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As a former MAGA it's just mind boggling to watch all the supposedly freedom loving GOP base clamor for mass digital surveillance and gestapo immigration raids. These same tools and policies will just be used against them in the future. Makes me question democracy.
I haven’t seen any base “clamoring for mass digital surveillance”?

It’s either indifference (mostly due to ignorance) or outright opposition?

As MAGA likes to say - Promises made, promises kept

It makes me question all sorts of things when people get what they were promised and then complain they got it.

Peter Thiel must be doing Mr Burns laugh on this one
> The app represents an unprecedented linking of government databases into a single tool, including from the State Department, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the FBI, and state records

I think we're well past the point of stopping these dystopian practices given the government has already collected this data. They're merely using it how they want. If you go through customs as a US citizen, you don't even need to hand over your passport: they just scan your face now.

Calling out these practices is good, but the time to stop this would've been after 9/11 and the ensuing terrorism hysteria (Patriot Act, FISA, etc..) which gave three letter agencies the go-ahead to do whatever they want.

Hm. No, I think the practice of using a capability for a bad goal is inherently worse than merely having a capability that can be used for a bad goal. (The whole principle behind the second amendment, after all!)

And we should condemn the overreach on its own terms and by its own moral failings and not just wave it away with a both-sides-ist "They're merely using it how they want".

Bad things are bad and we should say they are bad. Because at the end of the day every government is possessed of terrible power and the only reason any of them don't get worse is that we vote for the people who aren't bad.

The time to stop it is right now before it gets a massive boost in funding and becomes unstoppable. “Oh no too late” is literally the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Get all hands on deck right now.
This was demonstrated in the investigation into the January 6th riots. ICE is not the only part of the government using it, or something like it. Might be made seperately for each agency, more profitable that way.
We all knew USA is just a Temu version of Chinese Communist Party
If they are going to do this, they really ought to corroborate the face recognition with fingerprints. Many people have unrelated doppelgangers, even if an AI algorithm was near perfect: https://twinstrangers.net/
You can read all about USCBP policies on the use facial recognition

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy...

It would appear the software returns a lot of “potential matches” with propensity scores and demographic and recording information and it’s up to the agent to make the final determination.

It’s more a tool to find potential matches rather than a program that pops up and says “this is who this person is”