You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

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.

Not forgetting Elon's mass data scraping from earlier this year.

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

    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.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/doge-workers-code-suppor...

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.

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"?

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.

I see you, Wintermute, I see you.

This is a problem from your government, by your government, that you voted for - one way or another. Pretending this problem is originating from anywhere else except the political choices you're making as a nation is denying reality.

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.

(second result was Lawful Permanent Resident; make of that what you will)

Their budget right now is larger than the Marine Corps and a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison time if the democrats get back into control of the government. Think about what they are likely to do during the mid terms if they are told to monitor election sites. They are a gang of dangerously brutal violent thugs operating with complete impunity.

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.

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 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.

> Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”

I'd really like to know why ICE needs guided missile warheads to do their job. (Edit: pointed out below, this is a purchase category that includes distraction devices like smoke grenades – they're thankfully not buying actual warheads.)

At this point, I'm confident that ICE could kick down my door and blow my white, midwestern, US Citizen ass away where I sit on this couch, and none of them would ever see the inside of a courtroom.

¹ https://popular.info/p/ice-boosts-weapons-spending-700

No, I didn't, not one way, nor another. I might have had a share of influence over policy in certain statewide elections, but not in most other elections.

The purchase order PDF is linked here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-guided-missile-warhead...

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.

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.

Why are you defending this crap? They also destroyed the departments that were actually making digital services more streamlined and easier to use 18F by dissolution and US Digital Services by capture.

doge was a fucking disaster.

Better yet -- whisk her out of the country and then claim that she no longer has standing to sue.

Meta and Palantir are probably the IBM:s of the current age.

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.

> 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.’

But we cannot stop there, and needs ask why. There are structural forces that lead to this government, some of which are corporate. Fox and MSNBC exist to extract wealth from polarization, and have every incentive to drive wedges between us. Meta and X likewise get paid for optimizing engagement and hate drives engagement.

It's not all corporations, but they contribute to structural forces we're have to unwind as we also try to fix the government side too.

It's the official status of green card holders.

You as an individual are defenseless against an incorrect and badly trained officer. This goes for local cops, federal cops, the twitter racists they brought in for ICE, etc.

Even if you oppose this with all your heart, if you're semi-intelligent you know the Admin is looking for an excuse to execute greater powers, so any kinetic action against the poorly trained, illegal actions of the state will only cause greater harm.

The worst part about this, is if we allow the slow "legal" process to take it's course, even if all this is proven illegal and thrown out, people released, etc, nothing will happen to the people who brought it on. Those who have the power to hold accountable only reached the position of power by being amenable to others in power. We likely wont have trials against the individuals picking mothers and fathers up off the street for a bonus, we wont have trials against the people who offered the bonuses either. They'll disappear and come back when the times are more kind to their sick world view of violence and cruelty.

It can be argued as shared fault.

By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options.

In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote.

I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.

That doesn't absolve the republicans for turning to fascism, but we shouldn't say the Dems are blameless here.

Corporations absolutely have an effect on all of this, you can bet they'd save time and money by focusing their efforts elsewhere if they thought it was pointless.

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.

For the record: Apparently they helped the original Nazis. One link of many: https://time.com/archive/6931688/ibm-haunted-by-nazi-era-act...

> IBM, according to Black’s book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II — and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe’s Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM’s German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime — and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims’ families — Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after the Germans surrendered, Black says, IBM’s U.S. office was quick to collect profits made during the war by the subsidiary, called Dehomag.

> The punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were provided to Hitler’s government as early as 1933, and were probably used in the Nazis’ first official census that year. The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the government conducted another census, this time with the explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews — and finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi concentration camps.

> It’s this specificity of purpose, says William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that provides the most damning evidence. “Microsoft is not responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel,” Seltzer told TIME.com. “But if someone is doing custom designing of a database, they have to know what’s going on. With these punch cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new information that the government wanted.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this mess about misdemeanors at the federal level.

The authoritarians want you to say: “50% of people love this, give up already.”

When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through his actions since January. Don’t help them normalize this through emotion.

Say it’s “half” is negotiating with fascists.

Or even when they do end up before someone who knows the law, and that someone says "no, this is illegal, you have to set them free," they say "nah, we can do what we want" and put them on a plane to another country unrelated to the hapless detainee.

I am happy though that we are starting to seem more of this kind of content on HN. I understand that these political (?) posts can descend into finger-pointing and trolling. And that is too bad since I think we should not have blinders on in these rather unsettling times.

I will say that I remember when posts like this one were very quickly flagged when they hit the front page. I am happy to see that more and more people are finding them (unfortunately) relevant.

Note that all the facial recognition is being done by governments, which is the entity everyone suggests using to protect against facial recognition.

https://etias.com/articles/eu-biometric-border-checks-begin-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp7j55zxvo (under the control of the executive)

https://www.politico.eu/article/how-facial-recognition-is-ta... (under the control of the executive)

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202405/police-in-germany-usi...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-outlaws-facial-reco...

The important part about the Italian "ban" is, as with most privacy laws in the EU, the government bans facial recognition for companies, and explicitly allows the government to use it for everything they do)

This is common in the EU. For example, the GPDR guarantees that your medical data isn't used by companies. That sounds great! Except for the exceptions: insurance and health care providers are exempted, courts (even foreign ones) are excempted (and so a judge can subpoena your private medical information for divorce or custody cases), the police is exempted, youth services is exempted, ...

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 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.

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.

They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.

First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters".

Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him.

But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories:

- People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are.

- People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil.

- People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be)

None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes.

If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.

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.

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.

The immunity is only from state prosecution and only for acts taken required as part of their official duties, but it does exist.

Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t.

From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.)

It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.

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.

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.

Networks of companies support political candidates, so there really isn't a true separation between the government's actions and the will of these corporations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 have US citizenship + SSN but never lived in the USA. I do have a passport though and visited a few times for vacations.

It's interesting that everyone is kind of on the same page without communicating some things. It seems we are at the point now where were referencing Nazis by which volume/edition they are from.

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.

You can eventually punish humans abusing power. Cant do that wuth software designed to be abusive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

But part of this process is candidates being nominated by the major parties, and the RNC put forward a candidate that people actually wanted to elect. The DNC did a worse job of this, as a seeming plurality of votes for Harris were not because they liked her, but because she was "not Trump".

Both parties have agency, but the DNC did a worse job at picking their nominee (assuming the goal was to win an election).

There's real serious questions about what rights people have when being accused of non-criminal infractions and to what degree the punishments can overlap that people ought to be asking here.

But nobody on HN wants to ask these questions because all the things HN wants strictly regulated are done so using the same legal theories and doctrines and precedents.

This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.

Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted, corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into fascism.

They've certainly been held in custody, though.

Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the purpose of a system is what it does."

They are trying to bypass any review by being fast and creating facts that prevent US judges from any effective action as once people are outside US jurisdiction they have very little power.

And immigration judges are not actual judges, they are part of the executive.

This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they are running everyone through every database looking for things that might make you technically deportable that would never have come up under previous administrations:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o

You used to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right? Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get you out is not a sure thing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUO0Plcpbo

States ought to do that aynway, then instigate cop-on-cop violence. Ask Putin or Xi for help.

(Not suggesting anything about enforcement practices - just trying to understand what the edge cases are like.)

That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).

1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/191249066980685851...

Oh it was partly sarcastic ("terribly inconvenient" being something of a Britishism for really quite awful)

For now, until they move on to persecuting political adversaries.

you’re responding to a comment which states detainees are being sent to concentration camps, places like the deplorably named Alligator Alcatraz. i don’t think we should conflate that as deportation.

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.

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...

ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.

Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways —- what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent, unthinking consequence of this system is what it was actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality or even the perception that the USA is hostile to foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.

If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this, then you might say the purpose of this system is to desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent expression of presidential power.

But when you combine that with blowing up boats that contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not unconscious subtext.

You can't be serious.

Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane.

It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth reflecting on.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060702184553/http://www.nonati...

I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.

HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven

Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.

ICE is operating outside the bounds of law and basic human decency

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.

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.

> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports

To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).

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.

> pretending to understand things

Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.

“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,”

The awkward ‘Siemens and the holocaust’ section was so pathetic.

But later it flanderized into, we want to break the rules. The rules are an impediment to goodness, not the guarantor.

Immigration rates have not drastically shifted in the last 4 years from the 20+ prior, averaging 1M a year, or .3% of the population. Without immigration, we are below replacement rates

By leeway, do you include the beating people and excessive use of force, or should those agents face consequences?

he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.

He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.

Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.

>You can't be serious.

I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.

A legal resident would say "As someone here legally..."

> ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am

1. You cast doubt on your legal status.

2. The APP says you are not here legally.

3. You have no opportunity to present those things proving you are here legally.

> It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.

It's amazing how much conservative dicourse is just them literally not understanding things, thus making discourse impossible.

Consider the literal evil stuff you support, discourse with you is 100% worthless.

“Yeah, I know this is terrible and inhumane, but like, my taxes are kind of high and I’ve got to blame someone. Immigrants seem like maybe they somehow caused all the problems as long as I don’t think about it very hard.”

Sure is weird that DHS claims two million illegal immigrants have left the United States this year but nothing seems to have gotten better yet. Probably just need more deportations. I bet that’ll fix everything.

Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what America is now.

This is some more detail about the whisteblower's testimony from an earlier Krebs article:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...

Was there anything else about Russia?

Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.

We can defeat fascism too. We will defeat fascism too.

It'll just be harder if more people think like you.

The scary thing is that there is.. you should look up "sovereign immunity". The government has complete immunity, except where and how the law permits it to be held accountable. And while we have a constitution, defending those rights through the courts requires legislation to permit it. For the most part, federal law permits lawsuits against states that violate the constitution, but have permitted far less accountability for federal actions that violate the constitution.

For example, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act only permits individuals to sue state and local governments for rights violations. It can't be used to sue the federal government.

There's many court cases, dating back decades, tossing out cases against the federal government for rights violations. Look how SCOTUS has limited the precedent set by Bivens over the years, basically neutering it entirely.

https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html?utm_source=chat...

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

1)https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-trump-says-immigrants-...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-polic...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01634-z

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-recognition...

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&con...

Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.

Here's the science.

_Being aware_ of the use is also not exactly damning. We're all aware of what ICE is doing, that by itself doesn't make us responsible for that any more than we are responsible for the starving children in Africa.

1. Scraping a website, by anyone, allowed by courts if it is publicly accessible

2. "Scraping" of data, by the government, from various sources into a centralized database in partnership with Palantir. It's a worse version of the "Patriot" Act

https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...

Someone forgot about the 40-year long fascist dictatorship Spain was under

Not according to immigration law, which is all that matters for the current discussion. The parent of you comment made a point which you failed to notice.

BTW holier-than-thou attitudes and picking fights with friends are largely responsible for where we are. Spotting them is also a good hint for bot detection.

We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.

If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.

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.

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?

Rorschach was the bad guy.

Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.

Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.

A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps deciding in the administration's favor, but this is not true.

SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we are going to overturn the lower court who did actually hear the case and allow the administration to continue its actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got wrong."

Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they are frequently unsigned by the majority (conservative) Justices. Presumably because they don't want their names written on papers that they know will be understood by future generations to be totally indefensible.

SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and we can pick random panels to hear different cases.

Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any American even know if they had a policy disagreement with an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) – we just need courts that can decide on things that are important to our country.

Dem flaws aside, Trump isn't just 'a candidate people actually wanted to elect'. He's an authoritarian, every major prediction about how authoritarian this administration would be has turned out to be correct, he instigated efforts to overturn the result of the last election where he lost, and 25-30% of the voting population likes authoritarianism and do not give a shit about what the Constitution actually says.

...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.

The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).

In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.

It's borderline farcical.

Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%), selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may be confused (~15%).

Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof, but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing political phenomena become much easier to understand.

And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.

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.

You are in such a rush to be sarcastic that you're accusing the GP of wanting to cooperate with fascism, when they're simply stating the reality of the problem. You're saying naying nice words about the outcome you want to see, but ignoring the horrors between the institution of fascism and its eventual defeat. That suggests to me that you don't really have any idea or plan about how to overcome it, you're just wishcasting. The danger of this is that many people will advocate waiting for the next election to decide if it's really fascism (because that's an unpleasant thing people would prefer to avoid), but don't have anything in reserve if the election is subverted, and in any case are giving away the political initiative for a year.

Instead of trying to rally people with WW2 tropes (which the non-fascists are in no position to wage) it'd be better to build momentum toward general strikes, which have a rather successful track record in the US and have been quasi-outlawed as a result (eg by the Taft-Hartley act, which bans solidarity and political strikes by labor unions).

The tech industry is full of fine software developers. Not sure they'd make great public policy.

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.

The peddlers of the things that caused the legitimate gripes that drove them into the harms of these movements need to do some looking in the mirror.

Most people don't care about most issues most of the time. If they're holding their nose and voting for blatant extremism, the people they're not voting for ought to do some reflecting.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44285276

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 supreme court over the years has watered down constitutional protections against government enforcement upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc, etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by political optics.

So now here we are, in a situation where the government is doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.

There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should have listened.

My plan to overcome it is to make it clear to elite decisionmakers that they will be held personally responsible for the misery Trump's administration inflicts on people, including by many of the people who thought they supported Trump before they realized what he was doing. It's not a perfect plan, nor does it have a guarantee of success, but it seems better than the alternatives.

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.

Unfortunately USCIS doesn’t know anything about this (as it was all handled by the department of state), and presumably thinks I’m an alien who abandoned their status.

But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.

As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.

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.

You overlooked the fact that ICE goons are breaking the law on a regular basis.

Once the fallacy of composition starts becoming common in a forum, it is the beginning of the end for good discourse.

The light turns green.

You go blindly.

Get maimed in an accident.

"But the light was green!"

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” [ . . . ] Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

I completely agree but fear the democrats will be too spineless to do anything like this. A radical change in the democrat party is needed - they should be promising to pack the supreme court and prosecute 3/4s of this administrations officials, at a minimum.

I dare you to say with a straight face that opinions questioning the legal doctrine or legitimacy of civil regulation are anything other than an occasional rounding errors when the subject is any sort of regulation that people here generally likes.

It is not at all a stretch to say this HN believes strongly that administrative/civil law as it mostly currently stands is highly legitimate.

Of course, backpedaling and hair splitting ensues and the "doesn't represent us all" excuse flies when someone points out that those legal doctrines and, precedents are also empowering ICE. At some point you're responsible for who you associate with.

Well, we've already crossed into "the law is what I say it is" territory thanks to the republicans, so the next admin just needs to leverage that. The GOP thinks that pardons signed by autopen are invalid [0] so I don't see what would stop the democrats from apply the same logic to ICE agents and administration, except perhaps cowardice.

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5575379-house-gop-comer-d...

To the extent that their actions are unlawful, they are often crimes under state law in the states they occur, as well as federal law. The President of the United States has no power to pardon state law offenses (and while there may be political considerations that discourage pursuing charges while it might provoke conflict with the Trump Administration, but in many cases the statutes of limitations for violent crimes under state law are not short.

> an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien

You should be less credulous.

> It's not a stretch to say ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am.

ICE is yelling from the rooftops that they don't give a shit about this. It's a stretch to think they will use this information, regardless of can.

"The world is what you make of it" can be interpreted multiple ways.