At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it .
Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not if) it is finallly shoved through.It wont take long to foist it on the rest of the planet (see the recent visa requirements viz social media and insane bond requirements demanded of some countries like Mali citizens being asked for $15K per visa application).
I lived in California for some time a few years ago, and it was a mess, so I understand people being okay with this type of stuff if it will make them more secure, but it's a very risky slippery slope.
The other thing is that with all the data Google has, they can probably uncover everything they need just by paying for Google Ads data :/
EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.
https://www.regulations.gov/document/USCIS-2025-0205-0002/co...
India, which given its colonial-era ruling-elites who are maniacally obsessed with the Anglosphere, is today considered a "laboratory" for doing social experiments that'd be considered a outrage against human dignity in their own countries. This country was the first in line not only the biometric identification projects (Aadhar), and for demonetization (of 2016 with UPI). All of these were funded and pushed by USAID.
Both of these were implemented by running roughshod over constitution and regulation, by "roping-in" key regulatory people by giving them what they desire the most - access to the ruling elites in the US. Eg. Infosys' Nandan Nilekani was thrust to the top with his USAID funded projects.
Now the results of this "human corralling" experiments (note: a lot of what Orwell described came out of his experience in British-colonial India), is now coming to the West.
They can be used to uniquely identify you, but they're not secret. You literally leave fingerprints and DNA everywhere you go, and obtaining your biometrics is not as hard as guessing your password.
Biometrics should be used for identification, for authentication along with other means (passwords, PIN, device keys, etc), and never for authorization.
Biometrics aren't "publicly available" let alone "easily obtainable". They're easy to extract from you but this is why extraction and retention of this kind of data should be considered extremely invasive and sensitive. That wallet in your pocket may be "publicly available and easily obtainable" but that doesn't mean we should treat it as such - rather we should make sure it's actually illegal to do so without your consent: that's why theft is a crime.
To collect data just for police enforcement is horrifying and it will increase the control that goverment has in private affairs without proving anything of value to society.
The USA claims freedom to avoid taking care of their own, but it claims security to spy and control its own citizens.
https://www.crikey.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2023/08...
Chronologicaly the Stasi was built after fascism ended. It operated in East Germany, a communist state.
Fingerprints are used for investigating crimes. Giving them the access to this information before hand puts you as being investigated everytime they find a fingerprint at a crime scene.
The transmission chain that was later identified on CCTV was hand to escalator rail to hand, a 2+ km walk, and finally hand to latex glove.
My question would be how do we get there?
Aside: Social Security numbers should be public now, too. That ship sailed a long time ago and it should be recognized.
Imagine someone wanting to frame someone for a crime and using their publicly available fingerprint data to manufacture gloves that reproduce that fingerprint.
The point was not to make them publicly available but treat them as if they had already leaked and allowed anyone to frame anyone else.
Nadela, is that you ? /s
A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years.
Such trend data would be useful.
I think it's selective attention plus recency bias.
This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it.
People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
(On the plus side, I suppose, I think the story on storing DNA at the scale we're talking about is not fully complete. DNA does denature and it takes a reasonably good sample to get a full genome sequence, and fully sequencing and storing data for every person has other practical issues. The article itself only references using DNA results to "prove or disprove biological sex", which is much more trivial and while it's likely to come with its own problems and edge cases, is also much less information.)
What you are choosing, instead, is the management of the phenomenon you're trying to avoid by corporations—more or less emergent feudalism.
Consider the options: a corporation knows everything about you vs. no entity knows any information about you except for whether you're eligible for the service being provided, and that you exist. The former is the current state of affairs. The latter, I think, is a better state of affairs.
> It is a shame that your people suffered so. Just as in this situation, it was all avoidable. Why did Mandalore resist our expansion? The Empire improves every system it touches. Judge by any metric. Safety, prosperity, trade, opportunity, peace. Compare Imperial rule to what is happening now. Look outside. Is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death and chaos.
Luckily there was Gorbachev and in the people enough decency and civilisation left, so the system just folded
In the US, leak of SSN apparently can result in identity theft and so its public use can seem especially troubling, but other countries use different secrets and processes for identity.
Good luck changing eyes.
https://constella.ai/verifying-the-national-public-data-brea...
2. So people don't treat it as a "secure secret," because we've been down this road more than once before.
... arent as vital as other freedoms like travel, anonymity, speech and contract. I dont like this conflation because i see it as a nasty and harmful bias.
If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
What is collected and stored is a small blood-spot sample from a heel prick on a newborn. This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
This isn't a full DNA genome sequence or even any data at all, just the blood-spot specimen.
Law enforcement does not have automatic access to this sample, but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants. There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information or how often it's given to law enforcement, but there's been proposed legislation to make this more transparent.
Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.
If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.
People in the Netherlands trust their government because noone in the 500 years of history has ever gotten close to getting dictatorial power unless you count Napoleon and Hitler.
The escalation of the surveillance security state has been quick and vast.
Let's see. I've been fingerprinted, all 10 fingers, for, at least, 1) the US Army, 2) security clearance for a DoD job, multiple times, 3) a permit to ride a horse on SF Water Department property, and 4) Customs and Border Protection Global Entry, which also took an iris scan.
California DMV takes a thumbprint, but not all 10 fingers. They've been recording me at every transaction for decades.
So I'm on file.
I think of being IDd as a normal part of life, for any position of trust. Is this unusual?
Idk I’m just planning to stay clear of the US till we see if they recover from their bout of authoritarianism
"You could be refused entry to [...] if you:
[...]
- refuse to let an immigration officer take your photo, fingerprints or an iris scan"
a Gattaca-esq society is terrifying.
We can build privacy-preserving identity. It's a huge opportunity. Go work on it!
If you're in the Bay, there's a conference on it every year where the people building the tech and setting the standards are hashing out the ideas!
When the government comes knocking, they're not coming up with stuff from scratch—they're picking up the tools we left around ready to use.
the goal would be to stop using SSN(4) as a secret
Sure, in theory Accurint and TLO do KYC. In practice you can find tons of people on various crime forums offering those lookups for a few dollars a pop.
There's a discussion to be had about what the right amount is though.
No. I flat out reject the excuse you make on their behalf and consider you lesser than you would be had you not made it.
We're presumably discussing adults, not ten year olds or monkeys. They ought to f-ing act like it.
These people are almost all likely capable of the emotional restraint and logical thinking and sufficient abstract thought to think these things through and decide whether policy or action is good or bad regardless of if it's their guy doing it or their interest being served by it. The fact that they decline to do so is a failing of them. To excuse it only serves to reinforce or validate it and should be ridiculed.
Is this really about safety, or are we quietly building something we won’t be able to roll back?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-newborn-dna-privacy-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baby-dna-parental-consent-genet...
I also have Clear, which was voluntary but certainly collected my biometric data years ago.
I also have Global Entry, which has a similar scanning tech to point 1.
https://www.uscis.gov/forms/filing-guidance/preparing-for-yo...
Depending on your job, background check history, or interactions with the police, your fingerprints might be in a database somewhere.
If you fly, your facial image/photograph/video is held by TSA and also as part of the REAL ID program.
So there are some biometrics that the government has of us, but clearly the article is describing a huge increase in not just the kind of biometric data collected, but also the kinds of people who would be required to give it up.
So most people have a red iris. Problem solved. /s
If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.
DHS, through its component agency US Citizenship and Immigration Services, on Monday proposed a sweeping expansion of the agency's collection of biometric data. While ostensibly about verifying identities and preventing fraud in immigration benefit applications, the proposed rule goes much further than simply ensuring applicants are who they claim to be.
First off, the rule proposes expanding when DHS can collect biometric data from immigration benefit applicants, as "submission of biometrics is currently only mandatory for certain benefit requests and enforcement actions." DHS wants to change that, including by requiring practically everyone an immigrant is associated with to submit their biometric data.
"DHS proposes in this rule that any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, supporter, derivative, dependent, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with a benefit request or other request or collection of information, including U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents, and without regard to age, must submit biometrics unless DHS otherwise exempts the requirement," the rule proposal said.
DHS also wants to require the collection of biometric data from "any alien apprehended, arrested or encountered by DHS."
It's not explicitly stated in the rule proposal why US citizens associated with immigrants who are applying for benefits would have to have their biometric data collected. DHS didn't answer questions to that end, though the rule stated that US citizens would also be required to submit biometric data "when they submit a family-based visa petition."
In addition to expanded collection, the proposed rule also changes the definition of what DHS considers to be valid biometric data.
"Government agencies have grouped together identifying features and actions, such as fingerprints, photographs, and signatures under the broad term, biometrics," the proposal states. "DHS proposes to define the term 'biometrics' to mean 'measurable biological (anatomical, physiological or molecular structure) or behavioral characteristics of an individual,'" thus giving DHS broad leeway to begin collecting new types of biometric data as new technologies are developed.
The proposal mentions several new biometric technologies DHS wants the option to use, including ocular imagery, voice prints and DNA, all on the table per the new rule.
"The rule proposes to grant DHS express authority to require, request, or accept raw DNA or DNA test results," DHS said, including "to prove or disprove … biological sex" in situations where that can affect benefit eligibility.
DHS wants to use all that data for identity enrollment, verification and management of the immigration lifecycle, national security and criminal history checks, "the production of secure identity documents," to prove familial relationships, and to perform other administrative functions, the rule states.
As we noted in our story last week about DHS' new rule expanding biometric data collection on entry into and exit from the US, biometric technology - especially the often-used facial recognition scan - is ripe for misuse and prone to errors.
This new proposed rule goes far beyond subjecting immigrants to algorithmic identification tech prone to misidentifying non-white individuals, however, and reaches a new level of surveillance, with DHS seeking to collect and keep DNA test results - including partial profiles - from immigrants and some US citizens to verify family ties or biological sex when relevant. It's not much more assuring that DHS also wants to collect new forms of biometric data like voice records, which are increasingly easy to spoof with AI.
When we asked DHS questions about its biometric expansion proposal, it only sent us a statement identical to the one it sent last week when we inquired about the new entry/exit biometric requirements. The agency didn't respond when we asked for a statement pertaining to this latest proposed rule.
DHS is taking comments on the proposal until January 2; so far the submissions are nearly entirely negative, with posters decrying the plan as government overreach, comparing the proposal to communist China, and calling it a violation of Constitutional guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure. ®
The majority of Americans don't feel that way, but did about the last administration, and enough to do something about it. What's surprising is, given that revelation, a few people still actually think that.
Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle.
>If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
No one in the current administration cares about what random members of the public think about their policies, and that's by design. Even the government positions that are intended to be permanent across administrations aren't a safe bet at this point with was things have been going
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...
Then I can easily guarantee you that individual samples have been given to law enforcement _without_ orders or warrants.
> There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information
Which means there is zero oversight, logging, or auditing.
Then no, it wasn't an incendiary claim.
It's easy to fret at how dysfunctional and insane politics are. But after you talk to some actual voters (and look at opinion polls), instead you marvel at how comparatively sane policies manage to be---despite voters.
You only get a scan at the start, after that it's basically a usual crypto wallet + private key. They don't ask for your name or id or anything at the start. Although they are now offering me like $25 if I'll scan my passport and do kyc stuff. I think they are trying to make it into a payment/investment network.
What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up.
What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
Nothing sets me off like seeing people think this behavior from Trump doesn't have shared roots across both parties.
Biden kept kids in cages. Obama bombed weddings. Yes, the current admin is accelerating hard but like, prior admins were accelerating.
People should really try to stop thinking about politics like it's a two party game where you have to pick a side. Figure out your principles, and start finding candidates who match those principles.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
That's why your opponents are unstoppable - because you don't stop them. The performative nonsense is their aggression display.
They still want to win the election. Political and policy outcomes aren't all or nothing; the more they see, the more it will nudge them in whatever direction you want. Others will see it and it will nudge them too. If one person didn't embrace being a quitter, others would do the same.
Name one government of the past 60 years that was.
The government has granted themselves an option on your personal data that can’t be revoked.
Was it inaccurate?
Then why do they keep the samples?
It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=U6rjNqjSeKM
North Korea is not fascist and for the longest time it was South Korea was an actual fascist state. The fact that North Korea is run down has to do with the fact that they lost ALL trading partners apart from China which was still a poor country in the 1990s. Sadly North Korea has to be a highly militarised closed state because if they demilitarised you bet your ass US and SK tanks would be crossing that border tomorrow so that US tanks can sit on the border of Manchuria. Then again I don’t really expect smug imperialists on hacker news to take a genuine interest in North Korea actual existing socialism and what trying to create a different kind of economy in a world where every attempt to do so has been met with insane actual fascist violence and sabotage entails. Look at Venezuela or Cuba if you want an example of the price you have to pay if you actually try to break away from imperialism and capitalism.
What treating this biometric info as public means is that it won’t be accepted as valid proof of identity. Just because you posted a video on TikTok shouldn’t mean that a scammer can take out a loan in your name.
The only security is of those in power. For ordinary people it gets more unsafe with every measure.
I kind of wonder if the political arena is quietly doing the same thing. Instead of targeting dissenting opinions, it might be possible and effective to target the people with dissenting opinions.
sort of scary.
The issue is not the information itself, but how the information will be used. The chance of abusing information is not zero. But having rigorous rules and processes regarding that information, for instance mandatory destruction of said information, will greatly reduce the chance of abuse in the uncertain future.
Revolutions happen, inter alia, to break gridlock, whether consciously or unconsciously. The rise of the surveillance state might be seen as the coup by elites that is one of the known forms of revolution.
Of course that would require decades of testing and refining the technology on a people so conditioned for us to malign that our mainstream shows can make jokes about their dead babies and only be met with applause.
Relevant:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/d85bf67967cdc2fd0616343ed6c1004...
The question is „whose safety?“
Second, the root problem is not incompetence, it's that half of America wanted exactly this, for a second time now.
However, the likelihood of being able to "sequence" the biomatter on a blood spot is quite low, and the probability of getting good signal out of it continues to go down over time. It'll still remain useful for various kinds of spot testing and genetic disease testing, but it's not going to produce a fully validated genomic sequence or even be that useful for forensic purposes.
This isn't some sort of sealed blood vial, it's literally just blood on paper.
It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.
Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.
So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.
OP made it sound like Cali was genome sequencing everyone born in the state and then storing that.
What's really going on is they're doing routine blood tests.
So yeah, pretty inaccurate.
the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.
---
[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
They keep the samples for the same reason US tech startups keep deleted data and track seemingly useless behavior. Because they might find a use for it someday and there's literally no law preventing them from doing it.
A Sam Altman project which seemingly popped up out of nowhere, and offered people free money in exchange for biometric registration on the network, in a lot of countries all over the world. It seemed to be an attempt to set up some sort of global electronic ID system and currency all in one.
That silver sphere is an iris scanner, IIRC.
Got shut down pretty hard in a bunch of places as a potentially illegal invasion of privacy.
If I lose my passport while abroad, given that the government has my fingerprints etc, why can't I use those biometrics to reenter the country (and have a replacement passport reissued immediately)?
Officially, you are supposed to be able to opt out of the face recognition cameras at security but I think whether staff actually respect that is not consistent.
Having the government be the only ones without the data is a weird situation.
I'm German. My government literally issues ID cards and requires fingerprints for those nowadays as well (because terrorism or the children or whatever works as the excuse at the moment) but the idea of a government agency collecting my DNA seems far more invasive given the kind of things you can do with that information and the kind of things governments (especially in my country but in the US and Canada too) have historically done to groups of people under them.
If you think there's nothing concerning about the government wanting to collect extensive biometric data including DNA from not only people applying for immigration but also people associated with them or their application, maybe it would sound more concerning to you if I said that in German.
This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.
By both-sides-ing this, it plays into hands of the people who support the current abhorrent behavior by claiming they're not doing anything different than their opponents have done. That is patently false, and we should not accept it.
Nor it has anything to do with what countries do around the world. You can be democratically elected, law abiding, not overreach and bomb weddings abroad, those are not related.
US has the same constitutional weakness of the countries that went authoritarian in the last decades: a presidential republic.
There's one thing that Russia, Belarus, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua made constitutionally simpler to allow authoritarianism to happen, they gave the country a president elected by the government.
Thus enabling: - personality cult - hard to remove individuals - claiming popular mandate despite anything - deadlocks
All those situations are breeding grounds for chaos.
Say what you want about slow Europe, but it's hard, very hard to pull this stuff here where most countries don't have popular elections for presidents.
In parliamentary republics those shifts are very difficult and are generally centred on party-ism, so identification between state and party.
This is the Indian and Hungarian playbook, as the constitutions don't allow individuals to power grab with ease, it's a very tougher game to succeed.
You don't win an election and start firing executive orders and stretching their limits while courts get to decide what the limits are.
That makes opt out (which the sign says is allowed) kinda pointless, unless the opt out also deletes the existing database entries.
Tl;dr, I don’t bother opting out.
No you can't. International law (e.g. UN charters, Geneva conventions, etc.) once ratified become actual US domestic law.
This on top of the fact that the "law and order" party apparently is only for law and order if it's being used against people they don't like. Evidently most people aren't self aware enough to question their own beliefs, who knew?
Corporations didn't need our current level of surveillance in order to become massively wealthy and they won't risk their wealth just to find out the last time you took a shit or who you're sleeping with and how often.
Surveillance capitalism is a choice. It's happening because at the moment it's profitable, but it can be made unprofitable (or even dangerous) to collect and sell and the moment that happens it all stops.
Just because the technology exists to abuse something that doesn't make it inevitable that it will happen everywhere all the time. The problem we have now is that abusing technology to exploit and control people through the misuse and sale of their personal data is making a lot of people money hand over fist (including people in government) and they'll fight like hell to keep that easy cash and to convince you that any other kind of life would be impossible. Don't fall for the lie.
It's true, but usually in the opposite way you intend. If you go into ventures thinking they will "fail unnoticed", you certainly will fail. For example, who would hire someone or invest in someone with this attitude?
If you go in determined to succeed no matter what, there are no guarantees but you have a good chance.
Comments certainly contribute - the only risk to their power is people like you mocking them. And have you ever seen a successful team where some people mock others doing work?
That is the same psychology I described in the GP: Instead of looking in the mirror and figuring out what they need to do better, they blame outside forces. It's victim psychology - powerless, someone else's fault, etc.
Your group failed; people didn't vote for it because you are well-known quitters and whiners and victims - and losers; you're ok with losing and quit when it happens - and you conduct shitty politics as a result. Who votes for that? Who even can stand to listen to it - it's sickening, depressing, disheartening.
The right wing says, 'we believe in X and we won't be stopped no matter what; we will never give up'. That gets votes. That gets things done.
Get out of bed, stop crying, and get to work. That you still hold on politically with this victim psychology shows how bad the right wing's message is. Never give up, never even talk about it.
Also your statement directly conflicts with the purported confirmed utility of law enforcement getting warrants to use said samples.
The government has my biometrics. Most people should assume, by default, that the government has theirs as well.
as blood contains white blood cells, and these cells tend to contain DNA, yes a collection of identified blood samples is also a collection of DNA (molecules).
A DNA collection doesn't need to have been sequenced to qualify as a DNA collection.
Why does the state have to collect and keep the sample for that to happen? Why can't it be the private property of the parents, provided to whatever private testing labs are used to do the tests?
The cause of the universe must itself be uncaused, or else it is only an intermediate cause that must itself refer ultimately to an uncaused cause. An infinite regress is impossible with respect to existence. Unlike causes per accidens which can in principle be infinite in length, a cause `per se` cannot; without a terminus, there would be nowhere from which the latter causes would derive their force, so to speak, like an arm pushing a stick that is pushing a rock that is pushing a leaf. Meaning, the cause is not some distant one in time, but one always acting; otherwise, everything would vanish. The only cause that could have this property is self-subsisting being.
From there, you can know quite a bit about what else must be true of self-subsisting being.
Was it free money? I recall that it was some shitcoin token paid out, which may or may not be worth something.
I could be wrong, of course.
Look no further than a typical HN comment thread on a niche public policy issue.
They are rife with people scheming up all sorts of ways to thread the needle of public policy so that government enforcement action far in excess of what the public would support can be brought to bear on whoever is on the wrong side of whatever the issue being discussed is.
It's not both sidesing to identify and critique the role democrats had to play here, especially when I say the gop is clearly worse. A critical assessment of how the Dems failed to protect us is not only not helping the GOP, it's exactly the sort of root cause analysis that helps ensure the mid terms go OK.
Saying now's not the time to criticize Dems is the same sentiment that gets us "vote blue no matter who" when Biden runs but "I think we have to consider our options" when Mamdani runs. It's sticking your head in the sand rather than having to face the fact that the party has a losing platform.
We spent 10 years warning about him, pointing out his specific authoritarian tendencies, January 6 was predicted years before it happened, but when people said "he's not going to leave" they were met with mockery.
Who tf cares about databases when their plan was to just use their power to throw out entire states worth of votes? The entire J6 plot was that Pence was to reject the certification of the vote so that states could send "alternative electors" who voted for Trump, which would have disenfranchised millions of people at once. What is the law supposed to do against such anti-democratic "might makes right" depravity? At that point, the players have abandoned the game entirely, they're playing by different rules, your laws are meaningless.
Edit: to the dead comment below me:
> If you actually believed you were living under a dangerous, authoritarian government you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet. You'd be scared shitless trying to delete any trace of this connected to yourself.
Bro, I'm already labelled part of a terrorist organization by this government for my political beliefs. There's nothing I can say here or elsewhere that would change that, so at this point my fate is locked in because I'm not going to change what I believe.
There's not point in hiding anything, now is not a time for hiding, it's a time for speaking your mind. These people are authoritarians, but they are not all powerful. Yet. They have no consolidated power. Yet. They 100% want to, but that's not going to be possible as long as people continue to speak out. Read Timothy Snyder's, On Authoritarianism. He describes what you suggest is the rational response as "obeying in advance", which is the primary way in which the authoritarians seize power -- it's freely given by people who are too afraid to push back.
Automated passport-and-fingerprint (sometimes also iris) scanning is now often the default route at many airports.
Not really; every citizen is expected to have a driver's license, and this takes place before anyone has really thought about the issue even if they're likely to object later. It's sort of like the difference between baptizing infants and baptizing adults.
You're right that there's more information in the DNA, but what difference do you see in the iris scan?
Not necessarily - they look whatever you want them to look. In this case sama wanted to create a feeling of futurism - the story being he is leading a global AGI revolution and you can be a part of it by staring in a metal ball.
That's the mindset of an authoritarian. No needle threading here though, just use "the power of the state to" get our way (no sadness detected).
* For what it's worth, my cynicism for Worldcoin and that eye scanner thing is currently about 7/10: moderately high but could be much worse.
By comparison, I'm 9/10 in cynicism for Facebook and 10/10 in cynicism for everything Musk does except SpaceX, my SpaceX cynicism is only 5/10.
Apparently the token was only offered in some countries, and in some places where it was offered, that was considered enough of a bribe to render void the informed consent to collect and process private data.
There’s this quote I read recently: “When a political system collapses, the replacement is chosen from the choices available at the time ”.
I think it’s pretty clear to anyone with a brain that neoliberalism has failed the majority of people. Trump provided an alternative, and democrats ran on “nothing will fundamentally change”. The results are what we see today.
Yes, our ability to manipulate and read DNA has increased significantly in the past 40 years. But you can't create data from something that isn't there or has been corrupted beyond recovery.
And as far as the efficacy of police goes, I don't think that a warrant is sufficient to prove that there's confirmed utility in getting these samples.
There are activities that are absolutely not worth doing because their chance of succeeding is zero percent even with the strongest of desire for it to not be zero.
I posit because this administration literally does not care what you have to say only what one individual on this planet has to say there’s no point in trying to reason with them. The only action that will work to stop them is in court and in the voting booth, and by proxy activities that magnify the value of either of those activities by getting others to participate. I think protest is a much more effective use of energy for that reason - it energizes like minded people and when this administration reacts with brutality to opposing opinions it shocks people not aligned with dictatorial oppression - which is almost everyone. But participating in the comment processes of their regulatory capture? Waste of time with zero chance of causing even an iota of change no matter how hard you wish it to be otherwise or how much you ignore the naysayers. Spend that energy growing wings and flying to the moon.
I'm not American, so let me ask you: what do you think they should have done better? Maybe a not presenting a woman candidate? I ask because that's the most common denominator in their last two election losses.
So yes a collection of blood sample is technically also a collection of DNA sequences, but it has an expiry date (a short one compared to the lifespan of an individual!) contrary to a DNA sequence that's pure data.
There is a process for people to have the sample destroyed, I also have no idea how easy or how often that is used.
But it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. I don’t really understand that mindset as I haven’t experienced it myself. If my friends and family had UBI that allowed us all a good quality of life, I would split my time between spending time with them, reading and endlessly tinkering with new technology and adjacent creative fields, and be perfectly satisfied with that life. I crave the occasional toy, but simply don’t understand this constant ache for material accumulation that some people have. It seems to hurt them as much as it does everyone else around them.
As someone who came from the extremely far left (with an anarchist bent), I just want to respond to this, though:
>> it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”.
My observation has been that the desire for all, or at least more, is inherent to all people. You may be happy with a UBI, but the great complaint is wealth inequality.
I look around and find myself pretty well-off, with easy access to goods and services my father struggled for, and which my grandfather could never have imagined. I look around and see people of my own well-off technical elite upper-middle-class touting stuff like Maoism, because America allegedly has worse wealth inequality than China did in the 1970s. And logically I have to ask: Are these people so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses that they can't see what they have?
Greed comes in different forms, right? There's this amazing line in Dostoevsky's "Devils": Why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are so incredibly miserly, acquisitive, and proprietorial? In fact, the more socialist someone is, the further he's gone in that direction, the stronger his proprietorial instinct. Why is it?"
Okay, so imagine you live a life with 100x the material wealth of your grandfather, like me, but you still are in the middle 40-60% of the country in terms of wealth. You'll never own a private jet, you'll never party on a private island. The question is: Are you happy with yourself and your life? Can you see how much prosperity you've achieved and be proud of it? Or do you spend your time worrying that someone else has more than you, that it's unfair, that the system is rigged against you, etc.
Maybe this is because I come from an immigrant family mindset, but, prosperity and self-reliance are so much more important to me than trying to compare my life to what anyone else has.
Personally, I'd be happy enough in a prison cell or on my death bed, if I had a pen and paper to write on. So I'm okay with other people having luxuries I don't have. I count each day as an amazing blessing if I can wake up, find work, get laid, eat a good meal, watch a good Netflix show, get stoned and go to bed with my lover. Every single one.
I never for a moment thought that Elon or Bezos or any of them were happy. Their toys always seem to rot, their possessions don't intrigue me because they're clearly miserable.
In large bore: Those "certain types of people" you mention exist on both the Left and the Right - they will find a way to blame anyone who has something they don't have. That's the genesis of all the nasty politics we see. I'm not advocating for having less or having nothing or anything like that. I'm just saying, a small amount of appreciation (historically) for what you have now goes a long way toward letting people be happy and chill instead of angry and aggrieved. And someone will always have more unless you're the King of AI or King of Logistics or King of Twitter. So, we lead more modest lives, but lives are all finite, and we have happiness that they can't possibly achieve.
So the cause or dare I say reason for the universe being the way it is will depend on its cause.
You may balk at this as being ultimately futile but our entire existence is built on trying to break apart and simplify the world we exist in, starting with the first cut between self/inside and other/outside (i.e. "this is me" vs "this is where I am" - a distinction that becomes immensely relevant after the moment of birth). Language itself only functions because we can create categories it can operate on - regardless of whether those categories consistenly map to reality itself.
