Remix.run Logo
perihelions 3 days ago

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.

[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/721/ ("Davis v. Mississippi (1969)")