Literary? Haha

Not supported by law where? I’m unaware of any legal proscription of this practice in the USA, and the Journal article makes no such claims, either.

(IAAL but this is not my primary field of expertise, and this is not legal advice.)

Ah, what's good is law when the branch^W [after rereading about it, executive power is given to one] person tasked with executing laws is... lawless?

The notion that future administrations won't be offshots of the current regime (again, why do you think laws regarding democracy, like fair elections, will be upheld?) is also too hopeful.

Happy new year!

It won’t be restricted until the people push against it to a point where it becomes too politically expensive to not restrict.

Law is expensive.

Democracy is when you get abducted and sent to CECOT because some shitty AI face app said so

> is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest

That is not the system that the US has had since 2025, and the executive has made it very clear that it is not the system that it wants the US to have.

Meanwhile, SCOTUS has made it very clear that nothing this executive does will have any consequences for it.

Rule of law is a fairy tale when ICE can snag anyone they want off the street and throw them into some CECOT torture pit.

Rule of law is a fairy tale when the executive disregards direct judicial orders.

ICE does not care about "lawful arrests". Like common, that is not their thing.

> abduction of political rivals

Couldn’t have timed it better, we just pulled off the most high profile abduction of a geopolitical rival in history.

That's a totally wrong way to think about it, akin to "I have nothing to hide so why not let the government look into all my communications"

In both systems the law is being carefully followed to support inhumane goals

> Beijing showed the way. We followed their path.

lol, just like China invented social credit scores which are for social control and definitely not like US credit scores which are just good business sense

Edit: to be clear I am saying this from a US centric viewpoint. China is catching up but they’ve been behind us for over a century tech wise and the US has been really good at pioneering new forms of injustice. I’m laughing at the idea that we were trailing behind them on learning new for handling their population

Are we allowed to criticize Garry Tan here?

How is pointing out this inconsistency whataboutism? It might be reasonable to ask if it's a strawman since it seems reasonable to wonder if perhaps the people against what the Chinese are doing might also be against what ICE is doing.

Regardless, it's quite relevant to point out that at this point two of the world's superpowers are actively engaging in this. Claiming that the technology won't be used this way - that people are just fearmongering - clearly doesn't hold water. (Not that it ever did, but now we've got concrete evidence.)

America is not the West. There are a lot of things wrong in my country but we don't worship Jesus nor billionaires.

  whataboutism

China is not "safe, clean and nice" for everybody.

Yup, I agree. And this is why I think mass surveillance isn’t just another technology to regulate. The chilling effect isn’t misuse; it’s the default: continuous, opaque observation changes behavior by itself. Because it’s centralized and unavoidable, people self-censor and conform; you don’t need arrests once everyone assumes they’re being scored.

We don’t yet have long-run examples of fully algorithmic surveillance societies, so the outcome isn’t certain. But if these dynamics scale, the risk is trading experimentation for legibility. Problems get hidden, metrics look clean, and warning signals vanish. When real stress hits, responses are late and blunt - overcorrection, cascading failures, accelerated exit. Stability holds until it doesn’t.

>Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism

And every step of the way the enablers will defend it on the grounds of "well you still technically can do the thing if you're willing to put up with some absurd risks or jump through some insane and impractical hoops specifically designed to be non-starters for many/most."

Who ever said facial recognition wasn't going to threaten freedom? None of those points feel at all relevant or substantive to the topic of discussion

Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter. There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. For example, I am substantially more free to not die of smallpox, which would have been quite limiting to my options.

I think those examples miss an important distinction. Cars, guns, and electricity are consumer technologies. They’re widely distributed, regulated, and constrained by market forces and law. Individuals can choose how to use them, and misuse is at least partially visible and contestable.

Surveillance is different. It’s inherently centralized and asymmetrical. By design, it gives one side - the state or large institutions - persistent visibility into everyone else, with little reciprocity. You can regulate how it’s used on paper, but the power imbalance remains.

It’s closer to nuclear technology than to cars or electricity. I can’t build a nuclear weapon or possess fissile material, not because it’s inefficient, but because some technologies are considered too dangerous to be broadly accessible. Mass surveillance belongs in that category. Once it exists, citizens don’t get to opt out, and meaningful oversight tends to lag far behind capability.

Licensing works when the technology is decentralized. With surveillance, the risk isn’t misuse at the edges - it’s concentration at the center.

clothing i think is a big one. Once the poster-child of industrialisation, now results in millions of tons being thrown away each other at a massive environmental cost.

> I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.

In the golden age of the 90's we were able to ban CFCs, but I'm skeptical we could do that today. We no longer have that political ability, and I doubt we will get it back any time soon.

I think we're finally seeing the culture that's been present in law enforcement forever playing out to its logical end. The solution is pretty close to "all law enforcement is bad". We're seeing that the people most prone to violence and abuse seek out positions of power in law enforcement. Basically anyone who wants to be a cop should not be allowed to be a cop.

We can blame autocrats while also blaming the complicit tools. In Grand Rapids, Michigan yesterday the local police arrested the organizer of a protest against the invasion of Venezuela while she was on camera interviewing with the local news for "obstructing a roadway" (marching in a lane with other lanes open to traffic) and "disobeying a lawful command".

When we have local beat cops colluding with national secret police and suppressing dissent, we have a very serious problem and are running out of options very quickly.

> "Basically anyone who trusted the government at any point in the past."

Over one million Afghanis voluntarily gave America their iris biometrics; now the Taliban has that data. US military negligently failed to secure it. Lists of American collaborators' biometrics and everything.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/taliban-afghanistan-biome... ("Taliban likely to have access to biometric databases of Afghan civilians who helped US" (2021))

The normal TSA pre-check lines make you scan your face too. They used to read "images are deleted after use" but I didn't notice that message last time I went through security. So likely it's being used by ICE now.

The customs line have been doing much more rigorous face scanning for a while now.

Is this common? Airport scanners are usually face scanners. Iris scanners are almost always for employees with access to critical areas, not for travelers. I know Doha and Singapore airports use iris scanners at the security check. It's probably a growing trend, haven't seen any in the EU, is it already common in the US?

> And then the scope creeps.

Agreed and wanted to add. If it exists, can do the job, and the person in charge is aware of it, then it will inevitably be used. There's no such thing as "only for certain situations" unless there is a large inherent cost to using it outside of the proscribed scenario.

If you mandate the placement of fireman's axes by every door, at some point someone is going to use one of them to commit murder or vandalism or some other crime. There is effectively nothing that can be done to prevent that other than choosing not to mandate their placement.

My guy, stop with this false point. You're smarter than this.

Deep down you know it's not true and it's not being used this way.

Clean yourself and your soul.

We have a court system specifically meant to interpret the law, and a tiered appeals process for when one of the courtroom parties disagrees with that court’s interpretation.

Quick, does the First Amendment allow the government to place any restrictions on speech? The words are right there for the reading and knowing, so that should be a simple question, surely?

Laws don't exist in a vacuum, in practice governments decide how to implement and to enforce them or not.

Hypothetically speaking couldn't you collect it from any security camera in an area where you have positive ID on people? Airport security comes to mind.

With all the trade in personal data in the US I assume it's only a matter of time before places like grocery stores start selling it.

Why stop at just gait though? Geometric fingerprinting of various body parts is also possible. Palm geometry readers have been commonplace for a long time.

Every grocery store self checkout has cameras on the whole area as you walk up, then cameras on your face, and then pretty good self identification via your payment card/rewards.

Home Depot was already selling at least some of this to Meta in 2023 https://strategyonline.ca/2023/01/26/home-depot-found-to-hav...

Fingerprints?

Wrong appendages, unless I don't know what "gait" means

IIRC that's exactly what a character did in either Person of Interest or Mr. Robot

(I have a very hard time to distinguish both in my memory since they were so similar in their themes)

I remember reading that early systems could be defeated entirely by putting a pebble in your shoe, but I’m sure they’ve improved a lot since.

gait recognition is a pseudoscience. this is also obvious from the way it is used: to fabricate a pretext to detain undesirables.

does rock in shoe work? That's the only way i've heard

The UK once had a ministry specialized on that /s

You'll spend way more tax money to haul them across the border than you would to just print them a permit to live and work in the community they've been contributing to for years. Every study ever conducted on the issue has concluded that undocumented immigrants contribute far more to the economy than they consume in public welfare dollars. You've let the actual tax dollar parasites pawn the blame on a scapegoat because you're addicted to being angry.

This is a very shortsighted and frankly dumb argument. You would give up constitutional rights, to allow an unchecked police force, to arrest anyone they want, to save a few tax dollars?

So stupid.

> Americans don't want to expend their tax dollars on folks willing to break the law for financial gain.

Then why do they keep electing the lackeys of those people into office.

The American people are idiots.

the last election speaks otherwise