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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.

I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.

> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?

The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.

As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.

I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.

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> The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.

That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).

> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion

I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.

> I find it hard to keep these discussions separate.

...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.

The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).

In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.

It's borderline farcical.

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