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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...
Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.
In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
This Vox article and the podcast with the same name does a good job of explaining how it is now effectively impossible to hold ICE accountable to the law: https://www.vox.com/politics/464962/supreme-court-ice-no-law
New norms go both ways.
I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.
While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202509/ice-awards-clearview-...
The Soft Cage - Surveillance in America: From Slavery to the War on Terror, Christian Parenti, 2003
In that case it's Bow Mar, a small town in Colorado, relying on flock cameras to issue tickets for petty theft.
We as a society just aren't capable of using these toys right.
The facist American government is even sending their dissident citizens to detention camps in Africa .
Good luck to Americans that cannot go somewhere else.
The dehumanizing language is absolutely disgusting and it's use is an important milestone towards genocide.
Years ago special needs was a fairly safe term, yet now "speshul" definitely has different tone. I'm sure you know if many other examples (I can think of heaps). I predict that "delayed" will become derogatory.
I think that banning words is literally dumb. I am bit older and went through the Politically Correct putsh. Disclaimer: I'm a lefty.
They don't give a **.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-rule-of-law-i...
It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.
Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.
Its possible that insurance broker license is the same. Same for pharmacist.
I think a lot of US trades have fingerprinting as requisite, particularly if they require a background check.
if you have access to profoundly expensive weaponry and training to use it, it makes sense. also if you're shipping bodies back in pieces -- fingerprints, dental records, and DNA may be the only way to figure out what happened to you.
I did get fingerprint registration while considering adoption with my ex-wife as part of the background check.
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/biometrics/face/neof...
Their defacto scan everyone isn't to determine citizenship, it is to collect the data in the first place. They want to get as much data into their system as possible.
The crazy thing is though these people don't even have an identifying badge number and their license plates are often fake, zero repercussions for anything and they know it
Imagine by 2028 what's going down if this is still the first year
I remember in college my magazine journalism prof surprised me by pointing out that Vogue a bad-ass journalistic enterprise in its own right. That was 35 years ago and it's cool to see they still have it.
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.
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.
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.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.
Probable cause is out the window. This is, firsthand, Steven Millers White America policy starting to take effect.
“I wish I could play Wolfenstein in real life.”
https://www.mic.com/articles/185045/wolfenstein-ii-nazi-kill...
You basically have to be a party loyalist to get campaign funds so, unless you can self fund, you gotta toe the line.
The others may not be much better, but aren’t quite as unmistakably clear.
But the point we've arrived at, with so many of them complicit in these wanton attacks on our freedoms and our society, it's hard to see that there are any sort of ideals or values behind their party. People are going about their days, getting accosted by unaccountable masked gangs, having their face scanned, then getting sent to a concentration camp when some buggy app claims they aren't a citizen? How can one possibly look at that and think anything but "this could easily happen to me or my family" ?
The only answer I've been able to come up with is that it is straight up racism. They believe they could never possibly be on the pointy end of this fascist dystopia, because they look "American" (ie white), and so would never possibly be scanned in the first place? I earnestly hate this "racism everywhere" chant the Democratic party has fallen into for the past decade. But I'm having a real hard time finding any other explanation, so I'm reluctantly coming around to that. Someone please convince me I am wrong.
The point is it is brown people's faces.
They have always been OK with that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jim_Goldman_and_Elian_Gon...
Biden's CBP goons stripped me naked, imprisoned me, ran up an ER bill for which I'm still being chased for by debt collectors, and tranported me by prisoner van all over the state, while they were enforcing Biden's (and now continue with Trump) insane war on drugs. I did not have drugs, I am not involved with drugs.
Of course nothing was found, and the allegation was hearsay by an HSI detective that some unnamed dog alerted to an unnamed officer, neither of which I have any idea what they were even referencing.
ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement.
Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
Law is supposed to strive for justice, war is as lawless as it can get away with.
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.
* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
While pithy, public intellectual/academic conservatives like David Frum and Tom Nichols would disagree, and say the rule of law should apply equally to everyone.
Frum (IIRC, though it may have been Applebaum) wrote articles years ago that the direction of the GOP was going was similar to that of Hungary: using public office to enrich family and friends and not prosecute the same when they broke the law. There have been numerous conservatives aghast at what the GOP was becoming / has now become, and were ringing the alarm for years.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/hu...
It’s not an “ok for me if it’s ok for you” situation.
Otherwise there is no difference between a kidnapper and ICE agent.
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.
And you do have the right to contest the ticket in court, before a judge.
Unless you have the free time, and some evidence that doesn't involve the fringe around the courtroom's flag, you're probably better off just paying the ticket.
You do not in other states, like Virginia, which has signs informing you that they have planes that issue tickets (???)
Instead, the situation we have now is that many bureaucracies deliberately avoid making any citizenship or legal residency distinction on official documents because the polticians who determine the rules for those bureaucracies think immigration enforcement is immoral and want to make it easier for illegal immigrants to access American bureaucracies and harder for other bureaucracies controlled by less immigration-friendly polticians to detect illegal immigrants.
Pastor Niemöller
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..
> What we have aren't unified social credit systems…yet. They're fragmented behavioral scoring networks that don't directly communicate. Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems. The question isn't whether we have Chinese-style social credit now (because we don't). The question is whether we're building toward it without acknowledging what we're creating.
That was the carrot. This new development is the stick.
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
I'm using a YOLO-WORLD-XL object detection model. Lets me detect objects using text. This is the initial filter that scans for agents - once those are detected and outlined with bounding boxes the entire image and each cropped bounding box are then sent to chatgpt to confirm if the image looks legit. Once image passes those checks - I create image embeddings of each agent using CLIP and those are stored in a vector DB, and each agent is then compared to the DB and matched.
The matching system isn't perfect - but I think good enough to get the point across and can be easily tuned with more data! Happy to take suggestions here - I just spun this up over the weekend
EDIT: Legally, you have no right to privacy in public, if your photo is captured in public (US centric), broadly speaking. You have the right to record law enforcement officers exercising their official duties in public.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/yes-you-have-right-fil...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/federal-judge-upholds-...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/fourth-circuit-individ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/victory-another-court-...
"What a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." - Justice Potter in 'Katz v. United States'
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.
Illinois has the Biometric Information Privacy Act.
https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/ILCS/Articles?ActID=3004&Ch...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750955
From the statute: "A private entity does not include a State or local government agency."
that's all I'm saying
I hope the folks mentioned are, and continue to remain, somewhere safe while this plays out.
By saying such I might come up as part of The Resistance in the future, like German people that resisted the Nazis are considered heroes after the war.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/justice-brett-kavanaugh-a...
Bovino says they do profile people on how they look:
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
It's like that old Groucho joke: Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin' eyes?
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
Even non-citizens are entitled to due process and the 4th amendment. ICE is violating that left and right, citizens and legal residents included. Fuck ICE.
Except they form an important part of the economy, and they’re here because the government has implicitly allowed and supported that for decades.
That’s not an accident, either. It’s provided a source of cheap labor, who are not enfranchised, so have no political representation.
In many respects it’s a substitute for slavery. The perpetrators here aren’t the immigrants.
Minors do, in fact, have biometrics. Identification with them may be less reliable for some kinds of biometrics, but... reliability isn’t a hallmark of the current regimes “immigration enforcement” mechanisms.
> They are not obligated to have any sort of ID, especially citizens.
This is also true of adults, who are not obligated to have or carry ID if they are citizens (immigrants, both minors and adults, are a different story, are required to have ID, and are required to have biometrics taken unless they are under 14.)
Obviously, it can’t rule out citizens (though it could compare to databases available to the feds, which I would assume state ID databases are), since not all citizens will have biometrics of any kind, or even ID photos on file, but if they have presumed that the targets are immigrants, then scanning can be used to compare to records of documented immigrants, reinforcing (note I do not say justiying) the conclusion tha they are illegally present if it fails to match.
They can also be used to build intelligence databases of contacts even if not used to support immediate detention.
> Also, what in the fuck would CBP be doing in Chicago?
CBP, and more specifically Border Patrol, the main enforcement agency within CBP, is everywhere the Administration’s immhration crackdown is beig executed, and much of the most violent “immigration enforcement” attributed to “ICE” is actually Border Patrol, not ICE.
No, this entire encounter is illegal. It is a crime, being committed by the republican administration running the federal government and endorsed by every republican in congress who has declined to reign in the illegal behavior of the trump administration.
It is, however, very real. If you reside in American, then this is the reality you live in, imposed upon you by republican voters. You don't get to just plug your ears and cover your eyes.
What are you talking about? CBP has been in Illinois for weeks. Greg Bovino, their commander, has been hauled before a judge this week to testify about how CBP (and he, personally) have violated the judge's TRO against unjustified use of tear gas [0].
This is very basic factual stuff that's in the news every day. How do you not know this is going on?
[0] https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-news-border-patrol-...
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.
Fines and up to 8 years in a federal prison, 20 years if you use a deadly or dangerous weapon or actually inflict injury. You can get up to 15% off for good behavior, there is no parole.
One on hand, I'd really love to punch a neo-nazi to interrupt them disappearing people to concentration camps. On the other, ooooh scary federal charges.
I'll tell you this much, most judges will regard a circumstance for you to exert force against a peace officer - seeming or actual - as an extralegal action, and will very rarely affirm it as a protected action from the books. And even if you beat such a case, it ruins your life in the process. Their qualified immunity will remain longer than you can remain solvent.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Custom-Personalized-Print-Bandana-Reu...