ICE Awards $25M Iris-Scanning Contract to Bi2 Technologies
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Yes, that appears to be the whole thing.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymout...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-log...
This administration has had mass corruption and grift, taking from taxpayers and handing it to friends and family of Trump
It's not an equivalence of any merit.
Polymarket is even running ragebait ads[1] about Trump's corruption, while his son (profiting from the corruption) sits on the board
The word you are looking for is "greed", and it is ripping apart the moral fabric of this country
.. before this devolves into simple polarity jab posts.. taxation-based Big Gov seems very eager to embrace and extend constant tracking of location via devices.. social attribution profiles are maybe less so, maybe?
hard to see the positives in the new social dynamics, from either base in the US, from this chair
Shareholders tend to not have morals as long as money keeps pumping into their bank accounts.
They are responsible for much of the sad state of affairs across the planet, now they even offer gold statuses back home, for little favours.
The entire notion of somehow deserving to be corrupt as well is an indication of not just being unethical but literally not understanding what ethics looks like.
We have to come to terms with the idea that half of America is neither intelligent nor good people.
Many people’s access to virtually all their information is mediated through this propaganda machine. It’s frankly incredible that there are even any stories of people deep within it eventually breaking out seeing as how well functioning it all is.
Is this a conspiracy theory? Sort of I guess, but it seems pretty obvious to me. And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet), and I hope I can be one of those to break out of it does happen.
There are propaganda machines directed at everyone.
> And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet)
It seems incredibly naive to believe that propaganda in this age isn't utilised by all "sides". My base assumption for any information, particularly from mainstream media, is that it's biased one way or the other.
that's how you know it's successful.
Ultimately voters run the US. It's our responsibility to do the research and make an informed decision. Propaganda has existed forever. You can't ban all propaganda, so it's hard for me to not still point the finger at the people who voted for this
> The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the government’s security review for cloud systems handling sensitive data, before deployment. It described no independent audit, congressional notification or outside review of how the system would be used.
I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There are going to be so many breaches to fix.
For anyone outside the US (including me), it's dismaying.
It's not like any of us thought the US was perfect (at least those of who like history, no country is and the US has more issues than many) but they just straight took the wheel and swerved it into a wall.
There isn't one. And the sooner we all come to terms with that, the better off we and posterity will be. The constitutional government of the United States failed long before January 20th, 2025. Chasing sunk costs on this scale as futile, even if the alternatives are terrifying.
In my opinion, the best, just, course forward is a Constitutional Convention that dissolves the United States Government and replaces it with nothing. Let the states and territories govern themselves as they choose, and work out needed compacts and agreements going forward.
Nay, we must reform and reclaim a just federal government. Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
Who days that doesn't happen now? Seems like wishful thinking.
Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them.
May the best governance win.
If we had a software building code that applied to digital infrastructure in general, the way building codes apply to buildings in general, and electrical codes apply to electrical installation in general, this wouldn't be an issue, because you'd need your shit together to make any software product. But nobody seems to mind companies making shit products and leaking all our data.
Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.
This is federal shock troops (masked and unidentified, at that) gearing up for mass scale human rights violations. They are already flying facial recognition drones at extremely low altitudes over sidewalks in downtown LA and other places.
Could you cite a source for this?
If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is.
If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about?
Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.
And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.
If instead of looking up your name in a name list, I look up your face in a face list, ain’t that searching?
I feel like what you’re ultimately asking hinges on when, legally, a photo turns into biometrics.
Searching you means taking an inventory of the items on your person. It does not mean looking at you. In some cases, imaging you can be a "search" even where there is no physical contact (for example: a millimeter-wave scanner), but a photograph in a public place has never qualified as a "search" in the USA.
I understand your feelings, but so far as I know things like gait recognition, facial recognition, or even an iris scan derived from an ordinary photograph have never qualified as a "search" under U.S. law. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this: it's quite difficult to prove something has _not_ happened.
I think the legal line is not when it "becomes biometrics" or becomes identification. The legal line is when you are revealing a private property about an individual (for example, their blood type, or the contents of their pockets). Nothing visible to the naked eye in public is considered private, so nothing that derives identity from that public information is a "search".
As a nice easy example... an officer smelling alchohol on the breath of a person in the course of a conversation is not a "search". An officer compelling that same person to breathe into a breathalyzer machine is. Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...
There's a different standard that could apply with just a small amount of tweaking.
Many people's homes happen to leak IR out of their poorly-insulated windows, walls, and roofs. Anyone (police included) can get an IR camera and determine facts about what's going on in such a house. However, police must obtain a search warrant before doing so... despite the fact that the design of such a house means that it broadcasts all that information indiscriminately while one goes about one's day and the twin facts that IR cameras aren't dreadfully expensive and are available to anyone with the funds to get one.
The Supreme Court case that determined this hinges in part on things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion". This logic could be tweaked to cover things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical detention". The core problem with searches has never been the inconvenience involved in the search... it has always been the fact that you're being searched. New tech that removes the physical imposition of a type of search does not solve this problem. A long while back [0] NYPD was deploying mobile microwave scanners that they used to perform indiscriminate under-clothes searches of people who were committing the "crime" of being in public going about their day. IIRC, they wrapped this in «We're just looking for weapons, and it's only a pilot program, anyway!» language, but that doesn't change the fact that they were performing "stop and frisk" searches at scale.
[0] And maybe they're still doing this... I've not paid much attention to NYC's law enforcement insanity in quite a while.
The standard is whether something expected to be private is revealed. What your eyes look like (even in detail) is not that. There isn't a point on some line where the photograph becoming higher-quality applies a different standard than a low-resolution photo would.
Many states (something like half) in the US don't require people to respond to police requests to identify themselves.
While the courts might end up claiming that being grabbed by several cops and having an iris scanner forced onto one's face is "not testimonial" and therefor not covered by existing laws that permit one to not have to identify oneself, I would argue that such an outcome is -heh- rules lawyering and intensely unjust. IMNSHO the justice system should actively avoid producing unjust outcomes.