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

> “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"?

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.

IBM wasn't held responsible either:

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

A lot of people and companies ultimately got away with that, because of either necessity or the manufactured perception of necessity. It's an important lesson about selective enforcement, and just how extreme the cases it can be applied to. From traffic laws to genocide, it's all negotiable for the powerful if there are benefits at stake.

I went to the Siemens museum in Erlangen. Their history of work on medical imaging is on display and it’s good.

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

In a bleak sense I suppose I can understand, it's not as though they can have a big, "By the way, we greedily assisted the Nazis with the worst act of industrialized murder in modern history, profited from it, were never held to meaningful account, and we're still successful," room.

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.