Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15 years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the document says.
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Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15 years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the document says.
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By djoldman 2025-11-0121:38 I am not a lawyer.
There may be some confusion here. It's legal for anyone to take a photo of anyone else in public, with few exceptions. TFA is not saying that ICE is forcing people to stand for a photo, it's saying that once ICE takes a photo, they can do stuff with it.
As an aside, it's my understanding that, unless someone is arrested, they're free to wear whatever clothing they like including something that covers their face. Probable cause is required for arrest, therefore ICE cannot force you to uncover your face. I'm not sure this has been tested much though, especially with folks temporarily detained.
Second aside, I anticipate a ton of lawsuits where folks give clear and convincing evidence of US citizenship and are unlawfully detained thereafter.
> “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,”
This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying
They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?
By GarnetFloride 2025-11-0115:102 reply Just like IBM said, a computer can't be held responsible for its decisions. Management's been doing this for a long time to justify layoffs and such. This is just the next step.
By roywiggins 2025-11-0116:311 reply IBM wasn't held responsible either:
A lot of people and companies ultimately got away with that, because of either necessity or the manufactured perception of necessity. It's an important lesson about selective enforcement, and just how extreme the cases it can be applied to. From traffic laws to genocide, it's all negotiable for the powerful if there are benefits at stake.
I went to the Siemens museum in Erlangen. Their history of work on medical imaging is on display and it’s good.
The awkward ‘Siemens and the holocaust’ section was so pathetic.
By lb1lf 2025-11-0119:50 If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust'.
Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.
In a bleak sense I suppose I can understand, it's not as though they can have a big, "By the way, we greedily assisted the Nazis with the worst act of industrialized murder in modern history, profited from it, were never held to meaningful account, and we're still successful," room.
And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.
By jacobolus 2025-11-0121:12 They could have an exhibit like that, perhaps describing how they were trying to make amends, donating money to projects promoting pluralism and diversity, opposing authoritarianism around the world, helping the descendants of those they harmed, etc.
But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.
As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.
By nostrademons 2025-11-0120:07 Increasingly a human can't be held responsible for their decisions either.
Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.
This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.
> They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right?
This was also one of the more advanced theories about the people selection and targeting AI apps used in Gaza. I've only heard one journalist spell it out, because many journalists believe that AI works.
But the dissenter said that they know it does not work and just use it to blame the AI for mistakes.
By roywiggins 2025-11-0116:35 The alleged facts are worse than an AI simply making mistakes:
By dsngizfiggot 2025-11-0114:571 reply [flagged]
Since your account is 17 minutes old, I have to assume you have been lurking for some time to "remember when…" on HN.
I am happy though that we are starting to seem more of this kind of content on HN. I understand that these political (?) posts can descend into finger-pointing and trolling. And that is too bad since I think we should not have blinders on in these rather unsettling times.
I will say that I remember when posts like this one were very quickly flagged when they hit the front page. I am happy to see that more and more people are finding them (unfortunately) relevant.
By throw-the-towel 2025-11-0116:03 This is probably a throwaway account. (Also, its username reads, shall I say, suspicious.)
By zoklet-enjoyer 2025-11-0116:11 I lurked on HN for YEARS because I didn't even realize it was a message board haha. I had subscribed to the RSS feed and read the links but not comments. I thought it was just hacker news, as in a news aggregator.
By dsngizfiggot 2025-11-0116:49 [dead]
By dngzafigot 2025-11-0116:53 [flagged]
By ilegitmadethisw 2025-11-0114:55 [flagged]
By convolvatron 2025-11-0117:47 well, given that the current US regime has been dancing around the notion that criticism of the state of Israel should be _illegal_. Such criticism has already been used as the pretense to detain and deport legal residents. Combined with the popular notion that law enforcement should be digging around in people's social media accounts to ascertain if they are a member of the 'enemy within', some people might be legitimately concerned about posting anything that casts doubt on the morality of the current conflict in Gaza.
It's better that the alternative which is humans. Unless you think enforcing laws or ever having the need to establish identity should never take place
As a computer vision engineer, I wouldn’t trust any vision system for important decisions. We have plenty of established process for verification via personal documents such as ID, birth certificate, etc and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
By gatesbillz 2025-11-0120:32 KYC disagrees.
So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?
You can't be serious.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-11-0117:47 (using he as gender neutral here)
he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.
He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.
Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.
>You can't be serious.
I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-0119:15 > So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?
We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.
If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-0117:25 I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.
Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.
By shadowgovt 2025-11-0117:31 That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.
> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports
To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).
It's humans. This is like TSA's fake bomb detectors with nothing inside the plastic shell
You think the person at the TSA that gets paid 40k a year is better at facial recognition than a computer?
By snovv_crash 2025-11-0117:34 Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
By tchalla 2025-11-0117:45 Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now that says you should be banned on the Internet.
It's likely the TSA employee's five year old child is better at facial recognition than a computer, too.
Please don't spread unscientific misinformation. You can say ICE bad, or you don't believe in borders, but saying computer facial recognition is inaccurate compared to humans is just factually incorrect.
https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html?utm_source=chat...
By Kinrany 2025-11-0118:21 Better-than-human facial recognition existing doesn't mean that all facial recognition technology is that good.
https://abc7ny.com/post/man-falsely-jailed-nypds-facial-reco...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-polic...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01634-z
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-recognition...
https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&con...
Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.
Here's the science.
By Larrikin 2025-11-0117:42 Stop presenting your opinion with no evidence as obvious facts on the ground that people need to argue against with sources.
By novemp 2025-11-0117:46 Yes.
By anigbrowl 2025-11-0119:11 Your subsequent comments like 'If you deny the need to know anything about anyone at any time, you're just so far gone that there is no discussion that could be had' indicate that you're sarcastically trolling people, and I suggest you do that somewhere else in future.
By 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2025-11-0116:482 reply The real alternative would be the inalienable human rights we were promised
By pfannkuchen 2025-11-0117:061 reply This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people who wrote the line you’re referencing also decided that none of the people ICE is involved with were even eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this wouldn’t even be a thing. I’m not arguing that their rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things they said feels intellectually dishonest.
By UniverseHacker 2025-11-0119:49 It’s more complex than that- initial drafts of the declaration of independence were more explicit about literally covering all people, and even had a rant about how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite- he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be ended, all the while owning slaves himself.
Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.
By verdverm 2025-11-0117:23 Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.
HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven
By watwut 2025-11-0116:27 It is not better if it ends up harrasing and harning more people and is unaccountable.
You can eventually punish humans abusing power. Cant do that wuth software designed to be abusive.
By jMyles 2025-11-0116:22 Humans are great at identifying each other. As the internet matures (and ease of long-distance communication obviates the need for massive nation states), we can constrain state authority to geographic batches small enough that people are known to one another.
By dngzafigot 2025-11-0117:14 [flagged]
By estimator7292 2025-11-0116:21 [flagged]
By nemosaltat 2025-11-0117:01 DON'T SUSPECT A FRIEND, REPORT HIM
By jMyles 2025-11-0116:24 I don't know whether I can trust your take on this. Have you got a 27B-6?
By horisbrisby 2025-11-0114:181 reply The trouble here is "ICE officer may ignore" ignoring that selectively on a Republican Senator is a civil rights violation of everyone you didn't ignore it on.
By hexbin010 2025-11-0114:38 Well, these ICE thugs being told to do what they are doing is the actual trouble. Let's not shrink that Overton Window so small it can't be seen
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-0115:411 reply I mean, how did you expect them to build this? The goal is clearly to build an infrastructure that can be easily used to persecute US citizens, so you can’t let details like actual proof of citizenship get in the way.
By lisbbb 2025-11-0117:33 All that tech is already persecuting people in China. It's up to us to hold the line here. I kind of gave up after the L3 got those Naked Body scanners into the airports based on the "underwear bomber" that was probably a false flag operation. We can always hope for a mostly peaceful downfall of the state, like when Hungary finally shed its communist government, but most likely it will be a shooting war at some point. It is the nature of humanity--peace, freedom, and prosperity are exceptional, not the rule.
Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a threat.
By BeFlatXIII 2025-11-0116:431 reply People will read stories like this and still say domestic terrorism is wrong.
By CamperBob2 2025-11-0117:00 Not the people doing it, though. They proudly call themselves "domestic terrorists." [1] It's OK when they do it, you see.
1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/191249066980685851...
By im3w1l 2025-11-0119:49 > > “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,”
When they decide that someone is in the US illegaly using the app... what happens? Is the person apprehended? Driven straight to the border? Taken into custody while more data about them is gathered?
By _DeadFred_ 2025-11-0119:16 Yes. This give them 'good faith' coverage in the courts. It has always been this way. If you include enough broken bureaucratic processes, checklists, paperwork, outside expert 'best practices' (outside experts just being cops from other agencies/jurisdictions or who are members of cop 'associations') then it moves from malice to 'good faith. they did the best they could within the system they operated'. Yes you have a right to a speedy trial, and it's just 'unfortunately' our system kept your in jail for a weeks to months, during which you lost your job, maybe your car, maybe your housing. It's all just 'unfortunately' and due to 'the system' we have to accept you being locked up for weeks/months meets the 'speedy trial' requirement. That timeframe was a 'good faith' attempt, sadly we sadled ourselves with all these things that meant we couldn't meet it.
By sleepybrett 2025-11-0113:46 You mean 'clearview ai' says no.
By LogicFailsMe 2025-11-0117:57 they are super cereal!
> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.
And do you believe that some secret ICE app is likely to be that best technology?
I have no reason to believe that ICE has any meaningful biometrics that would identify me as a citizen.
I don't know about you, but I have a license and a passport, both which have a picture of me. I use it every time I'm at the airport, buying alcohol, getting pulled over, going to a bar, walking in to my daycare to pick up my children, walking into a corporate office as a guest, and about a million other things.
It's not a stretch to say ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am.
It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
By edoceo 2025-11-0117:33 ICE ignores those documents, even for citizens.
By dpark 2025-11-0117:35 The implication of using such an app (“the best technology”) is that it somehow has more accurate information. If the sum total of the information ICE has is just the standard government documents (and it is) then what is the point of this app?
> pretending to understand things
Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.
“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,”
By jasonlotito 2025-11-0117:48 You said: "If I was in the country legally..."
A legal resident would say "As someone here legally..."
> ICE can use this information to confirm I am the person I say I am
1. You cast doubt on your legal status.
2. The APP says you are not here legally.
3. You have no opportunity to present those things proving you are here legally.
> It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them not pretending to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
It's amazing how much conservative dicourse is just them literally not understanding things, thus making discourse impossible.
Consider the literal evil stuff you support, discourse with you is 100% worthless.
By bdangubic 2025-11-0117:33 thats cute :)
except that ICE is not using those documents, they are using an app and then claiming the documents to be false
ICE is operating outside the bounds of law and basic human decency
I'm willing to give ICE a little extra leeway right now because of the dire situation we face in terms of losing our nation by being swamped with uncontrolled immigration. The previous Administration sure had a big plan that they were very successful at executing. The mass influx has ruined two school districts in my area--they have had to spend ridiculous amounts of money on interpreters, the quality of education has fallen, and our state keeps coming up with more ways to tax us into oblivion while pandering to people who aren't even citizens! It all needs to stop for at least 10 years. If not, we will probably hyperinflate the currency (and may do so anyways--the damage is largely already done). I very much resent the Maoist approach to "tear everything down in order to seize control" type of power play. It is obscene and inhumane and uses poor people as pawns in a gambit to amass total control. That is not "democracy" that is anti-democratic in every possible way. They have continually chipped away at a citizen's franchise here in the US and now we are being taxed and inflated to death.
By dpark 2025-11-0117:54 How can you compare the use of this tech to the persecution of Chinese citizens in China but then say you’re “willing to give ICE a little extra leeway”?
“Yeah, I know this is terrible and inhumane, but like, my taxes are kind of high and I’ve got to blame someone. Immigrants seem like maybe they somehow caused all the problems as long as I don’t think about it very hard.”
Sure is weird that DHS claims two million illegal immigrants have left the United States this year but nothing seems to have gotten better yet. Probably just need more deportations. I bet that’ll fix everything.
By verdverm 2025-11-0117:45 Yes, blame immigrants for the problems our politicians created. Gold star reasoning
Immigration rates have not drastically shifted in the last 4 years from the 20+ prior, averaging 1M a year, or .3% of the population. Without immigration, we are below replacement rates
By leeway, do you include the beating people and excessive use of force, or should those agents face consequences?
By skopje 2025-11-0116:23 >>> Why wouldn't you want the most accurate method of identifying you?
But that's not what this is because it cannot be challenged. This is just an adjustable tool to arrest anyone and fits any need.
I want the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. I want to not be searched against my will and with no probable cause. I want my accuser named and my suspected crimes announced in a way that gives me the opportunity to defend myself. Basically, this denies all of that.
By lisbbb 2025-11-0117:43 Does that relate to removing illegal immigrants? My understanding is that illegals have limited rights. Also, all the things you go on about mostly come later on, during arraignment and during trial. Arguing with cops on the sidewalk is mostly just going to get you jammed up even harder. Probable cause is something for your lawyer to argue about later.
By estimator7292 2025-11-0116:19 Stop apologizing for nazis
By wsatb 2025-11-0116:52 The “best technology” based on what?
What if they scanned you and the result was illegal alien? How would you feel?
By techsupporter 2025-11-0117:042 reply > A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...
What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.
People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-0120:31 > Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]
By SR2Z 2025-11-0117:10 Yeah, it's amazing how many people are so eager to ignore things like "probable cause" and "protection from unreasonable search and seizure."
ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.
> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.
I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.
> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?
The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.
I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.
> The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.
That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).
> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion
I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.
By jMyles 2025-11-0119:58 > I find it hard to keep these discussions separate.
...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.
The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).
In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.
It's borderline farcical.
By slater 2025-11-0117:05 > A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
Man, remember when the entire right wing lost its shit for months on end over Obama's birth certificate? Truly a magical time to be alive...
By cool_man_bob 2025-11-0117:161 reply [flagged]
By dang 2025-11-0120:21 If you continue to post abusively with troll accounts, we will ban your main account as well.
By UniverseHacker 2025-11-0115:433 reply Per thousands of videos on social media, it doesn’t matter what your rights are anymore, if you try to ask for them ICE will just become even more sadistic and violent, and the DOJ/government will refuse to cooperate in bringing them to justice for denying you your rights- you have no rights or recourse anymore even as a citizen. Moreover, the agents are masked and refuse to self identify as the law requires so you will never be able to say who violated your rights- they are hiding their identities because they are committing crimes. They are not police that follow laws, they are state sponsored white supremacist terrorists.
By potato3732842 2025-11-0116:054 reply Fedcops have ALWAYS been like this. They don't go away from an interaction empty handed like local cops sometimes will because the person they're after is following the law.
But of course fed-cops were never seriously prowling neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is a Whole Foods so nobody on HN cared until now.
By dragonwriter 2025-11-0116:191 reply Most of Federal law enforcement except for those that patrol certain, usually sharply defined (but see border patrol for a big exception) areas historically has been in one of two modes interacting: either gathering information (this includes serving a search warrant), or arresting based on an existing arrest warrant, usually from a felony indictment. In the former case, something really out of ordinary has to happen to turn it into an arrest in that interaction (though that doesn't mean you wont be indicted and arrested based on it) and in the latter nothing is likely to deter arrest.
Border patrol specifically is wildly different, looking for people who are suspected of being subject to their jurisdiction without a specific indictment, detaining with in practice, if not in law, a much lower standard of suspicion than applies usually, and then generally having those detained subject to process that is almost entirely within executive branch “courts” with consequences as severe as criminal process but much lower protections than criminal process (where literal toddlers defend themselves in “court" against government lawyers.)
The current “immigration” crackdown, while ICE (which historically has worked more like a regular federal law enforcement agency despite its detainees often flowing into the executive immigration system and not the criminal justice system) has been the public face of it is effectively applying the Border Patrol culture/approach far more broadly (which is also why, in frustration with the “inadequate” results so far ICE middle leadership is being purged and replaced with Border Patrol personnel.)
By potato3732842 2025-11-0116:381 reply I agree with all that generally.
There's real serious questions about what rights people have when being accused of non-criminal infractions and to what degree the punishments can overlap that people ought to be asking here.
But nobody on HN wants to ask these questions because all the things HN wants strictly regulated are done so using the same legal theories and doctrines and precedents.
By potato3732842 2025-11-0120:231 reply You can say that about any group. Sure there's a long tail of rare people who can do better but averages and means will be what they are.
The tech industry is full of fine software developers. Not sure they'd make great public policy.
By estearum 2025-11-0119:44 "Fewer people cared when this was an objectively much smaller problem" is not the clever observation you seem to think it is, even with the weird Whole Foods snipe.
By anigbrowl 2025-11-0119:15 Some fedcops were always like this, but we can look back at previous administrations for invalid apprehensions of US citizens to see that the numbers used to be much lower over the last several decades.
By Moru 2025-11-0116:51 It's a bit worse now [1] with Trump in lead.
XD any way to clobber cellular data and wifi connection within six feet of contact?
By cozzyd 2025-11-0118:17 Sure you can jam all cellular frequencies. Not exactly legal but certainly possible.
By kbrisso 2025-11-0117:03 I agree.
