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Comment by newguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

What exactly do people expect to happen by identifying the capitol rioters?

Okay they get arrested, maybe charged with a crime. Others will get doxxed and most will lose their jobs. They'll become social outcasts.

Do you really want a bunch of very angry people to effectively be pushed into a corner, demonized by society and so on?

This will end up having very big unintended consequences.

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Yes. They tried to destroy the Capitol and capture elected officials. If you don't arrest them now then there will just be even more violent MAGA riots in the immediate future.

How long are we going to lock them up? How many people are we going to lock up?

My understanding was that there was 100k+ people in attendance at this rally and thousands of people were in the capitol building itself.

You’re not going to deter the die hards. You absolutely will deter the “normies” with mortgages and retirement accounts to lose (I’d say their families acceptance, but they don’t seem to care much about that).

No one is suggesting you arrest those who stayed outside. You arrest however many you can find who blew past doors/security or took stuff. Probably 500.

At the next Trump rally of 100k everyone will know not to break the law. It is pretty simple.

I think it's reasonable that people who were involved in actual violence or theft should face consequences.

When you say it's pretty simple, others are calling for everyone on the Capitol grounds to be arrested. Technically they were breaking the law by trespassing.

I've got an idea, you take people with unapproved ideologies or from communities that tend to have these people and put them in reeducation facilities. Because this is all expensive to do, they will need to work as well.

Sarcasm aside, we are moving quickly to a straight up authoritarian apparatus of state sanctioned discourse enforced by a handful of corporations. This will be used against _anything_ that challenges those in power or goes against the approved narrative. For those cheering this on, realize this will applied to you in one form or another with no recourse. Here are a few scenarios off the top of my head: being a pacifist or home schooling advocate, posting on social media something tacky like "Prominent figure X is a fat idiot", or personal medical decisions having a direct impact on your ability to: travel, access jobs, housing and financial systems.

You could say that about every criminal though.

In this situation we're talking about a bunch of conspiracy nut jobs compared to a cold-blooded criminal that premediates their violent crimes.

"But they're not like the other criminals!" Maybe let the courts decide that.

Or someone who smoked a little bit of weed.

They can be mad. Without employment or resources to express themselves it means nothing.

Yeah there are crazies that will be fine with that, but what they can do without the support of “normalish” people is limited.

The alternative is to allow the escalation to continue.

I've marched in support of BLM. Protest is necessary, and for it to be effective it generally has to make folks uncomfortable on some level and that may include a level of civil disobedience. It's not supposed to be all fun and sunshine, particularly if you are the adversary of those protesting.

I'm diametrically opposed to Trump and his supporters on a lot of issues, but I recognize that a functional society needs to accept their right to protest as well. They should be able to have their marches just like we have ours.

However, the stated goals and actions of many of those in last week's march and rioting are explicitly violent and seditious. Many of the protestors were heavily armed. They killed a policeman.

    Do you really want a bunch of very angry people to
    effectively be pushed into a corner, demonized by
    society and so on?

I understand what you're saying: by pushing individuals into a corner, we may make them more desperate and feed into the overall "persecution" complex that motivates their movement as a whole. I think that's true.

On the other side of things, if we do nothing we legitimize their extremist views? Those extremist views become the new normal, or at least most the goalposts for the range of views considered normal.

Admittedly, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation."

But this isn't about denying their views or their right to protest. It's about targeting specific criminal actions that we don't want my side, their side, or any side to do.

Not sure why your comment was at the bottom of the page; it seems like one of the more thoughtful responses.

I have to admit my gut feeling on governments using facial recognition at scale to round up its citizens feels like something you'd find under an authoritarian regime, reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643433

I think it's important to try to frame an opinion on tech like this from a well-informed viewpoint, striving to lend appropriate weight to the latest incidents while avoiding the temptation for tunnel vision to fixate on immediate goals to the exclusion of broader, long-term consequences.

I agree acts that crossed too far past the line of civil disobedience ought to be held to account.

I just hope our collective response doesn't erode the willingness of people of good conscience to take a stand when they see their institutions behave in a legitimately unsanctionable manner.

I think some of the same (100% valid and necessary) questions might have been raised in the past about identification cards, fingerprints, handwriting analysis, etc.

I think the bottom line is how the tech is employed.

Are we tracking ordinary citizens en masse, for some potential future use? Are we tracking folks just because they're dissenting/protesting? We would probably all agree those uses are bad. Very bad.

I'm not terribly worried about using them to identify specific criminal targets. Put another way, how absurd would it be for us to have perfectly clear video of people committing specific criminal acts, and not use the available technology to identify them?

On a related note, the (lack of) opsec displayed by the Capitol rioters is... really something. These people were happily mugging for the cameras, sans masks. I'm not sure if it was stupidity or entitlement. The easy and snarky answer would be "stupidity" but there were clearly intelligent folk among them or at least people that should know to cover their tracks better: lawyers, military and police officers.

I think there was a rather stunning sense of entitlement there: a lot of these folks honestly cannot believe they're being charged with crimes. As if they expected to be greeted as liberators!

God help us if and when they sharpen up their tactics. The sickening feeling in my stomach tells me that this was a hell of a practice run.

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