In the Civil Rights era, segregationist states' police would systematically[0] stop and fingerprint black people, without individualized suspicion, to see if they were in criminal fingerprint databases. There's nothing new under the sun. Biometrics are centuries old; the tech we're talking about here is merely evolutionary, not something qualitatively new and different in human terms. The debate we're revisiting, safetyism vs. liberty, is old and well-trodden. And of course the part where these degrading searches are clearly targeted at minorities based on their appearance and skin color is of no novelty whatsoever.
This is still not fully supported by law. It is becoming normalized indeed, especially by the current admin. Let's hope this is not going to become widely used or that it doesn't stay permanently, eg. it gets at least restricted to some type of crime by future administrations.
Ah, what's good is law when the branch^W [after rereading about it, executive power is given to one] person tasked with executing laws is... lawless?
The notion that future administrations won't be offshots of the current regime (again, why do you think laws regarding democracy, like fair elections, will be upheld?) is also too hopeful.
China is already doing abominable things; how people react to additional surveillance is always related to what the state is actually doing with that information.
So a system that supports the abduction of polital rivals (an actual human rights violation) is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest of someone breaking a law that's accepted as part of a democracy.
I also think the scale of investment plays a part, the investment in surveillance in China is absurd. Its a significant number of people (per capita) that do nothing but monitor people. These new systems are rather cheap; so much so that they feel a whole lot more inevitable.
> is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest
That is not the system that the US has had since 2025, and the executive has made it very clear that it is not the system that it wants the US to have.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS has made it very clear that nothing this executive does will have any consequences for it.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when ICE can snag anyone they want off the street and throw them into some CECOT torture pit.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when the executive disregards direct judicial orders.
lol, just like China invented social credit scores which are for social control and definitely not like US credit scores which are just good business sense
Edit: to be clear I am saying this from a US centric viewpoint. China is catching up but they’ve been behind us for over a century tech wise and the US has been really good at pioneering new forms of injustice. I’m laughing at the idea that we were trailing behind them on learning new for handling their population
How is pointing out this inconsistency whataboutism? It might be reasonable to ask if it's a strawman since it seems reasonable to wonder if perhaps the people against what the Chinese are doing might also be against what ICE is doing.
Regardless, it's quite relevant to point out that at this point two of the world's superpowers are actively engaging in this. Claiming that the technology won't be used this way - that people are just fearmongering - clearly doesn't hold water. (Not that it ever did, but now we've got concrete evidence.)
But china is safe and clean and nice, so it might be worth it. Anyway we got no privacy anymore, cameras are everywhere and we all captured on someone hard disk, so might as well take advantage of the benefits that comes with this technology
We like to think surveillance is something you can turn on for one problem and turn off afterward. In practice, that never happens. Once the machinery is in place, it stays and looks for new work. Tools justified today by "illegal immigration" won’t stop there. They drift into credit scoring, health insurance pricing, hiring and firing decisions, school admissions, housing access, travel permissions, banking, welfare eligibility, and even which online accounts are allowed to exist. Not because anyone set out to build a dystopia, but because systems, once built, naturally expand to whatever can be measured and enforced.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
There is a gradual chilling effect of self-censorship to mass surveillance and loss of anonymity. When you know you are being watched, you change your behavior. You don't visit the "wrong" protest, you don't meet with the "controversial" whistleblower, and you don't seek out the "unpopular" doctor. Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism where citizens police their own movements to avoid falling into a "high-risk" algorithm, even if they've done nothing illegal. At its extreme, such societies end up with no outliers, no more of "the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels." (Steve Jobs). Safety and compliance at all cost.
The peer-reviewed consensus of this in psychology describes a three-step internal process of Anticipatory Anxiety, Risk Aversion and Self-Censorship [1]. The Conforming Effect (Conformity Theory) has been measured in studies such as those by Jonathon Penney (2016/2021), where use of Wikipedia data and search traffic shows a statistical drop in "sensitive" searches (e.g., about "terrorism," "human rights," or "health") immediately following news of government surveillance. [2]
Yup, I agree. And this is why I think mass surveillance isn’t just another technology to regulate. The chilling effect isn’t misuse; it’s the default: continuous, opaque observation changes behavior by itself. Because it’s centralized and unavoidable, people self-censor and conform; you don’t need arrests once everyone assumes they’re being scored.
We don’t yet have long-run examples of fully algorithmic surveillance societies, so the outcome isn’t certain. But if these dynamics scale, the risk is trading experimentation for legibility. Problems get hidden, metrics look clean, and warning signals vanish. When real stress hits, responses are late and blunt - overcorrection, cascading failures, accelerated exit. Stability holds until it doesn’t.
>Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism
And every step of the way the enablers will defend it on the grounds of "well you still technically can do the thing if you're willing to put up with some absurd risks or jump through some insane and impractical hoops specifically designed to be non-starters for many/most."
This specific point is addressed in a famous 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski.
Specifically paragraphs:
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. ...
128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. ...
129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. ...
Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter. There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. For example, I am substantially more free to not die of smallpox, which would have been quite limiting to my options.
That first sentence of yours really struck a chord with me. I tried to think of other examples:
Cars — essential for leveraging time to travel longer distances and carrying multiple passengers and heavy loads; ens up being used by one person to drive three minutes to get coffee.
Guns — to quickly précis a … complex topic: good guys, but also bad guys.
Electricity — power generation goes up decade after decade, but so too does consumption with wasteful consumption going hand in hand with productive consumption.
As you might be able to tell, I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.
I think those examples miss an important distinction. Cars, guns, and electricity are consumer technologies. They’re widely distributed, regulated, and constrained by market forces and law. Individuals can choose how to use them, and misuse is at least partially visible and contestable.
Surveillance is different. It’s inherently centralized and asymmetrical. By design, it gives one side - the state or large institutions - persistent visibility into everyone else, with little reciprocity. You can regulate how it’s used on paper, but the power imbalance remains.
It’s closer to nuclear technology than to cars or electricity. I can’t build a nuclear weapon or possess fissile material, not because it’s inefficient, but because some technologies are considered too dangerous to be broadly accessible. Mass surveillance belongs in that category. Once it exists, citizens don’t get to opt out, and meaningful oversight tends to lag far behind capability.
Licensing works when the technology is decentralized. With surveillance, the risk isn’t misuse at the edges - it’s concentration at the center.
clothing i think is a big one. Once the poster-child of industrialisation, now results in millions of tons being thrown away each other at a massive environmental cost.
> I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.
In the golden age of the 90's we were able to ban CFCs, but I'm skeptical we could do that today. We no longer have that political ability, and I doubt we will get it back any time soon.
Your comment should offend far more on HN than it will.
Heck, drop into any comment section about transportation infrastructure or environmental policy (or a few years ago public health policy as well) and there's all sorts of evil mustache twirling going on about how to use basically the same sort of technologies to deploy state violence in pursuit of some goal and they are either unable or unwilling to think a few steps ahead see that what they're advocating for will over time if not quickly lead to dark places as policy and priorities change incrementally.
As I'm concerned the people who are happy to peddle this stuff when it suits them are just as complicit as the people who are cheering for it right now when it's being used for "obviously bad" things.
>As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
This quote is like a lightening rod for exactly the kind of people I'm talking about.
I don't think this is a useful framework for understanding these issues. What you are saying can, in essense, boil down to "any law enforcement is bad". ICE and its inhumane practices are just symptoms of an increasingly authoritarian administration that receives sufficient mandate from the population to push for increasingly authoritarian practices. The tools are just that, tools. The situation will keep getting worse until the population gets sick of it enough to push the wannabe autocrats out of power (and not replace them by other wannabe autocrats), and have the new administration dismantle these tools. Easier said than done, I know.
I think we're finally seeing the culture that's been present in law enforcement forever playing out to its logical end. The solution is pretty close to "all law enforcement is bad". We're seeing that the people most prone to violence and abuse seek out positions of power in law enforcement. Basically anyone who wants to be a cop should not be allowed to be a cop.
We can blame autocrats while also blaming the complicit tools. In Grand Rapids, Michigan yesterday the local police arrested the organizer of a protest against the invasion of Venezuela while she was on camera interviewing with the local news for "obstructing a roadway" (marching in a lane with other lanes open to traffic) and "disobeying a lawful command".
When we have local beat cops colluding with national secret police and suppressing dissent, we have a very serious problem and are running out of options very quickly.
Indeed, that's true. Payment for autism, originally intended for sick children, now a Somali scam. Veteran's disability, originally a means to allow people who were injured while serving the country, now a way for a desk-jockey to receive an annual stipend.
Any mechanism, once built, seeks to expand its scope. Until it delivers mail ;)
> "Basically anyone who trusted the government at any point in the past."
Over one million Afghanis voluntarily gave America their iris biometrics; now the Taliban has that data. US military negligently failed to secure it. Lists of American collaborators' biometrics and everything.
The normal TSA pre-check lines make you scan your face too. They used to read "images are deleted after use" but I didn't notice that message last time I went through security. So likely it's being used by ICE now.
The customs line have been doing much more rigorous face scanning for a while now.
Is this common? Airport scanners are usually face scanners. Iris scanners are almost always for employees with access to critical areas, not for travelers. I know Doha and Singapore airports use iris scanners at the security check. It's probably a growing trend, haven't seen any in the EU, is it already common in the US?
Depending on the crime, most people would agree that face/gait recognition is warranted, for example in case of murder or rape.
The difference here is that some people consider "illegal immigration" to be more like a misdemeanor, others consider it to be something much more serious.
Agreed and wanted to add. If it exists, can do the job, and the person in charge is aware of it, then it will inevitably be used. There's no such thing as "only for certain situations" unless there is a large inherent cost to using it outside of the proscribed scenario.
If you mandate the placement of fireman's axes by every door, at some point someone is going to use one of them to commit murder or vandalism or some other crime. There is effectively nothing that can be done to prevent that other than choosing not to mandate their placement.
> others consider it to be something much more serious.
We have limited funds for social safety nets for our own citizens: how is it not "serious" that we would deplete them on folks who are willfully and intentionally breaking our rules for financial benefit?
We have a court system specifically meant to interpret the law, and a tiered appeals process for when one of the courtroom parties disagrees with that court’s interpretation.
Quick, does the First Amendment allow the government to place any restrictions on speech? The words are right there for the reading and knowing, so that should be a simple question, surely?
Totalitarians on one side convince their side, that it's totally fine and desirable to ignore the law and let millions of illegal immigrants in. Then then totalitarians on the other side convince their side it is necessary to ignore the law and introduce wide sweeping surveillance to undo it. Congratulations, both sides cooperated while hating each other because they are easy to play dummies.
Hypothetically speaking couldn't you collect it from any security camera in an area where you have positive ID on people? Airport security comes to mind.
With all the trade in personal data in the US I assume it's only a matter of time before places like grocery stores start selling it.
Why stop at just gait though? Geometric fingerprinting of various body parts is also possible. Palm geometry readers have been commonplace for a long time.
Every grocery store self checkout has cameras on the whole area as you walk up, then cameras on your face, and then pretty good self identification via your payment card/rewards.
That would be implementing remigration, meaning deport all the non-white folks. Never mind that whites are immigrants too and aren't indigenous to the Americas.
I don't understand how the American public allows this administration to get away with half the shit it says and does. Every week is a new scandal.
Some Americans. Trump won a plurality, not the majority vote, for those who bothered to vote. His approval rating is somewhere between 36% and 41% depending on the poll for the last several months. It's clear a decent number of the 77 million who voted for him didn't think he would behave the way he has in his 2nd term.
They didn't take Project 2025 or his alliance with the tech bros seriously. They didn't listen to former Trump officials who warned a second term would be a revenge tour and he would surround himself with loyalists and sycophants without anyone to hold his worst impulses in check. They didn't realize people like Stephen Miller would have such influence over his decisions. They didn't believe that Trump had such disregard for the rule of law and would actually prefer to rule like a king.
But people have been waking up to the new reality. Even some MAGA like MTG and podcasters like Rogan.
You'll spend way more tax money to haul them across the border than you would to just print them a permit to live and work in the community they've been contributing to for years. Every study ever conducted on the issue has concluded that undocumented immigrants contribute far more to the economy than they consume in public welfare dollars. You've let the actual tax dollar parasites pawn the blame on a scapegoat because you're addicted to being angry.
This is a very shortsighted and frankly dumb argument. You would give up constitutional rights, to allow an unchecked police force, to arrest anyone they want, to save a few tax dollars?
https://archive.is/UB9kC
In the Civil Rights era, segregationist states' police would systematically[0] stop and fingerprint black people, without individualized suspicion, to see if they were in criminal fingerprint databases. There's nothing new under the sun. Biometrics are centuries old; the tech we're talking about here is merely evolutionary, not something qualitatively new and different in human terms. The debate we're revisiting, safetyism vs. liberty, is old and well-trodden. And of course the part where these degrading searches are clearly targeted at minorities based on their appearance and skin color is of no novelty whatsoever.
[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/721/ ("Davis v. Mississippi (1969)")
When China did this, this was seen as a terrible violation of rights....
Now that we do this hundreds of times a day, it has become routine.
The US literary attacked a country and captured its leader. They always have a double standard.
Literary? Haha
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This is still not fully supported by law. It is becoming normalized indeed, especially by the current admin. Let's hope this is not going to become widely used or that it doesn't stay permanently, eg. it gets at least restricted to some type of crime by future administrations.
Not supported by law where? I’m unaware of any legal proscription of this practice in the USA, and the Journal article makes no such claims, either.
(IAAL but this is not my primary field of expertise, and this is not legal advice.)
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Ah, what's good is law when the branch^W [after rereading about it, executive power is given to one] person tasked with executing laws is... lawless?
The notion that future administrations won't be offshots of the current regime (again, why do you think laws regarding democracy, like fair elections, will be upheld?) is also too hopeful.
Happy new year!
It won’t be restricted until the people push against it to a point where it becomes too politically expensive to not restrict.
Law is expensive.
China is already doing abominable things; how people react to additional surveillance is always related to what the state is actually doing with that information.
So a system that supports the abduction of polital rivals (an actual human rights violation) is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest of someone breaking a law that's accepted as part of a democracy.
I also think the scale of investment plays a part, the investment in surveillance in China is absurd. Its a significant number of people (per capita) that do nothing but monitor people. These new systems are rather cheap; so much so that they feel a whole lot more inevitable.
Democracy is when you get abducted and sent to CECOT because some shitty AI face app said so
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> is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest
That is not the system that the US has had since 2025, and the executive has made it very clear that it is not the system that it wants the US to have.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS has made it very clear that nothing this executive does will have any consequences for it.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when ICE can snag anyone they want off the street and throw them into some CECOT torture pit.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when the executive disregards direct judicial orders.
ICE does not care about "lawful arrests". Like common, that is not their thing.
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> abduction of political rivals
Couldn’t have timed it better, we just pulled off the most high profile abduction of a geopolitical rival in history.
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That's a totally wrong way to think about it, akin to "I have nothing to hide so why not let the government look into all my communications"
In both systems the law is being carefully followed to support inhumane goals
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Yep, it's converging to the same system...
In China government is controlled by chosen members of the ruling party who become wealthy through it;
In the US the government is controlled by billionaires who become powerful through it.
Neither is a "government by the people" nor a "democratic people's republic" and both are enacting more and more similar policies.
> When China did this, this was seen as a terrible violation of rights
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" [1].
Beijing showed the way. We followed their path. Both are at fault.
[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
> Beijing showed the way. We followed their path.
lol, just like China invented social credit scores which are for social control and definitely not like US credit scores which are just good business sense
Edit: to be clear I am saying this from a US centric viewpoint. China is catching up but they’ve been behind us for over a century tech wise and the US has been really good at pioneering new forms of injustice. I’m laughing at the idea that we were trailing behind them on learning new for handling their population
8 replies →
Let me quote the CEO of ycombinator.
>You're thinking Chinese surveillance
>US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
American capitalists are ideologically driven hypocrites.
Are we allowed to criticize Garry Tan here?
>"When China did this, this was seen as a terrible violation of rights.... Now that we do this hundreds of times a day, it has become routine."
Normally questions like this would be labeled as whataboutism, false equivalence etc. One rule for thee, another one for me.
Personally I think we (The West) are heading to disaster. I really missed older times before 9/11
How is pointing out this inconsistency whataboutism? It might be reasonable to ask if it's a strawman since it seems reasonable to wonder if perhaps the people against what the Chinese are doing might also be against what ICE is doing.
Regardless, it's quite relevant to point out that at this point two of the world's superpowers are actively engaging in this. Claiming that the technology won't be used this way - that people are just fearmongering - clearly doesn't hold water. (Not that it ever did, but now we've got concrete evidence.)
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America is not the West. There are a lot of things wrong in my country but we don't worship Jesus nor billionaires.
This is the default response whenever HN commentators have no other way to say "china bad".
But china is safe and clean and nice, so it might be worth it. Anyway we got no privacy anymore, cameras are everywhere and we all captured on someone hard disk, so might as well take advantage of the benefits that comes with this technology
China is not "safe, clean and nice" for everybody.
We like to think surveillance is something you can turn on for one problem and turn off afterward. In practice, that never happens. Once the machinery is in place, it stays and looks for new work. Tools justified today by "illegal immigration" won’t stop there. They drift into credit scoring, health insurance pricing, hiring and firing decisions, school admissions, housing access, travel permissions, banking, welfare eligibility, and even which online accounts are allowed to exist. Not because anyone set out to build a dystopia, but because systems, once built, naturally expand to whatever can be measured and enforced.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
There is a gradual chilling effect of self-censorship to mass surveillance and loss of anonymity. When you know you are being watched, you change your behavior. You don't visit the "wrong" protest, you don't meet with the "controversial" whistleblower, and you don't seek out the "unpopular" doctor. Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism where citizens police their own movements to avoid falling into a "high-risk" algorithm, even if they've done nothing illegal. At its extreme, such societies end up with no outliers, no more of "the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels." (Steve Jobs). Safety and compliance at all cost.
The peer-reviewed consensus of this in psychology describes a three-step internal process of Anticipatory Anxiety, Risk Aversion and Self-Censorship [1]. The Conforming Effect (Conformity Theory) has been measured in studies such as those by Jonathon Penney (2016/2021), where use of Wikipedia data and search traffic shows a statistical drop in "sensitive" searches (e.g., about "terrorism," "human rights," or "health") immediately following news of government surveillance. [2]
[1] Surveillance as a Socio-Technical System: Behavioral Impacts and Self-Regulation in Monitored Environments, https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/13/7/614
[2] Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use, https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1127413?v=pdf
Yup, I agree. And this is why I think mass surveillance isn’t just another technology to regulate. The chilling effect isn’t misuse; it’s the default: continuous, opaque observation changes behavior by itself. Because it’s centralized and unavoidable, people self-censor and conform; you don’t need arrests once everyone assumes they’re being scored.
We don’t yet have long-run examples of fully algorithmic surveillance societies, so the outcome isn’t certain. But if these dynamics scale, the risk is trading experimentation for legibility. Problems get hidden, metrics look clean, and warning signals vanish. When real stress hits, responses are late and blunt - overcorrection, cascading failures, accelerated exit. Stability holds until it doesn’t.
3 replies →
>Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism
And every step of the way the enablers will defend it on the grounds of "well you still technically can do the thing if you're willing to put up with some absurd risks or jump through some insane and impractical hoops specifically designed to be non-starters for many/most."
This specific point is addressed in a famous 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski.
Specifically paragraphs:
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. ...
128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. ...
129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Who ever said facial recognition wasn't going to threaten freedom? None of those points feel at all relevant or substantive to the topic of discussion
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[dead]
Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter. There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. For example, I am substantially more free to not die of smallpox, which would have been quite limiting to my options.
18 replies →
That first sentence of yours really struck a chord with me. I tried to think of other examples:
Cars — essential for leveraging time to travel longer distances and carrying multiple passengers and heavy loads; ens up being used by one person to drive three minutes to get coffee.
Guns — to quickly précis a … complex topic: good guys, but also bad guys.
Electricity — power generation goes up decade after decade, but so too does consumption with wasteful consumption going hand in hand with productive consumption.
As you might be able to tell, I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.
I think those examples miss an important distinction. Cars, guns, and electricity are consumer technologies. They’re widely distributed, regulated, and constrained by market forces and law. Individuals can choose how to use them, and misuse is at least partially visible and contestable.
Surveillance is different. It’s inherently centralized and asymmetrical. By design, it gives one side - the state or large institutions - persistent visibility into everyone else, with little reciprocity. You can regulate how it’s used on paper, but the power imbalance remains.
It’s closer to nuclear technology than to cars or electricity. I can’t build a nuclear weapon or possess fissile material, not because it’s inefficient, but because some technologies are considered too dangerous to be broadly accessible. Mass surveillance belongs in that category. Once it exists, citizens don’t get to opt out, and meaningful oversight tends to lag far behind capability.
Licensing works when the technology is decentralized. With surveillance, the risk isn’t misuse at the edges - it’s concentration at the center.
clothing i think is a big one. Once the poster-child of industrialisation, now results in millions of tons being thrown away each other at a massive environmental cost.
> I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.
In the golden age of the 90's we were able to ban CFCs, but I'm skeptical we could do that today. We no longer have that political ability, and I doubt we will get it back any time soon.
Your comment should offend far more on HN than it will.
Heck, drop into any comment section about transportation infrastructure or environmental policy (or a few years ago public health policy as well) and there's all sorts of evil mustache twirling going on about how to use basically the same sort of technologies to deploy state violence in pursuit of some goal and they are either unable or unwilling to think a few steps ahead see that what they're advocating for will over time if not quickly lead to dark places as policy and priorities change incrementally.
As I'm concerned the people who are happy to peddle this stuff when it suits them are just as complicit as the people who are cheering for it right now when it's being used for "obviously bad" things.
>As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
This quote is like a lightening rod for exactly the kind of people I'm talking about.
I don't think this is a useful framework for understanding these issues. What you are saying can, in essense, boil down to "any law enforcement is bad". ICE and its inhumane practices are just symptoms of an increasingly authoritarian administration that receives sufficient mandate from the population to push for increasingly authoritarian practices. The tools are just that, tools. The situation will keep getting worse until the population gets sick of it enough to push the wannabe autocrats out of power (and not replace them by other wannabe autocrats), and have the new administration dismantle these tools. Easier said than done, I know.
I think we're finally seeing the culture that's been present in law enforcement forever playing out to its logical end. The solution is pretty close to "all law enforcement is bad". We're seeing that the people most prone to violence and abuse seek out positions of power in law enforcement. Basically anyone who wants to be a cop should not be allowed to be a cop.
We can blame autocrats while also blaming the complicit tools. In Grand Rapids, Michigan yesterday the local police arrested the organizer of a protest against the invasion of Venezuela while she was on camera interviewing with the local news for "obstructing a roadway" (marching in a lane with other lanes open to traffic) and "disobeying a lawful command".
When we have local beat cops colluding with national secret police and suppressing dissent, we have a very serious problem and are running out of options very quickly.
1 reply →
Indeed, that's true. Payment for autism, originally intended for sick children, now a Somali scam. Veteran's disability, originally a means to allow people who were injured while serving the country, now a way for a desk-jockey to receive an annual stipend.
Any mechanism, once built, seeks to expand its scope. Until it delivers mail ;)
Whats really scary is that ICE is now working with a myriad of other bodies such as FBI, meaning they all get used to using this tech.
> the agency has greenlighted a contract for a tool that can scan subjects’ irises
Where does the initial iris data come from? Is this actually collected now?
One likely source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/sam-altmans-worldcoin-beco...
> Where does the initial iris data come from?
Visa photos. DACA applications [1]. Basically anyone who trusted the government at any point in the past.
It won't catch cartel members. But cocaine seems to be the one thing whose price this administration has driven down [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/mexico-drugs-cartel-osegu... "Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago"
> "Basically anyone who trusted the government at any point in the past."
Over one million Afghanis voluntarily gave America their iris biometrics; now the Taliban has that data. US military negligently failed to secure it. Lists of American collaborators' biometrics and everything.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/taliban-afghanistan-biome... ("Taliban likely to have access to biometric databases of Afghan civilians who helped US" (2021))
Probably from the airport scanners and cameras I see everyone gleefully sticking their faces in. A savings of several minutes per flight!
The normal TSA pre-check lines make you scan your face too. They used to read "images are deleted after use" but I didn't notice that message last time I went through security. So likely it's being used by ICE now.
The customs line have been doing much more rigorous face scanning for a while now.
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Is this common? Airport scanners are usually face scanners. Iris scanners are almost always for employees with access to critical areas, not for travelers. I know Doha and Singapore airports use iris scanners at the security check. It's probably a growing trend, haven't seen any in the EU, is it already common in the US?
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everywhere
DOGE
We've been building a turn key police state for the past 25 years.
Depending on the crime, most people would agree that face/gait recognition is warranted, for example in case of murder or rape.
The difference here is that some people consider "illegal immigration" to be more like a misdemeanor, others consider it to be something much more serious.
> Depending on the crime, most people would agree that face/gait recognition is warranted, for example in case of murder or rape
That's the problem with dragnet surveillance. People are okay with it for extreme cases. And then the scope creeps.
Free or secure. You can't have both. And you usually can't even have just the latter.
> And then the scope creeps.
Agreed and wanted to add. If it exists, can do the job, and the person in charge is aware of it, then it will inevitably be used. There's no such thing as "only for certain situations" unless there is a large inherent cost to using it outside of the proscribed scenario.
If you mandate the placement of fireman's axes by every door, at some point someone is going to use one of them to commit murder or vandalism or some other crime. There is effectively nothing that can be done to prevent that other than choosing not to mandate their placement.
> others consider it to be something much more serious.
We have limited funds for social safety nets for our own citizens: how is it not "serious" that we would deplete them on folks who are willfully and intentionally breaking our rules for financial benefit?
My guy, stop with this false point. You're smarter than this.
Deep down you know it's not true and it's not being used this way.
Clean yourself and your soul.
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gait recognition is a pseudoscience.
> " others consider "
laws are knowable. readable. Opinion on them does NOT matter.
We have a court system specifically meant to interpret the law, and a tiered appeals process for when one of the courtroom parties disagrees with that court’s interpretation.
Quick, does the First Amendment allow the government to place any restrictions on speech? The words are right there for the reading and knowing, so that should be a simple question, surely?
Laws don't exist in a vacuum, in practice governments decide how to implement and to enforce them or not.
Totalitarians on one side convince their side, that it's totally fine and desirable to ignore the law and let millions of illegal immigrants in. Then then totalitarians on the other side convince their side it is necessary to ignore the law and introduce wide sweeping surveillance to undo it. Congratulations, both sides cooperated while hating each other because they are easy to play dummies.
It’s not just facial it’s also gait recognition too.
> It’s not just facial it’s also gait recognition too
Source? Where would they get the fingerprints from?
Hypothetically speaking couldn't you collect it from any security camera in an area where you have positive ID on people? Airport security comes to mind.
With all the trade in personal data in the US I assume it's only a matter of time before places like grocery stores start selling it.
Why stop at just gait though? Geometric fingerprinting of various body parts is also possible. Palm geometry readers have been commonplace for a long time.
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Every grocery store self checkout has cameras on the whole area as you walk up, then cameras on your face, and then pretty good self identification via your payment card/rewards.
Home Depot was already selling at least some of this to Meta in 2023 https://strategyonline.ca/2023/01/26/home-depot-found-to-hav...
Fingerprints?
Wrong appendages, unless I don't know what "gait" means
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Mostly gait probably. I wonder if there are any hacker techniques to scramble gait, like putting wooden planks or plastic parts inside clothes
IIRC that's exactly what a character did in either Person of Interest or Mr. Robot
(I have a very hard time to distinguish both in my memory since they were so similar in their themes)
I remember reading that early systems could be defeated entirely by putting a pebble in your shoe, but I’m sure they’ve improved a lot since.
gait recognition is a pseudoscience. this is also obvious from the way it is used: to fabricate a pretext to detain undesirables.
does rock in shoe work? That's the only way i've heard
The UK once had a ministry specialized on that /s
As if they needed an excuse.
For anyone still in denial, america is fully a fascist, authoritarian state. WE ARE NO LONGER A FREE COUNTRY.
What could go wrong?
Just a reminder that DHS just posted on Twitter for the holidays about how much of a paradise the US will be after 100 million "deportations".
And that we don't have close to 100 million immigrants.
That the "kavanaugh stop" allows them to detain you on he basis of skin color or accent.
And that a driver's license with Real ID is no longer sufficient "papers".
That would be implementing remigration, meaning deport all the non-white folks. Never mind that whites are immigrants too and aren't indigenous to the Americas.
I don't understand how the American public allows this administration to get away with half the shit it says and does. Every week is a new scandal.
Soon the chant will be "USSA! USSA! USSA!"
It's not the technology. The American people voted for this. That is the real discussion you should have. Why do Americans want fascism?
Some Americans. Trump won a plurality, not the majority vote, for those who bothered to vote. His approval rating is somewhere between 36% and 41% depending on the poll for the last several months. It's clear a decent number of the 77 million who voted for him didn't think he would behave the way he has in his 2nd term.
They didn't take Project 2025 or his alliance with the tech bros seriously. They didn't listen to former Trump officials who warned a second term would be a revenge tour and he would surround himself with loyalists and sycophants without anyone to hold his worst impulses in check. They didn't realize people like Stephen Miller would have such influence over his decisions. They didn't believe that Trump had such disregard for the rule of law and would actually prefer to rule like a king.
But people have been waking up to the new reality. Even some MAGA like MTG and podcasters like Rogan.
> Why do Americans want fascism?
Americans don't want to expend their tax dollars on folks willing to break the law for financial gain.
You'll spend way more tax money to haul them across the border than you would to just print them a permit to live and work in the community they've been contributing to for years. Every study ever conducted on the issue has concluded that undocumented immigrants contribute far more to the economy than they consume in public welfare dollars. You've let the actual tax dollar parasites pawn the blame on a scapegoat because you're addicted to being angry.
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This is a very shortsighted and frankly dumb argument. You would give up constitutional rights, to allow an unchecked police force, to arrest anyone they want, to save a few tax dollars?
So stupid.
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> Americans don't want to expend their tax dollars on folks willing to break the law for financial gain.
Then why do they keep electing the lackeys of those people into office.
The American people are idiots.
the last election speaks otherwise
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