The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter. This is completely lawless. From the article: > He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and…
I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"
Or, put more succinctly, Wilhoit’s Law (which is framed as about “conservatism” rather than “fascism”, but the latter can be viewed as, within the context of the description, a complex of ideas which includes the former as its central element): Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not…
There's a similar quote that also fits: > If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
Another alternative, that any poltical side can use, is to attempt to change the composition of the electorate that votes in the democracy.
lol - I made something to do the same to ICE. Stores each ICE agent as a visual embedding and creates a database of all sighted agents. https://www.realtimefascism.com/ice-sight
What's your policy for complying with the patchwork of national biometrics laws?
No biometrics collected. It's only scanning bodys, clothes and details on gear.
Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)
Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle. Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes. In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
The supreme court has effectively removed all of the possible mechanisms to sue ICE or DHS and hold them accountable, with the sole exception of having the DOJ prosecute them on your behalf, which is of course never going to happen. The only remaining possibility to hold them accountable for crimes appears to be within the states judicial systems- but most are currently setup to not allow this, deferring to the federal mechanisms which only very recently stopped existing.
People can look identical, that's the reason we started using finger prints. Faces are not unique.
There is no scientific proof that fingerprints are unique, either. Like a lot of forensic science, it's just accepted wisdom.
I think the scientific consensus is that they are NOT unique. I seem to recall there’s something like a one in five million chance of collision. (Recalling from memory so please verify, I recall thinking that in a large city there’s likely to be another person who’s fingerprints could be mistaken for yours)
But what if Target security cooperates with the government, and they share capabilities, so that a facial recognition inside of a Target location would notify law enforcement who also has an interest in that person? In such a scenario.. Target would freely give its data but not necessarily acting an agent of the government.
People need to work to reverse the Bush and Obama initiated and then continued practice (setting precedent) of bypassing direct surveillance by buying data from data brokers. The Biden and Trump admins just continue this practice. That’s where people need to reverse the practice. I mean you had the FBI and probably others wiretapping Congress folks so… it’s like they don’t care.
Or we need to focus on making data brokers illegal, period. Taking a page from the GDPR would be a good start. As long as the surveillance databases continue to exist, they will be juicy targets for anyone attracted to the power. And not just for the de jure government, but also plenty of "private" businesses that adopt them nearly in lockstep. If you get blackballed in the one used by say Target, it's not like Walmart is going to make it a point of competition to serve the small fraction of people who would be good customers but for getting tripped up by Target. Rather they will all use the same databases, shutting you off from most commerce. That's effectively creating a de facto government, independent of any de jure government adoption.
Yes, ICE has been a bad actor since the day it was created, which is why "shutdown ICE" has been a thing on the left for a while now. But it's now operating as the private military of Donald Trump and the executive branch on a scale never before seen in America. Its upcoming budget is greater than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. We see videos every day of their gleeful assaults on anyone they lik…
In a way, the 9/11 terrorists have brought much more damage to the USA than they could have ever hoped for.
What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later? Osama bin Laden had a fairly specific immediate poltical goal, resisting US military influence in Muslim countries and US support of Israel. His broader goals involved revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim countries of the middle east. None of this was related to Latin American immigration to the US, legal or otherwise.
I wonder why people downvote. Many western countries now couldn't be more obviously fascist. State responsibilities are being offloaded to multinational corporations, de facto private policing is around the corner, surveillance (digital ID tracking your movements and what you talk about, chat controls and whatnot). It's creeping in and people pretend it's not happening.
Many western countries now couldn't be more obviously fascist. Which ones? This isn't an "I'm just asking" attack, I genuinely want to know which ones you think are obviously fascist.
In a way, the 9/11 terrorists have brought much more damage to the USA than they could have ever hoped for.
What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later? Osama bin Laden had a fairly specific immediate poltical goal, resisting US military influence in Muslim countries and US support of Israel. His broader goals involved revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim countries of…
> What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later?
The centralized security apparatus in the Department of Homeland Security being leverage here exists entirely as a result of the reaction to 9/11.
In half an hour, Gregory Bovino, who heads some ICE operation in Chicago, is supposed to appear before a Federal judge to be questioned on what ICE did to whom today. Let's see if he shows up.