> “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"?
> 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.
I remember when those articles would get posted here and people would get mass flagged when they brought up the fact that the same tech the Israelis used in their genocide would end up stateside. Good times
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
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.
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.
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.
> > “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?
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that this is a legal process. This is all so contrary to the established laws of the USA legal system that the Trump's military will not even show their faces.
There's no "custody", these people aren't being afforded the Constitutional, legal, or human rights. This is internment by militarised fascist gangs.
"Officer", ha. These are people given a gun and told to go out and brutalise others. There not performing an office of state, they're far outside the law. All, it seems, to try and force those who support democracy to step out of line so Trump/Vance and their handlers can have more people killed and claim civil war is getting in the way of having elections.
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.
The existence of the app is horrifying but the real problem is if an ICE agent violates your rights, you can't really sue them (I mean, you can sue them but it will just get thrown out of court because of their sovereign immunity and the fact that the current Supreme Court would never grant you a Bivens action for anything Trump's ICE did to you).
As long as they can claim that whatever they did to you is part of their official duties (which, again, good luck expecting the current federal government to take your side on this even if the ICE officer clearly oversteps their duties) only the federal government/DOJ can prosecute them for misconduct, which also obviously won't happen under the current administration.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
Playing edgelord isn't going to save you. A difference in scale is a difference in degree. When law enforcement overran their mandate, we had a shot at identifying their victims, saying their names, demanding justice, and possibly righting some wrongs in the the smallest step. When deputized white supremacist militias mass disappear people without any sort of legal process or documentation besides incrementing a counter for their bonus from King Krasnov, we likely won't even know all of their names.
"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.
The issue right now is that DHS are federal police not subject to any vehicle for redress of wrongs unless they break state law and are identified for criminal offenses that lose QI, but there is no 42 USC § 1983-like law for bringing civil rights violations claims against them. Civilly, they're effectively "samurai" who can do whatever they want because the courts, legislature, and executive branches are all on their side.
Other than the fact that they're locking people up instead of levying ruinous fines how's this different from any other enforcer working on behalf of the a federal (or state) administrative bureaucracy?
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!'
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.
You’re ignoring the cases where people produce fraudulent documentation proving they are a citizen.
Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?
What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.
Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.
Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.)
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?
>>> 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.
>>>> 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.
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.
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.
> Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.
"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.
The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Unfortunately a highly motivated third of the population is authoritarian, and they've been motivated by a cult of personality around Trump whom they see as their savior or instrument for setting all the things wrong with America right. And anyone, any institution or any law in the way needs to be removed. They seemed to have learned nothing from history, or all the fictional stories and tropes warning about this.
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.
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 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.
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.
Nope, that might be the policy in some sane world: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person’s identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media” they are talking about walking up to you and scanning your face with an app, you can see them doing it (to minors!) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EyesOnIce/comments/1ogm1qk/ice_agen...
You don’t have to look too far on the internet to see that ICE is acting with impunity, and that the regular rules and rights are not being applied.
Yet false arrests without probable cause are happening. The limits on this are being tested on real people. For some voters, those are the right people to test it on.
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.
The rule of law is slipping away from Americans. These masked “anonymous” federal agents are identifying people without consent. In most states of the United States, one is not always required to identify oneself and has the right to remain anonymous unless an officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe that the individual is involved in a crime. One may argue, “well, what if the officer already knew the person’s identity? Isn’t this the same?” No, this is not the same, because there is a huge difference in scale, and furthermore, this is database building. These are reasons why the dichotomy in the US between public and private should be scrapped and modernized. We the people should have some right to privacy even in public, as the abilities to identify and track individuals in public are more expansive and invasive than ever. Never in history have the tools of surveillance been this oppressive and all encompassing.
Without veering too much into politics, in functional families, children do not mind if their dad knows they are home and who they bring in along, and dads do not install AI-powered security cameras.
There is something deeply disturbing about the commonality of the "paternalist" conception of government.
I've been troubled by the normalization of "daddy" and paternal government rhetoric, especially the "daddy's home" framing that's become so prevalent. This language isn't just colorful—it signals something genuinely dangerous about how we're being asked to relate to political authority.
When we accept government through a paternalistic lens, we're accepting a fundamentally anti-democratic premise: that citizens should be treated as dependents rather than as autonomous equals. This isn't new—fascist regimes have consistently used paternal imagery to justify concentrated power, from Stalin to Hitler to countless others. The "strong father" archetype is a proven tool for normalizing authoritarian control.
What's particularly troubling about the "daddy" rhetoric we're seeing is how it combines paternalism with threats of punishment and retribution. It invites a dynamic where citizens compete for approval from a leader who's positioned as both protector and disciplinarian—someone who will "spank" the nation for "misbehaving." This language erodes the principle that government authority should be accountable to the people, not the reverse.
Democracy requires citizens who see themselves as stakeholders in governance, not children waiting for a father figure to tell them what's best. When we accept government as "dad," we're tacitly accepting a hierarchy where some people are "favored children" (the in-group) and others are outsiders to be excluded or punished. History shows this path leads away from democracy.
We should resist this framing, not because strong leadership is bad, but because paternalism is incompatible with democratic equality and individual autonomy.
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(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.
> Sad to see programmers, who are supposed to be so thoughtful, slip into panicked irrationality in the face of new technology.
This is not about technology. It's about civil, and ultimately, human rights. Society is crumbling fast and what you're concerned about are technicalities.
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.
> “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"?
> 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/
I remember when those articles would get posted here and people would get mass flagged when they brought up the fact that the same tech the Israelis used in their genocide would end up stateside. Good times
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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
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
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.
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
> > “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?
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that this is a legal process. This is all so contrary to the established laws of the USA legal system that the Trump's military will not even show their faces.
There's no "custody", these people aren't being afforded the Constitutional, legal, or human rights. This is internment by militarised fascist gangs.
"Officer", ha. These are people given a gun and told to go out and brutalise others. There not performing an office of state, they're far outside the law. All, it seems, to try and force those who support democracy to step out of line so Trump/Vance and their handlers can have more people killed and claim civil war is getting in the way of having elections.
The movie "Brazil" seems more real every day.
I don't know whether I can trust your take on this. Have you got a 27B-6?
DON'T SUSPECT A FRIEND, REPORT HIM
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.
The existence of the app is horrifying but the real problem is if an ICE agent violates your rights, you can't really sue them (I mean, you can sue them but it will just get thrown out of court because of their sovereign immunity and the fact that the current Supreme Court would never grant you a Bivens action for anything Trump's ICE did to you).
As long as they can claim that whatever they did to you is part of their official duties (which, again, good luck expecting the current federal government to take your side on this even if the ICE officer clearly oversteps their duties) only the federal government/DOJ can prosecute them for misconduct, which also obviously won't happen under the current administration.
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...
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.
>>> 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.
Stop apologizing for nazis
> 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.
What if they scanned you and the result was illegal alien? How would you feel?
The “best technology” based on what?
> 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.
> 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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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.)
Playing edgelord isn't going to save you. A difference in scale is a difference in degree. When law enforcement overran their mandate, we had a shot at identifying their victims, saying their names, demanding justice, and possibly righting some wrongs in the the smallest step. When deputized white supremacist militias mass disappear people without any sort of legal process or documentation besides incrementing a counter for their bonus from King Krasnov, we likely won't even know all of their names.
"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
The issue right now is that DHS are federal police not subject to any vehicle for redress of wrongs unless they break state law and are identified for criminal offenses that lose QI, but there is no 42 USC § 1983-like law for bringing civil rights violations claims against them. Civilly, they're effectively "samurai" who can do whatever they want because the courts, legislature, and executive branches are all on their side.
State governors need to start deploying their national guards to keep law and order versus these masked gangs of lawless thugs, period.
Other than the fact that they're locking people up instead of levying ruinous fines how's this different from any other enforcer working on behalf of the a federal (or state) administrative bureaucracy?
The road to hell wasn't paved in a day.
I agree.
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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.
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.
>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.
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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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Was unamerican.
Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what America is now.
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.
You’re ignoring the cases where people produce fraudulent documentation proving they are a citizen.
Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?
What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.
Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.
Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
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> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
Ideally, the government wouldn't be doing anything that requires tracking like this. We got by for hundreds of years without it.
LPR?? It is so frustrating to see acronyms without explanation. I looked in the article and searched the web.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!"
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...
> Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.
"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.
The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.
What is your next move?
The supreme court interprets the laws, including the constitution, and they've decided that being brown is sufficient reasonability.
Monarchy doesn’t need a constitution.
IDK if you missed the last 10 months but the constitution is dead and buried.
This same story was killed on HN over the last couple work days. Huh...
Weekend crowd.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.’
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.
Because half of American voters want fascism.
> 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.
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?
Unfortunately a highly motivated third of the population is authoritarian, and they've been motivated by a cult of personality around Trump whom they see as their savior or instrument for setting all the things wrong with America right. And anyone, any institution or any law in the way needs to be removed. They seemed to have learned nothing from history, or all the fictional stories and tropes warning about this.
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> 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.
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 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.
I haven't read 1984 but this reminds me of when I read 1984
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.
Nope, that might be the policy in some sane world: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person’s identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media” they are talking about walking up to you and scanning your face with an app, you can see them doing it (to minors!) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EyesOnIce/comments/1ogm1qk/ice_agen...
You don’t have to look too far on the internet to see that ICE is acting with impunity, and that the regular rules and rights are not being applied.
Yet false arrests without probable cause are happening. The limits on this are being tested on real people. For some voters, those are the right people to test it on.
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?
"You can refuse to give password to those fellow gentlemen with a hammer that tied you to a chair" kind of title
https://archive.is/WxyIP
The International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines was right all along.
The rule of law is slipping away from Americans. These masked “anonymous” federal agents are identifying people without consent. In most states of the United States, one is not always required to identify oneself and has the right to remain anonymous unless an officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe that the individual is involved in a crime. One may argue, “well, what if the officer already knew the person’s identity? Isn’t this the same?” No, this is not the same, because there is a huge difference in scale, and furthermore, this is database building. These are reasons why the dichotomy in the US between public and private should be scrapped and modernized. We the people should have some right to privacy even in public, as the abilities to identify and track individuals in public are more expansive and invasive than ever. Never in history have the tools of surveillance been this oppressive and all encompassing.
With enough images in the database a match will be found any face.
I wonder if they perfected e-ink tattoos yet, run a magnet over them to change the tattoo maybe
The Humanity Bureau
You can't refuse your transfer to New Eden.
Without veering too much into politics, in functional families, children do not mind if their dad knows they are home and who they bring in along, and dads do not install AI-powered security cameras.
This is a trust issue.
There is something deeply disturbing about the commonality of the "paternalist" conception of government.
I've been troubled by the normalization of "daddy" and paternal government rhetoric, especially the "daddy's home" framing that's become so prevalent. This language isn't just colorful—it signals something genuinely dangerous about how we're being asked to relate to political authority.
When we accept government through a paternalistic lens, we're accepting a fundamentally anti-democratic premise: that citizens should be treated as dependents rather than as autonomous equals. This isn't new—fascist regimes have consistently used paternal imagery to justify concentrated power, from Stalin to Hitler to countless others. The "strong father" archetype is a proven tool for normalizing authoritarian control.
What's particularly troubling about the "daddy" rhetoric we're seeing is how it combines paternalism with threats of punishment and retribution. It invites a dynamic where citizens compete for approval from a leader who's positioned as both protector and disciplinarian—someone who will "spank" the nation for "misbehaving." This language erodes the principle that government authority should be accountable to the people, not the reverse.
Democracy requires citizens who see themselves as stakeholders in governance, not children waiting for a father figure to tell them what's best. When we accept government as "dad," we're tacitly accepting a hierarchy where some people are "favored children" (the in-group) and others are outsiders to be excluded or punished. History shows this path leads away from democracy.
We should resist this framing, not because strong leadership is bad, but because paternalism is incompatible with democratic equality and individual autonomy.
"Land of the free. Home of the brave."
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.
These days I am having trouble telling America apart from a Black Mirror episode…
The slide into authoritarianism and fascism is becoming more blatantly obvious every day. It’s legitimately terrifying.
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(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
How do you know what you need to hide?
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.
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
Sacred shit guys. I was hoping the sarcasm would shine through with the "at the moment". But yes, this otherwise deserves all the downvoting!
Define the “you” you are talking about please.
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> Sad to see programmers, who are supposed to be so thoughtful, slip into panicked irrationality in the face of new technology.
This is not about technology. It's about civil, and ultimately, human rights. Society is crumbling fast and what you're concerned about are technicalities.
Not recognizing someone is not probable cause for seizing them.
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.
Scale and cost matter. Skin in the game too.
Are you arguing that seeing and recording someone are the same act?
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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