One thing that i would prefer in biometrics would be that the iris/fingerprints get treated as what they are publicly available and easily obtainable data.
At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it .
Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not if) it is finallly shoved through.It wont take long to foist it on the rest of the planet (see the recent visa requirements viz social media and insane bond requirements demanded of some countries like Mali citizens being asked for $15K per visa application).
The problem with these types of technologies is that you will be at the mercy of whoever uses them. It's like chat control, censorship, gun laws, etc. You can't control how they will be leveraged.
I lived in California for some time a few years ago, and it was a mess, so I understand people being okay with this type of stuff if it will make them more secure, but it's a very risky slippery slope.
The other thing is that with all the data Google has, they can probably uncover everything they need just by paying for Google Ads data :/
I suspect this government isn’t receptive to commentary from anyone other than only one person. While I’d never discourage anyone from advocating their beliefs this feels like at best a waste of energy. They are going to do it because they decided to do it - the solicitation of comments is performative and required. The only way to stop it is via the courts and by voting next November.
There's even precedent for the current president's agencies compiling some pretty sketchy "comments" in the past due to not doing basic sanity checks on pretty obvious fake comments that happened to support their agenda, like when supposedly seeking input from the public about repealing net neutrality[1]. There were so many duplicates that only thirty 30 unique comments made up 57% of the overall total, and the second most common "name" among the authors was literally "The Internet".
No one in the current administration cares about what random members of the public think about their policies, and that's by design. Even the government positions that are intended to be permanent across administrations aren't a safe bet at this point with was things have been going
Did you know that the State of California has a DNA sample from every person born in the state since 1983? It's required by law for the hospital to collect it and give it to the state.
This is a particularly incendiary way of putting this information out there.
What is collected and stored is a small blood-spot sample from a heel prick on a newborn. This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
This isn't a full DNA genome sequence or even any data at all, just the blood-spot specimen.
Law enforcement does not have automatic access to this sample, but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants. There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information or how often it's given to law enforcement, but there's been proposed legislation to make this more transparent.
The blood sample isn’t a DNA sample right up until the point they decide to sequence it. This is the same legal doctrine allowing the government to systematically collect all of your personal data without violating your privacy as long they don’t look at what they collect without a warrant.
The government has granted themselves an option on your personal data that can’t be revoked.
No, they are correct, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They have a DNA sample of everyone. Those samples haven't been sequenced. As you've pointed out, they are sequenced when the state needs them to be.
It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
It's about as accurate a Buzzfeed headline, but I guess that's par for the course on the internet these days.
It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.
Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.
So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.
> this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities
Why does the state have to collect and keep the sample for that to happen? Why can't it be the private property of the parents, provided to whatever private testing labs are used to do the tests?
That seems like a fair criticism. I don't know enough to quantify the benefit of retaining these samples, but I do know that the reason for keeping samples primarily relates to quality control, research, and development of tests.
There is a process for people to have the sample destroyed, I also have no idea how easy or how often that is used.
the implication was misleading, yes. the implication being that California has database of its citizens' genetic data. when the reality is that CA has a _physical sample_ of blood.
it was misinformation, the DNA in such a sample is not only miniscule and unstandardized, but also not treated for longterm archival specimen retention.
the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.
It is as accurate as any of the incendiary Pravda propaganda pieces[1] about how the capitalist swine lived. Other posters have helpfully pointed out the specifics of why your particular spin on it is not entirely honest.
---
[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
I just got back from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and was marveling at the size of a small footprint facility that stores samples of more than 10% of all known living plants.
Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.
If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.
Do you have a source? I know there is an index[0] of the information on California birth certificates from 1905 to 1995 and technically, despite the privacy implications, birth records in California are considered "public record".
The trick is that you don't elect someone like Donald Trump. I just read on the BBC that the president of America threatened New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani.
People in the Netherlands trust their government because noone in the 500 years of history has ever gotten close to getting dictatorial power unless you count Napoleon and Hitler.
Despite the downvotes you are right that democracies mostly deliver what voters want. And if voters want silly things, they get silly things.
It's easy to fret at how dysfunctional and insane politics are. But after you talk to some actual voters (and look at opinion polls), instead you marvel at how comparatively sane policies manage to be---despite voters.
It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House.
EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.
The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over.
What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up.
What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
>The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law.
This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.
Yup, the fight against American authoritarianism happened between 2015 and 2025. It's now over, authoritarianism won. All that's left now is for it to burn itself out as people bear the consequences they refused for a decade to entertain were possible.
We spent 10 years warning about him, pointing out his specific authoritarian tendencies, January 6 was predicted years before it happened, but when people said "he's not going to leave" they were met with mockery.
Who tf cares about databases when their plan was to just use their power to throw out entire states worth of votes? The entire J6 plot was that Pence was to reject the certification of the vote so that states could send "alternative electors" who voted for Trump, which would have disenfranchised millions of people at once. What is the law supposed to do against such anti-democratic "might makes right" depravity? At that point, the players have abandoned the game entirely, they're playing by different rules, your laws are meaningless.
Edit: to the dead comment below me:
> If you actually believed you were living under a dangerous, authoritarian government you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet. You'd be scared shitless trying to delete any trace of this connected to yourself.
Bro, I'm already labelled part of a terrorist organization by this government for my political beliefs. There's nothing I can say here or elsewhere that would change that, so at this point my fate is locked in because I'm not going to change what I believe.
There's not point in hiding anything, now is not a time for hiding, it's a time for speaking your mind. These people are authoritarians, but they are not all powerful. Yet. They have no consolidated power. Yet. They 100% want to, but that's not going to be possible as long as people continue to speak out. Read Timothy Snyder's, On Authoritarianism. He describes what you suggest is the rational response as "obeying in advance", which is the primary way in which the authoritarians seize power -- it's freely given by people who are too afraid to push back.
FWIW, I've believed we've had an authoritarian in power for quite a while now. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Bush have all tried and succeeded in expanding executive power. They've all engaged in extrajudicial killings overseas.
Nothing sets me off like seeing people think this behavior from Trump doesn't have shared roots across both parties.
Biden kept kids in cages. Obama bombed weddings. Yes, the current admin is accelerating hard but like, prior admins were accelerating.
People should really try to stop thinking about politics like it's a two party game where you have to pick a side. Figure out your principles, and start finding candidates who match those principles.
Yes, it has been accelerating a long time. But I worry a bit about toning it down too much by both-sides-ing it. The Dems were no angels, but they most assuredly did not ever try to overturn the counting of the vote for president. They did not relentlessly claim the whole game was rigged. They never openly mocked the citizens who did not vote for them, made policy specifically to spite red states, etc. Or created government web sites like https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace
By both-sides-ing this, it plays into hands of the people who support the current abhorrent behavior by claiming they're not doing anything different than their opponents have done. That is patently false, and we should not accept it.
Authoritarianism by definition is about controlling all the forms of power, not about expanding one.
Nor it has anything to do with what countries do around the world. You can be democratically elected, law abiding, not overreach and bomb weddings abroad, those are not related.
US has the same constitutional weakness of the countries that went authoritarian in the last decades: a presidential republic.
There's one thing that Russia, Belarus, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua made constitutionally simpler to allow authoritarianism to happen, they gave the country a president elected by the government.
Thus enabling:
- personality cult
- hard to remove individuals
- claiming popular mandate despite anything
- deadlocks
All those situations are breeding grounds for chaos.
Say what you want about slow Europe, but it's hard, very hard to pull this stuff here where most countries don't have popular elections for presidents.
In parliamentary republics those shifts are very difficult and are generally centred on party-ism, so identification between state and party.
This is the Indian and Hungarian playbook, as the constitutions don't allow individuals to power grab with ease, it's a very tougher game to succeed.
You don't win an election and start firing executive orders and stretching their limits while courts get to decide what the limits are.
This bothesideism is insufferable. You know that the GOP is far worse, stop pretending otherwise. The entire right has been hellbent on destroying democracy for the last decade.
>Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception?
No. I flat out reject the excuse you make on their behalf and consider you lesser than you would be had you not made it.
We're presumably discussing adults, not ten year olds or monkeys. They ought to f-ing act like it.
These people are almost all likely capable of the emotional restraint and logical thinking and sufficient abstract thought to think these things through and decide whether policy or action is good or bad regardless of if it's their guy doing it or their interest being served by it. The fact that they decline to do so is a failing of them. To excuse it only serves to reinforce or validate it and should be ridiculed.
> It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
The majority of Americans don't feel that way, but did about the last administration, and enough to do something about it. What's surprising is, given that revelation, a few people still actually think that.
I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.
Do you have any evidence that public concern over privacy changes depending on who is in the white house?
A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years.
I think it's selective attention plus recency bias.
This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it.
People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
Fwiw, I would be unhappy with the Biden and Obama administrations trying to do this as well. For me this has nothing to do with who's in the White House, it's an overreach plain and simple.
100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
>It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle.
>If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
India, which given its colonial-era ruling-elites who are maniacally obsessed with the Anglosphere, is today considered a "laboratory" for doing social experiments that'd be considered a outrage against human dignity in their own countries. This country was the first in line not only the biometric identification projects (Aadhar), and for demonetization (of 2016 with UPI). All of these were funded and pushed by USAID.
Both of these were implemented by running roughshod over constitution and regulation, by "roping-in" key regulatory people by giving them what they desire the most - access to the ruling elites in the US. Eg. Infosys' Nandan Nilekani was thrust to the top with his USAID funded projects.
Now the results of this "human corralling" experiments (note: a lot of what Orwell described came out of his experience in British-colonial India), is now coming to the West.
EU's recently rejected chat control looks like child's play compared to this. These are some Stasi methods that are going to destroy the US if implemented. Europe already went through creating dossier on citizens in the past, the next immediate step is always fascism. Nothing good comes out of fascism, as the history showed.
> It is a shame that your people suffered so. Just as in this situation, it was all avoidable. Why did Mandalore resist our expansion? The Empire improves every system it touches. Judge by any metric. Safety, prosperity, trade, opportunity, peace. Compare Imperial rule to what is happening now. Look outside. Is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death and chaos.
Every time I fly from SFO, there’s a face-tracking camera that takes your photo after you stand up close to it. There’s definitely some sort of data harvesting there and there’s no opt out that I know about.
I also have Clear, which was voluntary but certainly collected my biometric data years ago.
I also have Global Entry, which has a similar scanning tech to point 1.
Yeah, I think the crappy side of it at this point is that the biometric data they collect is never leveraged to help you as a citizen.
If I lose my passport while abroad, given that the government has my fingerprints etc, why can't I use those biometrics to reenter the country (and have a replacement passport reissued immediately)?
Officially, you are supposed to be able to opt out of the face recognition cameras at security but I think whether staff actually respect that is not consistent.
As a US citizen, you likely have your photo in a state or federal database somewhere from getting your ID or driver's license.
Depending on your job, background check history, or interactions with the police, your fingerprints might be in a database somewhere.
If you fly, your facial image/photograph/video is held by TSA and also as part of the REAL ID program.
So there are some biometrics that the government has of us, but clearly the article is describing a huge increase in not just the kind of biometric data collected, but also the kinds of people who would be required to give it up.
I guess I wasn't counting my photo ID as biometrics since there's no 3D map of my face to accompany it. I haven't been through an airport in over ten years either so hopefully my biometrics remain out of government databases for now.
The TSA uses facial recognition right now at most US airports. While they claim to not store the pictures, they've "accidentally" stored data many other times they promised not to so consider me skeptical.
I haven't been through an airport in over 10 years, but it was my understanding that you could opt out of the facial scanning stuff? I've asked my wife to do it each time she flies to California, just to see what happens, but she doesn't want to be a nuisance. :\
I don't have one, but even if I did that's only a 2D photo right? I guess when I think biometrics I think of the full on 3D depth maps, vocal signatures, iris recognition, etc. that a phone is doing to tell who's trying to unlock it. Not that I want them to have a plain photo of me either, but that ship has sailed unfortunately.
Hilariously, this is the second Sam that wants to collect everyones iris's for nefarious purposes
This WorldCoin image will forever live rent free in my head:
https://www.crikey.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2023/08...
"How does it work?"
"It's magic. All technology is."
Given that we don’t know why electromagnetism exists, this is basically true for many technologies.
Big difference between a hash for use as an attestation (proof of humanity) and a digital ID associated with your name
One thing that i would prefer in biometrics would be that the iris/fingerprints get treated as what they are publicly available and easily obtainable data.
At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it .
Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not if) it is finallly shoved through.It wont take long to foist it on the rest of the planet (see the recent visa requirements viz social media and insane bond requirements demanded of some countries like Mali citizens being asked for $15K per visa application).
It'll be treated just as stupidly as Social Security numbers, and soon we'll have biometric data breaches. >sigh<
Aside: Social Security numbers should be public now, too. That ship sailed a long time ago and it should be recognized.
Hey now, at least I'm able to change my social security number and passwords.
Good luck changing eyes.
Why should they be publicly available and easily obtainable?
The problem with these types of technologies is that you will be at the mercy of whoever uses them. It's like chat control, censorship, gun laws, etc. You can't control how they will be leveraged.
I lived in California for some time a few years ago, and it was a mess, so I understand people being okay with this type of stuff if it will make them more secure, but it's a very risky slippery slope.
The other thing is that with all the data Google has, they can probably uncover everything they need just by paying for Google Ads data :/
You can submit a public comment on the proposal to DHS at the link below:
https://www.regulations.gov/document/USCIS-2025-0205-0002/co...
I suspect this government isn’t receptive to commentary from anyone other than only one person. While I’d never discourage anyone from advocating their beliefs this feels like at best a waste of energy. They are going to do it because they decided to do it - the solicitation of comments is performative and required. The only way to stop it is via the courts and by voting next November.
There's even precedent for the current president's agencies compiling some pretty sketchy "comments" in the past due to not doing basic sanity checks on pretty obvious fake comments that happened to support their agenda, like when supposedly seeking input from the public about repealing net neutrality[1]. There were so many duplicates that only thirty 30 unique comments made up 57% of the overall total, and the second most common "name" among the authors was literally "The Internet".
No one in the current administration cares about what random members of the public think about their policies, and that's by design. Even the government positions that are intended to be permanent across administrations aren't a safe bet at this point with was things have been going
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...
Did you know that the State of California has a DNA sample from every person born in the state since 1983? It's required by law for the hospital to collect it and give it to the state.
This is a particularly incendiary way of putting this information out there.
What is collected and stored is a small blood-spot sample from a heel prick on a newborn. This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
This isn't a full DNA genome sequence or even any data at all, just the blood-spot specimen.
Law enforcement does not have automatic access to this sample, but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants. There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information or how often it's given to law enforcement, but there's been proposed legislation to make this more transparent.
The blood sample isn’t a DNA sample right up until the point they decide to sequence it. This is the same legal doctrine allowing the government to systematically collect all of your personal data without violating your privacy as long they don’t look at what they collect without a warrant.
The government has granted themselves an option on your personal data that can’t be revoked.
They can arrest you (with a warrant) and take your DNA whenever they want so I don't see what your point is.
No, they are correct, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They have a DNA sample of everyone. Those samples haven't been sequenced. As you've pointed out, they are sequenced when the state needs them to be.
It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
> This is a particularly incendiary way of putting this information out there.
Was it inaccurate?
It's about as accurate a Buzzfeed headline, but I guess that's par for the course on the internet these days.
It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.
Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.
So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.
> this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities
Why does the state have to collect and keep the sample for that to happen? Why can't it be the private property of the parents, provided to whatever private testing labs are used to do the tests?
That seems like a fair criticism. I don't know enough to quantify the benefit of retaining these samples, but I do know that the reason for keeping samples primarily relates to quality control, research, and development of tests.
There is a process for people to have the sample destroyed, I also have no idea how easy or how often that is used.
the implication was misleading, yes. the implication being that California has database of its citizens' genetic data. when the reality is that CA has a _physical sample_ of blood.
It's very inaccurate.
OP made it sound like Cali was genome sequencing everyone born in the state and then storing that.
What's really going on is they're doing routine blood tests.
So yeah, pretty inaccurate.
Blood isn't stored after routine blood tests?
it was misinformation, the DNA in such a sample is not only miniscule and unstandardized, but also not treated for longterm archival specimen retention.
the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.
It is as accurate as any of the incendiary Pravda propaganda pieces[1] about how the capitalist swine lived. Other posters have helpfully pointed out the specifics of why your particular spin on it is not entirely honest.
---
[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
I just got back from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and was marveling at the size of a small footprint facility that stores samples of more than 10% of all known living plants.
Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.
If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.
Do you have a source? I know there is an index[0] of the information on California birth certificates from 1905 to 1995 and technically, despite the privacy implications, birth records in California are considered "public record".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Birth_Index
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/default....
What about people born outside of a hospital?
... The concept of DNA sample collection existed in 1983?
They actually started in 1966 (it's a blood spot collection) but they only started keeping it in 1983.
And what information did they hope to glean back then?
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/tag/newborn-blood-spot-pr...
[flagged]
The trick is that you don't elect someone like Donald Trump. I just read on the BBC that the president of America threatened New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani.
People in the Netherlands trust their government because noone in the 500 years of history has ever gotten close to getting dictatorial power unless you count Napoleon and Hitler.
Why does Belgium exist? Is it because the Flemish revolted against Dutch rule?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Revolution
Despite the downvotes you are right that democracies mostly deliver what voters want. And if voters want silly things, they get silly things.
It's easy to fret at how dysfunctional and insane politics are. But after you talk to some actual voters (and look at opinion polls), instead you marvel at how comparatively sane policies manage to be---despite voters.
I think it's an interesting visual to compare the Stasi's rows of scent jars to data centers filled with banks of flash memory storing biometric data.
It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House.
EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.
Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception? It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.
The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over.
What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up.
What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
>The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law.
This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.
Yup, the fight against American authoritarianism happened between 2015 and 2025. It's now over, authoritarianism won. All that's left now is for it to burn itself out as people bear the consequences they refused for a decade to entertain were possible.
We spent 10 years warning about him, pointing out his specific authoritarian tendencies, January 6 was predicted years before it happened, but when people said "he's not going to leave" they were met with mockery.
Who tf cares about databases when their plan was to just use their power to throw out entire states worth of votes? The entire J6 plot was that Pence was to reject the certification of the vote so that states could send "alternative electors" who voted for Trump, which would have disenfranchised millions of people at once. What is the law supposed to do against such anti-democratic "might makes right" depravity? At that point, the players have abandoned the game entirely, they're playing by different rules, your laws are meaningless.
Edit: to the dead comment below me:
> If you actually believed you were living under a dangerous, authoritarian government you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet. You'd be scared shitless trying to delete any trace of this connected to yourself.
Bro, I'm already labelled part of a terrorist organization by this government for my political beliefs. There's nothing I can say here or elsewhere that would change that, so at this point my fate is locked in because I'm not going to change what I believe.
There's not point in hiding anything, now is not a time for hiding, it's a time for speaking your mind. These people are authoritarians, but they are not all powerful. Yet. They have no consolidated power. Yet. They 100% want to, but that's not going to be possible as long as people continue to speak out. Read Timothy Snyder's, On Authoritarianism. He describes what you suggest is the rational response as "obeying in advance", which is the primary way in which the authoritarians seize power -- it's freely given by people who are too afraid to push back.
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At this point, at least a third of the country always thinks an authoritarian is in power.
FWIW, I've believed we've had an authoritarian in power for quite a while now. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Bush have all tried and succeeded in expanding executive power. They've all engaged in extrajudicial killings overseas.
Nothing sets me off like seeing people think this behavior from Trump doesn't have shared roots across both parties.
Biden kept kids in cages. Obama bombed weddings. Yes, the current admin is accelerating hard but like, prior admins were accelerating.
People should really try to stop thinking about politics like it's a two party game where you have to pick a side. Figure out your principles, and start finding candidates who match those principles.
Yes, it has been accelerating a long time. But I worry a bit about toning it down too much by both-sides-ing it. The Dems were no angels, but they most assuredly did not ever try to overturn the counting of the vote for president. They did not relentlessly claim the whole game was rigged. They never openly mocked the citizens who did not vote for them, made policy specifically to spite red states, etc. Or created government web sites like https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace
By both-sides-ing this, it plays into hands of the people who support the current abhorrent behavior by claiming they're not doing anything different than their opponents have done. That is patently false, and we should not accept it.
>FWIW, I've believed we've had an authoritarian in power for quite a while now.
Relevant:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/d85bf67967cdc2fd0616343ed6c1004...
Authoritarianism by definition is about controlling all the forms of power, not about expanding one.
Nor it has anything to do with what countries do around the world. You can be democratically elected, law abiding, not overreach and bomb weddings abroad, those are not related.
US has the same constitutional weakness of the countries that went authoritarian in the last decades: a presidential republic.
There's one thing that Russia, Belarus, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua made constitutionally simpler to allow authoritarianism to happen, they gave the country a president elected by the government.
Thus enabling: - personality cult - hard to remove individuals - claiming popular mandate despite anything - deadlocks
All those situations are breeding grounds for chaos.
Say what you want about slow Europe, but it's hard, very hard to pull this stuff here where most countries don't have popular elections for presidents.
In parliamentary republics those shifts are very difficult and are generally centred on party-ism, so identification between state and party.
This is the Indian and Hungarian playbook, as the constitutions don't allow individuals to power grab with ease, it's a very tougher game to succeed.
You don't win an election and start firing executive orders and stretching their limits while courts get to decide what the limits are.
This bothesideism is insufferable. You know that the GOP is far worse, stop pretending otherwise. The entire right has been hellbent on destroying democracy for the last decade.
>Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception?
No. I flat out reject the excuse you make on their behalf and consider you lesser than you would be had you not made it.
We're presumably discussing adults, not ten year olds or monkeys. They ought to f-ing act like it.
These people are almost all likely capable of the emotional restraint and logical thinking and sufficient abstract thought to think these things through and decide whether policy or action is good or bad regardless of if it's their guy doing it or their interest being served by it. The fact that they decline to do so is a failing of them. To excuse it only serves to reinforce or validate it and should be ridiculed.
They should bear in mind that someone they consider an authoritarian will inevitably be elected.
What makes this objectionable is that it's an authoritarian thing to do.
> It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
The majority of Americans don't feel that way, but did about the last administration, and enough to do something about it. What's surprising is, given that revelation, a few people still actually think that.
I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.
Do you have any evidence that public concern over privacy changes depending on who is in the white house?
A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years.
Such trend data would be useful.
I don't think it is.
I think it's selective attention plus recency bias.
This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it.
People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
Fwiw, I would be unhappy with the Biden and Obama administrations trying to do this as well. For me this has nothing to do with who's in the White House, it's an overreach plain and simple.
100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
>It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle.
>If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
Biden cancelled this during his administration
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This shows how complex the balance is between security and privacy, every new technology seems to push that line a bit further.
Every grocery store I have been to in the US is recording people at the checkout.
Does anyone know about PRISM?
Nope. This all started with Trump.
Unsurprising.
India, which given its colonial-era ruling-elites who are maniacally obsessed with the Anglosphere, is today considered a "laboratory" for doing social experiments that'd be considered a outrage against human dignity in their own countries. This country was the first in line not only the biometric identification projects (Aadhar), and for demonetization (of 2016 with UPI). All of these were funded and pushed by USAID.
Both of these were implemented by running roughshod over constitution and regulation, by "roping-in" key regulatory people by giving them what they desire the most - access to the ruling elites in the US. Eg. Infosys' Nandan Nilekani was thrust to the top with his USAID funded projects.
Now the results of this "human corralling" experiments (note: a lot of what Orwell described came out of his experience in British-colonial India), is now coming to the West.
EU's recently rejected chat control looks like child's play compared to this. These are some Stasi methods that are going to destroy the US if implemented. Europe already went through creating dossier on citizens in the past, the next immediate step is always fascism. Nothing good comes out of fascism, as the history showed.
To be honest, one could argue that places like Singapore turned on amazingly well by most metrics.
Isn’t that a quote from The Mandalorian?
> It is a shame that your people suffered so. Just as in this situation, it was all avoidable. Why did Mandalore resist our expansion? The Empire improves every system it touches. Judge by any metric. Safety, prosperity, trade, opportunity, peace. Compare Imperial rule to what is happening now. Look outside. Is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death and chaos.
>the next immediate step is always fascism.
Chronologicaly the Stasi was built after fascism ended. It operated in East Germany, a communist state.
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Yes, they're definitely doing this to help you, the hoi polloi whose data is being harvested.
Santa Claus is coming tonight.
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And just like that jimbo throws away his right to privacy.
In other news, water is wet.
The party of liberty and small government.
How is this news, the usgov has been taking my biometrics for the past 5 years
Have they? They haven't taken mine.
Every time I fly from SFO, there’s a face-tracking camera that takes your photo after you stand up close to it. There’s definitely some sort of data harvesting there and there’s no opt out that I know about.
I also have Clear, which was voluntary but certainly collected my biometric data years ago.
I also have Global Entry, which has a similar scanning tech to point 1.
Yeah, I think the crappy side of it at this point is that the biometric data they collect is never leveraged to help you as a citizen.
If I lose my passport while abroad, given that the government has my fingerprints etc, why can't I use those biometrics to reenter the country (and have a replacement passport reissued immediately)?
Officially, you are supposed to be able to opt out of the face recognition cameras at security but I think whether staff actually respect that is not consistent.
The camera at SJC says it deletes the scan immediately after querying the database.
That makes opt out (which the sign says is allowed) kinda pointless, unless the opt out also deletes the existing database entries.
Tl;dr, I don’t bother opting out.
As a US citizen, you likely have your photo in a state or federal database somewhere from getting your ID or driver's license.
Depending on your job, background check history, or interactions with the police, your fingerprints might be in a database somewhere.
If you fly, your facial image/photograph/video is held by TSA and also as part of the REAL ID program.
So there are some biometrics that the government has of us, but clearly the article is describing a huge increase in not just the kind of biometric data collected, but also the kinds of people who would be required to give it up.
I guess I wasn't counting my photo ID as biometrics since there's no 3D map of my face to accompany it. I haven't been through an airport in over ten years either so hopefully my biometrics remain out of government databases for now.
I've gotten scanned at the airport on entry and for my greencard h1b/greencard applications, I had to go get scanned at a biometrics center.
https://www.uscis.gov/forms/filing-guidance/preparing-for-yo...
Yes immigrants but not citizens.
And is now required for Americans traveling to the EU now anyway.
The TSA uses facial recognition right now at most US airports. While they claim to not store the pictures, they've "accidentally" stored data many other times they promised not to so consider me skeptical.
I haven't been through an airport in over 10 years, but it was my understanding that you could opt out of the facial scanning stuff? I've asked my wife to do it each time she flies to California, just to see what happens, but she doesn't want to be a nuisance. :\
> They haven't taken mine
If you let have a passport, State has your face.
I don't have one, but even if I did that's only a 2D photo right? I guess when I think biometrics I think of the full on 3D depth maps, vocal signatures, iris recognition, etc. that a phone is doing to tell who's trying to unlock it. Not that I want them to have a plain photo of me either, but that ship has sailed unfortunately.