citizens be carried out? If we're not going to do democracy anymore, do we have a country at all? What benefit is there to citizenship? An illegal immigrant erases their past, how can a citizen do the same? Why can't citizens drive, work, get loans from banks, or even in extreme cases vote and hold office without identifying themselves?
If you're going to answer all these questions with "Screw you!" do you see how you're ushering in a police state with popular support? How it's inevitable? And they'll just take off and go home, while we have to live in it because we don't have anywhere else to go.
Western elites are stupider than they have ever been. They're just going to usher in nativist demagogues who will administer the totalitarian states they've built, and suffer no consequences. They'll be richer than they ever were, and having stupid taste arguments about their consumption while what they've ushered in is immiserating the vast majority of people. Feudalism is coming, and the landlords and their children are cosplaying as workers.
“How exactly can they do it if every Democratic-run state and city refuses to comply? How can the democratic will of citizens be carried out?”
If a candidate makes campaign promises that do not work in the framework of our constitution or civil rights that is the candidates problem to figure out, you don’t get to throw away those things because your side won and they make your job hard, that is not how this is supposed to work.
What I wrote isn’t about democrats vs republicans- it’s about calling out terrorism from white supremacists for what it is- the fact that plenty of democrats are also extremely racist does not change what is actually happening here. They are not selective in only targeting black people- they have expanded that to include middle eastern, hispanic, and LGTBQ people simply because more of them are now visible in this country, with no reduction in their hatred and targeting of black people. We’re talking about the same groups of people doing the same things, now with a BUFF and a tactical vest instead of a white hood. Trump was raised in a KKK household, his dad was arrested at a KKK rally, and both he and his dad were sued and lost for racial discrimination in housing against black people and then ignored the rulings and continued the discrimination. He launched his political career by stoking hatred for a black president. His core supporters are a group of people that never accepted that they lost the civil war, and have been able to continually derail the reconstruction and the civil rights movement to this day. They are putting back up confederate pro slavery statues, and flying confederate flags. The KKK itself is mostly organizationally defunct, but these people are not simply “like the KKK,” they are literally the same people. However, for the first time in US history, they now have essentially complete control over the federal government.
The irony of doing this while covering their own faces
What's ironic about it? That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench. They're doing things unto others that they would not have done unto them.
> That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench.
ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement.
Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
Fortunately, the National Guard members have better training than most law enforcement on how to properly interact with civilians (the public).
They're trained how to kill them, and not to do so without orders.
Yes, it's a big problem, and what you're seeing is only the beginning.
It’s ironic that it’s brave to uncover your face, it’s brave to verify your identity, but these officers’ policy actively avoids the brave choice. Then, we’re supposed to accept that they’re operating in war zones like Portland.
Except law is not a battle field, otherwise lawyers would decide the victors, or guns the outcomes of trials.
Law is supposed to strive for justice, war is as lawless as it can get away with.
This isn't law; it's an incipient police state that would have made Stalin and Honecker jealous.
Absolutely. But they are trying very hard to not throw all brown people with an accent into detention centers as Joe and Erik would have done. This very, very scary tech is exactly what is necessary to catch the right people with a minimum of inconviense for the wrong ones and without wasting exorbitant resources.
Joe and Erich loved brown people. But, yes, targeting is a huge amplifier of the coercive force of violence.
> But they are trying very hard to not throw all brown people with an accent into detention centers
Are you sure about that? There's quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, starting with the really high false-positive[0][1[[2][3][4][5] rates of facial recognition, especially among people of color.
In fact, as the studies linked below show, people of color are misidentified (i.e., false positive) more than 1/3 of the time. That's not nearly accurate enough to round folks up if 10 of every 30 arrested, detained and potentially deported actually aren't the folks you're looking for.
What could possibly go wrong?
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/police-facial-rec...
[1] https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/biased-technology-automated-...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facial-recognition-race-1.54...
[3] https://jusmedia.co.uk/riotandreason/2025/06/02/face-the-bia...
[4] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva...
[5] https://civilrights.org/edfund/2024/09/25/advocates-ring-ala...
In this case, ICE officer's are being shot at.
That's about as ironic as carrying a gun while wearing a bulletproof vest. If the tech exists and works it changes both defense and offense.
That latter part isn't ironic at all... just because you carry a gun, doesn't mean you aren't going to be shot at.
It's not ironic, it's saying "the rules are for you, not for me, fuck you".
People voted for this...some of them three times...
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
People voted for a bait and switch. Nobody wanted to destroy the rule of law. Nobody wants corruption (except the corrupt). The farmers didn’t vote for a trade war destroying their livelihoods. I don’t think people wanted a militarized force accountable to no one attacking their own communities.
If we give them room to say “this isn’t what wanted” we give them room to say “next time I want something different.”
The only way to preserve democracy is to preserve our ability to say “regardless of how the last election went, I want something different next time”
>People voted for a bait and switch.
There was no "bait and switch." Nothing Trump is doing now should be a surprise to anyone who paid attention to him or the Trumpist movement over the last decade.
>If we give them room to say “this isn’t what wanted” we give them room to say “next time I want something different.”
The problem is, this is exactly what many of them wanted, and now they're just trying to cover their ass because the revolution didn't work out the way they expected.
>The problem is, this is exactly what many of them wanted, and now they're just trying to cover their ass because the revolution didn't work out the way they expected.
That's as may be, but if you give these folks the room to act differently next time, at least some of them will. Which might well be enough to turn the tide in the next elections.
As such, writing off everyone who didn't support exactly what you support as a racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbag who should be put down isn't the best strategy.
I'm incensed by what's been going on and I never supported Trump or his (now) hangers on. That said, I'm sure that you and I disagree about a bunch of things. Does that make me an unredeemably evil human being?
In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree about much more than they disagree. Your "othering" of folks is just as bad as those who "other" folks who believe what you do.
No. This isn't a "both sides" argument. Rather it's a "your fellow Americans are humans too and mostly want the same things. Why don't we agree on those things and work to come to amicable resolutions where possible?" kind of argument.
>As such, writing off everyone who didn't support exactly what you support as a racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbag who should be put down isn't the best strategy.
I never did any such thing. I don't believe anyone should be put down for their beliefs, I'm not like them.
A lot of them are racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbags. That isn't even controversial, a lot of them will admit it openly.
>I'm incensed by what's been going on and I never supported Trump or his (now) hangers on. That said, I'm sure that you and I disagree about a bunch of things. Does that make me an unredeemably evil human being?
I never said anyone was an unredeemably evil human being. I just have no interest in their redemption.
>In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree about much more than they disagree. Your "othering" of folks is just as bad as those who "other" folks who believe what you do.
I'm not "othering" anyone, I'm expressing skepticism about the motivations behind the stated regrets of some Trump supporters and the narrative that they "never voted for this."
>Rather it's a "your fellow Americans are humans too and mostly want the same things. Why don't we agree on those things and work to come to amicable resolutions where possible?" kind of argument.
Because many of my fellow Americans want masked, armed troops in the streets kidnapping brown people. They want the government to police "degenerate" art and erase "woke" ideology. They want to send trans kids to mandatory conversion camps. They want to normalize Christian nationalism and fascism. They want to tear down science and medicine and replace it with conspiracy theories and nonsense.
If I'm not talking about you, I'm not talking about you. But I am talking about a lot of people.
If Trump supporters want to reconsider supporting him and his agenda, great. It's a little late, but I guess late is better than never. I'm not stopping them from acting differently, I'm just a guy trying to survive here. No one is stopping them. I don't need to "make room" for them - they're the most politically and culturally powerful demographic in existence. If they want something different next time - assuming there is a next time, they can just vote for it. They believe in the will to power don't they?
But I'm under no obligation to forgive and forget when the brownshirts are in the streets.
> The irony of doing this while covering their own faces
* https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue
Or, put more succinctly, Wilhoit’s Law (which is framed as about “conservatism” rather than “fascism”, but the latter can be viewed as, within the context of the description, a complex of ideas which includes the former as its central element):
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
While pithy, public intellectual/academic conservatives like David Frum and Tom Nichols would disagree, and say the rule of law should apply equally to everyone.
Frum (IIRC, though it may have been Applebaum) wrote articles years ago that the direction of the GOP was going was similar to that of Hungary: using public office to enrich family and friends and not prosecute the same when they broke the law. There have been numerous conservatives aghast at what the GOP was becoming / has now become, and were ringing the alarm for years.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/hu...
This. There's exactly nothing conservative about MAGA. Quite the opposite, it's overtly and proudly radical and extremist, and views actual conservative values with as much contempt as it views actual liberal values.
> There's exactly nothing conservative about MAGA.
Just look at the recent brouhaha about Ontario's televsion ad using Reagan's words against tariffs and the reaction it caused.
There's a similar quote that also fits:
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
Another alternative, that any poltical side can use, is to attempt to change the composition of the electorate that votes in the democracy.
With, like, education and nutrition programs?
No, like, with voter restrictions.
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
This is from David Frum, a conservative himself:
> Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9077312-maybe-you-do-not-ca...
Even leftist Latin American politicians use ample doses of hypocrisy. They demonize the rich, and promote austerity, while them, their family, and friends/conspirators enjoy a subsidized life of luxuries.
Not all of them are fascists, or conservatives, but they're world-class hypocrites.
That conservatism (including fascism) foundationally rests on something that involves explicitly unequal standards does not mean that every hypocrite is a conservative, correct. (p implies q) does not imply (q iimplies p).
Also, though, a lot of groups with some degree of leftist rhetoric are substantially right-wing hierarchy-promoting groups (even promoting fascist-style leader-centric structures) that are simply trying to replace one heirarchy with another rather than eliminate hierarchy, a tradition of deceptive rhetorical positioning which has included fascists as far back as the early days of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
They're covering their faces due to the left wing terrorism that has targeted ICE agents and facilities. If you were concerned that terrorists would show up at your house and harm you and possibly your children (for having the nerve to do the will of the American people), you'd probably mask up, too.
You know this, of course. It's pretty sick to pretend that ICE agents' fear of left wing terrorism is actually somehow evidence of their malevolence. But non-tech threads on HN are just reddit-tier, low-effort prog slop now, so it's sadly not surprising.
The evidence of their malevolence goes far behind face coverings (which let's face it, is probably to avoid embarrassment in their community the next time they teargas a children's Halloween parade).
Not sure it counts as irony. Whoever is able to sell masking to the public as a luxury item will make bank.
All of the replies to my comment are focusing on the definition of irony.
It's like I'm 12 years old again hearing all my classmates talk about why having spoons when you need a knife isn't "actually" irony.
I think the nitpicking is because the phrasing implies that it's not an intentional choice on the part of the government.
It does not imply that.
Source: me, the person who wrote it.
I don't think his phrasing implies that.
What did you actually expect from commenters on this site?
I have a cashmere balaclava from Rick Owens if high fashion masking is what you’re after
Boris Bidjan Saberi also has hoodies with face coverings
That's fine, as long as they aren't making anyone remove face coverings. People are allowed to cover their faces in public places. And we can't tell from this biased article whether they had probable cause to stop anyone that they did.
What they have said previously is that they consider someone looking hispanic as probable cause. I don't see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Nahhh… hiding the identities of public officials isn’t ok in my book.
It’s not an “ok for me if it’s ok for you” situation.
Government officials arresting people should be required to positively identify themselves and provide the legal reason they are detaining someone.
Otherwise there is no difference between a kidnapper and ICE agent.
If you haven’t seen it this video is a dystopian display of this tech in action: https://www.reddit.com/r/EyesOnIce/comments/1ogm1qk/ice_agen...
I am struggling a bit personally with how to grapple with the fact that the career I have chosen has ended up bolstering all the horrible inclinations of those in power. I think we need some kind of tech workers collective and some version of the hippocratic oath to start pushing back against this bullshit.
I think a lot of tech needs to go through that struggle.
From the perspective of a long career in infosec, what’s occurring now was enabled a longtime ago by broad-based industry consensus. Concerns then, which == awful stuff occurring now, were robustly dismissed by many many many devs with s/strong viewpoints/paychecks.
The only silver lining I can see is we’re taking our medicine now, but there’s a lot more to go through still, on the back of many significant tech capabilities.
For example, Flock was kept out of many cities, but Amazon was not, Flock just signed a data sharing deal with Ring. That’s a no-nonsense, nationwide, warrantless vehicular and pedestrian tracking network mechanism.
Not great, Bob! But RSUs for building it all sure was great.
It's true now as in the past. Technology or science aren't inherently good or bad, just a matter of how you use it. Personally I enjoyed much more working on medical devices at a university than typical commercial software, simply because there's an ethical component to that software that was quite fulfilling.
How certain are we that the photos being taken are going to a Palantir database?
Asking because the FBI has been assembling biometrics databases since the mid-20th century and providing access to other law enforcement agencies since the 1990s.
Physicists have Pugwash, which started after they saw the culmination of their decades of work in the actual evaporation of two entire cities.
I wonder if this is a portend to an American social credit score, like where China uses facial recognition to identify criminals at concerts[1], and jaywalkers, etc. which severely impacts a person's ability to get a job, housing, etc.
I can't help but assume this is already being used at retail establishments, but now it could be tied into law enforcement databases, and .. communicate..
We already live in the social credit dystopia. https://www.thenexus.media/your-phone-already-has-social-cre...
I think the post's argument is that we are on the way to something akin to China's social credit system (but not there yet).
> What we have aren't unified social credit systems…yet. They're fragmented behavioral scoring networks that don't directly communicate. Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems. The question isn't whether we have Chinese-style social credit now (because we don't). The question is whether we're building toward it without acknowledging what we're creating.
Chinese style social credit is largely an invention by Western media
Those systems depend on enforcement. If a private system keeps score and gate keeps you usually have alternatives (utilities excluded), if it’s the gov and they decide to enforce it, then things get dire…
But what if Target security cooperates with the government, and they share capabilities, so that a facial recognition inside of a Target location would notify law enforcement who also has an interest in that person? In such a scenario.. Target would freely give its data but not necessarily acting an agent of the government.
People need to work to reverse the Bush and Obama initiated and then continued practice (setting precedent) of bypassing direct surveillance by buying data from data brokers. The Biden and Trump admins just continue this practice. That’s where people need to reverse the practice. I mean you had the FBI and probably others wiretapping Congress folks so… it’s like they don’t care.
Or we need to focus on making data brokers illegal, period. Taking a page from the GDPR would be a good start. As long as the surveillance databases continue to exist, they will be juicy targets for anyone attracted to the power. And not just for the de jure government, but also plenty of "private" businesses that adopt them nearly in lockstep. If you get blackballed in the one used by say Target, it's not like Walmart is going to make it a point of competition to serve the small fraction of people who would be good customers but for getting tripped up by Target. Rather they will all use the same databases, shutting you off from most commerce. That's effectively creating a de facto government, independent of any de jure government adoption.
"American" "social" credit scores were instituted long ago. Distracting from this was the whole reason the media added the word "social" to the term - to other the idea as something that happens over there, never here.
That was the carrot. This new development is the stick.
lol - I made something to do the same to ICE. Stores each ICE agent as a visual embedding and creates a database of all sighted agents.
https://www.realtimefascism.com/ice-sight
thanks awesome. thank you for making this.
Can you go into any detail on what technologies you used? Is there enough differentiating data in their attire to actually match agents? None of them are showing their faces so I wonder how many false positives would occur
yes! although the techniques aren't perfect.
I'm using a YOLO-WORLD-XL object detection model. Lets me detect objects using text. This is the initial filter that scans for agents - once those are detected and outlined with bounding boxes the entire image and each cropped bounding box are then sent to chatgpt to confirm if the image looks legit. Once image passes those checks - I create image embeddings of each agent using CLIP and those are stored in a vector DB, and each agent is then compared to the DB and matched.
The matching system isn't perfect - but I think good enough to get the point across and can be easily tuned with more data! Happy to take suggestions here - I just spun this up over the weekend
Thank you for doing this! Great work.
What's your policy for complying with the patchwork of national biometrics laws?
Ignore them? Operate outside of US reach. The tubes are global.
EDIT: Legally, you have no right to privacy in public, if your photo is captured in public (US centric), broadly speaking. You have the right to record law enforcement officers exercising their official duties in public.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/yes-you-have-right-fil...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/federal-judge-upholds-...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/fourth-circuit-individ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/victory-another-court-...
Taking someone's photo is different than storing their biometrics. The latter would violate laws such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...
So avoid being subject to the US jurisdiction, if applicable. Do not store data or operate the system from within the US, or any country within US reach.
https://owasp.org/www-community/Threat_Modeling_Process
No biometrics collected. It's only scanning bodys, clothes and details on gear.
Don't tread on me. ... Tread on them, just not me.
Ask Pastor Niemöller how well that's likely to work out.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
Pastor Niemöller
Fascism is not just knocking at the door, it’s walking into the house. Some want it to come in, and the rest aren’t doing enough to push it back out.
I wonder why people downvote. Many western countries now couldn't be more obviously fascist. State responsibilities are being offloaded to multinational corporations, de facto private policing is around the corner, surveillance (digital ID tracking your movements and what you talk about, chat controls and whatnot). It's creeping in and people pretend it's not happening.
I’ve gone from thinking people are oblivious to thinking that people are willing to sacrifice a lot (democracy, individual liberties, food safety, etc.) out of fear, selfishness, and greed. It is surprising with the HN crowd though given how much less innovation and entrepreneurship there is under fascism.
People downvote because an oligarchy controlled by big tech is their idea of a wet dream.
Half of the user base of HN is “founders” excited at the idea that morals, values, and laws will no longer matter.
Temporarily embarrassed founders.
Because "The rest aren't doing enough to push it back out" is the same old, tired victim blaming that comes up every time anyone points out that one American political party seems to have different policies and priorities than the other.
Many western countries now couldn't be more obviously fascist.
Which ones? This isn't an "I'm just asking" attack, I genuinely want to know which ones you think are obviously fascist.
US, UK, most of the EU.
I mean they are flashbanging houses, teargassing residential neighborhoods, dragging parents away from their screaming children outside of elementary schools, shooting people, all in chicago right now. The things you mention were serious problems we needed to address 5, 10, 20 years ago. We did not and now we have a very different problem to solve. We will still have to address those things but we have to deal with this first.
When I saw them do iris scanning during Iraq War I instantly knew that was coming to US police sooner or later, I guess this is the new easier method
The crazy thing is though these people don't even have an identifying badge number and their license plates are often fake, zero repercussions for anything and they know it
Imagine by 2028 what's going down if this is still the first year
Asking a "kid" for his ID? Kids aren't supposed to have IDs, much less carry them around. I'm confused as to what the kid was supposed to provide.
The lack of safeguarding is shocking. Kids should not be hassled at all much less strip searched without their parents.
I wonder how soon till the automated license plate reader cameras everywhere start doing this.
My understanding is that the only thing keeping this from happening is that the data is far more valuable for traffic monitoring than law enforcement. As a trivial example, these cameras can already determine is a vehicle is speeding based on its number plate sightings between any two cameras. They can hence start issuing tickets, no radar or police needed.
However, they've not gone down this path because they are (rightfully) concerned that there would be an instantaneous and severe backlash that could lead to those cameras being banned entirely, which would cripple traffic control.
Don't we have the right to "face your accuser" ie getting automatic tickets from the government is illegal because you don't have an accuser.
The accuser is the state issuing the ticket.
And you do have the right to contest the ticket in court, before a judge.
Unless you have the free time, and some evidence that doesn't involve the fringe around the courtroom's flag, you're probably better off just paying the ticket.
You do in some states, like Minnesota. Red light and speed cameras are illegal here.
You do not in other states, like Virginia, which has signs informing you that they have planes that issue tickets (???)
This and ezpass readers are already everywhere in cities (even outside toll points) to track movement.
For today's ten thousand https://deflock.me
I'm sure it's already happening!
"You're being pulled over because this licence plate is not registered with a valid REAL ID"
If only it was this bad. REAL ID only proves you were at one point allowed to be here. It doesn't prove you're allowed to be here right now (which can change arbitrarily and at any time apparently)
The state should avoid giving a REAL ID to anyine who isn't at least a permanent resident of the US (and the distinction between cirizen and non-citizen IDs should be very obvious). A lot of illegal immigrants are people who legally entered the US on a temporary visa, and overstayed; and it would be good if basically every American bureaucracy was quickly, consistently, and legibly checking for that status.
Instead, the situation we have now is that many bureaucracies deliberately avoid making any citizenship or legal residency distinction on official documents because the polticians who determine the rules for those bureaucracies think immigration enforcement is immoral and want to make it easier for illegal immigrants to access American bureaucracies and harder for other bureaucracies controlled by less immigration-friendly polticians to detect illegal immigrants.
> The state should avoid giving a REAL ID to anyine who isn't at least a permanent resident of the US
REAL ID or certain alternative federal ID is required to enter federal buildings and domestic flights. The only immigrants who are issued federal ID that is usable in place of real ID are permanent residents. Ergo, your plan would have states effectively ban legally-present non-citizens who are not permanent residents from federal buildings and domestic flights. This is a bad idea; and, absent a specific federal mandate, probably unconstitutional for states to do.
States could, as some do, issue restricted term REAL IDs to aliens who are not permanent residents, but REAL ID isn’t intended as proof-of-status but an identity document, so while that's doable, it doesn't seem to be particularly necessary.
(Yes, foreign passports are also permissible “federal ID” in place of REAL ID, but there are legally present aliens who may not have passports—particularly refugees—and who are also not issued federal ID by the US government because, except for permanent resident aliens, the US has generally declined to have national ID and given ID functions to the state; REAL ID nationalized standards for some uses instead of nationalizing the ID itself.)
I'm not sure what documents you think entail getting a REAL ID but they are typically proof of permanent residence, such as US passport, birth certificate, or green card. Its requirements are actually stricter than what entails getting a passport, because you also have to prove you actually live in the state you're applying in.
As for the rest of your post, I don't really know what you're babbling about has to do with what I wrote.
I checked the State of California website for REAL ID eligibility before I wrote my above comment, and it confirms that people with temporary legal immigration status are eligible for REAL ID cards, specifically mentioning DACA recipients as an example of a category of people who are eligible. This is exactly the sort of thing I think should not be allowed by the federal framework governing REAL IDs, non-permanent residents should not be able to get a REAL ID at all under any circumstances and the one for permanent residents should look obviously distinct from those for citizens. The point of this is to make it extremely obvious that a REAL ID holder is definitely a legal citizen, and therefore make it actually useful for proving citizenship or legal permanent residency.
You're effectively saying non-permanent residents should be prohibited from using commercial flight to move around the giant country that is the US. I'm not sure if that's your intention.
I've personally flown domestic commercial flights in at least two foreign countries (China and Mexico), that I have no legal permanent residency in, using the same American passport I used as ID to enter these countries to begin with; and there was no issue. I don't even know what the Chinese or Mexican equivalent of a REAL ID might be like. I'm sure the US could create a similar legal ID framework for domestic air travel.
California is an outlier here. I am a permanent resident in Washington and Washington will only issue REAL ID-compliant Enhanced Drivers Licenses to US citizens, not to LPRs.
Maybe it is, I don't know the rules as they exist in every state - but that's also a problematic aspect of the REAL ID system: because the rules vary somewhat from state to state, authorities in one state who are used to one system for who can be legitimately given a REAL ID might make bad assumptions about someone from another state with different rules. And in any case, California is the most populous state by far, so even if it's an outlier, that still affects a huge percentage of the entire US population.
We really should have one, federally issued ID system, that works uniformally everywhere in the country for demonstrating citizenship and legal permanent residency, and that no other category of person can be able to legitimately obtain.
Washington is one of a handful of states (all bordering Canada) that offer enhanced driver's licenses, which are by definition meant to prove US citizenship so you can use it to travel back to the US from Canada.
I presume this is powered by data collected by the face scanners at airports when you go thru security?
Could we please not criticize the administration on Hacker News? Hacker News is not the place for ideological criticism of the surveillance state. Hacker News is meant to be a safe space for the hacker ethos of maximizing money, and this administration has been good for Silicon Valley, as judged by our leaders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen.
You almost had me for a moment.
Nice to see the post 9/11 digital surveillance and beyond finally get its usage by a fascist takeover
"Pick up that can."
"I'm behind on my beatings."
Regarding the specific issue of using facial recognition apps to identify criminals, and using those apps as justification for detention/arrest - has this ever been challenged in court? I know there's caselaw that supports using cameras in public, but I'm wondering about the apps that are used to "recognize", and then the decision to detain/arrest based on those apps. If I'm a lawyer challenging this, I wanna see the source code for the app; I want verification that the app is working as it's intended, the false positive/negative rate, and that there's no way for someone to "put their thumb on the scale" to get a desired outcome, etc. I'm also gonna want access to the phone that was used to take the picture(s).
Any shred of trust that was left in our federal agencies is going straight down the drain.
The funny thing is these heavy handed tactics don’t scale. ICE’s own statistics show that deportations are down from the Biden Administration’s numbers last year. So what’s the point? To scare people? To set a precedent? To normalize civil rights abuses? Any right-leaning people who support this should understand that it could easily be used against them.
Life in the US is turning like one of its sci-fi movies. Now it's playing the first half where the bad suppress the good, before the reverse will happen for a happy ending.
By saying such I might come up as part of The Resistance in the future, like German people that resisted the Nazis are considered heroes after the war.
the people who run YC and Hacker News have Peter Thiel's phone number.
that's all I'm saying
They're too busy writing brave, orthodoxy-challenging essays about wokeness...
They would call and say what? "Go home you crazy weaponized narcissist, you're drunk on power and delusions of techo authoritarianism." If you're challenging someone who can hurt you, you should not approach until you are highly confident you are going to win, whatever that looks like.
I hope the folks mentioned are, and continue to remain, somewhere safe while this plays out.
More like they'd come out publicly against what Thiel and Palantir are doing, given that they are members of, and colleagues within, the same communities of moneyed tech leadership.
I think Family guy had a gag about this...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/family-guy-skin-color-chart
that has nothing to do with this
SCOTUS has endorsed using "apparent ethnicity" as grounds for a stop:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/justice-brett-kavanaugh-a...
Bovino says they do profile people on how they look:
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
We're calling them Kavanaugh Stops. Legalized racial profiling.
Absolutely. I'm a legal immigrant, but delays in processing and other things when I had to adjust status after divorcing from my US citizen wife (I moved here on a K-1 fiance visa) had me involving an immigration attorney, who made the comment, "I hate saying this, but it's true. You're the right color, and with where you're coming from (Australia), nobody cares about checking up on you."
All those illegal Polish immigrants in Chicagoland (of which there are many) seem to be doing just fine.
Of course it has. They're checking people that look "foreign".
That's what they say, but of course they would say that.
It's like that old Groucho joke: Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin' eyes?
They don't even always say that:
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
Discussion's over everyone! Some random user said that had nothing to do with this. He didn't elaborate, but you can't argue with that logic.
I can't help but blame this on the performative lack of cooperation of every Democratic Party run city and state on illegal immigration (but mostly, the wealthy constituency that supports it.) I wish I could blame the administration actually doing it, but the fact is that both parties would happily usher in this level of surveillance, and Democrats are handing Republicans an excuse to do it over a nonsense issue that didn't exist for them before they were wielding it against Trump during his first term.
If anything, this is a cooperation between the two most powerful and destructive political parties on the planet to turn the US into a police state trying to conquer the planet.
There is no right for illegal immigrants to stay in the US, it hurts working people, and the rights that are being claimed by illegal immigrants are real but purely being used in a dilatory manner. The problem has also been exacerbated in a predictable manner by bipartisan attacks on their home countries, followed by legal encouragement for them to come here.
Right now, Trump is driving more Venezuelans to the US while pretending that he's trying to keep them away, by keeping the US acting as a thief in Venezuela. War for theft. They'll be here just in time for the Democrats to throw the doors open again, we'll have all the cheap, leverage-less labor back, and now facial recognition cameras everywhere. Bipartisanship!
Yes, the republicans doing republican things is the democrats fault!
Huge numbers of Venezuelans would want to leave Venezuela and immigrate to the US if they legally could, regardless of anything Trump does or doesn't do, because the US is a much richer and better-run country than Venezuela is. Working illegally for poor wages in the US is a better deal for many people than physically being in Venezuela. There's also nothing special about Venezuela in this respect, much of the world is so much poorer and badly run than the US that many people from many different places would prefer to live in the US compared to their own countries.
> lack of cooperation of every Democratic Party run city and state on illegal immigration
It is not the job of state, let alone local, law enforcement to enforce federal law.
'Katz v. United States' was quite clear - you have no expectation of privacy in public. Anyone may photograph you and use said photos. Do I like it? No. But that is the current caselaw in USA.
"What a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." - Justice Potter in 'Katz v. United States'
They legally can take a photo of you, sure.
But they aren't just taking a photo from across the street. They are also:
1. "briefly" detaining you to make you face a camera and take of hats etc for the app to get a good enough shot.
2. arresting you if it doesn't correctly identify you
3. using protected characteristics to decide who needs to get scanned.
Taking photo is one thing, storing biometrics to compare against without consent is quite another
Illinois has the Biometric Information Privacy Act.
https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/ILCS/Articles?ActID=3004&Ch...
Fair. If anything is stored, it likely would be illegal in some states.
Frustratingly, the BIPA might exclude these offensive actions. It was really designed to protect customers from bad businesses. This sort of action probably didn't factor into it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750955
From the statute: "A private entity does not include a State or local government agency."
Something must already be stored, for them to be comparing the photo against.
Hypothetically: driver license/passport databases are theirs already
If they ignore all other forms of evidence that you're a citizen, that goes beyond privacy in a public space
This ^^^ What is the point of having an ID in the first place, if they can just ignore it?
Keep in mind that what "anyone" can do and what "anyone serving in an official government capacity" can do are different.
The case I cited specifically talked about government doing it.
For facial recognition or just plain photography? Obviously Katz predates the former.
Katz jut said "what a person knowingly exposes to the public" IIRC. We'd need a new SCOTUS case to clarify whether data derived from physical features that can be used to identify you still counts as such
Agreed.
> what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
Identity might be, might not be.
All, I recommend you familiarize yourself with relevant state laws regarding your protections when assisting folks that are in immediate danger, e.g.: https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_161.200
I'm not a lawyer. So, if you have counsel on retainer and can stomach the bill, get clarity there first. But know that many states have such protections on the books.
The veil of immunity for DHS agents may soon be pierced. Apathy and ignorance are no longer acceptable for this situation.
You can be arrested and charged with a federal criminal law, 18 USC 111 "assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees." The judge wont entertain your arguments about state law.
Fines and up to 8 years in a federal prison, 20 years if you use a deadly or dangerous weapon or actually inflict injury. You can get up to 15% off for good behavior, there is no parole.
would a case like that go to a grand jury allowing for nullification to be on the table?
Good points! Quite the cost / benefit analysis.
One on hand, I'd really love to punch a neo-nazi to interrupt them disappearing people to concentration camps. On the other, ooooh scary federal charges.
We need states to step in and encourage local police to arrest federal agents breaking the law, and allow victims to sue in state courts.
lovely ideas that no longer work in america given that SCOTUS is now a branch of a political party so all the suing leads to nothing but time-wasting unfortunately
I am not a lawyer, but might it be possible to do entirely within a state using state law, in a way that fundamentally cannot be escalated to the supreme court because it does not involve federal law in any way? I expect this might require some changes to state laws to make it possible in the first place.
> I am not a lawyer, but might it be possible to do entirely within a state using state law, in a way that fundamentally cannot be escalated to the supreme court because it does not involve federal law in any way?
No, any arrests of federal agents notionally doing what they are assigned by the federal government will have an easy route for the federal government to raise justiciable questions of federal law regarding state interference with exercise of federal powers. The feds may not always have a good case—they won't always win in a fair court—but it's hard to imagine them not being able to actually get in the door with a federal court in that basis.
OTOH, when you have armed agents of the state attempting to forcibly arrest armed federal agents, you also have a very real risk of creating the kind of conflict that is resolved kinetically—and in a way that rapidly speaks out of control in scale—rather than in court.
Sort of. You have to look up if your state has "necessity/choice-of-evils” defense and the standard defense-of-others rule - and what scopes it has.
I'll tell you this much, most judges will regard a circumstance for you to exert force against a peace officer - seeming or actual - as an extralegal action, and will very rarely affirm it as a protected action from the books. And even if you beat such a case, it ruins your life in the process. Their qualified immunity will remain longer than you can remain solvent.
I asked a similar question elsewhere, but in states like Texas you can have a jury trial for just about any offense. Could federal charges go before a grand jury allowing nullification to be an option?
If you want to take a bet that enough of your peers have varying degrees of distrust in police AND that they are aware of jury nullification in procedure or in principle, sure.
Do people think they are clever and can have defacto open borders? Maybe stop the goon squads and enforce at the employer level though it would probably work too well…
Most of these people have SSNs and work permits. We let them in and let them work legally and now have suddenly changed our collective mind and are violently letting them know. It's absurd.
Actually there are at least ten million with no legal standing in the country at all. Did you actually just claim everyone in the country is here legally?
> Actually there are at least ten million with no legal standing in the country at all.
Except they form an important part of the economy, and they’re here because the government has implicitly allowed and supported that for decades.
That’s not an accident, either. It’s provided a source of cheap labor, who are not enfranchised, so have no political representation.
In many respects it’s a substitute for slavery. The perpetrators here aren’t the immigrants.
The poster did not say everyone in the country is here, you're putting words in their mouth. Presumably in bad faith.
Even non-citizens are entitled to due process and the 4th amendment. ICE is violating that left and right, citizens and legal residents included. Fuck ICE.
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Please don't fulminate on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Minors don't have biometrics.
Minors do, in fact, have biometrics. Identification with them may be less reliable for some kinds of biometrics, but... reliability isn’t a hallmark of the current regimes “immigration enforcement” mechanisms.
> They are not obligated to have any sort of ID, especially citizens.
This is also true of adults, who are not obligated to have or carry ID if they are citizens (immigrants, both minors and adults, are a different story, are required to have ID, and are required to have biometrics taken unless they are under 14.)
Obviously, it can’t rule out citizens (though it could compare to databases available to the feds, which I would assume state ID databases are), since not all citizens will have biometrics of any kind, or even ID photos on file, but if they have presumed that the targets are immigrants, then scanning can be used to compare to records of documented immigrants, reinforcing (note I do not say justiying) the conclusion tha they are illegally present if it fails to match.
They can also be used to build intelligence databases of contacts even if not used to support immediate detention.
> Also, what in the fuck would CBP be doing in Chicago?
CBP, and more specifically Border Patrol, the main enforcement agency within CBP, is everywhere the Administration’s immhration crackdown is beig executed, and much of the most violent “immigration enforcement” attributed to “ICE” is actually Border Patrol, not ICE.
> This entire encounter is fake.
No, this entire encounter is illegal. It is a crime, being committed by the republican administration running the federal government and endorsed by every republican in congress who has declined to reign in the illegal behavior of the trump administration.
It is, however, very real. If you reside in American, then this is the reality you live in, imposed upon you by republican voters. You don't get to just plug your ears and cover your eyes.
This entire encounter is fake.
What are you talking about? CBP has been in Illinois for weeks. Greg Bovino, their commander, has been hauled before a judge this week to testify about how CBP (and he, personally) have violated the judge's TRO against unjustified use of tear gas [0].
This is very basic factual stuff that's in the news every day. How do you not know this is going on?
[0] https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-news-border-patrol-...
They can be trivially defeated with a 6 dollar product[1].
1. https://www.amazon.com/Custom-Personalized-Print-Bandana-Reu...
Do... do you think ICE agents would come up to you and just scan the mask you clearly have pulled over your head?
Worse, scanning the mask would guarantee no match to a citizen's face.
https://xkcd.com/1105/