341–350 of 380 posts
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Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava? New norms go both ways.
The Netherlands has a law that makes it illegal to cover your face. Officially this is to help the police but its also a great tool against religion. Constitution>god
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'm somewhat morbidly curious how many citizens we're going to deport to random countries. It happened fairly often before this administration.
I wonder who is storing this data, I would bet Palantir. Possibly Oracle too.
Not Palantir. Their CEO has explicitly said that they don't collect data on US citizens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-IH7EVrBbQ
I wonder how soon till the automated license plate reader cameras everywhere start doing this.
My understanding is that the only thing keeping this from happening is that the data is far more valuable for traffic monitoring than law enforcement. As a trivial example, these cameras can already determine is a vehicle is speeding based on its number plate sightings between any two cameras. They can hence start issuing tickets, no radar or police needed. However, they've not gone down this path because they are (r…
So lets scan faces of agents and identify them. We can use those technologies in both ways.
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When are citizens’ fingerprints normally put on file, in the US? Or, for that matter, noncitizens who entered irregularly?
When you get a driver's license, for one.
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I assume the agents are using their own phones. One of their phones is going to be left in a bar and end up on eBay at some point and then the APK can be extracted at least.
It should be an assigned/signed device with biometric and passcode access configured... At least it was in a couple proposals I helped define for credentialing emergency responders... though the contract definitely went with a different supplier than the one I was working with.
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…
People can look identical, that's the reason we started using finger prints. Faces are not unique.
The Soft Cage - Surveillance in America: From Slavery to the War on Terror, Christian Parenti, 2003
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What's ironic about it? That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench. They're doing things unto others that they would not have done unto them.
> That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench. ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement. Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
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Cops be cops: https://denverite.com/2025/10/27/bow-mar-flock-cameras-accus... In that case it's Bow Mar, a small town in Colorado, relying on flock cameras to issue tickets for petty theft. We as a society just aren't capable of using these toys right.
I'd say it's nice to see that particular demographic at the business end of this 1984 crap since they're usually the ones pushing it but I don't think the rest of them are smart enough to have the "that could be me" reaction.