ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people

https://archive.is/UB9kC

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.

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.

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)")

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?

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".

For anyone still in denial, america is fully a fascist, authoritarian state. WE ARE NO LONGER A FREE COUNTRY.

It’s not just facial it’s also gait recognition too.

As if they needed an excuse.

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.

What could go wrong?

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?

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