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I wonder who is storing this data, I would bet Palantir. Possibly Oracle too.
I wonder how soon till the automated license plate reader cameras everywhere start doing this.
My understanding is that the only thing keeping this from happening is that the data is far more valuable for traffic monitoring than law enforcement. As a trivial example, these cameras can already determine is a vehicle is speeding based on its number plate sightings between any two cameras. They can hence start issuing tickets, no radar or police needed.

However, they've not gone down this path because they are (rightfully) concerned that there would be an instantaneous and severe backlash that could lead to those cameras being banned entirely, which would cripple traffic control.

The irony of doing this while covering their own faces
That's fine, as long as they aren't making anyone remove face coverings. People are allowed to cover their faces in public places. And we can't tell from this biased article whether they had probable cause to stop anyone that they did.
What's ironic about it? That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench. They're doing things unto others that they would not have done unto them.
> The irony of doing this while covering their own faces

    It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy 
    as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things 
    they are doing to people were never meant to be 
    equally applied.
    
    It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent
    to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
    
    It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t
    just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or
    an unintended side-effect.
    
    It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself
    the thing you’re able to deny others, because 
    you dominate, is the whole point.
    
    For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue—the greatest.
* https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267

* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue

lol - I made something to do the same to ICE. Stores each ICE agent as a visual embedding and creates a database of all sighted agents.

https://www.realtimefascism.com/ice-sight

thanks awesome. thank you for making this.

Can you go into any detail on what technologies you used? Is there enough differentiating data in their attire to actually match agents? None of them are showing their faces so I wonder how many false positives would occur

Thank you for doing this! Great work.
The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter.

This is completely lawless.

From the article:

> He also said “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.

People can look identical, that's the reason we started using finger prints. Faces are not unique.
Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)
Birth certificates and driver's licenses can be and are routinely faked by everyone from high school students to foreign agents. Faces cannot be faked.
I think ICE is in fact setup / groomed to be ... lawless. Just thugs for the federal government.
> the person is an alien

The dehumanizing language is absolutely disgusting and it's use is an important milestone towards genocide.

I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"
At this point, the US is a failed democracy and a facist state. I would definitely advice people from other countries to leave ASAP.

The facist American government is even sending their dissident citizens to detention camps in Africa .

Good luck to Americans that cannot go somewhere else.

I'm somewhat morbidly curious how many citizens we're going to deport to random countries. It happened fairly often before this administration.
Lots of lawsuits forthcoming. Who’s going to pay for them? We are.
Wow this is going downhill fast. I don't have access to the article but I'm assuming this is what Palantir is all about right? Or are we not quite there yet, is this the CBP face scanning they have at border crossings too?
Any shred of trust that was left in our federal agencies is going straight down the drain.
'Katz v. United States' was quite clear - you have no expectation of privacy in public. Anyone may photograph you and use said photos. Do I like it? No. But that is the current caselaw in USA.

"What a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." - Justice Potter in 'Katz v. United States'

They legally can take a photo of you, sure.

But they aren't just taking a photo from across the street. They are also:

1. "briefly" detaining you to make you face a camera and take of hats etc for the app to get a good enough shot.

2. arresting you if it doesn't correctly identify you

3. using protected characteristics to decide who needs to get scanned.

Keep in mind that what "anyone" can do and what "anyone serving in an official government capacity" can do are different.
Asking a "kid" for his ID? Kids aren't supposed to have IDs, much less carry them around. I'm confused as to what the kid was supposed to provide.
The lack of safeguarding is shocking. Kids should not be hassled at all much less strip searched without their parents.
If you haven’t seen it this video is a dystopian display of this tech in action: https://www.reddit.com/r/EyesOnIce/comments/1ogm1qk/ice_agen...

I am struggling a bit personally with how to grapple with the fact that the career I have chosen has ended up bolstering all the horrible inclinations of those in power. I think we need some kind of tech workers collective and some version of the hippocratic oath to start pushing back against this bullshit.

I think a lot of tech needs to go through that struggle.

From the perspective of a long career in infosec, what’s occurring now was enabled a longtime ago by broad-based industry consensus. Concerns then, which == awful stuff occurring now, were robustly dismissed by many many many devs with s/strong viewpoints/paychecks.

The only silver lining I can see is we’re taking our medicine now, but there’s a lot more to go through still, on the back of many significant tech capabilities.

For example, Flock was kept out of many cities, but Amazon was not, Flock just signed a data sharing deal with Ring. That’s a no-nonsense, nationwide, warrantless vehicular and pedestrian tracking network mechanism.

Not great, Bob! But RSUs for building it all sure was great.

How certain are we that the photos being taken are going to a Palantir database?

Asking because the FBI has been assembling biometrics databases since the mid-20th century and providing access to other law enforcement agencies since the 1990s.

It's true now as in the past. Technology or science aren't inherently good or bad, just a matter of how you use it. Personally I enjoyed much more working on medical devices at a university than typical commercial software, simply because there's an ethical component to that software that was quite fulfilling.
Physicists have Pugwash, which started after they saw the culmination of their decades of work in the actual evaporation of two entire cities.
Don’t fall for the lie that this is at all about illegal immigration- that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism operating completely outside the law. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa, while firing all federal immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum claims from brown skinned people.

I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.

Don't tread on me. ... Tread on them, just not me.
the people who run YC and Hacker News have Peter Thiel's phone number.

that's all I'm saying

All, I recommend you familiarize yourself with relevant state laws regarding your protections when assisting folks that are in immediate danger, e.g.: https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_161.200

I'm not a lawyer. So, if you have counsel on retainer and can stomach the bill, get clarity there first. But know that many states have such protections on the books.

The veil of immunity for DHS agents may soon be pierced. Apathy and ignorance are no longer acceptable for this situation.

[flagged]
This is not remotely a widely-held sentiment in the HN audience.
Seems like this would be to collect faces of what they consider "dissedents" rather than verify citizenship which can be done much more accurately through a mobile fingerprint reader.

Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.

I wonder if this is a portend to an American social credit score, like where China uses facial recognition to identify criminals at concerts[1], and jaywalkers, etc. which severely impacts a person's ability to get a job, housing, etc.

I can't help but assume this is already being used at retail establishments, but now it could be tied into law enforcement databases, and .. communicate..

Do people think they are clever and can have defacto open borders? Maybe stop the goon squads and enforce at the employer level though it would probably work too well…