ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program(prospect.org) |
ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program(prospect.org) |
Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?
Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?
Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?
Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.
US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?
1 - https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-d...
The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.
A DOJ with its ducks in a row would be charging this left and right.
Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-bill-abolish-ice-shut-do...
But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.
Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.
Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.
Source: I'm a naturalized citizen.
Naturalized citizens can be deported and their citizenship can be revoked in cases of violent crime or other immoral behavior. That information is provided when swearing in.
It's more accurate to say that US citizens who are law abiding and moral, or who are born in the US, can't be deported.
If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.
It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.
in fact it sounds uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens, like NKVD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka
And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.
I'm sure Trump has had plenty of input from Putin about all this. Even if he's not formally an "asset", it's more a case of shared goals.
Whatever functions we need can be rebuilt from scratch later. But this is a rebuild moment, not a refactor moment.
The infra we are building for our future dictator is awesome.
They were legal, every last one of them. They were under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). There was no "law and order" justification to object to their presence. Didn't stop the GOP from going after them. Trump and Vance viciously attacked them with the full support of the conservative media. The administration repealed their TPS protection, turning people who had done no wrong into fugitives.
This is about race. Always has been. When they run out of "illegals", they'll turn people into "illegals". When they run out of immigrants entirely, they'll overturn the 14th Amendment and start stripping citizenship from native-born Americans of the wrong color. They've already tried just that, and three motherfuckers on the Supreme Court voted to let them.
Let's add some levity to the situation, and here's the link: https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE?si=lGJ7_L0IN31WNMKE
You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.
This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.
I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.
You can say no.
Until that's true, the 2nd amendment is meaningless when USAF can buy JDAMs and F35s and I, an American citizen, cannot.
* Which US citizens have been abducted and by who? Which have been killed?
* Which US citizens found themselves in US detention centers (without lawful arrest) ?
* Which US citizens were placed in other countries without judicial review?
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.
The Serbians did that for two years straight, until their government resigned and called for new elections. Look at videos from a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jc29fk/breathtakin...
If a much poorer country with (for now!) much worse repression can do it, what's your excuse, Americans?
Politics isn't just the ballot box every couple of years. Politics is always and everywhere.
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.
We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.
Never underestimate how much most Americans will gladly shit on their freedoms if they're told it will hurt someone slightly different than them.
But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"
Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.
You can't really understand a hypocrite by taking their public utterances at face value.
As for swing voters, they really just wanted inflation to get under control. So they didn't even trade away their rights for DEI or migration control, just inflation. A bit disconcerting to see that people will so easily give away the very rights that people fought decades to have.
Did this actually happen though? Friends/family in e.g. Texas/California are unconvinced, and I don't think I ever saw any real data versus just scaremongering ("they're eating our cats and dogs").
On what basis are you deciding what is or isn't an issue? You think right wing media doesn't talk about DEI and trans people all day? It's like the only issue they have left to win "middle America" over on.
Who likes seeing ICE thugs round up non criminals on the basis of skin color and nationality alone? Not enough of the middle. I'm seeing more and more Trump voters saying they didn't vote for this. The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter not on partisans. How many of these voters have articulated the same regret when it comes his policies re DEI or trans rights?
Maybe you are projecting because it's easier to come up with an excuse based on alleged economic malaise?
Theis issue with conservatives isn't the policy you believe in, the issue is that you are just so unbelievably ignorant of how the world works, to where you see an issue like migrants coming in, and think that its such a big problem that the best course of action is giving a flamethrower to a convicted felon rapist and likely a pedo (all the things you supposedly firmly stand against), and trusting him to burn just the right parts down with authoritative force (something you are also supposedly firmly against)
Furthermore, if you bothered to actually care, you would have paid attention, Dems completely would agree with you that undocumented migrants were a problem - Biden had a border bill that was bipartisan, supported by border patrol, that would have allocated all the correct funding to reign in the asylum process, which would have correctly filtered the people that were coming here to work, versus those taking advantage of the system. And consequently, Trump told the Republicans to vote against that bill because it would hurt his chances of getting elected.
So for people like you, it was never about the migrants - you don't actually care. It was always about racism and sexism. At least there isn't any questions about it anymore.
This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.
All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicitly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.
I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.
If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
The details are complicated, and higher numbers seem to come from the fact that usually _encounters_ are counted, in the wild and at ports of entry, which includes millions of people who were turned around, many of whom might have tried and been encountered multiple times.
The source is extremely comprehensive and deep, way beyond what I wrote above.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigrat...
That being said, the HR bit that you also quoted from GP is a bad analogy. It should be clear that immigration is quite different than onboarding new hires, something a country literally built on immigration like the US is a testament to.
They will have the power to at very least lay off every person involved. But will they? Probably not (your point). Trump (illegally) shut down the DOE and USAID by simply firing everyone employed there.
How common is the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter? (Edit: I asked Gemini that question and it demurred). These would be the voters who don't really pay much attention until they get into the voting booth. I'm not sure, maybe that's up to 1/3 or maybe it's like 5%? I suppose it's possible that a chunk of the electorate just votes on feelz and that's pretty depressing.
Ya, I am a fan of the coast guard... and I think we need the FAA/TSA to keep the planes running on time. And FEMA might be laughed at in some quarters but a federal disaster response is something we should have ahead of hurricane season.