> “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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Since your account is 17 minutes old, I have to assume you have been lurking for some time to "remember when…" on HN.
I am happy though that we are starting to seem more of this kind of content on HN. I understand that these political (?) posts can descend into finger-pointing and trolling. And that is too bad since I think we should not have blinders on in these rather unsettling times.
I will say that I remember when posts like this one were very quickly flagged when they hit the front page. I am happy to see that more and more people are finding them (unfortunately) relevant.
I lurked on HN for YEARS because I didn't even realize it was a message board haha. I had subscribed to the RSS feed and read the links but not comments. I thought it was just hacker news, as in a news aggregator.
well, given that the current US regime has been dancing around the notion that criticism of the state of Israel should be _illegal_. Such criticism has already been used as the pretense to detain and deport legal residents. Combined with the popular notion that law enforcement should be digging around in people's social media accounts to ascertain if they are a member of the 'enemy within', some people might be legitimately concerned about posting anything that casts doubt on the morality of the current conflict in Gaza.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.
HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven
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.
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.
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.
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.
> > “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?
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.
I don't know about you, but I have a license and a passport, both which have a picture of me. I use it every time I'm at the airport, buying alcohol, getting pulled over, going to a bar, walking in to my daycare to pick up my children, walking into a corporate office as a guest, and about a million other things.
It's not a stretch to say ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am.
It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
The implication of using such an app (“the best technology”) is that it somehow has more accurate information. If the sum total of the information ICE has is just the standard government documents (and it is) then what is the point of this app?
> pretending to understand things
Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.
“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
I'm willing to give ICE a little extra leeway right now because of the dire situation we face in terms of losing our nation by being swamped with uncontrolled immigration. The previous Administration sure had a big plan that they were very successful at executing. The mass influx has ruined two school districts in my area--they have had to spend ridiculous amounts of money on interpreters, the quality of education has fallen, and our state keeps coming up with more ways to tax us into oblivion while pandering to people who aren't even citizens! It all needs to stop for at least 10 years. If not, we will probably hyperinflate the currency (and may do so anyways--the damage is largely already done). I very much resent the Maoist approach to "tear everything down in order to seize control" type of power play. It is obscene and inhumane and uses poor people as pawns in a gambit to amass total control. That is not "democracy" that is anti-democratic in every possible way. They have continually chipped away at a citizen's franchise here in the US and now we are being taxed and inflated to death.
How can you compare the use of this tech to the persecution of Chinese citizens in China but then say you’re “willing to give ICE a little extra leeway”?
“Yeah, I know this is terrible and inhumane, but like, my taxes are kind of high and I’ve got to blame someone. Immigrants seem like maybe they somehow caused all the problems as long as I don’t think about it very hard.”
Sure is weird that DHS claims two million illegal immigrants have left the United States this year but nothing seems to have gotten better yet. Probably just need more deportations. I bet that’ll fix everything.
Yes, blame immigrants for the problems our politicians created. Gold star reasoning
Immigration rates have not drastically shifted in the last 4 years from the 20+ prior, averaging 1M a year, or .3% of the population. Without immigration, we are below replacement rates
By leeway, do you include the beating people and excessive use of force, or should those agents face consequences?
I want the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. I want to not be searched against my will and with no probable cause. I want my accuser named and my suspected crimes announced in a way that gives me the opportunity to defend myself. Basically, this denies all of that.
Does that relate to removing illegal immigrants? My understanding is that illegals have limited rights. Also, all the things you go on about mostly come later on, during arraignment and during trial. Arguing with cops on the sidewalk is mostly just going to get you jammed up even harder. Probable cause is something for your lawyer to argue about later.
> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...
What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.
People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
> Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]
Yeah, it's amazing how many people are so eager to ignore things like "probable cause" and "protection from unreasonable search and seizure."
ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.
> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.
I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.
> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?
The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.
I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.
> The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).
> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion
I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.
> I find it hard to keep these discussions separate.
...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.
The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).
In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
They put a whole lot of children onto a plane in the middle of the night to deport them. This was only stopped because laywers got wind of it and a federal judge intervened almost immediately on the weekend.
They are trying to bypass any review by being fast and creating facts that prevent US judges from any effective action as once people are outside US jurisdiction they have very little power.
And immigration judges are not actual judges, they are part of the executive.
you’re responding to a comment which states detainees are being sent to concentration camps, places like the deplorably named Alligator Alcatraz. i don’t think we should conflate that as deportation.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
See: 8 U.S.C. § 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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.)
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.
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?
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.
> 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:
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
>>> 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.
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:
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?")
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
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.
>>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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, ...
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You’re kidding I hope? Spearheading democratic socialist policies is a far cry from communism… calling Mamdani a communist is woefully ignorant at best and bad faith propaganda at worst.
(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.
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.
> “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"?
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.
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.
IBM wasn't held responsible either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The alleged facts are worse than an AI simply making mistakes:
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
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Since your account is 17 minutes old, I have to assume you have been lurking for some time to "remember when…" on HN.
I am happy though that we are starting to seem more of this kind of content on HN. I understand that these political (?) posts can descend into finger-pointing and trolling. And that is too bad since I think we should not have blinders on in these rather unsettling times.
I will say that I remember when posts like this one were very quickly flagged when they hit the front page. I am happy to see that more and more people are finding them (unfortunately) relevant.
This is probably a throwaway account. (Also, its username reads, shall I say, suspicious.)
I lurked on HN for YEARS because I didn't even realize it was a message board haha. I had subscribed to the RSS feed and read the links but not comments. I thought it was just hacker news, as in a news aggregator.
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well, given that the current US regime has been dancing around the notion that criticism of the state of Israel should be _illegal_. Such criticism has already been used as the pretense to detain and deport legal residents. Combined with the popular notion that law enforcement should be digging around in people's social media accounts to ascertain if they are a member of the 'enemy within', some people might be legitimately concerned about posting anything that casts doubt on the morality of the current conflict in Gaza.
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
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.
KYC disagrees.
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.
(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.
> 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.
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.
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).
It's humans. This is like TSA's fake bomb detectors with nothing inside the plastic shell
You think the person at the TSA that gets paid 40k a year is better at facial recognition than a computer?
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.
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.
It's likely the TSA employee's five year old child is better at facial recognition than a computer, too.
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=chat...
Better-than-human facial recognition existing doesn't mean that all facial recognition technology is that good.
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/s00146-023-01634-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.
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
Stop presenting your opinion with no evidence as obvious facts on the ground that people need to argue against with sources.
Yes.
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.
The real alternative would be the inalienable human rights we were promised
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.
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.
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Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.
HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven
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.
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.
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The movie "Brazil" seems more real every day.
DON'T SUSPECT A FRIEND, REPORT HIM
I don't know whether I can trust your take on this. Have you got a 27B-6?
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.
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
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.
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.
People will read stories like this and still say domestic terrorism is wrong.
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/191249066980685851...
> > “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?
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.
You mean 'clearview ai' says no.
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> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.
And do you believe that some secret ICE app is likely to be that best technology?
I have no reason to believe that ICE has any meaningful biometrics that would identify me as a citizen.
I don't know about you, but I have a license and a passport, both which have a picture of me. I use it every time I'm at the airport, buying alcohol, getting pulled over, going to a bar, walking in to my daycare to pick up my children, walking into a corporate office as a guest, and about a million other things.
It's not a stretch to say ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am.
It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
ICE ignores those documents, even for citizens.
The implication of using such an app (“the best technology”) is that it somehow has more accurate information. If the sum total of the information ICE has is just the standard government documents (and it is) then what is the point of this app?
> pretending to understand things
Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.
“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,”
You said: "If I was in the country legally..."
A legal resident would say "As someone here legally..."
> ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am
1. You cast doubt on your legal status.
2. The APP says you are not here legally.
3. You have no opportunity to present those things proving you are here legally.
> It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
It's amazing how much conservative dicourse is just them literally not understanding things, thus making discourse impossible.
Consider the literal evil stuff you support, discourse with you is 100% worthless.
thats cute :)
except that ICE is not using those documents, they are using an app and then claiming the documents to be false
ICE is operating outside the bounds of law and basic human decency
I'm willing to give ICE a little extra leeway right now because of the dire situation we face in terms of losing our nation by being swamped with uncontrolled immigration. The previous Administration sure had a big plan that they were very successful at executing. The mass influx has ruined two school districts in my area--they have had to spend ridiculous amounts of money on interpreters, the quality of education has fallen, and our state keeps coming up with more ways to tax us into oblivion while pandering to people who aren't even citizens! It all needs to stop for at least 10 years. If not, we will probably hyperinflate the currency (and may do so anyways--the damage is largely already done). I very much resent the Maoist approach to "tear everything down in order to seize control" type of power play. It is obscene and inhumane and uses poor people as pawns in a gambit to amass total control. That is not "democracy" that is anti-democratic in every possible way. They have continually chipped away at a citizen's franchise here in the US and now we are being taxed and inflated to death.
How can you compare the use of this tech to the persecution of Chinese citizens in China but then say you’re “willing to give ICE a little extra leeway”?
“Yeah, I know this is terrible and inhumane, but like, my taxes are kind of high and I’ve got to blame someone. Immigrants seem like maybe they somehow caused all the problems as long as I don’t think about it very hard.”
Sure is weird that DHS claims two million illegal immigrants have left the United States this year but nothing seems to have gotten better yet. Probably just need more deportations. I bet that’ll fix everything.
Yes, blame immigrants for the problems our politicians created. Gold star reasoning
Immigration rates have not drastically shifted in the last 4 years from the 20+ prior, averaging 1M a year, or .3% of the population. Without immigration, we are below replacement rates
By leeway, do you include the beating people and excessive use of force, or should those agents face consequences?
>>> Why wouldn't you want the most accurate method of identifying you?
But that's not what this is because it cannot be challenged. This is just an adjustable tool to arrest anyone and fits any need.
I want the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. I want to not be searched against my will and with no probable cause. I want my accuser named and my suspected crimes announced in a way that gives me the opportunity to defend myself. Basically, this denies all of that.
Does that relate to removing illegal immigrants? My understanding is that illegals have limited rights. Also, all the things you go on about mostly come later on, during arraignment and during trial. Arguing with cops on the sidewalk is mostly just going to get you jammed up even harder. Probable cause is something for your lawyer to argue about later.
Stop apologizing for nazis
The “best technology” based on what?
What if they scanned you and the result was illegal alien? How would you feel?
> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...
What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.
People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
> Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44285276
Yeah, it's amazing how many people are so eager to ignore things like "probable cause" and "protection from unreasonable search and seizure."
ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.
> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.
I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.
> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?
The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.
I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.
> The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).
> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion
I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.
> I find it hard to keep these discussions separate.
...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.
The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).
In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.
It's borderline farcical.
> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
Man, remember when the entire right wing lost its shit for months on end over Obama's birth certificate? Truly a magical time to be alive...
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If you continue to post abusively with troll accounts, we will ban your main account as well.
they are super cereal!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Are you aware that HN is not of a single mind?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
It's a bit worse now [1] with Trump in lead.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUO0Plcpbo
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.
XD any way to clobber cellular data and wifi connection within six feet of contact?
Sure you can jam all cellular frequencies. Not exactly legal but certainly possible.
I agree.
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
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...)
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.
>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.
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-...
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.
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They put a whole lot of children onto a plane in the middle of the night to deport them. This was only stopped because laywers got wind of it and a federal judge intervened almost immediately on the weekend.
They are trying to bypass any review by being fast and creating facts that prevent US judges from any effective action as once people are outside US jurisdiction they have very little power.
And immigration judges are not actual judges, they are part of the executive.
bit of a motte and bailey, there.
you’re responding to a comment which states detainees are being sent to concentration camps, places like the deplorably named Alligator Alcatraz. i don’t think we should conflate that as deportation.
>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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> Not according to immigration law
You overlooked the fact that ICE goons are breaking the law on a regular basis.
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
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.
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.
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.
See: 8 U.S.C. § 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
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.
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.
Was unamerican.
Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what America is now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.nonati...
> 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.
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
LPR?? It is so frustrating to see acronyms without explanation. I looked in the article and searched the web.
They were born as a network printing system, and became a US citizen later in life.
I see you, Wintermute, I see you.
I thought LPR stands for "line printer".
echo face | lpr
Lawful Permanent Resident - https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/lawful-permanent-res....
It's the official status of green card holders.
I also searched the web: Laryngopharyngeal Reflux
(second result was Lawful Permanent Resident; make of that what you will)
I’m with you on this, especially this year LPR seems to stand for license plate recognition (Flock and others) much more often.
tried searching for "noodlesUK" and didn't find anything meaningful
It's the guy's username
Legal permanent resident
Several results on the first page of Google for "lpr acronym" brings up "lawful permanent resident" or similar on my end.
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.)
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.
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?
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-h-chapter...
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.
> 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.
> 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)
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>>> 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.
> 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.
Are there any details available on whether or not anything actually happened there?
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...
Not just doge, there were pretty clear indicators they left the door open for Russia to grab all they could as well.
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?
Are you talking about DOGE? That data already existed in government databases. There was also no scraping involved.
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?")
Why would scraping have an unlawful connotation? I thought US courts have ruled scraping to be allowed.
"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
FYI, you wrote “scrapping”, but the word under discussion only has one P.
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.
Disturbing is when I burn my scrambled eggs in the frying pan. This is state terrorism.
>>>> 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.
Who needs mandatory id systems? State ID's and passports work just fine. What if I don't want an ID?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Rorschach was the bad guy.
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.
> 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!"
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.
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Never trust anything with a 3 letter acronym.
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.
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!)
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...
Monarchy doesn’t need a constitution.
The supreme court interprets the laws, including the constitution, and they've decided that being brown is sufficient reasonability.
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.
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.
IDK if you missed the last 10 months but the constitution is dead and buried.
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.
when a government implements 1930s style nationalism with 2020s tech - what could possibly go wrong?
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
The book you want is IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. Well-researched, well-regarded & a bestseller. 597 pages.
> 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.
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.
This same story was killed on HN over the last couple work days. Huh...
Weekend crowd.
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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.
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?
> 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.
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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.
The safest assumption would be that if your face has ever featured in a photo on Facebook, it already is in their database.
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.
Don't they take photo and collect fingerprints when crossing the border?
The International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines was right all along.
With enough images in the database a match will be found any face.
"You can refuse to give password to those fellow gentlemen with a hammer that tied you to a chair" kind of title
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?
The point is domination, and the app is simply one means to that end. They'd find another if they had to.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
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, ...
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Secession?
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
> a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison time
They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.
…and a Dem president would be too cowardly to add "new" charges and break the system.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The scary thing? Who says Trump is going away?
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.
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.
> 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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because half of American voters want fascism.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not incompatible with what I said, and indeed is largely what I attempted to convey.
Are there really that many unbelievably stupid people?
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.
Some of them are unbelievably cruel
Probably the most horrible thing I heard this year: “I’m ready to watch people burn now.”
Yup!
This is what abolishing knowledge tests for voting caused. It was an unintended consequence of a necessary reform.
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).
Not even close to half.
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.
Yeah well maybe the rest should get off their ass and vote then chief
A third are for it. A third are against it. A third just don’t care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.
Someone forgot about the 40-year long fascist dictatorship Spain was under
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.
> 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.
https://archive.is/WxyIP
if DOGE data + AI decided your WOKE.. maybe this won't say your a citizen one day
that is exactly where this is going. who needs pink triangles and yellow stars with ice cameras everywhere.
They better have that thing in a fucking OtterBox then.
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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.
Your argument: seeing someone and recording someone are the same act. Right...
Not recognizing someone is not probable cause for seizing them.
Scale and cost matter. Skin in the game too.
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.
the USA has achieved communist levels of surveillance
this isn't communism: communism is an economic system. this is fascism (not even authoritarianism), which is a governing structure.
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You’re kidding I hope? Spearheading democratic socialist policies is a far cry from communism… calling Mamdani a communist is woefully ignorant at best and bad faith propaganda at worst.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. They aren't coming after you at the moment.
(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.
_at the moment_ lul
You got it!
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.
Sacred shit guys. I was hoping the sarcasm would shine through with the "at the moment". But yes, this otherwise deserves all the downvoting!
How do you know what you need to hide?
That's an awfully suspicious question to ask, don't you think?
As a German, I gotta ask: Is this a reference to Martin Niemöller's "First They Came"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
Almost certainly
Natürlich.
Define the “you” you are talking about please.