The US is turning into a mass techno-surveillance state
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
It's been one for at least the last twenty years.
I think you refer to China, or maybe Japan or Singapore. Not every country in Asia has advanced surveillance. The UK, Canada, and America have advanced the same technology but use it in other ways, which is why American police can’t make the subways or roads safe like the Japanese have, but monitor your social media posts and emails for signs of terrorism and political dissent.
Japanese businesses often refuse foreigners outright, or, like famed cheap-goods retailer Don Quijote, have notices posted indicating they can demand you cough up your passport at any time, so have it ready before entering.
At least the customs agents were friendly, in that Japanese way, even as they asked me probing questions like why I flew in from Helsinki on Finnair instead of over the Pacific on an American airline. Though they seemed content with my answer ("because it was cheaper").
Every country has separate immigration lines for citizens and foreigners. Immigration officials have access to national databases but not those of other countries. Like the USA and most other countries Japan has biometric data associated with passports, but only has direct access to match that for Japanese passports. Perhaps you have never experienced the “dystopian” foreigner entry process in the USA or your own country.
Don Quijote has no such signs and does not demand your passport to enter or shop. If you want to get the VAT refunded — a privilege many countries extend to foreign tourists — you can do that by showing you have a tourist visa. Essentially duty-free shopping extended out of the airport. The USA does not have a national VAT so no American store needs a passport to refund taxes.
Japanese businesses do sometimes exclude foreigners, mainly because they don’t have multilingual staff, but also because they want to reserve some places for Japanese and not have tourists overrun every locals restaurant and bar.
Customs and immigration officials everywhere ask probing questions to catch smugglers and criminals. Annoying perhaps but hardly a Japanese thing. Part of the job description. You have no right to enter a foreign country, the immigration officers get to determine that.
The one I visited had just such a sign posted at the entrance.
> Customs and immigration officials everywhere ask probing questions to catch smugglers and criminals.
I've never been asked such questions by customs in Australia, Canada, France, or the UK. The only ones who gave me a harder time were the American customs officials, as I was re-entering my own fucking country from Canada. They couldn't even be bothered to smile or act polite.
For good or ill, Japanese trust of foreigners is much lower than in the Western world. Maybe they loosened up a bit since 2011 but they're tightening back up now what with idiot streamers gaijin-smashing into construction sites and the like. Racism and open discrimination against people who even look foreign is higher than what a Canadian or Brit would be used to. Given that the Japanese are more interested in preserving their culture against foreign influence than the Brits or Canadians, it makes sense, yes. But it still felt dystopian at the point of entry. Once I'd cleared that hurdle, though, I had a great time in Japan and most of the people I met were pretty laid back.
Edit: Japan (like many other countries) requires everyone to carry official ID at all times. Japanese have government ID cards. For foreigners that means your passport. Americans find that requirement off-putting because we don’t (yet) have to “show our papers” to police on demand.
I travel a lot. Only had immigration or customs ask anything in the USA (my native country), Canada (had my young son with me so understandable), UK multiple times. Never anywhere in Asia, and I live in SE Asia. It mainly comes down to appearance and attitude and the mood of the officer at the moment, hard to extrapolate to a national or ethnic tendency from a few anecdotes.
I’ve never had Thai immigration hassle me but I’ve seen them take young people who look rough aside, maybe to check for drugs, probably to make sure they had sufficient funds and an onward/return ticket. Asian cultures tend to more formality and higher expectations of appearance in public, so foreigners may call negative attention to themselves with their clothes or tattoos, and their entitled attitude.
Japan may feel closed off and xenophobic. On the other hand they don’t have foreigners marginalized into ghettos or rounded up by ICE. The USA and Canada have no ethnic identity, whereas Japan and other Asian countries do. Unfamiliar perhaps but I don’t interpret that as racist or hostile.
In many places you do.
https://lawshun.com/article/can-law-enforcement-require-you-...
On top of that, with the current ICE activity, what happens if they don't like your face and you don't show ID?
Japan faces the same problems with too many tourists, and too many of those who don’t respect the culture and people. I see that every day in Bangkok too. The difference is the Japanese and the Thais can identify foreigners on sight, whereas in San Francisco locals places had to use other techniques to discriminate.
So exactly like the US then? They take your fingerprints and photo and ask probing questions about your visit which the officer doesn't actually care about but are designed to rattle you and trip you up.
Of course, this was 2011, which was forever ago in national-security time.
No, they cannot. They are required to ask for it for duty-free purchases, though.
I'll assume you aren't familiar with a US visa consular appointment.
For example i really believe that traffic enforcement cameras are state oppression. They create more human suffering then they prevent. it's just that people are used to it so they don't protest.
What, like actually enforcing laws? I live in the US and I would love a way to rein in traffic. Enforcing traffic laws is literally the best thing the police do.
US roads are built to encourage speeding.
Taking the traffic enforcement then - we’re talking about a dangerous piece of machinery that you’re allowed to operate in a public place under certain conditions in order to reduce the risk to others. One of those conditions is speed. It seems blindingly obvious to me that if a society agrees those conditions it should also enforce them?
As a general rule these things start with sincere intentions but often devolve into cynical exploitation. So if you weigh the benefits of speed cameras against the suffering they cause i think you would find they aren't a good thing.
Getting to your original question i think many people don't trust that their face and fingerprint scans will be used in a way that would be in the publics interest. Its more likely that the authorities would find a way to use that data against you.
I'm really not sure where and how you draw the line but i do think we should err on the side of less surveillance. That's the predominant view on hn.
Rather than rampant surveillance I would support confiscating the car and cancelling the license of reckless drivers on the second offense, and DUIs on the first offense.
Only in the doge side of HN
> I'm honestly not sure what the balance is, but there is a point where one bad accident is worth less then many speeding tickets.
No amount of speeding tickets is worth one kid killed by a drunk driver.
> Only in the doge side of HN
That's hardly true. I'm pretty far from the doge end of the spectrum, but I want as little surveillance as possible (ideally: only via court order).
You need only read about what impact a simple census question about religious affiliation had in the 1930s/40s to realize that information about yourself can very quickly be used for very dark purposes.
We've already seen stories about red states using data from social media and phone apps to target women who may have gotten abortions.
I can think of plenty of not so great ways red light camera data can be (and probably already is being) used for things completely outside the scope of merely automating speeding and red light crossing tickets.
>No amount of speeding tickets is worth one kid killed by a drunk driver.
In an idealised plane of existence i agree with you, but real life is about finding the right balance.
This has been widely documented for red light cameras. Red light cameras are politically much easier because approximately nobody thinks blatantly running red light is ever acceptable (vs. speed limits which have a wide range of debate on what the correct number should be).
So, towns install red light cameras. And initially, it's good! Then when the town gets used to the revenue stream, they want more money. How to get more? They shorten the yellow light more and more and more so they can artificially increase the number of people "running the red light". What started as a good plan to punish people who blatantly run the light, becomes a gotcha trick programmed to maximize revenue at the cost of safety (rear end accidents increase substantially after people become trained to panic brake at yellow lights due to the excessively short time).
I don't understand how people can come to any conclusion other than blaming the following driver for not maintaining a safe distance. It's generally impossible to predict when the driver in front may have to perform an emergency stop (e.g. kid running into the road) and you have to leave enough room when following so that you don't crash into them if they need to stop. Surely this is just a basic driving skill?
Didn't this actually occur at the start of the year?
Ubiquitous smartphones have racheted this up to a level before unimaginable.
Imagine saying in 1990 that in 2025 everyone will be carrying a locator device which tracks their whereabouts 24/7 and who they associate with and message with.
Do they not remember Snowden?
Although the level of accessing "social media" posts, and internal government docs, for use in persecution of an individual is rising to new levels with The Cheato administration.
What are good ways to irreparably disable an ALPR or general-purpose surveillance camera without getting caught?
https://www.jalopnik.com/1866994/lidar-permanently-damage-ph...
The goals of all these nations working together come directely from the World Economic Forum. Klaus Shwab-ass has said the governments will be stakeholders in the giant tech companies. The tech companies have peoples data that governments want but dont have "user-friendly" welcome into peoples data as the deceptive tech companies do. Thats why you've seen Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Trump together in photos recentely planning the technocracy transition. Trump also making plans with Palantir which already targets civilians in Gaza for air strikes.
So, what "they" want is total U.S. surveillance on all citizens not just foreigners. Drones will fly and identify "enemies of the nation" based on the U.S. governments twisted interpretations of whats right or wrong. They want to completely control and enslave you to an AI false god that will determine what you can buy, when you can go outside, where you can or cant go, what you can or cant do. A digital slave system. An outside prison but a "Smart City" in their words.
It's a group of people with relatively many narcissistic and sociopathic people. They would rather eat each other alive than deeply cooperate.
There is no coherent "they" that would act to achieve some mid/long term goal together.
There is more to say about what parent wrote, but I wanted to add this aspect because I feel like it often get overlooked.
They don’t need to call a meeting—they already know what’s good for them.
Now, these apply to both the government and companies, but slowly more and more carveouts are created to allow governmental entities to violate your privacy.
For example, when I lived in Belgium, there was a debate around installing ALPR cameras on the E314 (major freeway).
How long was the data stored? Who has access to it? Do you need a warrant? (And then later on it was discovered that data wasn't really purged...)
This is completely different to ALPR cameras in the USA. Here a private company can start to drive around with ALPR cameras mounted on a car, and start to build a database. Flock has cameras on a LOT of intersections and HOAs.
And Flock sells this service to law enforcement, who don't need a warrant to search this database (unlike them setting up a camera or putting a tracker on someone's vehicle).