[HN Gopher] You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recog...
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You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS
document say
Author : nh43215rgb
Score : 442 points
Date : 2025-11-01 08:58 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| baubino wrote:
| >>> Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15
| years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the
| document says.
|
| The headline plus this quote reveals the real intentions -- to
| create a comprehensive dataset that includes biometric data and
| can be used however the government wishes, regardless of one's
| citizenship. I have no doubt that this data will also be sold to
| other entities.
|
| I remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was
| particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker skin
| and was generally not great as the sole method of identification.
| The possibility of a mistaken identity being captured by this app
| would have life-altering implications with essentially no
| recourse. This is really disturbing.
| lysp wrote:
| > to create a comprehensive dataset that includes biometric
| data and can be used however the government wishes
|
| Not forgetting Elon's mass data scraping from earlier this
| year.
| leobg wrote:
| Are you talking about DOGE? That data already existed in
| government databases. There was also no scraping involved.
| orwin wrote:
| I think "Scrapping" semantic meaning is slowly switching to
| "illegally collecting", and for those who mean that, your
| comment is perceived as pedantic (basically me when people
| talk about "crypto" and i am still responding
| "cryptocurrency you mean?")
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Why would scraping have an unlawful connotation? I
| thought US courts have ruled scraping to be allowed.
| verdverm wrote:
| "scraping" is being used in two ways
|
| 1. Scraping a website, by anyone, allowed by courts if it
| is publicly accessible
|
| 2. "Scraping" of data, by the government, from various
| sources into a centralized database in partnership with
| Palantir. It's a worse version of the "Patriot" Act
| zzrrt wrote:
| FYI, you wrote "scrapping", but the word under discussion
| only has one P.
| daveguy wrote:
| It was exfiltration -- copying or moving data from an
| internal system to an external system. They insisted on and
| bragged about full access because now it would be
| "efficient". But it was clearly just simple opportunity for
| theft by a bunch of shady assholes. They also touted the
| ability to link data across multiple department to mine
| data on US citizens. The libertarian, "don't make databases
| of us" folks sat around with their thumbs up their asses
| because reasons. See also the Krebs link.
|
| Why are you defending this crap? They also destroyed the
| departments that were actually making digital services more
| streamlined and easier to use 18F by dissolution and US
| Digital Services by capture.
|
| doge was a fucking disaster.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| Are there any details available on whether or not anything
| actually happened there?
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Yes, good grounds for concluding that there was a large
| exfiltration of govt data by the doge team
|
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/doge-workers-code-
| suppor...
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Not just doge, there were pretty clear indicators they
| left the door open for Russia to grab all they could as
| well.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| The same whistleblower mentioned newly-created doge
| credentials being used to attempt login to the NLRB
| system from an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, the
| province around Vladivostock in Russias far east. They
| were blocked because the system doesn't allow non-US
| access even with proper credentials. There are many
| possible explanation for that since it's just an IP
| address.
|
| This is some more detail about the whisteblower's
| testimony from an earlier Krebs article:
|
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-
| sipho...
|
| Was there anything else about Russia?
| Muromec wrote:
| >>>> Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15
| years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the
| document says.
|
| That's what happens when you don't have mandatory id system and
| want to enforce immigration policy -- government just does
| whatever bullshit sticks and there is no carefully crafted set
| of safeguards and procedural rules to slap it for doing too
| much.
|
| > remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was
| particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker
| skin
|
| I would imagine that for current administration it's not a bug,
| but a feature.
| kbrisso wrote:
| Who needs mandatory id systems? State ID's and passports work
| just fine. What if I don't want an ID?
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think the answer is in the article, you get a mobile app
| that acts as a defacto national ID with the officers using
| the app explicitly being allowed to ignore any other ID
| documents.
| tempodox wrote:
| Disturbing is when I burn my scrambled eggs in the frying pan.
| This is state terrorism.
| ktallett wrote:
| Why exactly have ICE been given limitless power? Facial
| recognition is at best right more than half the time, but many
| studies have shown it to be consistently faulty leading to many
| wrong ID's. What is the point of a database with incorrect
| biometric data connected to a person?
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| Guarantee Palantir is 'mitigating' those concerns before anyone
| has them by having a 'process' and 'guardrails' in place, so
| everyone can convince themselves this is a great thing to do.
| The decision makers won't even be around by the time a
| substantial enough number of people are harmed to incur
| blowback, and by then, people will have gotten rich/promoted.
| XorNot wrote:
| You Americans are really going to have to get over trying to
| blame corporations for all your problems, or expecting them
| to fix all your problems.
|
| This is a problem from your government, by your government,
| that _you_ voted for - one way or another. Pretending this
| problem is originating from anywhere else except the
| political choices you 're making as a nation is denying
| reality.
| djcannabiz wrote:
| I agree with you, but I think this ignores the structural
| factors caused by corporations that lead to the election of
| this government in the first place (multinational
| corporations lobbying for NAFTA and the resulting
| deindustrialization of america).
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> your government, that you voted for - one way or
| another
|
| No, I didn't, not one way, nor another. I might have had a
| share of influence over policy in certain statewide
| elections, but not in most other elections.
| whoooboyy wrote:
| I think you are right, but not thinking deeply enough. You
| point at the government, and the voting that led to it.
| 100% that's a step in the root cause chain.
|
| But we cannot stop there, and needs ask why. There are
| structural forces that lead to this government, some of
| which are corporate. Fox and MSNBC exist to extract wealth
| from polarization, and have every incentive to drive wedges
| between us. Meta and X likewise get paid for optimizing
| engagement and hate drives engagement.
|
| It's not all corporations, but they contribute to
| structural forces we're have to unwind as we also try to
| fix the government side too.
| jordanscales wrote:
| I did not vote for this. Some of my neighbors voted for
| this because they were pushed over the edge by inflammatory
| social media algorithms, some stayed home for similar
| reasons.
|
| Corporations absolutely have an effect on all of this, you
| can bet they'd save time and money by focusing their
| efforts elsewhere if they thought it was pointless.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Americans? This is being rolled out all over the west, and
| was already pervasive everywhere else. China uses "subtle"
| cameras but there's just so many that you can't help but
| constantly see them around any city center, although I
| think I actually prefer them hiding the cameras (certainly
| better than London atm)
|
| Note that all the facial recognition is being done by
| governments, which is the entity everyone suggests using to
| protect against facial recognition.
|
| https://etias.com/articles/eu-biometric-border-checks-
| begin-...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp7j55zxvo (under the
| control of the executive)
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/how-facial-recognition-is-
| ta... (under the control of the executive)
|
| https://www.biometricupdate.com/202405/police-in-germany-
| usi...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-outlaws-facial-
| reco...
|
| The important part about the Italian "ban" is, as with most
| privacy laws in the EU, the government bans facial
| recognition for companies, and explicitly allows the
| government to use it for everything they do)
|
| This is common in the EU. For example, the GPDR guarantees
| that your medical data isn't used by companies. That sounds
| great! Except for the exceptions: insurance and health care
| providers are exempted, courts (even foreign ones) are
| excempted (and so a judge can subpoena your private medical
| information for divorce or custody cases), the police is
| exempted, youth services is exempted, ...
| caconym_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
| impossiblefork wrote:
| The thing though, is that the US government and the
| successful companies are strong connected.
|
| Networks of companies support political candidates, so
| there really isn't a true separation between the
| government's actions and the will of these corporations.
| baq wrote:
| see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Because half of American voters want fascism.
| righthand wrote:
| Not even close to half.
| animitronix wrote:
| Yeah well maybe the rest should get off their ass and vote
| then chief
| wat10000 wrote:
| A third are for it. A third are against it. A third just
| don't care.
| righthand wrote:
| Yes that's a valid emotional criticism, I'm more worried
| about normalizing authoritarianism and fascism by saying
| "half support it". We're already sliding down because
| we're lazy privileged Americans. IMO, stating that half
| agree signals an okayed complacency.
|
| There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less
| than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this
| mess about misdemeanors at the federal level.
|
| The authoritarians want you to say: "50% of people love
| this, give up already."
|
| When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in
| 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through
| his actions since January. Don't help them normalize this
| through emotion.
|
| Say it's "half" is negotiating with fascists.
| whoooboyy wrote:
| Note the parent said "voters" not people. Of the people who
| voted, yes, nearly half voted for this. You are correct
| it's a small minority of the populace, but not of voters.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Are there really that many unbelievably stupid people?
| spencerflem wrote:
| Some of them are unbelievably cruel
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Probably the most horrible thing I heard this year: "I'm
| ready to watch people burn now."
| animitronix wrote:
| Yup!
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| This is what abolishing knowledge tests for voting caused.
| It was an unintended consequence of a necessary reform.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| As I recall, those knowledge tests were specifically
| designed to prevent black people voting. Unfortunately,
| the USA seems to be regressing to a system whereby only
| rich white men would be able to vote (and only if they're
| going to vote for the fascists).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral
| phenotypes in dyadic games
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
|
| Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept
| being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on
| someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups
| being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%),
| selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may
| be confused (~15%).
|
| Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof,
| but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has
| heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about
| 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing
| political phenomena become much easier to understand.
| mothballed wrote:
| Democrats threw the election by telling their primary voters
| party base to go fuck themselves and instead just jammed
| through an unpopular candidate (even in her home state) at
| the 11th hour.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I really enjoy the American political dynamic where
| Democrats are the only ones considered to have any agency.
| If Democrats do it, it's Democrats' fault. If Republicans
| do it, it's Democrats' fault for provoking them or not
| doing enough to stop them. Nothing is ever the
| responsibility of the people who cast their votes for
| Trump.
| mothballed wrote:
| The Democratic party selects the Democrat candidate in a
| two-party system.
|
| It can be argued as shared fault.
|
| By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a
| candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy
| jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't
| work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is
| only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if
| not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that
| actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our
| voting system virtually ensure those will be the options.
|
| In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican,
| maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot
| and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote.
|
| I would argue we probably _could_ fix this with write-in
| only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or
| similar, but as it stands a large part of the election
| process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and
| this played out in Trump 's favor last election.
| wat10000 wrote:
| This boils down to: Democrats didn't provide a good
| enough alternative.
|
| Which I will completely accept as true. They didn't.
|
| From here, there are two branching paths. Did the
| Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than
| Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November
| election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats
| have a better candidate who just wasn't better _enough_
| to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very
| subjective question.)
|
| It's my firm opinion that it's the second one. Harris
| would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush,
| Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a
| frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case,
| giving Democrats _any_ blame for the outcome requires the
| people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency.
| They were presented with a choice and they selected the
| worse one. That's entirely on them.
| whoooboyy wrote:
| FWIW, as a left of democrat voter, the Dems have been a
| corporate captured neoliberal party for 40 years. They
| spent a lot of time building the infrastructure for a
| Trump-like. Biden and Harris were uniquely poor opponents
| to run.
|
| That doesn't absolve the republicans for turning to
| fascism, but we shouldn't say the Dems are blameless
| here.
| wat10000 wrote:
| How about this: Democrats share some responsibility for
| the climate that allowed someone like Trump to gain
| traction. People who ticked the "Trump" box have full
| responsibility for the fact that he currently occupies
| the office.
| whoooboyy wrote:
| That's not incompatible with what I said, and indeed is
| largely what I attempted to convey.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think it's because people, somewhat rightfully,
| consider the descent into a fascist regime to be a force
| of nature--a bug in humanity v1.0 that history has proven
| we have basically no internal defenses for. And the last
| election might have been the point of no return so it's
| frustrating to see the party opposed to the regime own
| goal so hard in the one election it actually mattered.
| fastball wrote:
| The American people have agency and are responsible for
| the candidates they elect.
|
| But part of this process is candidates being nominated by
| the major parties, and the RNC put forward a candidate
| that people actually wanted to elect. The DNC did a worse
| job of this, as a seeming plurality of votes for Harris
| were not because they liked her, but because she was "not
| Trump".
|
| Both parties have agency, but the DNC did a worse job at
| picking their nominee (assuming the goal was to win an
| election).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is a sideshow. Harris was a poor candidate, and lost
| a ton of votes because she refused to commit to a
| ceasefire in Gaza. Th larger problem is the Dems lining
| up behind the idea of running Biden again even though he
| was obviously inadequate.
|
| Dem flaws aside, Trump isn't just 'a candidate people
| actually wanted to elect'. He's an authoritarian, every
| major prediction about how authoritarian this
| administration would be has turned out to be correct, he
| instigated efforts to overturn the result of the last
| election where he lost, and 25-30% of the voting
| population likes authoritarianism and do not give a shit
| about what the Constitution actually says.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| You're not wrong about the process. However, I'm deeply
| skeptical of the idea that a popular primary candidate
| translates to a general election win or that the continual
| 2nd place primary finisher somehow can't be far more viable
| in the general election than the primary winner.
| danaris wrote:
| This is unhelpfully reductive.
|
| First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of
| _people who voted in the last election_ " is not the same as
| "half of _all eligible voters_ ".
|
| Second of all, a _lot_ of the people who voted for Trump do
| not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do--no question about
| that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have
| rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-
| justify their decision to vote for him.
|
| But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely _do
| not understand what is going on_ , and fall into one (or
| more) of a few categories:
|
| - People who have _always_ voted Republican, because their
| parents always voted Republican, and that 's just The Way
| Things Are.
|
| - People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda
| from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that
| Democrats are Evil.
|
| - People who have poor to no civics education, have seen
| their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last
| few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard
| the various Republican candidates telling them, over and
| over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You
| don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil
| Others who are the cause of every ill in this country",
| depending on how racist they're already primed to be)
|
| None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you,
| _from personal experience_ , that there are still people out
| there--left, right, and center--who genuinely do not know
| what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to
| get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off
| the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch
| institutions that actually run this country, or that the
| Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he
| likes.
|
| If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to
| understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of
| millions of people as "eh, they all _wanted_ fascism; guess
| there 's no possible way to reach them, then" is the _wrong
| problem definition_.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Not to be an asshole, this will not get fixed. It doesn't
| matter how reductive people are, helpfully or otherwise.
| The fascist cat is out of the bag.
| danaris wrote:
| Oh, well, then I guess we should all just give up and
| deepthroat the boot, right?
|
| Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was
| defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was
| defeated.
|
| We can defeat fascism too. We _will_ defeat fascism too.
|
| It'll just be harder if more people think like you.
| ergl wrote:
| > Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.
|
| Someone forgot about the 40-year long fascist
| dictatorship Spain was under
| tastyface wrote:
| Obviously, fascism will be defeated someday. The cost is
| the issue. Defeating fascism in Germany required the
| biggest and most violent war in all of human history,
| plus a decimation of its population.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| In Germany and Italy it was defeated by the military loss
| of a total war. In Span it was defeated by the eventual
| death of Franco and the assassination of his designated
| successor, after decades of right wing rule.
|
| You are in such a rush to be sarcastic that you're
| accusing the GP of wanting to cooperate with fascism,
| when they're simply stating the reality of the problem.
| You're saying naying nice words about the outcome you
| want to see, but ignoring the horrors between the
| institution of fascism and its eventual defeat. That
| suggests to me that you don't really have any idea or
| plan about how to overcome it, you're just wishcasting.
| The danger of this is that many people will advocate
| waiting for the next election to decide if it's _really_
| fascism (because that 's an unpleasant thing people would
| prefer to avoid), but don't have anything in reserve if
| the election is subverted, and in any case are giving
| away the political initiative for a year.
|
| Instead of trying to rally people with WW2 tropes (which
| the non-fascists are in no position to wage) it'd be
| better to build momentum toward general strikes, which
| have a rather successful track record in the US and have
| been quasi-outlawed as a result (eg by the Taft-Hartley
| act, which bans solidarity and political strikes by labor
| unions).
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I just don't see how you're going to run a general strike
| against Trump with the Teamsters and much of their
| membership on Trump's side.
|
| My plan to overcome it is to make it clear to elite
| decisionmakers that they will be held personally
| responsible for the misery Trump's administration
| inflicts on people, including by many of the people who
| thought they supported Trump before they realized what he
| was doing. It's not a perfect plan, nor does it have a
| guarantee of success, but it seems better than the
| alternatives.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data
| connected to a person?
|
| Accuracy is irrelevant. Even if facial recognition as a
| technology was adequate, it certainly wouldn't be in whatever
| random lighting conditions are present in the real world after
| going through the image processing pipelines of inconsistent
| phone hardware.
|
| The point is domination, and the app is simply one means to
| that end. They'd find another if they had to.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Because who's going to stop them?
|
| What happens right now is this: ICE can run loose and do
| whatever they want. If some judge finds their activities
| illegal, they can block ICE from doing the illegal things.
|
| But...who's going to stop them? Not the DOJ. Stephen Miller has
| said that ICE have "federal immunity". The keen observer will
| of course know that there's no such thing as "federal
| immunity", so a charitable way to interpret that statement is
| that no-one federal will go after them.
|
| So what about states, and local police? Sure, they could start
| arresting them, but then again, Miller et. al have warned the
| states about not interfering, threatening with going after
| LEO's etc. with federal charges if they do so.
|
| The long story made short is that they can (and will) keep
| doing illegal shit until someone stops them, and that's not
| going to happen as long as Trump is POTUS. DOJ and ICE
| leaderships has explicitly said that their workers should just
| ignore the law and courts.
| empath75 wrote:
| Yeah I don't think people understand how bad it is. ICE are a
| lawless secret police force with loyalty only to trump and
| they are actively and intentionally recruiting racists and
| fascist and fast tracking them through regardless of
| background. Right wing gangs like the Proud Boys are actively
| funneling their members into it.
|
| Their budget right now is larger than the Marine Corps and a
| lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison
| time if the democrats get back into control of the
| government. Think about what they are likely to do during the
| mid terms if they are told to monitor election sites. They
| are a gang of dangerously brutal violent thugs operating with
| complete impunity.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| To your point, this article1 recently analyzed records from
| the Federal Procurement Data System and found that ICE has
| boosted their weapons spending by 700%:
|
| > Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there
| have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons
| and "guided missile warheads and explosive components."
|
| I'd really like to know why ICE needs _guided missile
| warheads_ to do their job. (Edit: pointed out below, this
| is a purchase category that includes distraction devices
| like smoke grenades - they 're thankfully not buying actual
| warheads.)
|
| At this point, I'm confident that ICE could kick down my
| door and blow my white, midwestern, US Citizen ass away
| where I sit on this couch, and none of them would ever see
| the inside of a courtroom.
|
| 1 https://popular.info/p/ice-boosts-weapons-spending-700
| edot wrote:
| I doubt this makes you feel better but they didn't buy
| guided missile warheads. That category ("guided missile
| warheads and explosive components") contains, among other
| things, "distraction devices". So things like flashbangs,
| smoke grenades, etc.
|
| The purchase order PDF is linked here:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-guided-missile-
| warhead...
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Thank you! I'm still concerned about the massively
| increased weapons spending (it partly makes sense since
| they've been hiring so much, every agent has a gun), but
| it's good to know they're not buying actual warheads lol.
| I appreciate the link and the correction.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i'm not into this level of conspiracy really but all it
| takes is a lawyer checking a box and then giving a thumbs
| up and you could be killed with a Hellfire launched from
| a MQ9 at any time. This has already happened during the
| Obama admin and MQ9s patrol the border so is pretty much
| inevitable if not already happening there.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or
| prison time
|
| They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| ...and a Dem president would be too cowardly to add "new"
| charges and break the system.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| A blanket pardon can protect you from prison time, it
| can't guarantee you a job. We can do quite a lot to
| ensure that people who worked for ICE from 2025-2028 die
| miserable, penniless, and alone.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.
|
| Well, we've already crossed into "the law is what I say
| it is" territory thanks to the republicans, so the next
| admin just needs to leverage that. The GOP thinks that
| pardons signed by autopen are invalid [0] so I don't see
| what would stop the democrats from apply the same logic
| to ICE agents and administration, except perhaps
| cowardice.
|
| [0] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5575379-house-gop-
| comer-d...
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Stephen Miller has said that ICE have "federal immunity".
| The keen observer will of course know that there's no such
| thing as "federal immunity"
|
| The immunity is only from state prosecution and only for acts
| taken required as part of their official duties, but it does
| exist.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Sure, they could start arresting them, but then again,
| Miller et. al have warned the states about not interfering,
| threatening with going after LEO's etc. with federal charges
| if they do so.
|
| States ought to do that aynway, then instigate cop-on-cop
| violence. Ask Putin or Xi for help.
| kbrisso wrote:
| The scary thing? Who says Trump is going away?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It depends on how hard they push States. If it comes to the
| point where States begin threatening succession, and starts
| giving orders to local law enforcement...
| Kinrany wrote:
| Secession?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I live in Texas and lots of people were talking about that
| a few years ago. "We should just secede!", when i pointed
| out that they would have to defeat the United States
| Marines (and all of the United States armed forces) first
| they got real quiet. Once a state declares they're no
| longer a part of the United States then any sense of
| Constitutional protections or governance fly out the
| window. They're now on their own and subject to the full
| force of the remaining United States.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| _The keen observer will of course know that there 's no such
| thing as "federal immunity"_
|
| The scary thing is that there is.. you should look up
| "sovereign immunity". The government has complete immunity,
| except where and how the law permits it to be held
| accountable. And while we have a constitution, defending
| those rights through the courts requires legislation to
| permit it. For the most part, federal law permits lawsuits
| against states that violate the constitution, but have
| permitted far less accountability for federal actions that
| violate the constitution.
|
| For example, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act only
| permits individuals to sue state and local governments for
| rights violations. It can't be used to sue the federal
| government.
|
| There's many court cases, dating back decades, tossing out
| cases against the federal government for rights violations.
| Look how SCOTUS has limited the precedent set by Bivens over
| the years, basically neutering it entirely.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Removal of administrative restraint is different than limitless
| power.
|
| I think it remains to be seen how broader US society responds
| to the approach being taken. Hard to say how close the Senate
| will be next year.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Why exactly have ICE been given limitless power?_
|
| To act as the domestic enforcement arm for Trump's autocratic
| fascism red in tooth and claw, the culmination of what everyone
| not drinking social media Kool-aid has been saying for the last
| 10 years. Yet a third of our country chose to aggressively
| reject these concerns because throwing the Constitution in the
| trash "owned the libs", which was the only concrete policy they
| had left after decades of being led around by the nose by the
| corporate state.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Every authoritarian needs secret police. ICE happens to be the
| perfect agency for Trump to use for this, because immigration
| is such a hot issue for his base, and immigration law provides
| some nice loopholes in constitutional guarantees.
|
| For example, deportation is a civil action, not criminal. That
| means that to _exile you from your home_ the government does
| not need to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, does
| not need to provide you with legal representation if you can't
| afford a lawyer, and the procedure takes place in an
| administrative court. There have been numerous cases of small
| children representing themselves in deportation proceedings.
| And this was all before the current administration.
|
| The point of a bogus database is to give them cover for
| arresting, imprisoning, and deporting anyone they wish to.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Why exactly have ICE been given limitless power?
|
| > What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data
| connected to a person?
|
| The answer to both questions is 'to cause fear among the
| [immigrant] population.'
| fzeroracer wrote:
| ICE is, essentially the perfect cover agency. Your average Fox
| News-addled American will see criticisms of ICE and immediately
| jump to its defense, because obviously that means you want
| immigrants to take over our country or you hate our borders or
| you hate the law etc. You can even look back through various HN
| threads on some of the various crimes ICE has committed in the
| past year and see this common byline.
|
| The fact that Americans are getting caught in the dragnet,
| having their possessions and lives destroyed, getting sent to
| secret jails or being assaulted for merely being in the same
| zipcode as an ICE agent doesn't matter to them. It's all about
| inflicting harm on people they dislike, and if ICE is harming
| someone then obviously it's because it's they did something
| bad.
|
| It's pretty dire circumstances. ICE was always close to a
| paramilitary organization, it just took Trump to actually fund
| it and push it over the edge.
| tdeck wrote:
| This is not untrue, but it's also worth pointing out that
| democrats have been active participants in making ICE the
| dangerous, unaccountable, overreaching agency that it is.
| Nothing was meaningfully rolled back under Biden. And in
| Congress they didn't even block the massive funding increase
| for ICE earlier this year (instead Chuck Schumer urged his
| caucus to vote to end debate).
|
| This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the
| situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to
| vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential
| power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the
| midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.
|
| Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than
| risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a
| stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this
| year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted,
| corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and
| folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote
| hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad
| dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into
| fascism.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The opposition is right this second taking a stand on
| funding the entire government! I don't understand how this
| narrative keeps spreading when it's so transparently
| untrue.
| beej71 wrote:
| Legal Eagle just did a video about this. When you get
| Constitutionally screwed over by federal agents, you basically
| have zero legal recourse (unlike with state and local police).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Why exactly have ICE been given limitless power?_
|
| To keep everyone else in line. Americans are so programmed to
| defer to aw enforcement that they will watch the most blatant
| abuses carried out right in front of them with little other
| than hand-wringing. Immigration status is just the excuse,
| compliance is the goal. What do you think is going to happen at
| the next election? ICE doesn't even need to intimidate people
| at polling places, just the rumor that hey are doing so will be
| enough to scare many citizens away from voting in person. They
| could vote by mail, but no doubt you're aware that the
| President ad his party constantly impugn the validity of such
| votes. How much do you trust them to uphold and abide by the
| voting process? We've already seen what happens when they get a
| result that's not favorable to them.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| We've seen what happens when they get a result that's not
| favorable to them, and it resulted in them leaving office
| anyway while hundreds of their supporters went to prison for
| years. Trump did break them out, and I'm sure that's given
| some of them nasty ideas, but I'd encourage them to reflect
| on what the _maximum_ penalty for treason is if they try
| again.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| This is going to be a huge pain. The US has a very fragmented
| identity system, and "move fast and break things" approaches like
| this to bring information from across government systems well
| outside the scope of what that information was collected for will
| result in real problems.
|
| I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm
| a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I
| got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320,
| the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being
| noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but
| not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there
| are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely
| indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at
| least been very bad about renewing their green card.
|
| I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a
| camera put in their face, some old database record that has no
| chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious
| evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport
| will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar
| situations to me, and millions more with even more complex
| statuses.
|
| I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names,
| similar to this person:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily
| deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of
| real people?
|
| EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder
| e40 wrote:
| LPR?? It is so frustrating to see acronyms without explanation.
| I looked in the article and searched the web.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| They were born as a network printing system, and became a US
| citizen later in life.
|
| I see you, Wintermute, I see you.
| ape4 wrote:
| echo face | lpr
| codedokode wrote:
| I thought LPR stands for "line printer".
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Legal permanent resident
| griffzhowl wrote:
| I also searched the web: Laryngopharyngeal Reflux
|
| (second result was Lawful Permanent Resident; make of that
| what you will)
| williamtrask wrote:
| tried searching for "noodlesUK" and didn't find anything
| meaningful
| r_lee wrote:
| It's the guy's username
| frantathefranta wrote:
| I'm with you on this, especially this year LPR seems to stand
| for license plate recognition (Flock and others) much more
| often.
| 0xxon wrote:
| Lawful Permanent Resident -
| https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/lawful-permanent-
| res....
|
| It's the official status of green card holders.
| squigz wrote:
| Several results on the first page of Google for "lpr acronym"
| brings up "lawful permanent resident" or similar on my end.
| roxolotl wrote:
| > This is going to be a huge pain.
|
| I struggle a lot when I see comments like this. The point is to
| be a pain. The point is to empower a national police force to
| subjugate the populace. The people in charge don't care if it
| is " able to cope with the complex realities of real people."
|
| I don't understand why people, especially those like you who
| have complex realities, significantly more complex than me a
| white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA, are
| still giving any benefit of the doubt to these actions.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA
|
| and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from?
| right, you're an immigrant, you should be detained. the 1600s
| detail is just smoke. the only key thing you said was white.
| everything after that is just fluff for telling the story.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come
| from? right, you're an immigrant,
|
| Not according to immigration law, which is all that matters
| for the current discussion. The parent of you comment made
| a point which you failed to notice.
|
| BTW holier-than-thou attitudes and picking fights with
| friends are largely responsible for where we are. Spotting
| them is also a good hint for bot detection.
| dylan604 wrote:
| who's picking a fight? you tell me the sky is red, and
| i'm going to tell you you're wrong. if you think any of
| my comments sound like bots, then boy, i don't know
| tempodox wrote:
| > Not according to immigration law
|
| You overlooked the fact that ICE goons are breaking the
| law on a regular basis.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I struggle a lot when I see comments like this.
|
| This comes off to me as a more refined "Yes of course, what
| did you expect you naive person ?" type of comment you often
| find online (somewhat common among radical leftists)
|
| Maybe commenter agrees with you that the point is to empower
| a national police to subjugate the populace (This opinion
| does not raise any of _my_ eyebrows) but do you think this is
| going to reach people who don 't already think that ? To put
| any doubt in their minds ? I understand the anger the current
| situation is causing and I am guilty of breaking the hn
| guidelines a few times myself but I am also convinced of the
| need to actually explain what you think are the actual
| problems from the ground up rather than just casting your own
| conclusions onto people, no matter how obvious they seem to
| you
|
| So I did think they did a good job with their comment
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Someone I know is in a similar situation. She doesn't have the
| "naturalization documents". She has a passport, a ssn, and
| became a citizen before she turned 18.
|
| Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for
| months with poor conditions, with an administration that does
| not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or
| call out for help?
|
| This site likes to do the cowardly take of avoiding politics as
| long as it's advantageous. I'm going to look into these
| companies that produce this tech, and memorize the company
| names. If a resume ever passes my desk with a significant time
| at any of these companies, it's going to be a "no" from me.
| That's the small bit of power I hold.
| curt15 wrote:
| >Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for
| months with poor conditions, with an administration that does
| not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or
| call out for help?
|
| Better yet -- whisk her out of the country and then claim
| that she no longer has standing to sue.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Basically any "legal option", aka trying to legally fight
| illegal actions, requires letting people get hurt, or
| killed with no recourse while hoping some judge makes a
| decision and these people actually follow it.
|
| You as an individual are defenseless against an incorrect
| and badly trained officer. This goes for local cops,
| federal cops, the twitter racists they brought in for ICE,
| etc.
|
| Even if you oppose this with all your heart, if you're
| semi-intelligent you know the Admin is looking for an
| excuse to execute greater powers, so any kinetic action
| against the poorly trained, illegal actions of the state
| will only cause greater harm.
|
| The worst part about this, is if we allow the slow "legal"
| process to take it's course, even if all this is proven
| illegal and thrown out, people released, etc, nothing will
| happen to the people who brought it on. Those who have the
| power to hold accountable only reached the position of
| power by being amenable to others in power. We likely wont
| have trials against the individuals picking mothers and
| fathers up off the street for a bonus, we wont have trials
| against the people who offered the bonuses either. They'll
| disappear and come back when the times are more kind to
| their sick world view of violence and cruelty.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| The fun part is the Supreme Court has steadily eroded
| away any avenues for recourse. ICE can harass, abuse,
| even kill people with zero justification and any lawsuits
| will be thrown out.
| Muromec wrote:
| >Will ICE get it right?
|
| Hands on the ground don't read the laws, they only bring
| people before the person who actually knows them.
|
| So no, ICE goons will do the basic thing -- check how white
| the person is, if not white enough, ask for documents, if
| documents are not convincing enough _to them_ , snatch the
| person and let the more nuanced decisions to be made by those
| who can read.
|
| Now if the person above them isn't agreeing with
| interpretation of the law that was used to issue those
| documents, it's sitting in the jail waiting for a judge time.
| danaris wrote:
| Except that to all appearances, most of the time ICE isn't
| actually bringing them before people who actually know the
| law: they're throwing them in concentration camps.
|
| Or even when they _do_ end up before someone who knows the
| law, and that someone says "no, this is illegal, you have
| to set them free," they say "nah, we can do what we want"
| and put them on a plane to another country unrelated to the
| hapless detainee.
| adrr wrote:
| Administration view is that if you're not citizen, you
| don't get due process[1]. Even if you're a citizen, if
| their system says your not, you'll never get brought in
| front of people who know the law. Why due process only
| works if everyone gets it otherwise the government will say
| your a class that doesn't get it even if you aren't.
|
| 1)https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-trump-says-
| immigrants-...
| mike50 wrote:
| https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-h-chapter...
| oddsockmachine wrote:
| Your point about orphaned records resonates with me, but for a
| much simpler (or stupider) "use case". I took a domestic flight
| earlier this year and foolishly showed my British passport as
| ID. I had returned to the country the day before, it just
| happened to be in my pocket. My green card was clipped to the
| front of it. After checking the identification page, the TSA
| agent flipped through the pages of entry stamps, visas, etc.
| There, they found all my old US work visas, which have long
| since expired. The agent was convinced that, since I have
| expired visas, I must be here illegally and would have to "come
| with [her]". I pointed out that I have a valid green card, so
| I'm here legally, and that of course every visa in the book has
| expired because - well that's what they do. It took 30 minutes,
| multiple staff being called over, supervisors, etc before I was
| allowed to continue. At every step, the presence of the expired
| visas was a mark against me. Never got an apology or
| recognition that they were wrong, just eventually told I could
| be on my way. I truly fear that overzealous thugs will use any
| "evidence" to prove their presuppositions, like your orphaned
| records. (I've naturalized since then, and carry my passport
| card around religiously, for all the good it may do...)
| randerson wrote:
| Can someone remind me why this fragmented identity system is
| preferable to a National ID?
|
| I get that nobody wants to be tracked by the government. But we
| are already being tracked... just imperfectly to the point
| where innocent people are being jailed.
|
| The question should be how accurate do we want the government's
| data on us to be. And how much of our taxpayer money do we want
| to spend on companies like Palantir to fuzzy match our data
| across systems when we could simplify this all with a primary
| key.
| beej71 wrote:
| I think this is a valid question. The first thing that comes
| to mind for me is that multiple conflicting records introduce
| a doubt about the veracity of those records. So we might be
| able to consider that there has been a mistake made. Contrast
| that to a single identification with an error. In that case,
| there is no way to tell that an error has been made, and very
| little recourse.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Can someone remind me why this fragmented identity system
| is preferable to a National ID?
|
| States prefer having the power to issue ID cards and all of
| the control that grants them, they do not want to give up
| those powers, and politically the states have enough
| political and legal power to keep it this way.
|
| Don't make the mistake of presuming that this the result of a
| flawed cooperative system. It isn't -- it's adversarial.
|
| Just look at how long states fought to stop Real ID
| legislation.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because when it is convenient, people like to think state's
| rights means something and that the federal government is the
| wrong place for things like this. Giving a national ID cedes
| power from the states to the fed. Or so discussions go
| noodlesUK wrote:
| This argument rings especially true in the U.S. where there
| is already a primary key in use every day. The SSN serves as
| a universal enumerator but without canonical data.
|
| If the U.S. wanted to have a national ID system with rules, a
| defined scope, and redress procedures when things went wrong,
| and established it in the open, following a democratic
| process, I would be much happier.
|
| The system we are getting instead has all the downsides of
| centralisation, with none of the upsides.
| jonway wrote:
| Well, in the 90s through the late 2000s there was a LOT of
| paranoia from the right, especially the evangelical right,
| as well as the milieu that is sorta called the "patriot
| movement" which includes minutemen militias, sovereign
| citizens, conspiracy theorists, separatists etc. regarding
| Government goons coming for them, "Mark of the Beast"
| stuff, and New World Order global cabals and what not. They
| even had magazines.[0] This is the precursor to the Obama
| FEMA Camp conspiracy theories (Which is ironic, since we
| are now building camps, just you know, for _those_ people.)
|
| Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault
| weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in
| Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to
| impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much
| flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter
| this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20
| years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it
| unless you want to get on a plane.
|
| It is _highly_ ironic that the very same humans brains that
| constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID
| act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth
| reflecting on.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060702184553/http://www.n
| onati...
| kotaKat wrote:
| I'm also thinking about people that could get caught up at the
| border crossing back and forth on the regular because of this.
|
| If you get captured as part of this Mobile Fortify stuff, it
| sounds like it's going to merge it with all other CBP records
| you have (including all border entry interactions). Pulling up
| at the passport desk or at a land crossing is just begging for
| the officer to see that an ICE HSI agent pulled you at a
| protest and scanned your face to pull you in for "secondary
| screening" for "higher risk factors" going forward and throwing
| nice glowing red targets on your back.
| exasperaited wrote:
| Kristi Noem says no US citizens have been arrested so it's all
| OK, right?
|
| If you're white British with an accent from our shores, you
| don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up
| somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly
| inconvenient --- that clearly is happening to British citizens
| -- but nobody is going to pin you to the ground until you can't
| breathe. We appear to be getting the benefit of some doubt
| (unless we have opinions).
|
| And if you are white and have an American accent you're going
| to be ignored entirely anyway.
|
| Perhaps carry any paperwork you need, definitely carry any
| medication you'll need for a few days.
|
| As to whether the officer will ignore evidence presented: that
| is clearly _what they are being told_ to do. There are lawful
| citizens carrying their papers with them and there 's video of
| an ICE agent mockingly saying "what papers?"
|
| Because on the ground it's not about immigration status really,
| it's about race and white power and sheer numbers of arrests to
| meet Stephen Miller's quotas.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > Kristi Noem says no US citizens have been arrested so it's
| all OK, right?
|
| They've certainly been held in custody, though.
|
| Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-
| hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the
| purpose of a system is what it does."
| exasperaited wrote:
| She was lying, is what I meant. She is a liar.
|
| Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways ---
| what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent,
| unthinking consequence of this system is what it was
| actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality
| or even the perception that the USA is hostile to
| foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the
| operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.
|
| If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this,
| then you might say the purpose of this system is to
| desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent
| expression of presidential power.
|
| But when you combine that with blowing up boats that
| contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the
| use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which
| they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that
| feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not
| unconscious subtext.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > you're white British with an accent from our shores, you
| don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked
| up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is
| terribly inconvenient
|
| This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very
| good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they
| are running everyone through every database looking for
| things that might make you technically deportable that would
| never have come up under previous administrations:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o
|
| You _used_ to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted
| out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for
| months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out
| before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right?
| Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find
| themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when
| they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped
| into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get
| you out is not a sure thing.
| exasperaited wrote:
| > This may be statistically true, but it's probably not
| very good advice.
|
| Oh it was partly sarcastic ("terribly inconvenient" being
| something of a Britishism for really quite awful)
| jimt1234 wrote:
| And Justice Kavanaugh said that even if someone is stopped
| and question by ICE, all they have to do is prove they're a
| citizen, and everything will be fine; there's really no
| inconvenience at all.
| exasperaited wrote:
| It's such a shock he turned out to be a weasel, eh? He
| seemed like such a straight-backed, moral, uncompromised
| person in his confirmation hearings.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > And if you are white and have an American accent you're
| going to be ignored entirely anyway.
|
| For now, until they move on to persecuting political
| adversaries.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The correct answer is that you're a US citizen unless proved
| not to be. That's how the US has always worked, since we've
| made a long-term societal decision not to require papers or
| allow extrajudicial treatment of our people. This app and
| everything behind it is foundationally wrong and unamerican.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| The thing I think most people forget is _why_ society made
| the decision that the government requires a neutral third-
| party to be consulted to determine if there is probable cause
| to conduct a search of "persons, houses, papers, and
| effects".
|
| Otherwise, you have a 'king' issuing general warrants which
| allow federal agents to search and seize anyone they want in
| the course of their investigations based on 'feels'. What
| makes it even worse is some court said racial profiling is
| sufficient reason to conduct a Terry stop to determine if the
| person is engaged in (civil) criminal activity and lets law
| enforcement demand they show their papers or be scanned by
| some dodgy app.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Who cares about correct answers. While technically correct,
| it means nothing in the world of today. Those in power
| believe unless you can prove you are a citizen, you are not.
| It is only correct answer if that's how people are behaving.
| tremon wrote:
| You're being too generous. Once you are targeted for
| whatever reason, you are not a citizen unless you manage to
| publicly prove that you are, and they will fight tooth and
| nail to deny you any such opportunity.
| dboreham wrote:
| How much you believe this might depend on which regional
| bubble you're in. I live in Montana and around here I have an
| expectation that while there might be the odd rogue law
| enforcement person roaming the state, generally things still
| work like America.
|
| Meanwhile last week I was in LA for a family thing and caught
| some TV ads playing there. That dog-killing gnome woman was
| on TV saying something like "We will hunt you down and deport
| you, there is no hiding, leave now". Initially I thought I
| was watching some comedy skit, but no it was an official US
| government advert.
|
| Whether I'm in Montana or in LA vastly changes my perception
| of what's considered ok in America today.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Was unamerican.
|
| Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what
| America is now.
| somenameforme wrote:
| See: 8 U.S.C. SS 1304(e) : "Every alien, eighteen years of
| age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in
| his personal possession any certificate of alien registration
| or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to
| subsection (d)." [1] So aliens are indeed required to carry
| papers at all times. The balance between the rights of
| citizens and the obligations of aliens comes in the form of
| probable cause. It's similar to how a cop can't pull you over
| and just randomly search your car without reason, but if he
| has probable cause, then suddenly he can.
|
| An ICE officer can't just detain somebody for having an
| accent or whatever, but if they have probable cause to think
| the person may not be a citizen then they have a substantial
| amount of leverage to affirm that. Probable cause has been
| tested somewhat rigorously in the courts and really means
| probable cause and not the knee-jerk obvious abuses like
| 'he's brown!'
|
| [1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1304
| convolvatron wrote:
| the Supreme Court has recently determined, in Noem v.
| Perdomo, that racial profiling by ICE is indeed completely
| .. acceptable? idk what the right word for 'legal but not
| legal' is.
| Izkata wrote:
| That ruling wasn't based on race, it was based on a whole
| bunch of factors (including: high amount of illegal
| immigrants in the area in question, jobs and locations
| that attract illegal immigrants due to not needing
| paperwork, etc). It was also not final, it was temporary
| pending another appeal.
| pandaman wrote:
| The databases you are concerned about are, most likely, not
| indexed by pictures so how does it matter if your identity is
| determined by face, fingerprints, passport, or another
| government identification document?
| dataflow wrote:
| I assume you mean your parents naturalized? In which case I
| think you(r parents) should have been given a certificate of
| citizenship for you at that point, along with their own
| certificates of naturalization - was that not the case?
|
| (Not suggesting anything about enforcement practices - just
| trying to understand what the edge cases are like.)
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Nope. I was born abroad to a U.S. citizen who didn't meet the
| physical presence criteria to pass on citizenship. I came to
| the U.S. as a child on an IR-2 green card, then when the CCA
| became law I automatically became a citizen. My parents
| applied for a passport for me, and in the process the
| department of state presumably shredded my green card. I
| don't have a certificate of citizenship and I'm not eligible
| to apply for one, as I no longer live in the U.S.
|
| Unfortunately USCIS doesn't know anything about this (as it
| was all handled by the department of state), and presumably
| thinks I'm an alien who abandoned their status.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the
| complex realities of real people?
|
| _Cope_ with?! These systems and procedures are designed to
| circumvent the "complex" realities and give cover for
| deporting citizens and legal residents. So maybe you have a
| passport, but you've been attending protests, and perhaps even
| dared to be lippy towards an ICE agent; your passport is going
| to the shredder, and your ass to Liberia.
|
| I don't know how folk keep assuming DHS/ICE are acting in good
| faith - a shocking number of people continue to be oblivious
| until the agents come for them or theirs.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > "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,"
|
| This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying
|
| They've just created an app to justify what they were already
| doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex
| app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| You mean 'clearview ai' says no.
| rgsahTR wrote:
| > They've just created an app to justify what they were already
| doing right?
|
| This was also one of the more advanced theories about the
| people selection and targeting AI apps used in Gaza. I've only
| heard one journalist spell it out, because many journalists
| believe that AI works.
|
| But the dissenter said that they know it does not work and just
| use it to blame the AI for mistakes.
| bko wrote:
| It's better that the alternative which is humans. Unless you
| think enforcing laws or ever having the need to establish
| identity should never take place
| jMyles wrote:
| Humans are great at identifying each other. As the internet
| matures (and ease of long-distance communication obviates
| the need for massive nation states), we can constrain state
| authority to geographic batches small enough that people
| are known to one another.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not better if it ends up harrasing and harning more
| people and is unaccountable.
|
| You can eventually punish humans abusing power. Cant do
| that wuth software designed to be abusive.
| sennalen wrote:
| It's humans. This is like TSA's fake bomb detectors with
| nothing inside the plastic shell
| bko wrote:
| You think the person at the TSA that gets paid 40k a year
| is better at facial recognition than a computer?
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-
| humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people
| are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question
| than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M
| people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical
| document with their name and likeness on it already makes
| up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Stop presenting your opinion with no evidence as obvious
| facts on the ground that people need to argue against
| with sources.
| tchalla wrote:
| Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without
| human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now
| that says you should be banned on the Internet.
| novemp wrote:
| Yes.
| atmavatar wrote:
| It's likely the TSA employee's five year old child is
| better at facial recognition than a computer, too.
| bko wrote:
| Please don't spread unscientific misinformation. You can
| say ICE bad, or you don't believe in borders, but saying
| computer facial recognition is inaccurate compared to
| humans is just factually incorrect.
|
| https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html?utm_source=c
| hat...
| Kinrany wrote:
| Better-than-human facial recognition existing doesn't
| mean that all facial recognition technology is that good.
| esseph wrote:
| https://abc7ny.com/post/man-falsely-jailed-nypds-facial-
| reco...
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2023/12/...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-
| polic...
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-0163
| 4-z
|
| https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-
| recognition...
|
| https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&
| con...
|
| Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.
|
| Here's the science.
| verdverm wrote:
| Looks like GP is using ChatGPT (see the utm_source in
| their link) to find the first result that supports their
| viewpoint rather than doing a broad discovery and
| analysis
| gessha wrote:
| As a computer vision engineer, I wouldn't trust any vision
| system for important decisions. We have plenty of
| established process for verification via personal documents
| such as ID, birth certificate, etc and there's no need to
| reinvent the wheel.
| bko wrote:
| So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and
| you just take it on face value? Why do we even have
| photos on licenses and passports?
|
| You can't be serious.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I love how you're contrasting the credibility of
| demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition
| tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have
| been the basis for establishing identity for more than a
| century.
|
| Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn
| bit better than racist security cameras though.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.
|
| > Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports
|
| To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your
| mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given
| how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated
| actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge
| the security content in the license; the photo is one of
| the _weakest_ pieces of security protection in the
| document).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| (using he as gender neutral here)
|
| he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses
| and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is
| for standard ids that he would want these things as they
| are part of the standard id set.
|
| He said he was against computer vision identifying
| people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer
| vision engineer implying that they know what they are
| talking about. Although that was only implied without any
| technical discussion as to why the distrust.
|
| Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them,
| which they never claimed to do either, they discussed
| established processes, which a process may or may not be
| more involved than being handed a piece of paper,
| depending on context and security needs.
|
| >You can't be serious.
|
| I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and
| you just take it on face value? Why do we even have
| photos on licenses and passports?
|
| We have photos on licenses and passports so that if
| you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an
| ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be
| confident that this is not you.
|
| If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is
| another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list,
| that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them,
| because there could be any number of people who look
| similar enough to each other to cause a false positive
| for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision
| system.
| gatesbillz wrote:
| KYC disagrees.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The real alternative would be the inalienable human rights
| we were promised
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people
| who wrote the line you're referencing also decided that
| none of the people ICE is involved with were even
| eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this
| wouldn't even be a thing. I'm not arguing that their
| rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things
| they said feels intellectually dishonest.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It's more complex than that- initial drafts of the
| declaration of independence were more explicit about
| literally covering all people, and even had a rant about
| how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by
| cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it
| happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite-
| he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be
| ended, all the while owning slaves himself.
|
| Anyways, I think it's perfectly reasonable to nowadays
| take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just
| because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the
| past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Your subsequent comments like 'If you deny the need to know
| anything about anyone at any time, you're just so far gone
| that there is no discussion that could be had' indicate
| that you're sarcastically trolling people, and I suggest
| you do that somewhere else in future.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The alleged facts are _worse_ than an AI simply making
| mistakes:
|
| https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
| horisbrisby wrote:
| The trouble here is "ICE officer may ignore" ignoring that
| selectively on a Republican Senator is a civil rights violation
| of everyone you didn't ignore it on.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Well, these ICE thugs being told to do what they are doing is
| the actual trouble. Let's not shrink that Overton Window so
| small it can't be seen
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| Just like IBM said, a computer can't be held responsible for
| its decisions. Management's been doing this for a long time to
| justify layoffs and such. This is just the next step.
| roywiggins wrote:
| IBM wasn't held responsible either:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
| EA-3167 wrote:
| A lot of people and companies ultimately got away with
| that, because of either necessity or the manufactured
| perception of necessity. It's an important lesson about
| selective enforcement, and just how extreme the cases it
| can be applied to. From traffic laws to genocide, it's all
| negotiable for the powerful if there are benefits at stake.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I went to the Siemens museum in Erlangen. Their history
| of work on medical imaging is on display and it's good.
|
| The awkward 'Siemens and the holocaust' section was so
| pathetic.
| lb1lf wrote:
| If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot
| worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the
| Holocaust'.
|
| Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude
| towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| In a bleak sense I suppose I can understand, it's not as
| though they can have a big, "By the way, we greedily
| assisted the Nazis with the worst act of industrialized
| murder in modern history, profited from it, were never
| held to meaningful account, and we're still successful,"
| room.
|
| And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show
| that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-
| reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I
| won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to
| any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral
| outrage that feels earned around all of this.
| jacobolus wrote:
| They _could_ have an exhibit like that, perhaps
| describing how they were trying to make amends, donating
| money to projects promoting pluralism and diversity,
| opposing authoritarianism around the world, helping the
| descendants of those they harmed, etc.
|
| But they're not going to, because the people in charge
| don't sincerely care about the topic.
|
| As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions
| there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Increasingly a human can't be held responsible for their
| decisions either.
|
| Accountability literally means "being forced to give an
| account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind
| why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you
| have a public forum of people with common values, merely
| being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of
| shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline.
| Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.
|
| This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common
| values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you
| just find different peers until somebody thinks that what
| you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure
| solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I mean, how did you expect them to build this? The goal is
| clearly to build an infrastructure that can be easily used to
| persecute US citizens, so you can't let details like actual
| proof of citizenship get in the way.
| lisbbb wrote:
| All that tech is already persecuting people in China. It's up
| to us to hold the line here. I kind of gave up after the L3
| got those Naked Body scanners into the airports based on the
| "underwear bomber" that was probably a false flag operation.
| We can always hope for a mostly peaceful downfall of the
| state, like when Hungary finally shed its communist
| government, but most likely it will be a shooting war at some
| point. It is the nature of humanity--peace, freedom, and
| prosperity are exceptional, not the rule.
|
| Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War
| recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of
| corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings
| controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low
| chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a
| threat.
| bokchoi wrote:
| The movie "Brazil" seems more real every day.
| jMyles wrote:
| I don't know whether I can trust your take on this. Have you
| got a 27B-6?
| nemosaltat wrote:
| DON'T SUSPECT A FRIEND, REPORT HIM
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| People will read stories like this and still say domestic
| terrorism is wrong.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Not the people doing it, though. They _proudly_ call
| themselves "domestic terrorists." [1] It's OK when they do
| it, you see.
|
| 1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1912490669806858
| 51...
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| they are super cereal!
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Yes. This give them 'good faith' coverage in the courts. It has
| always been this way. If you include enough broken bureaucratic
| processes, checklists, paperwork, outside expert 'best
| practices' (outside experts just being cops from other
| agencies/jurisdictions or who are members of cop
| 'associations') then it moves from malice to 'good faith. they
| did the best they could within the system they operated'. Yes
| you have a right to a speedy trial, and it's just
| 'unfortunately' our system kept your in jail for a weeks to
| months, during which you lost your job, maybe your car, maybe
| your housing. It's all just 'unfortunately' and due to 'the
| system' we have to accept you being locked up for weeks/months
| meets the 'speedy trial' requirement. That timeframe was a
| 'good faith' attempt, sadly we sadled ourselves with all these
| things that meant we couldn't meet it.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > > "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,"
|
| When they decide that someone is in the US illegaly using the
| app... what happens? Is the person apprehended? Driven straight
| to the border? Taken into custody while more data about them is
| gathered?
| elif wrote:
| This is insane level of data to store for every person's
| likeness.
|
| Fake masks are so advanced now, I'm sure the IC has 3d printers
| that could just arbitrarily map any face to any user. And this
| insane spoofing capability would give not just the government,
| but contractors, corrupt police departments, or hackers or rich
| people that aquire the data.
|
| And that's just the physical realm because to me that's the
| scariest one, but giving these power manipulators access to
| likeness for deep fake video is probably sufficient to cause all
| kind of havock.
| mring33621 wrote:
| This same story was killed on HN over the last couple work days.
| Huh...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Weekend crowd.
| tempodox wrote:
| I was wondering why it isn't flagged yet.
| herval wrote:
| when a government implements 1930s style nationalism with 2020s
| tech - what could possibly go wrong?
| Y-bar wrote:
| I searched for records of IBM donations to Trump, but it seems
| they might actually be one of a few tech companies staying out
| of it. This company might remember their history.
|
| Meta and Palantir are probably the IBM:s of the current age.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _This company might remember their history._
|
| For the record: Apparently they helped the original Nazis.
| One link of many: https://time.com/archive/6931688/ibm-
| haunted-by-nazi-era-act...
|
| > _IBM, according to Black's book and the lawsuit, was
| responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi
| demographers in the years leading up to World War II -- and
| eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up
| Europe's Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM's
| German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated
| with the regime -- and, indeed, was in a consortium of
| companies making payments to survivors and victims' families
| -- Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the
| use to which the technology was put. And after the Germans
| surrendered, Black says, IBM's U.S. office was quick to
| collect profits made during the war by the subsidiary, called
| Dehomag._
|
| > _The punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were
| provided to Hitler's government as early as 1933, and were
| probably used in the Nazis' first official census that year.
| The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the
| government conducted another census, this time with the
| explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews -- and
| finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi
| concentration camps._
|
| > _It's this specificity of purpose, says William Seltzer, an
| expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that
| provides the most damning evidence. "Microsoft is not
| responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel," Seltzer
| told TIME.com. "But if someone is doing custom designing of a
| database, they have to know what's going on. With these punch
| cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new
| information that the government wanted."_
| AceyMan wrote:
| The book you want is _IBM and the Holocaust_ by Edwin
| Black. Well-researched, well-regarded & a bestseller. 597
| pages.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > original Nazis
|
| It's interesting that everyone is kind of on the same page
| without communicating some things. It seems we are at the
| point now where were referencing Nazis by which
| volume/edition they are from.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Collecting profits made by the subsidiary isn't
| interesting, not unless it was done without inheriting the
| responsibility as well.
|
| _Being aware_ of the use is also not exactly damning. We're
| all aware of what ICE is doing, that by itself doesn't make
| us responsible for that any more than we are responsible
| for the starving children in Africa.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The 2020s tech has had remarkably little impact.
|
| If anything, it seems to be helping the people more than the
| government. Turns out that if the government decides it doesn't
| need due-process, it doesn't need to spy on people either.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. They aren't
| coming after you at the moment.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| How do you know what you need to hide?
| boothby wrote:
| That's an awfully suspicious question to ask, don't you
| think?
| mark_and_sweep wrote:
| As a German, I gotta ask: Is this a reference to Martin
| Niemoller's "First They Came"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Naturlich.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Almost certainly
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Define the "you" you are talking about please.
| thhoooowww0101 wrote:
| (edit: It seems that it was sarcasm! I didn't detect it!)
|
| You'd think the HN crowd, with access to a lot of information,
| probably higher education, and basic knowledge of history,
| would be smarter than this, but maybe not.
| sanex wrote:
| _at the moment_ lul
| foofoo12 wrote:
| You got it!
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Sacred shit guys. I was hoping the sarcasm would shine through
| with the "at the moment". But yes, this otherwise deserves all
| the downvoting!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I downvoted you even though I know you're being sarcastic. The
| reflexive use of snark and sarcasm is bad. Poe's law (observing
| the difficulty of separating sarcasm from actual nastiness)
| identifies a real problem: reflexive snark is easily weaponized
| by people who argue your position sincerely and use you as
| cover. They can always say they're trolling until suddenly
| they're not.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| https://archive.is/WxyIP
| beeflet wrote:
| the USA has achieved communist levels of surveillance
| skopje wrote:
| this isn't communism: communism is an economic system. this is
| fascism (not even authoritarianism), which is a governing
| structure.
| jaco6 wrote:
| Explain why a person in public should be able to refuse being
| looked at through a camera. No one is allowed to refuse being
| looked at by any public citizen in a public place--by entering
| public you surrender your right to total privacy of identity. In
| a public park I can turn to anyone around me and say, "Who is
| that fellow over there? Anyone recognize him?" I have that right,
| and so does a police officer. A camera is simply a lens through
| which to be looked at, and so an extension of the park example.
|
| Sad to see programmers, who are supposed to be so thoughtful,
| slip into panicked irrationality in the face of new technology.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Scale and cost matter. Skin in the game too.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Not recognizing someone is not probable cause for seizing them.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| That's how ICE wants you to think about it, but they've tricked
| you. The rule that they actually implemented is that you _must
| accept temporary detention_ while being scanned. If a random
| guy wants to take a picture of my face, he has every right to,
| but I in turn have every right to hide my face or flip him off
| and leave the scene before he gets a good shot. If ICE stops
| your car, and they don 't trust your word that you're a citizen
| (or if you refuse to engage with them as is your right as a
| citizen), they will not let you leave until you've accepted a
| scan.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Are you arguing that seeing and recording someone are the same
| act?
| qustrolabe wrote:
| "You can refuse to give password to those fellow gentlemen with a
| hammer that tied you to a chair" kind of title
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Per thousands of videos on social media, it doesn't matter what
| your rights are anymore, if you try to ask for them ICE will just
| become even more sadistic and violent, and the DOJ/government
| will refuse to cooperate in bringing them to justice for denying
| you your rights- you have no rights or recourse anymore even as a
| citizen. Moreover, the agents are masked and refuse to self
| identify as the law requires so you will never be able to say who
| violated your rights- they are hiding their identities because
| they are committing crimes. They are not police that follow laws,
| they are state sponsored white supremacist terrorists.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Fedcops have ALWAYS been like this. They don't go away from an
| interaction empty handed like local cops sometimes will because
| the person they're after is following the law.
|
| But of course fed-cops were never seriously prowling
| neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is a Whole Foods
| so nobody on HN cared until now.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Most of Federal law enforcement except for those that patrol
| certain, usually sharply defined (but see border patrol for a
| big exception) areas historically has been in one of two
| modes interacting: either gathering information (this
| includes serving a search warrant), or arresting based on an
| existing arrest warrant, usually from a felony indictment. In
| the former case, something really out of ordinary has to
| happen to turn it into an arrest in that interaction (though
| that doesn't mean you wont be indicted and arrested based on
| it) and in the latter nothing is likely to deter arrest.
|
| Border patrol specifically is wildly different, looking for
| people who are suspected of being subject to their
| jurisdiction without a specific indictment, detaining with in
| practice, if not in law, a much lower standard of suspicion
| than applies usually, and then generally having those
| detained subject to process that is almost entirely within
| executive branch "courts" with consequences as severe as
| criminal process but much lower protections than criminal
| process (where literal toddlers defend themselves in "court"
| against government lawyers.)
|
| The current "immigration" crackdown, while ICE (which
| historically has worked more like a regular federal law
| enforcement agency despite its detainees often flowing into
| the executive immigration system and not the criminal justice
| system) has been the public face of it is effectively
| applying the Border Patrol culture/approach far more broadly
| (which is also why, in frustration with the "inadequate"
| results so far ICE middle leadership is being purged and
| replaced with Border Patrol personnel.)
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I agree with all that generally.
|
| There's real serious questions about what rights people
| have when being accused of non-criminal infractions and to
| what degree the punishments can overlap that people ought
| to be asking here.
|
| But nobody on HN wants to ask these questions because all
| the things HN wants strictly regulated are done so using
| the same legal theories and doctrines and precedents.
| lukan wrote:
| Are you aware that HN is not of a single mind?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You can say that about any group. Sure there's a long
| tail of rare people who can do better but averages and
| means will be what they are.
|
| The tech industry is full of fine software developers.
| Not sure they'd make great public policy.
| joquarky wrote:
| I'm almost 50 and I've seen this pattern many times now.
|
| Once the fallacy of composition starts becoming common in
| a forum, it is the beginning of the end for good
| discourse.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Oh really?
|
| I dare you to say with a straight face that opinions
| questioning the legal doctrine or legitimacy of civil
| regulation are anything other than an occasional rounding
| errors when the subject is any sort of regulation that
| people here generally likes.
|
| It is not at all a stretch to say this HN believes
| strongly that administrative/civil law as it mostly
| currently stands is highly legitimate.
|
| Of course, backpedaling and hair splitting ensues and the
| "doesn't represent us all" excuse flies when someone
| points out that those legal doctrines and, precedents are
| also empowering ICE. At some point you're responsible for
| who you associate with.
| Moru wrote:
| It's a bit worse now [1] with Trump in lead.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUO0Plcpbo
| convolvatron wrote:
| that's a great talk - from the cited executive order:
|
| There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting
| this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under
| the umbrella of self-described "anti-fascism." [ . . . ]
| Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-
| Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;
| support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
| extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility
| towards those who hold traditional American views on
| family, religion, and morality.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Some fedcops were always like this, but we can look back at
| previous administrations for invalid apprehensions of US
| citizens to see that the numbers used to be much lower over
| the last several decades.
| estearum wrote:
| "Fewer people cared when this was an objectively much smaller
| problem" is not the clever observation you seem to think it
| is, even with the weird Whole Foods snipe.
| juris wrote:
| XD any way to clobber cellular data and wifi connection within
| six feet of contact?
| cozzyd wrote:
| Sure you can jam all cellular frequencies. Not exactly legal
| but certainly possible.
| kbrisso wrote:
| I agree.
| fortyseven wrote:
| They better have that thing in a fucking OtterBox then.
| sambull wrote:
| if DOGE data + AI decided your WOKE.. maybe this won't say your a
| citizen one day
| skopje wrote:
| that is exactly where this is going. who needs pink triangles
| and yellow stars with ice cameras everywhere.
| DenisM wrote:
| With enough images in the database a match will be found any
| face.
| jschoe wrote:
| I wonder if my face is even in their database.
|
| I have US citizenship + SSN but never lived in the USA. I do have
| a passport though and visited a few times for vacations.
| tremon wrote:
| The safest assumption would be that if your face has ever
| featured in a photo on Facebook, it already is in their
| database.
| pramsey wrote:
| Last couple times over the border the officers have pointed a
| camera at me (travelling on US passport), so I assume my mug is
| in there. Seems completely routine and universal at airports
| now? I wonder if the original passport photo has similarly been
| scanned at this point.
| codedokode wrote:
| Don't they take photo and collect fingerprints when crossing
| the border?
| lbrito wrote:
| And the other day there was a thread with multiple people moaning
| that The Baddies signed a data privacy agreement, while of course
| the only country in the world that respects privacy is Murrica.
| jmward01 wrote:
| As I have gotten older I have liked 'vigilante justice' movies
| less and less. Superheros that always prove might makes right,
| cops that 'buck the system and do what is needed to get the job
| done', etc etc. It is because those actions always lead to
| exactly what we seen now, unchecked attacks on people. Corruption
| using 'we gotta do something and it means a few people will get
| hurt but it is worth it' as a tool to achieve their agenda.
| American media has been pushing this message out for so many
| decades now that we think these are the good guys fighting the
| hard fight when in reality the opposite is true. Law enforcement
| and the military should be held at a far higher level of
| accountability, not a lower one, because of the powers they
| wield. The country needs to grow up and stop believing, and
| allowing, this behavior to continue. Be an adult, show up to
| local city counsel meetings, get actually informed and not
| headline informed and vote.
| halJordan wrote:
| 24 is a great example of it. Watching the flanderization of
| that show is incredible bc what they flanderize is exactly what
| you're talking about. In the first seasons it was clear that
| what Jack did was wrong in the sense that it broke well
| intentioned rules; we were just in such an extreme scenario
| that the rules themselves broke down.
|
| But later it flanderized into, we want to break the rules. The
| rules are an impediment to goodness, not the guarantor.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 24, dr. Phil, and a whole lot of other trash from that era
| sowed the seeds of the current faacism-lite brewing in
| America right now. Neoconservatism is as much of a cancer as
| civic nationalism is.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Because the piecemeal sellout of the nation's industrial
| base to the far east on environmental grounds and then the
| piecemeal closure of any remaining paths up into the middle
| class on comparable grounds was such a resounding success?
|
| The peddlers of the things that caused the legitimate
| gripes that drove them into the harms of these movements
| need to do some looking in the mirror.
|
| Most people don't care about most issues most of the time.
| If they're holding their nose and voting for blatant
| extremism, the people they're not voting for ought to do
| some reflecting.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Not coincidentally, 24 was produced by the neocon Murdoch's
| Fox, and dramatized the same "ticking time-bomb" scenarios
| that Cheney was talking about on national TV in order to
| justify torture. Where you might think torturing one person
| is justified if it's going to help save thousands from the
| bomb, that kind of scenario never actually happens. Instead
| one of the main uses of torture was to extract "confessions"
| from people swiped from streets all over the world that they
| belonged to al-Qaeda, in order to justify the war aims of
| that criminal cabal of still-powerful and protected
| individuals.
| baq wrote:
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
|
| Rorschach was the bad guy.
| kbrisso wrote:
| This is America and we shouldn't have to put up with this. We
| shouldn't allow mask men running around terrorizing people
| because of race. But we can't stop it. American freedom is about
| being free from this form of harassment. American freedom is
| about being left alone to make something for yourself and your
| family. America is built on a bad marriage and is not perfect but
| to let this administration continue to do these types of illegal
| acts and cause one constitutional crisis after another is the
| down fall of this country in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned
| there will be no more elections in the future. What do we do
| then?
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > This is America
|
| It's probably not, but your post almost reads like satire in
| reference to the tv show by Sacha Baron Cohen with the same
| name. Living with so many contradictions for so long just
| leaves one confused and disoriented when it all shatters around
| you. American exceptionalism means the freedom to poison the
| well and the freedom to die from drinking poisoned water.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution: > The right
| of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
| effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
| violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
| supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
| place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
|
| Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law
| of the land here.
|
| Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like
| this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
| fragmede wrote:
| The supreme court interprets the laws, including the
| constitution, and they've decided that being brown is
| sufficient reasonability.
| estearum wrote:
| Nope they didn't decide that. It's actually even worse!
|
| A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps
| _deciding_ in the administration 's favor, but _this is not
| true._
|
| SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right
| now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we
| are going to overturn the lower court who _did_ actually hear
| the case and allow the administration to continue its
| actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got
| wrong. "
|
| Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is
| a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they
| are frequently _unsigned_ by the majority (conservative)
| Justices. Presumably because they don 't want their names
| written on papers that they know will be understood by future
| generations to be totally indefensible.
|
| SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling
| its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot
| more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases
| we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and
| we can pick random panels to hear different cases.
|
| Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any
| American even _know_ if they had a policy disagreement with
| an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) - we just need courts
| that can decide on things that are important to our country.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Frankly it's a miracle it took this long to be a problem IMO.
|
| The supreme court over the years has watered down
| constitutional protections against government enforcement
| upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to
| empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial
| regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc,
| etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by
| political optics.
|
| So now here we are, in a situation where the government is
| doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a
| criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically
| fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has
| been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court
| administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's
| doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the
| political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.
|
| There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone
| somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should
| have listened.
| V__ wrote:
| A constitution is a worthless piece of paper if it is not
| enforced. I'm about 50/50 right now if the midterms can safe
| the U.S., so far it doesn't look good.
| sigwinch wrote:
| To be more specific, ICE will be scanning the lines to vote,
| and pulling people out. In some states, poll watchers will be
| there to say, "no, you don't have to go with them". In other
| states, poll watchers will also be scanning.
| hiddencost wrote:
| IDK if you missed the last 10 months but the constitution is
| dead and buried.
| maleldil wrote:
| Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order
| Because Of Little-Known 'No One Will Stop Me' Loophole
|
| https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...
| henry2023 wrote:
| Monarchy doesn't need a constitution.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Gaming this out theoretically and actually being seized and put
| into a detention facility where you're not allowed to call
| anyone including a lawyer are two different things.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not just gaming it out theoretically! It's important to
| keep in mind that it's not just a policy dispute - everyone
| involved in this is violating the law, and when
| constitutional government is restored they can and should go
| to prison for it. (If you find yourself working for ICE, even
| indirectly, I'd encourage you to keep that in mind!)
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > when constitutional government is restored they can and
| should go to prison for it.
|
| I completely agree but fear the democrats will be too
| spineless to do anything like this. A radical change in the
| democrat party is needed - they should be promising to pack
| the supreme court and prosecute 3/4s of this
| administrations officials, at a minimum.
| joquarky wrote:
| > The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
|
| The light turns green.
|
| You go blindly.
|
| Get maimed in an accident.
|
| "But the light was green!"
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| The International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing
| Machines was right all along.
| djoldman wrote:
| I am not a lawyer.
|
| There may be some confusion here. It's legal for anyone to take a
| photo of anyone else in public, with few exceptions. TFA is not
| saying that ICE is forcing people to stand for a photo, it's
| saying that once ICE takes a photo, they can do stuff with it.
|
| As an aside, it's my understanding that, unless someone is
| arrested, they're free to wear whatever clothing they like
| including something that covers their face. Probable cause is
| required for arrest, therefore ICE cannot force you to uncover
| your face. I'm not sure this has been tested much though,
| especially with folks temporarily detained.
|
| Second aside, I anticipate a ton of lawsuits where folks give
| clear and convincing evidence of US citizenship and are
| unlawfully detained thereafter.
| sigwinch wrote:
| Yet false arrests without probable cause are happening. The
| limits on this are being tested on real people. For some
| voters, those are the right people to test it on.
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