Depending on the crime, most people would agree that face/gait recognition is warranted, for example in case of murder or rape.
The difference here is that some people consider "illegal immigration" to be more like a misdemeanor, others consider it to be something much more serious.
We like to think surveillance is something you can turn on for one problem and turn off afterward. In practice, that never happens. Once the machinery is in place, it stays and looks for new work. Tools justified today by "illegal immigration" won’t stop there. They drift into credit scoring, health insurance pricing, hiring and firing decisions, school admissions, housing access, travel permissions, banking, welfare eligibility, and even which online accounts are allowed to exist. Not because anyone set out to build a dystopia, but because systems, once built, naturally expand to whatever can be measured and enforced.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
In the Civil Rights era, segregationist states' police would systematically[0] stop and fingerprint black people, without individualized suspicion, to see if they were in criminal fingerprint databases. There's nothing new under the sun. Biometrics are centuries old; the tech we're talking about here is merely evolutionary, not something qualitatively new and different in human terms. The debate we're revisiting, safetyism vs. liberty, is old and well-trodden. And of course the part where these degrading searches are clearly targeted at minorities based on their appearance and skin color is of no novelty whatsoever.
Totalitarians on one side convince their side, that it's totally fine and desirable to ignore the law and let millions of illegal immigrants in. Then then totalitarians on the other side convince their side it is necessary to ignore the law and introduce wide sweeping surveillance to undo it. Congratulations, both sides cooperated while hating each other because they are easy to play dummies.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadNow that we do this hundreds of times a day, it has become routine.
In China government is controlled by chosen members of the ruling party who become wealthy through it;
In the US the government is controlled by billionaires who become powerful through it.
Neither is a "government by the people" nor a "democratic people's republic" and both are enacting more and more similar policies.
Where does the initial iris data come from? Is this actually collected now?
The difference here is that some people consider "illegal immigration" to be more like a misdemeanor, others consider it to be something much more serious.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/721/ ("Davis v. Mississippi (1969)")
And that we don't have close to 100 million immigrants.
That the "kavanaugh stop" allows them to detain you on he basis of skin color or accent.
And that a driver's license with Real ID is no longer sufficient "papers".