Posted by samfriedman 10/29/2025
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.
While ICE is being massively scaled up with the intent that you describe, its not unique in kind or even the worst by degree of the agencies involved in terms of either historic or current lawlessness. It's just the one with the public mission most in line with the propaganda cover chosen for Trump's totalitarian efforts.
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.
(Not scanning faces, but continuously monitoring yourself to prove innocence. Depressing.)
Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.
But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?
I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.
There have been some updated styles for CNN based models, but never tried them, the originals did work back in the day
Done hide. Overwhelm.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.
The Hannity and Infowars fans will be written off as crazy when no longer useful.
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.
They'd just tell you they are only going after pedo-terrorists.
What are we going to do? Call them liars? They don't care.
Without it I have to look at any reporting as unduly biased and likely from an activist lens.
I have a healthy distrust of both the govt and journalists.
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.