Ice and Cbp Agents Are Scanning Faces on the Street to Verify Citizenship
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ICE and CBP agents are using facial recognition technology to scan people's faces on the street to verify citizenship, sparking concerns about privacy, racial profiling, and the misuse of technology.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-IH7EVrBbQ
Their defacto scan everyone isn't to determine citizenship, it is to collect the data in the first place. They want to get as much data into their system as possible.
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/biometrics/face/neof...
Instead, the situation we have now is that many bureaucracies deliberately avoid making any citizenship or legal residency distinction on official documents because the polticians who determine the rules for those bureaucracies think immigration enforcement is immoral and want to make it easier for illegal immigrants to access American bureaucracies and harder for other bureaucracies controlled by less immigration-friendly polticians to detect illegal immigrants.
As for the rest of your post, I don't really know what you're babbling about has to do with what I wrote.
We really should have one, federally issued ID system, that works uniformally everywhere in the country for demonstrating citizenship and legal permanent residency, and that no other category of person can be able to legitimately obtain.
REAL ID or certain alternative federal ID is required to enter federal buildings and domestic flights. The only immigrants who are issued federal ID that is usable in place of real ID are permanent residents. Ergo, your plan would have states effectively ban legally-present non-citizens who are not permanent residents from federal buildings and domestic flights. This is a bad idea; and, absent a specific federal mandate, probably unconstitutional for states to do.
States could, as some do, issue restricted term REAL IDs to aliens who are not permanent residents, but REAL ID isn’t intended as proof-of-status but an identity document, so while that's doable, it doesn't seem to be particularly necessary.
(Yes, foreign passports are also permissible “federal ID” in place of REAL ID, but there are legally present aliens who may not have passports—particularly refugees—and who are also not issued federal ID by the US government because, except for permanent resident aliens, the US has generally declined to have national ID and given ID functions to the state; REAL ID nationalized standards for some uses instead of nationalizing the ID itself.)
However, they've not gone down this path because they are (rightfully) concerned that there would be an instantaneous and severe backlash that could lead to those cameras being banned entirely, which would cripple traffic control.
You do not in other states, like Virginia, which has signs informing you that they have planes that issue tickets (???)
And you do have the right to contest the ticket in court, before a judge.
Unless you have the free time, and some evidence that doesn't involve the fringe around the courtroom's flag, you're probably better off just paying the ticket.
Otherwise there is no difference between a kidnapper and ICE agent.
It’s not an “ok for me if it’s ok for you” situation.
Law is supposed to strive for justice, war is as lawless as it can get away with.
ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement.
Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
National guard has duties that go way beyond warfare...
No, I'm not.
* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
This is from David Frum, a conservative himself:
> Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9077312-maybe-you-do-not-ca...
While pithy, public intellectual/academic conservatives like David Frum and Tom Nichols would disagree, and say the rule of law should apply equally to everyone.
Frum (IIRC, though it may have been Applebaum) wrote articles years ago that the direction of the GOP was going was similar to that of Hungary: using public office to enrich family and friends and not prosecute the same when they broke the law. There have been numerous conservatives aghast at what the GOP was becoming / has now become, and were ringing the alarm for years.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/hu...
Just look at the recent brouhaha about Ontario's televsion ad using Reagan's words against tariffs and the reaction it caused.
https://www.realtimefascism.com/ice-sight
EDIT: Legally, you have no right to privacy in public, if your photo is captured in public (US centric), broadly speaking. You have the right to record law enforcement officers exercising their official duties in public.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/yes-you-have-right-fil...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/federal-judge-upholds-...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/fourth-circuit-individ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/victory-another-court-...
https://owasp.org/www-community/Threat_Modeling_Process
Can you go into any detail on what technologies you used? Is there enough differentiating data in their attire to actually match agents? None of them are showing their faces so I wonder how many false positives would occur
I'm using a YOLO-WORLD-XL object detection model. Lets me detect objects using text. This is the initial filter that scans for agents - once those are detected and outlined with bounding boxes the entire image and each cropped bounding box are then sent to chatgpt to confirm if the image looks legit. Once image passes those checks - I create image embeddings of each agent using CLIP and those are stored in a vector DB, and each agent is then compared to the DB and matched.
The matching system isn't perfect - but I think good enough to get the point across and can be easily tuned with more data! Happy to take suggestions here - I just spun this up over the weekend
1. https://www.amazon.com/Custom-Personalized-Print-Bandana-Reu...
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202509/ice-awards-clearview-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
The Soft Cage - Surveillance in America: From Slavery to the War on Terror, Christian Parenti, 2003
https://archive.org/details/softcagesurveill0000pare
Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.
In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
New norms go both ways.
Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.
But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?
[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
[1] https://www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie
I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.
There have been some updated styles for CNN based models, but never tried them, the originals did work back in the day
The Hannity and Infowars fans will be written off as crazy when no longer useful.
Done hide. Overwhelm.
[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/hyperface/
As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.
(Not scanning faces, but continuously monitoring yourself to prove innocence. Depressing.)
I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.
While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.
They'd just tell you they are only going after pedo-terrorists.
What are we going to do? Call them liars? They don't care.
Without it I have to look at any reporting as unduly biased and likely from an activist lens.
I have a healthy distrust of both the govt and journalists.
This Vox article and the podcast with the same name does a good job of explaining how it is now effectively impossible to hold ICE accountable to the law: https://www.vox.com/politics/464962/supreme-court-ice-no-law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...
It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.
While ICE is being massively scaled up with the intent that you describe, its not unique in kind or even the worst by degree of the agencies involved in terms of either historic or current lawlessness. It's just the one with the public mission most in line with the propaganda cover chosen for Trump's totalitarian efforts.
The dehumanizing language is absolutely disgusting and it's use is an important milestone towards genocide.
Years ago special needs was a fairly safe term, yet now "speshul" definitely has different tone. I'm sure you know if many other examples (I can think of heaps). I predict that "delayed" will become derogatory.
I think that banning words is literally dumb. I am bit older and went through the Politically Correct putsh. Disclaimer: I'm a lefty.
In that case it's Bow Mar, a small town in Colorado, relying on flock cameras to issue tickets for petty theft.
We as a society just aren't capable of using these toys right.
The facist American government is even sending their dissident citizens to detention camps in Africa .
Good luck to Americans that cannot go somewhere else.
They don't give a **.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-rule-of-law-i...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/family-guy-skin-color-chart
It's like that old Groucho joke: Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin' eyes?
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/justice-brett-kavanaugh-a...
Bovino says they do profile people on how they look:
> “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/29/feds-march-into-...
> The number of Irish citizens deported from the United States has risen by more than 50% so far in 2025 compared to the previous year, figures released to BBC News NI show.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o
"What a person knowingly exposes to the public [...] is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." - Justice Potter in 'Katz v. United States'
But they aren't just taking a photo from across the street. They are also:
1. "briefly" detaining you to make you face a camera and take of hats etc for the app to get a good enough shot.
2. arresting you if it doesn't correctly identify you
3. using protected characteristics to decide who needs to get scanned.
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