This is still not fully supported by law. It is becoming normalized indeed, especially by the current admin. Let's hope this is not going to become widely used or that it doesn't stay permanently, eg. it gets at least restricted to some type of crime by future administrations.
There are many unresolved gray areas around what exactly the 4th amendment permits in the way of what United States v. Knotts called "dragnet-type law enforcement practices". Knotts suggested they might not be permitted, even if they were made up of permissible individual parts, but didn't elaborate. More recent case law has held, for example, that cell phone companies turning over large quantities of records is a 4th amendment search requiring a warrant, even if they do it voluntarily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States). Most other types of dragnets haven't been litigated enough to have solid caselaw on their boundaries afaik.
I don't know if it's likely a court will do anything about this particular program, but from what I've read I don't think 4th amendment scholars think this area is at all settled.
From what I understand, this isn’t so much a “dragnet” operation involving combing through mass quantities of records on demand; it’s more like “this person is in public in my field of view, and I want to know who they are.”
More importantly, though, the cases so far have focused on the investigative activity that follows once a suspect has been identified. Here, we’re talking about de-anonymization: identifying one or more individuals who occupy a public space. AFAIK, the Court has never established a reasonable expectation of privacy of one’s identity in public. That will be a steep hill to climb.
I don't have to identify myself to police where I live. That's why, in my opinion, this is an unreasonable use of technology. I'm not sure what qualifies under the fourteenth but force-ably identifying me when I don't want to be and not required to seems unreasonable.
In the U.S., current law holds that for a law enforcement officer to stop and request identification, the officer needs at least some sort of articulable basis for doing so (Terry stop). The key word here, though, is “stop.” Electronic surveillance of a public space, though, involves stopping nobody. It’s not clear to me that passive identification involves either a “search” or “seizure” within the traditional meaning of the 4th Amendment. We’ll see what the courts think, though.
While you are correct that some states do regulate facial recognition, all they can do is regulate their own law enforcement and private entities doing business there. They cannot regulate the federal government (ICE and CBP are federal agencies).
Ah, what's good is law when the branch^W [after rereading about it, executive power is given to one] person tasked with executing laws is... lawless?
The notion that future administrations won't be offshots of the current regime (again, why do you think laws regarding democracy, like fair elections, will be upheld?) is also too hopeful.
China is already doing abominable things; how people react to additional surveillance is always related to what the state is actually doing with that information.
So a system that supports the abduction of polital rivals (an actual human rights violation) is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest of someone breaking a law that's accepted as part of a democracy.
I also think the scale of investment plays a part, the investment in surveillance in China is absurd. Its a significant number of people (per capita) that do nothing but monitor people. These new systems are rather cheap; so much so that they feel a whole lot more inevitable.
> is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest
That is not the system that the US has had since 2025, and the executive has made it very clear that it is not the system that it wants the US to have.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS has made it very clear that nothing this executive does will have any consequences for it.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when ICE can snag anyone they want off the street and throw them into some CECOT torture pit.
Rule of law is a fairy tale when the executive disregards direct judicial orders.
Democracy is when the useful idiots cheer on the abductions/renditions with full-throated support, relishing in the spectacular human suffering of others as if two wrongs make a right. But those pounds of flesh are merely being chummed at them by the same exact corporate-government propagandists that shipped their jobs to China in the first place, now promising naked fascism as a way of somehow putting things right when it's really just the next step of the ongoing destruction of their country. But I'm sure when they start to wake up to the grave error they've made (ten+ years too late), their egos will protect themselves with cognitive dissonance while the machine throws them some new scapegoats to distract themselves with.
comming through the door with a throw away account to monitor and disparage someones reputation under the increadably dubious cover of maintaining "standards" as a self appointed gramer/spelling enforcement officer.
conventions are strictly a tool used by entrenched beurocracys to discredit voices that wont, or cant, conform to there little tedious "rules", and fully weaponised in situations where someone is to be detained and held against there will.The standard method bieng to choose one specific statement, taken out of context, to diagnose
a person, and justify further action, for "saftey"
but our discussion centers on this whole process bieng automated and rendered down to an image, likely begining with a pantone # for skin tone
Some say unfortunate, others say fortunate. It's a luxury belief to want to let people walk across the border and have no repercussions. Enforce the border, get all the illegals out.
Everyone in this country regardless of their status is still guaranteed due process by the Constitution. The Venezuelans and Abrego Garcia sent to CECOT was done without due process and in violation of a Federal Judge's orders. Not to mention CECOT is a horrible prison.
I think it's cruel and inhuman to deport people already here unless they're engaged in criminal activities. Most of them are hard working people who gave up everything to flee bad circumstances in their home countries. We're a nation of immigrants.
You want the border secure, fine (I would prefer immigration reform since we have a large country and tons of economic opportunity migrants fulfill). But don't be so cruel as to support what ICE is doing to hard working people who have established lives here. Most of them are not criminals.
Unfortunately for them they are technically criminals by entering illegally. They all knew they were taking a calculated risk by coming here, some made it, some did not.
Agreed on the reform, we are in a pendulum stage now where the previous admin let too many in without reform (The first 3 years) and how it's gone too far the other way.
Overstay and unlawful presence are civil offenses, not criminal. Vast majority of undocumented people overstay visas and entered legally.
Asylum seekers are being abducted and deported to countries they have no ties to. It's perfectly legal to cross borders without inspection to seek asylum.
They are still deportable crimes. You cannot walk into a country and never leave just "because".
And no, the vast majority are not overstays. Less than half are overstays that came here legally [0]. So 58% crossed the border illegally.
Asylum seekers have been coached on what to say to claim asylum. Few are seeking asylum at all. The system is obviously being abused when these people vacation back to their home country that was so "dangerous" they claimed asylum.
This is suicidal empathy. Mercy for the guilty is cruelty for the innocent.
I think it's cruel and inhumane to let millions unvetted into our neighborhoods, schools, and communities.
It means less jobs for American young people. It means loss of culture and shared spaces. It means your kids can't play with their neighbors because they don't speak the same language.
It's weakness and we need to stop rationalizing it.
Would you want these people as your neighbor? Not speaking English? How about your whole town?
It's cruel. The modern left does not care about Americans, only the foreigners who can't build a safe and prosperous country of their own.
You believe laws were not followed in the case of deportations and seem to be angry about that but simultaneously you want the laws, that demand deportations of illegal aliens, to not be followed. Do you notice any irrationality with this position?
I admit I didn’t expect this pushback against America’s corrupt current regime which is obviously morally bankrupt. But, by the letter of the law and the function of the court system they are acting with complete impunity within what they have been permitted to do to the detriment of people everywhere.
> In both systems the law is being carefully followed to support inhumane goals
I’m not sure it is though, there are plenty of headlines about judicial orders being disregarded. This last few weeks it has been the required release of the Epstein papers, though that has been railroaded by a conveniently timed attack on a neighbour.
Why do we need to give free stuff to every person that wades across the southern border?
What is our legal or moral obligation to eviscerate our already-limited social safety net for outsiders who, by and large, do not contribute to them?
You are free to die on the cross and spend your income this way, but how is it "humane" to use violence (taxes) to reappropriate the fruits of my labor for your special interests?
Bc these immigrants as a whole contribute more to the federal state and local tax base than they take out, it’s super simple. I guess you don’t like the economy.
Another artful legal vs. illegal conflation - citation needed. I have no doubt in my mind folks coming in on H-1B and O-1 visas contribute more than they take out: nobody is disputing that.
When an illegal immigrant making $2/hr under the table cuts his hand off at a meat packing plant, who pays the hospital bill? How many tax dollars does this one incident wipe out?
Vastly less than the tax dollars for all the foreign military interventions including the latest adventure in Venezuela, if you're really worried about wasting tax dollars.
A universal healthcare system would cover everyone in the country when it's needed. The US is a massive, highly developed economy, no reason we couldn't fund that.
lol, just like China invented social credit scores which are for social control and definitely not like US credit scores which are just good business sense
Edit: to be clear I am saying this from a US centric viewpoint. China is catching up but they’ve been behind us for over a century tech wise and the US has been really good at pioneering new forms of injustice. I’m laughing at the idea that we were trailing behind them on learning new for handling their population
You should read up on China's credit score. There are a lot of misinformations about it online. In effect, it does little more than the US credit scores that inspired it.
It is infuriating to see my fellow countrymen criticize another system so heavily, when we are living under a largely similar system.
Especially after finding out that the current credit score system was only adopted in 1989, so it’s just another yoke millennials and younger have to live with, that our forefathers got to start their adult life without having to deal with
Brah, some employers in the US check your credit score to make sure you are trustworthy enough.
Your credit score can be checked in multiple other situations that have nothing to do with you taking on debt, but still somehow your debt factors into the decision.
If you think there is no social control as part of this system, then you are just blind to the system you grew up in
How is pointing out this inconsistency whataboutism? It might be reasonable to ask if it's a strawman since it seems reasonable to wonder if perhaps the people against what the Chinese are doing might also be against what ICE is doing.
Regardless, it's quite relevant to point out that at this point two of the world's superpowers are actively engaging in this. Claiming that the technology won't be used this way - that people are just fearmongering - clearly doesn't hold water. (Not that it ever did, but now we've got concrete evidence.)
But china is safe and clean and nice, so it might be worth it. Anyway we got no privacy anymore, cameras are everywhere and we all captured on someone hard disk, so might as well take advantage of the benefits that comes with this technology
Not all AI generated outputs are slop, usually it's the low effort prompts that create slop. When you bring in external data or extensive human curation it is almost certainly not slop. I think many people put all AI outputs in the slop bucket but this is unfair to those who put a lot of thinking in their AI interactions. Slop is not given by the LLM, but by the human effort associated to that task. For code, it is the quality of the testing framework that sets the bar.
Plenty of unemployable PhDs here Australia. I know one who is tutoring high school students to earn a living. His thesis was on phycology and the production of sustainable fuels. A nuclear physicist with a PhD is unemployable and is retraining as a data scientist. Another phycologist is retraining as a counsellor. A molecular biologist is running a plant shop.
The first phycologist is charming but a century ago, he would have been a charming but very average greenkeeper or a gardener.
Bright people in Australia head into finance, medicine or law not into dead end PhDs. The problem is that universities sucker too many into PhD programs for the sake of the departmental government funding. This leads to indiscriminate entry into virtually all the PhD programs in Australia. When they graduate they are often underemployed or unemployed.
The ultimate harm to society is the production of research slop that worsens the SN ratio in published work.
more pointedly: the commenter presumes that the friends are unhappy with their lives. Also that some them would be better served performing back-breaking menial low-wage labor while otherwise being illiterate. Any PhD (even one in specializing in Plankton and especially nuclear physics/engineering) would equip you with a bunch transferable skills that normally would be valued in a modern society ... 1) public speaking 2) initiative 3) resourcefulness 4) analysis and communication etc etc. If I was being uncharitable I would say finance and law are actually worse for society: at least the subset of those that get paid the highest with respect to their impact on the broader society (but that is debatable).
Would you think it would be better for "society" to allow more people to go into finance and law? Or that advanced knowledge should be gate kept by only the select cognitive elite that are most adept at playing the "glass bead game" by age 18? Would you change any of your opinions if AI renders most High IQ practical/technical tracts obsolete? Perhaps, a more sane society would be one where curious people could develop themselves in whichever way they so choose: if they want to study the mating habits of marmots in the Central Asian steppe then so be it.
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