I agree completely - the NUC segment has a gaping hole post 2023, and faster raspberry pis can probably fill a lot of it especially for small scale commercial stuff.
There are dozens and dozens of NUC style / form factor machines available these days. Especially cheap ones from China. Not sure what you mean by gaping hole post 2023. I'm running 3 of them with N97 and N150 Cpus. All bought within the last 18 months.
There are very few which are suitable for integration into other products - I currently build a scientific instrument that needs a fairly powerful SBC to run. Intel NUCs were well supported and documented: all of their firmware was updatable on linux without any issues, they had data sheets with power specs so you could run them off DC predictably, and you could buy boards without a case. There are plenty of small NUC shaped mini-PCs but few that are suitable for integration (at the price point intel was at).
Cheap Chinese mini PCs just aren't well documented and don't have predictable supply.
It sounds like they've dropped the digital ID part being mandatory, but not the digital right-to-work checks being mandatory. I suspect that the UK will end up building something like the US's E-Verify programme, which allows a number of documents to be checked against authoritative sources. It really wouldn't be that hard to build a service that in the first instance allowed you to generate a share code with a GBR passport much the same way people can generate share codes with their drivers licenses or UKVI accounts.
What I have a problem with is just how fragmented and broken the UK immigration system is when you have the misfortune of coming into contact with it. It's (like many such large systems worldwide) a set of policies and rules that have accumulated over time into something that is pathologically poorly thought out. I'm going through the process of renewing my spouse's visa (I'm British), and it's fractally awful -- we've just had a snarky email from our landlord who is worried that the right-to-rent permission is expiring, but it's not possible to apply for a renewal for the visa prior to 28 days before expiry of her current visa. I meet all the criteria to sponsor my spouse for renewal, but the evidentiary burden is insane (I've collected 400+ pages of documents so far). Nobody wants this. It is very expensive and difficult (probably >£10k per person until permanent residency in fees, not including legal expenses) to be compliant even if you meet the criteria, which just leads people falling out of status (to borrow an American term). The government (of all stripes) tries to be "tough" but the only lever it knows how to pull is to make the rules stricter, not making them better enforced or align with some meaningful policy agenda.
This farcical situation extends into the UK's broken citizenship model where there are 6 different types of nationality, none of which give any rights you can't build through a hodgepodge of other different statuses. As far as I know the UK is the only country in the world that permits dual nationality with itself!
A government online account which can generate verifiable credentials would probably be helpful in a broad sense but it wouldn't cure bad policy which is rampant in the UK immigration sector. I'd much rather have some kind of digital ID that's clear and authoritative rather than just hoping that Experian has my details right with no recourse if they're wrong.
> This farcical situation extends into the UK's broken citizenship model where there are 6 different types of nationality, none of which give any rights you can't build through a hodgepodge of other different statuses.
There is one right. If you are British at birth they can't strip your citizenship and kick you out. Everyone else's residence is at the whim of the Home Secretary.
> If you are British at birth they can't strip your citizenship and kick you out
Not true. If you have dual nationality at birth, typically because you have one British parent and are born in the UK, then you are British at birth but the Home Secretary has the power to strip you of British citizenship anyway.
So, paradoxically, a child born in the UK to a British mother can end up with stronger UK citizenship rights if the mother doesn't reveal who the father is.
That's not as bad as if you are a naturalized British citizen. In that case, the Home Secretary has the power to strip you of British citzenship and leave you entirely stateless (you have no citizenship anywhere), which you can imagine is a very difficult status to live with.
This is what I thought until last week. Then I read the actual legislation. The 2014 changes apply to naturalised citizens. If you are born with two citizenships you aren't naturalised.
Wrong way round. She was born in the UK and was a British Citizen at birth and had a British passport
She is (maybe) entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship which is why the UK government was allowed under UK law to remove her British citizenship because British courts didn't consider her to be stateless.
The only people who can't have British citizenship removed are British citizens with no other citizenship or entitlement to a citizenship. I think in theory that means the British government is legally allowed to remove citizenship from any person from Northern Ireland if they justify it (since they're allowed to claim Irish citizenship under the Good Friday agreement).
I'm not an immigration lawyer but as I understand it: having been born in the UK as the child of Bangladeshi parents who were living here legally she was entitled to British citizenship, but she wasn't British automatically. They would have had to apply for it. As such, the politicians were able to take it away.
This is quite a recent change in the law. Prior to 2014 they could only strip citizenship if you applied and received it without having a right to it (e.g. if you were born abroad to non-British parents). After 2014 naturalised citizens (like Begum) were also liable.
I do think it is a bad law and she is being treated disgracefully. There's still hope the ECHR will sort it.
This is mainly because the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons requires it.
Of course, as a soverign, the UK is free to ignore the convention, but being able to use it to deal with the nationals of other countries is more valuable than the theoretical ability to eject (whence to?) undesired birthright-citizens.
The whole headache around good legal immigration is exactly why I left the UK after getting married. The costs, timeline and paperwork associated is insane! The US system is fairly bad too, but the rules and categories are clear cut with reasonable timelines
Also Irish citizens in Britain have the same rights as British citizens (even voting), plus all the benefits of EU citizenship too. Brexit made us second class citizens in our own country. Good job everyone.
It’s possible to have been born with multiple forms of British nationality such as being BOTC (e.g. bermudians) and a British citizen at the same time.
It’s also possible for e.g. a BNO to register for British citizenship after a period of residence in the UK. This does not extinguish the original nationality. Most hong kongers with British citizenship are in this bucket.
It really is pretty crazy that some of the more esoteric forms of citizenship have never been rolled into "British Citizen". Almost all BOTCs were given the opportunity to become British Citizens, but not all, and they kept the original status around. BNOs are similarly a somewhat silly situation especially now that it's possible to move to the UK on the special BNO visa (which gives them different/better family reunion rights than normal British citizens). British Subjects essentially don't exist in practice, but they also haven't just rolled that into British Citizen status either (British Subject is the residual status of certain Irish born people who chose to retain the status - they have the right to live in the UK on the basis of their Irish nationality, not on their British nationality which is insane). There's just a perpetual allergy to just rationalising the whole setup.
It would be perfectly politically acceptable to just do away with the statuses that have fewer than say 5000 people and grant them all full-fat citizenship. Generally people who live in the UK are shocked when they find out that holding a British passport does not entitle you to the right to live in the UK.
I think this is a huge mistake at least as far as the office software goes. One of the key advantages to Pages.app and friends is that they are pre-installed and free on MacOS. This will just drive people to M365 and Google Docs.
Pages and other iWork apps will remain free. The premium features are for curated images and templates, and AI assisted document creation. If you don't care for those features, you will not be affected by the change.
Whilst I seriously doubt that this will be regularly or universally enforced, I think that gas powered gardening and construction equipment is incredibly loud and annoying, and that especially in built-up areas it's not really acceptable where good alternatives exist. Noise pollution is usually very avoidable, and it can be quite disruptive and sometimes damaging to health.
Further, where I live (in the UK), there needs to be a serious reckoning about modified cars and road noise. At least 5-10x daily people drive through the city centre near my home with cars modified with unbelievably loud pop and bang ECU tunes and exhaust noise (close to as loud as gunfire). This kind of deliberate noise pollution is exceptionally antisocial behaviour and should not be tolerated by society.
We have the same problem where I live in the US. When I get some free time I'm going to lobby our state congress to have the sale of them banned, because it's the only way to get people to stop installing them. There is a law against driving them but it's impossible to enforce because there's no means of measuring the sound and associating it with the vehicle quickly enough to enforce it.
I'd love to have an ALPR system that localizes the noise and snaps a picture of the plate and vehicle and sends them a ticket in the mail.
German police have a what amounts to a dyno mounted on a truck bed, and they pull over suspicious cars and sound check them while an officer goes through the gears on the dyno.
Failing that test is expensive, and you don't see your car again for a few weeks. They revoke your permission to operate the vehicle on public roads, so in addition to the fine, you face fees (towing, storage of car in evidence locker, towing your car to a shop after getting it back in order to make it street legal, then redoing the road-worthiness certification).
Police in the US can just give people a faulty equipment ticket based on their perception of it being too loud or visually modified.
But you are not likely to see this enforced outside of rich quiet neighborhoods where police don't have anything better to attend to. Culturally, sentiment in the US does not want the law coming down hard on drivers and their vehicles. For instance, most US states do not even require vehicles to be safety inspected. And in urban areas the police have worse infractions to be going after.
Ah yes, nothing quiets the streets like the police literally running a damn dyno roadside on an elevated platform for the loudest vehicles they think they can find, which by itself would likely also make the police violators of the law since they are the one operating the vehicle in public at the time of the sound infraction they have induced.
Noise control laws typically exempt law enforcement and first responders, for obvious reasons. e.g. their vehicles have devices installed that are intentionally noisy: sirens.
> Ah yes, nothing quiets the streets like the police literally running a damn dyno
It would be bad only if it didn't result in decrease of loud vehicles. If they run the dyno and impound vehicle, it means that this loud vehicle won't be coming back this street for some time.
If the police take my car and make loud noises with it, all that means is the police can potentially make loud noises with my car. Not that I personally made loud noises.
The only provable noise polluter in that case is the police.
I'm sure they could also put my car on a dyno and prove it could go 100mph on the 30mph street I was on too.
Presumably for a car to be sold from factory and registered by owner as street legal in Germany, it must not be able to make loud noises under reasonable operation — specifically, driven like someone would drive a car (up to 100% throttle, up to redline rpm) but not attempting to maliciously create problems (fuzzing the pedal inputs for backfire scenarios from factory). If the police are able to reasonably operate it on a dyno to create an illegal condition, then either it has a mechanical defect, an owner modification, or a design defect; and in all three cases, the vehicle would presumably therefore not be street legal, as proven on the roadside dyno. The loophole you’re describing wouldn’t hold up in front of a judge anywhere at first glance: “I don’t ever push the gas pedal that far down in my fancy sports car designed/modded to accelerate loudly when I push the gas pedal that far down” is not a particularly convincing argument when one is found to be operating said vehicle. A more convincing argument would be, “the pedal inputs by the police were improper for operation of a vehicle and do not conform to the training given to roadside dyno operators”; and, presumably dyno logs and body cam of the operator are available to defeat that as well. And arguing that the training itself is improperly having police operate the vehicle through all factory-provided regimes would almost certainly fail (even in the U.S. were such roadside dynos a thing here!), but if your case was that the training needs to be improved in a specific way rather than for termination of the roadside dyno program, you might get traction with that.
One assumes this process is generally reserved for vehicles whose driving has earned them a dyno inspection, as it would induce mockery were they to e.g. dyno an old beaten-up Geo Metro without cause, and that the fines are directed towards either the vehicle owner and/or manufacturer, as circumstances require, as the responsible parties for its mechanical-design and/or aftermarket-modded violations of the law. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
That does not really prove much. Not really clear the charges the fed had were well thought out. The general sovereign citizen test always fails because those folks still want to participate in society.
Of course it holds no merit when the law is written such that merely having the capability of loud noise is an offense, and the method by which you are convicted is the police do the thing they say is bad and then damn you for the thing they themselves just did for the purpose of convicting you.
Oh I am well aware. "Society" takes the things you have, uses them against you, then shits on you for the thing they have just done. Thus is how taxes are born.
But as it turns out, the government isn't society, and the law isn't what's right.
Some of the most annoying offenders are motorbikes who almost see it as an obligation to revv as annoyingly as possible every chance they get on residential neighborhoods.
It’s not all of them. Some ride responsibly but my god, some are extremely good at being the most annoying human beings on earth.
It’s a pretty solved problem. In NSW, Australia we have automated systems for heavy vehicle noise fines. (They could of course be used for regular vehicles as well, we just don’t)
For all vehicles the police can issue a defect notice to anything that seems too loud. The owner then has to present to an inspection station and prove that they’re compliant. If they don’t show up or don’t test as compliant their registration is voided and they’re fined. Of course, they can remove the modification before visiting the induction station then reinstall it afterwards, but that gets pretty time consuming pretty fast and people largely stay within the bounds of reason as a result. The system isn’t perfect but it works fine.
Noise enforcement is a normal thing in areas that want to enforce it. It happens exactly the same way speed enforcement happens, the officer has a device that measures it and can present that information in court if the other party disputes it.
The problem for both noise and speed enforcement is entirely a problem of will. Some jurisdictions simply don't care, or just do targeted enforcement to drive revenue but not actually change driving habits. Do any driving around the country and you'll see areas where people regularly drive 20mph over the speed limit and areas where people barely go 5 over.
NYC installed these. Turns out with a city noise limit of 76 and ticketing those in excess of 84dBa, that you’ll ticket certain street ‘legal’ cars whose noise levels can reach into the 90s (!) if driven improperly in-city. Always glad to see technology progressing; I hope it spreads elsewhere.
No, I drive a modified 2-seat sports car with minimal visible modifications and have been reverse engineering its ECU for half a decade. Can’t speak for anyone else but you’re way off the mark for assuming the person you’re replying to has a boring car anyways.
Nope there is a difference between a modified exhaust and a straight pipes or more commonly a tuned ecu that causes after fire. It can be quite loud, pretty darn close to gun shot level and is a disruptive. If you like it go take your car to a track.
There are MANY factory production vehicles with exhausts above the DB limits for what is considered legal by municipalities and states. Is the onus on the consumer for buying these or on the manufacturer? Or are these laws asinine when they don't apply to horns, trains, construction sites and other noise-emitters?
As a fellow vehicle customization enthusiast you have the flexibility to do what you want for snaps, crackles and pops up to the limit of what is deemed acceptable by your locality. It's not like a blanket ban is going to fix the behavior of people that mod their cars. I don't personally add after-fire to ECU tunings but they are popular in the bimmer community - what harm are these people causing that motorcyclists aren't?
I got the answer: it's easy to target car modders and sports/supercars because those who don't drive them are petty + jealous.
This is such a bad idea I don't know if you're serious, or if you're satirizing these kinds of people or an accelerationist looking to burn down the credibility of your state legislature.
The right thing to do is to ban their use on a local level pursuant to some specific criteria is one thing (as many municipalities do, and Portland took a step further by doing categorically city wide). To ban their sale (but not use, are you kidding?) state wide is a great example of not only crap law, but the exact sort of minutia that the state level government should not be regulating and is necessarily proceeded by the sort of evil "I know best, damn the exceptions" world view that underpins much of the bad policy that sours people on the same institutions you are trying to use to solve what you perceive to be problems.
> there needs to be a serious reckoning about modified cars and road noise. At least 5-10x daily people drive through the city centre near my home with cars modified with unbelievably loud pop and bang ECU tunes and exhaust noise
I live in Portland and we have the same issue all over the city. They are much louder and more frequent than gas power leaf blowers. There are supposedly laws against them, but they are not enforced.
There is another issue. The 2-stroke gas engines in backpack leaf blowers emit very toxic exhaust. Much worse than a 4-stroke. The landscapers are breathing that in all day.
What I find interesting about this ban: probably mostly makes sense in the for city for low workloads however the electric blowers (even the good ones that I am sure the city isn't paying for) are underpowered for real work leaf workloads. They operate as a midlevel gas powered blower.
As someone who is on board with electrify as much as possible - I still see where there are limitations and chokepoints.
They shouldn't be underpowered. Small electric motors are way more powerful per mass/volume than small gas motors. You'd have to use a backpack mounted battery pack, but contractors are already doing that.
Perhaps not. Businesses are way more conservative than consumers when adopting new tech, so there will be little demand at the beginning. And with little demand, there's little supply. Laws like the headline will break this chicken/egg problem.
Except that they require keeping lots of expensive extra batteries on hand—batteries with a limited lifespan—driving up overall operating costs. This is basically just a stealth tax on the already not very profitable landscaping industry.
Prices for landscaping services are already getting out of hand, at least in my area. This will make things worse.
As usual, the very wealthy won’t care, and the middle class and small business owners will be crushed. I bet private equity will get some great deals on small landscaping companies.
The notion of leafblowing is also mindboggling to me... You don't need a leafblower to clean up your driveway, and leaves on a lawn will turn into soil.
My neighbour has a golf court style yard and constantly provides friendly suggestions how to better take care of my yard - with fruit trees and wild flowers. There are no mechanisms he could force his views around here, but boy would he love that.
More likely leaves on a lawn will destroy it and will create a dirt patch, at least this is what happens in PNW (Seattle & Portland). I have giant maple trees next to my house and I get 2 feet of leaves in my backyard every fall, if you don't remove them you get a breeding ground for rodents, you get mold and dirt everywhere (and clogged gutters, clogged street drains) and standing water. And it's not only leaves, I'm getting fir/cedar needles and maple seeds on my drive way, good luck removing it without a blower.
It astonishes me that there would be so many cases of things like wrong authors. I began using a citation manager that extracted metadata automatically (zotero in my case) more than 15 years ago, and can’t imagine writing an academic paper without it or a similar tool.
How are the authors even submitting citations? Surely they could be required to send a .bib or similar file? It’s so easy to then quality control at least to verify that citations exist by looking up DOIs or similar.
I know it wouldn’t solve the human problem of relying on LLMs but I’m shocked we don’t even have this level of scrutiny.
Maybe you haven’t carefully checked yet the correctness of automatic tools or of the associated metadata. Zotero is certainly not bug free. Even authors themselves have miss-cited their own past work on occasion, and author lists have had errors that get revised upon resubmission or corrected in errata after publication. The DOI is indeed great, and if it is correct, I can still use the citation as a reader, but the (often abbreviated) lists of authors often have typos. In this case the error rate is not particularly high compared to random early review-level submissions I’ve seen many decades ago. Tools helped increase the number of citations and reduce the error per citation but not sure if they reduced the papers that have at least one error.
I agree that the author lists in various metadata sources and databases are often a bit wrong (weird formatting of names for instance is very common), but many of the cases in the OP article are pretty egregious and far beyond just data entry issues.
Presumably the citation scanner they're using is relying on similar data sources as Zotero in any case to detect these sorts of issues.
Regardless, my comment still stands, it seems like the submission is relying on the actual text of the bibliography being correct, rather than requiring a machine readable citation metadata file of some sort, which would at least allow much of the quality control checks to be automated (and certainly would preclude complete hallucinations of nonexistent papers getting through).
They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.
Ads and “scammy” tactics were always like bread and butter. The whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using whatever means possible except for what the industry deems unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there’s this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as tolerable (preferably under the guise of “improvement” to prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of opportunity is still open. Sad but true.
As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.
Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.
Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.
> if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it,
They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.
Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.
I think it's an important thing to remind yourself of sometimes that there's a pretty significant difference between a startup and a small business. In spaces outside HN, small businesses are the default form of business, and there's plenty of merit to running one even in tech - not everything is scaleable, nor does it need to be. If you can identify a niche, generate profits, and provide business value and support the livelihood of your workers, that can be enough. Startups can be very impactful, and the tech sector has thrived as a result of the model, but the growth obsession and leverage is not mandatory.
I know it's a bit worn out but if you want to learn about practical orbital mechanics and have fun doing it, Kerbal Space Program is the best tutor there is. It's a simplified physics model so stuff like Lagrange points don't work, but there's no better way of getting an intuitive understanding of how bodies move in space.
U.S. passports have a unique shielding which prevents them from being read whilst closed. It’s a low tech solution but I think it’s an amazing example of clever mitigations.
This is going to be a huge pain. The US has a very fragmented identity system, and "move fast and break things" approaches like this to bring information from across government systems well outside the scope of what that information was collected for will result in real problems.
I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320, the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at least been very bad about renewing their green card.
I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a camera put in their face, some old database record that has no chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar situations to me, and millions more with even more complex statuses.
I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names, similar to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?
EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder
Your point about orphaned records resonates with me, but for a much simpler (or stupider) "use case". I took a domestic flight earlier this year and foolishly showed my British passport as ID. I had returned to the country the day before, it just happened to be in my pocket. My green card was clipped to the front of it. After checking the identification page, the TSA agent flipped through the pages of entry stamps, visas, etc. There, they found all my old US work visas, which have long since expired. The agent was convinced that, since I have expired visas, I must be here illegally and would have to "come with [her]". I pointed out that I have a valid green card, so I'm here legally, and that of course every visa in the book has expired because - well that's what they do. It took 30 minutes, multiple staff being called over, supervisors, etc before I was allowed to continue. At every step, the presence of the expired visas was a mark against me. Never got an apology or recognition that they were wrong, just eventually told I could be on my way. I truly fear that overzealous thugs will use any "evidence" to prove their presuppositions, like your orphaned records.
(I've naturalized since then, and carry my passport card around religiously, for all the good it may do...)
Someone I know is in a similar situation. She doesn't have the "naturalization documents". She has a passport, a ssn, and became a citizen before she turned 18.
Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for months with poor conditions, with an administration that does not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or call out for help?
This site likes to do the cowardly take of avoiding politics as long as it's advantageous. I'm going to look into these companies that produce this tech, and memorize the company names. If a resume ever passes my desk with a significant time at any of these companies, it's going to be a "no" from me. That's the small bit of power I hold.
Hands on the ground don't read the laws, they only bring people before the person who actually knows them.
So no, ICE goons will do the basic thing -- check how white the person is, if not white enough, ask for documents, if documents are not convincing enough to them, snatch the person and let the more nuanced decisions to be made by those who can read.
Now if the person above them isn't agreeing with interpretation of the law that was used to issue those documents, it's sitting in the jail waiting for a judge time.
Administration view is that if you're not citizen, you don't get due process[1]. Even if you're a citizen, if their system says your not, you'll never get brought in front of people who know the law. Why due process only works if everyone gets it otherwise the government will say your a class that doesn't get it even if you aren't.
This isn’t new under Trump. But it’s entertaining watching everyone pretend it is.
Obama had similar rules around standing deportation orders and how quickly they could be executed once an alien was in custody.
If you’ve stood before a judge, argued why you should be allowed to stay and lost, you have a standing deportation order. That’s due process. Nothing has been denied.
It makes for a great talking point but is a pretty shallow analysis of what is going on or their historical relevance.
“This temporary restraining order was not served to ICE until AFTER the criminal illegal alien was removed….Following his heinous crimes, he lost his green card, and an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2006. 20 years later, he tried a Hail Mary attempt to remain in our country by claiming he was a U.S. citizen.”
Available reporting indicates that judge ruled on Thursday, and that DHS deported on Friday. Moreover, available reporting also indicates:
> DHS and ICE did not respond to questions from The Associated Press seeking additional details on the timeline and how officials receive federal court orders.
So they aren’t clarifying anything. Odd.
And don’t forget back in March, when the administration publicly asserted that oral orders from a judge carried no authority and that they would only heed written orders.
When you put those two together, one wonders: perhaps DHS is playing fast and loose with timelines again.
Why on earth would you treat anything they say as if it were truthful or reliable? They have lost the right to be treated as trustworthy by default.
Are you suggesting a government agency is just making things up in official communications?
If that’s the case you must also assume the deportee is lying as well? Between the two it’s the deportee who has the bigger incentive to make things up.
If we’re going to go with those assumptions there is no point in even discussing it because neither of have any facts to base an argument on.
So why should I believe anything they say these days? They are blatantly lying, in ways that are manifestly obvious to anyone that is willing to look. We don’t owe the presumption of good faith to people who time and again have been publicly caught lying - and worse, who haven’t even tried to correct the record.
Half of your sources are other government officials. That kind of runs counter to your argument that you can't rely on government official statements to be true, no?
And let's look at the Reason article. "Martinez also was taken to the hospital by ambulance, and the criminal complaint against her only mentions two cars, not 10."
Ok, so the DHS "lied" about being boxed in by 2 not 10 cars. That seems to miss the forest for the tree no? The DHS agents were still boxed in - normally threatening federal law enforcement officers is illegal, no?
While Obama, Biden, and Trump all had cruel deportation policies, the previous two didn't have 5-figure bonuses for a deportation.
Additionally, the performative method of how they're looking for deportations, its random, violent, and meant to send a message of powerlessness and fear.
The point is fear and cruelty. As was Family separation under Biden, the cruelty is accelerating.
Except that to all appearances, most of the time ICE isn't actually bringing them before people who actually know the law: they're throwing them in concentration camps.
Or even when they do end up before someone who knows the law, and that someone says "no, this is illegal, you have to set them free," they say "nah, we can do what we want" and put them on a plane to another country unrelated to the hapless detainee.
They put a whole lot of children onto a plane in the middle of the night to deport them. This was only stopped because laywers got wind of it and a federal judge intervened almost immediately on the weekend.
They are trying to bypass any review by being fast and creating facts that prevent US judges from any effective action as once people are outside US jurisdiction they have very little power.
And immigration judges are not actual judges, they are part of the executive.
you’re responding to a comment which states detainees are being sent to concentration camps, places like the deplorably named Alligator Alcatraz. i don’t think we should conflate that as deportation.
>Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for months with poor conditions, with an administration that does not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or call out for help?
Better yet -- whisk her out of the country and then claim that she no longer has standing to sue.
Basically any "legal option", aka trying to legally fight illegal actions, requires letting people get hurt, or killed with no recourse while hoping some judge makes a decision and these people actually follow it.
You as an individual are defenseless against an incorrect and badly trained officer. This goes for local cops, federal cops, the twitter racists they brought in for ICE, etc.
Even if you oppose this with all your heart, if you're semi-intelligent you know the Admin is looking for an excuse to execute greater powers, so any kinetic action against the poorly trained, illegal actions of the state will only cause greater harm.
The worst part about this, is if we allow the slow "legal" process to take it's course, even if all this is proven illegal and thrown out, people released, etc, nothing will happen to the people who brought it on. Those who have the power to hold accountable only reached the position of power by being amenable to others in power. We likely wont have trials against the individuals picking mothers and fathers up off the street for a bonus, we wont have trials against the people who offered the bonuses either. They'll disappear and come back when the times are more kind to their sick world view of violence and cruelty.
The fun part is the Supreme Court has steadily eroded away any avenues for recourse. ICE can harass, abuse, even kill people with zero justification and any lawsuits will be thrown out.
I struggle a lot when I see comments like this. The point is to be a pain. The point is to empower a national police force to subjugate the populace. The people in charge don’t care if it is “ able to cope with the complex realities of real people.”
I don’t understand why people, especially those like you who have complex realities, significantly more complex than me a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA, are still giving any benefit of the doubt to these actions.
> a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA
and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from? right, you're an immigrant, you should be detained. the 1600s detail is just smoke. the only key thing you said was white. everything after that is just fluff for telling the story.
> and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from? right, you're an immigrant,
Not according to immigration law, which is all that matters for the current discussion. The parent of you comment made a point which you failed to notice.
BTW holier-than-thou attitudes and picking fights with friends are largely responsible for where we are. Spotting them is also a good hint for bot detection.
who's picking a fight? you tell me the sky is red, and i'm going to tell you you're wrong. if you think any of my comments sound like bots, then boy, i don't know
This comes off to me as a more refined "Yes of course, what did you expect you naive person ?" type of comment you often find online (somewhat common among radical leftists)
Maybe commenter agrees with you that the point is to empower a national police to subjugate the populace (This opinion does not raise any of my eyebrows) but do you think this is going to reach people who don't already think that ? To put any doubt in their minds ?
I understand the anger the current situation is causing and I am guilty of breaking the hn guidelines a few times myself but I am also convinced of the need to actually explain what you think are the actual problems from the ground up rather than just casting your own conclusions onto people, no matter how obvious they seem to you
So I did think they did a good job with their comment
What do you think a good response would look like? I thought about linking to comments from those in charge but I admit I was too lazy to collect them. At this point I’m lost on what more to say to people other than “You know those problems you’re pointing out? Well if you listen to the people in charge they are saying they aren’t problems.”
Well, I think this would be a great response. You can basically say the same thing but the first sounds like "it's like your opinion, man" whereas the second one hits harder
“You know those problems you’re pointing out? Well if you listen to the people in charge they are saying they aren’t problems" is much better than "Duh, what did you expect ?"
No matter how obvious you think the context that led to your conclusion is, it's always worth it to share it along, especially in times of information bubbles
"Radical Leftist" is a term the current administration is using to brandish anyone who disagrees with them, particularly the Democratic party, it's donors and former Trump officials critical of him.
I happen to agree with you. I haven't fully accepted yet the new era where words are meaningless. I meant actual radical leftists, the ones who believes capitalism is the source of all issues even though they can't always explain clearly what is is. Not just people who think the rule of law is good and should be maintained.
The correct answer is that you’re a US citizen unless proved not to be. That’s how the US has always worked, since we’ve made a long-term societal decision not to require papers or allow extrajudicial treatment of our people. This app and everything behind it is foundationally wrong and unamerican.
The thing I think most people forget is why society made the decision that the government requires a neutral third-party to be consulted to determine if there is probable cause to conduct a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Otherwise, you have a 'king' issuing general warrants which allow federal agents to search and seize anyone they want in the course of their investigations based on 'feels'. What makes it even worse is some court said racial profiling is sufficient reason to conduct a Terry stop to determine if the person is engaged in (civil) criminal activity and lets law enforcement demand they show their papers or be scanned by some dodgy app.
Who cares about correct answers. While technically correct, it means nothing in the world of today. Those in power believe unless you can prove you are a citizen, you are not. It is only correct answer if that's how people are behaving.
You're being too generous. Once you are targeted for whatever reason, you are not a citizen unless you manage to publicly prove that you are, and they will fight tooth and nail to deny you any such opportunity.
See: 8 U.S.C. § 1304(e) : "Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d)." [1] So aliens are indeed required to carry papers at all times. The balance between the rights of citizens and the obligations of aliens comes in the form of probable cause. It's similar to how a cop can't pull you over and just randomly search your car without reason, but if he has probable cause, then suddenly he can.
An ICE officer can't just detain somebody for having an accent or whatever, but if they have probable cause to think the person may not be a citizen then they have a substantial amount of leverage to affirm that. Probable cause has been tested somewhat rigorously in the courts and really means probable cause and not the knee-jerk obvious abuses like 'he's brown!'
the Supreme Court has recently determined, in Noem v. Perdomo, that racial profiling by ICE is indeed completely .. acceptable? idk what the right word for 'legal but not legal' is.
That ruling wasn't based on race, it was based on a whole bunch of factors (including: high amount of illegal immigrants in the area in question, jobs and locations that attract illegal immigrants due to not needing paperwork, etc). It was also not final, it was temporary pending another appeal.
You are describing rules that pertain to non-citizens. U.S. citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship ever and they can't legally be arrested or detained for this. The most that legally ICE can do to a citizen is briefly stop them to ask questions. Anything beyond that is an illegal arrest, full stop.
There is a lot of constitutional law here, not a lot of ambiguity. While mistakes happen, and ICE is clearly becoming more eager to violate the law (see TFA), that doesn't mean we should be unclear about what the law says. In particular, prioritizing the (incorrect) results from an app over any sort of claim or presentation of proof is illegal.
The issue is fake documents. People in the country illegally have already shown a willingness to break the law and the typical consequence for presenting fake documents is nonexistent - it's deportation, exactly as if they didn't even bother trying. So we've created a scenario where fake documents are widespread, especially in areas with high numbers of illegal immigrants where they are readily available.
So how do you discourage this? We could start prosecuting and imprisoning people with fake documents, but that would send our already absurd prison population through the roof and cost immense amounts of money. An alternative way is exactly what this article is about.
Fake documents are a problem for immigration enforcement officials. They are a problem that makes immigration enforcement harder, and requires officials to be more creative. They are not a problem for me, a legitimate US citizen, such that they require my rights or freedom to be curtailed in any way. And let’s be clear: that’s precisely what TFA is talking about: an unreliable, unauthenticated database that officials will believe over my legitimate and truthful statements of citizenship, and over my legitimate and truthful presentation of US citizenship evidence.
As I said in a different comment, we US folks have decided as a society that we don’t want to have mandatory difficult-to-forge national ID. When asked this question democratically, US voters and their representatives have repeatedly* turned down this option and explicitly banned the Federal government from issuing Federal ID cards outside of optional passports for international travel. We made this decision precisely because we distrust the sort of Federal government that would require us to carry that sort of document. There is nothing accidental about this, and you can find explicit statements of this bipartisan consensus all over real Federal legislation; there’s really no possibility that we did this by accident or without due consideration of the tradeoffs.
You’re correct that this lack of standardized documentation makes the immigration enforcer’s job harder, since they can’t just force people to produce proof-of-citizenship on demand and they can’t detain US citizens, and they can’t necessarily trust every paper document they’re given. I’m sympathetic! But that’s the tradeoff we’ve made as a society. The answer is not “throw out the rule book and risk depriving citizens of their rights because our job is hard.” The answer is: respect the rules you were given and due the best job you can without depriving US citizens of their rights.
And PS this situation is hardly unique: we also make ordinary cops’ jobs harder by requiring them to respect suspects’ civil rights and demanding probable cause to make an arrest. It’s tough! The result there is that cops have to work harder and be smarter; they don’t just get to detain anyone they want just because they might vaguely hypothetically be a criminal.
The chances of a citizen being targeted by ICE is low. The chances of a citizen being unable to compellingly correct that mistake is very low. The chance of a mismatch on the database is very low. The chance of there being a mismatch that isn't immediately obvious to the ICE officer is astronomically low.
And now you need every single one of these events to occur, simultaneously. The chances of this happening is practically zero. And even if somehow this does happen, which it won't, it's at worst a significant inconvenience for the person who somehow managed to win the reverse lottery. Though in this case perhaps it's not even entirely the reverse lottery - because there'd be a big paycheck awaiting them in lawsuits, crowdfunding, media fees, and so on.
I simply don't see false positives as a realistic concern here, whatsoever. Going with your analog with the police I'd mention e.g. DNA tests or finger prints. These do have non-zero failure rates, but they're still regularly used to convict people simply because the failure rate is seen as acceptably low. And in this case, the conditional probability we're speaking of is probably even lower, and with much less at stake!
Today I watched a video of a US citizen being dragged out of a car and arrested because ICE ran into her car. She was held for the better part of a day without medical care. So no, I'm not going to assign highly-optimistic data-free priors to the masked agents operating these agencies, nor am I going to assume that (for the first time in my experience) a hastily-assembled government database is accurate.
You're free to hope for these things if you want. But hoping does not make them true.
This video? [1] Did you watch a different video? Not only did she obviously hit the car, she railed into it. Check the moment of impact at 2:20. She bounces a way bigger SUV with a little sedan. It also looks like she never once touched her brakes. I find that part difficult to believe, but did you ever see her brake lights come on? So one could try to claim it was an accident because the ICE vehicle was turning around in the middle of the street, but that's also probably impossible as it was a giant scene full of adults acting like children with the ICE car right in the middle of the road. You can't be that aloof.
The reason divides on these sort of issues are probably irreconcilable is because of stuff like this. So many people seem to have missed the point of the childhood story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
> The chances of a citizen being targeted by ICE is low.
You can’t start with this premise, though. Recent rulings allow stops based on “probable cause” such as a combination of “speaks Spanish”, “is brown”, and “is in a place where we think illegal immigrants might be”.
So like: any Latino US citizen, who happens to be working someplace like a landscaping company. Or a kitchen.
The idea that citizens aren’t likely to be targets is now laughable. And we have ample reporting indicating that in fact, citizens are being detained, for hours and hours (if not longer).
Low doesn't mean zero, it means low. You might notice I used different terms for the different groupings, with the chance of a citizen being targeted by ICE as the highest overall at "low". ICE has so far deported more than 400,000 illegal aliens. [1] If they were "only" 99% accurate, you'd be able to find thousands of instances where things went wrong. Instead, you're looking more at tens to low hundreds of instances, so it's likely that their overall accuracy is somewhere in the 99.9% to 99.99% range.
And as I was demonstrating above, the conditional probabilities required for a false positive from this app mean that it's practical effective accuracy rate will likely be 100%.
> Instead, you're looking more at tens to low hundreds of instances
…based on what, the independent research ProPublica did? DHS doesn’t even keep statistics on how many citizens they detain so I’m not sure we should be assuming the numbers here are that low.
What I mentioned already. Being incorrectly detained isn't consequence free. People can and have successfully sued, winning substantial sums of money in the process. And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim. And on top of this all immigration enforcement runs contrary to the corporate media's biases. They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.
In other words, ICE's errors are highly visible. That my approximation aligns with ProPublica's (which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered) is unsurprising.
> People can and have successfully sued, winning substantial sums of money in the process.
I would be quite interested to know if you can cite sources on that.
> And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim.
What, exactly, is your argument here? That it’s all fine because you think people will play victim and strike it rich on GoFundMe? I’m struggling to see what point you’re actually trying to make.
> They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.
Sources? Please list out what molehills were made into mountains. What evidence do you have that they are actively trying to do it because of their “bias”? You’re regurgitating tired, right-wing talking points. Back it up with evidence if you’re so sure about it.
> which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered
Well, sure. Let’s see some evidence that they weren’t critical enough with their reporting. My understanding is that they are a highly respected journalistic outfit. What makes you so sure they were playing fast and loose with the facts?
Here [1] is a case where somebody won $150,000 for being detained for 12 hours. The cases aren't especially difficult to search for yourself, so I'm not sure why you're asking me. I can actually respond to everything else you said with an example from ProPublica's story you cited [2], to emphasize that I'm not cherry picking cases to make my point! Scroll down about 25% of the way and you'll get their first inline video example of "Rafie Ollah Shouhed".
Now go frame by frame at about the 5.5s mark. You can see the individual in question charge and then thrust his body in front of the responding ICE officer (watch how he leans left into the officer before they are in physical contact) to create a physical altercation. He then attempts to grab the legs of the officer as he jogs away. The same guy then comes out for more, and pushes one ICE officer dealing with somebody else, and then starts grappling with another ICE officer before he's finally tackled and arrested.
Media Framing:
- Surveillance footage shows Ice agents pushing 79-year-old man to the ground (Guardian)
- Car wash owner files $50M claim over injuries sustained during immigration raid (ABC)
- 79-year-old US citizen pinned by ICE agents (Fox)
- U.S. citizen files civil rights claim after ICE raid at his car wash (NBC)
As this is the first video ProPublica featured, presumably they think that's the most compelling case. In any case it's certainly one of their cases which are supposed to be injust, yet there wasn't even the slightest injustice there whatsoever. And now he wants $50 million lol. I'd also add that ProPublica implies that the government dropping charges in cases is because of lack of merit. In reality it's going to be a balance of gain:loss from such. This is one of those cases where the charges were dropped, but obviously that was not done for lack of merit.
What you see as “thrusting” sure looks to me like he was trying to stop himself from a full-on run - why did he grab a door handle on the wall? Why would you grab and pull like that if you were trying to tackle?
And “grabbing his legs”… come on man. That looks a hell of a lot like an old man flailing after getting tackled.
And you think he grappled with the officer before getting arrested outside? It looks like precisely the opposite.
I didn't say he was trying to tackle, I said he was trying to create a physical altercation, probably with the premeditated goal of trying to sue and/or buy time for the likely illegal aliens working for him - not only for their sake, but because hiring illegal aliens is a felony. I don't believe you believe that he just 'accidentally fell' exactly on the officer exactly as he came into range.
The reason he grabbed the door handle is because in his mind he thought he was going to be the one knocking the officer down. He's a big and very aggressive guy that's this spry at 79 - I'm positive this wasn't even remotely close to his first rodeo. He grabbed on to help maintain balance.
As another issue he wasn't running anywhere in particular, except towards the officer. As soon as he collides, he then gets up from crashing into him he turns around and starts racing back towards him again. He then pushes the other officer at 28 seconds and begins grappling with yet a third officer at 30 seconds. He's then tackled at 35 seconds.
Given he was not arrested for intentionally crashing into the first officer I think ICE was generally trying their hardest to ignore him, but that probably became impossible about the point he actively decided to start grappling with them.
> probably with the premeditated goal of trying to sue and/or buy time for the likely illegal aliens working for him
My bad. Didn’t realize you already knew his heart, and that this was premeditated. And that you clearly know who his employees were and that they were here illegally.
Whoops. Since we know they’re guilty, I guess all that’s left to do is find the evidence!
Enjoy yourself. I won’t engage in this uncharitable, ugly discussion with you anymore. I hope you find peace in you heart, and I hope others treat you with the charity and dignity you’re clearly unwilling to give others.
Feel free to try to create a plausible explanation for his aggressive behavior otherwise. Why would you say he was running towards the office officer only to 'accidentally' land on him right as he passed him? And then why would he go outside, push one officer, and begin grappling with another? This is not how normal people behave.
He actually gave an explanation for this which we clearly know is a lie - he claimed that "when he tried to speak with the agents and show them the legal paperwork for his employees, they shoved him to the ground, and at least one agent put his knee on Shouhed’s neck." [1] He probably wasn't aware the outside altercation had been recorded. Where's the paperwork? And in this case 5 illegal aliens were arrested, including one who had already been arrested and deported twice previously.
There's a balance to all things in life. Obviously we should not be blindly prejudiced against individuals on one extreme, yet on the equal but opposite extreme one can be so open minded that your brain falls out.
How much you believe this might depend on which regional bubble you're in. I live in Montana and around here I have an expectation that while there might be the odd rogue law enforcement person roaming the state, generally things still work like America.
Meanwhile last week I was in LA for a family thing and caught some TV ads playing there. That dog-killing gnome woman was on TV saying something like "We will hunt you down and deport you, there is no hiding, leave now". Initially I thought I was watching some comedy skit, but no it was an official US government advert.
Whether I'm in Montana or in LA vastly changes my perception of what's considered ok in America today.
You’re ignoring the cases where people produce fraudulent documentation proving they are a citizen.
Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?
What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.
Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.
Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
“In Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in the Cincinnati area alone intercepted and identified more than 6,800 fraudulent, counterfeit, or stolen documents.”
That ONE CBP office in the US. And it’s not even in a state with a high population of illegal aliens. There are 20 offices in the US.
And sure creating fraudulent documents from scratch isn’t easy. But it’s not that hard to use someone else’s identity to get documents that support US citizenship. Hell, a paper social security card is proof as long as it doesn’t say “NOT WORK AUTHORIZED on it.
So it wouldn’t even be that unusual to locate an alien that the database says (correctly) has a deportation order but for them to claim US citizenship and even produce a document that looks like they are.
You can even read a nice CBP report on the problems they have with fraudulent documents.
With due respect, that problem is on CBP. I am somewhat (albeit decreasingly) sympathetic to the unique challenges that immigration enforcement agencies face in the US. We live in a country where the citizens have decided democratically that no US citizen will ever have to carry proof of US citizenship, and moreover, that national ID and standardized proof-of-citizenship passports should not even be mandatory for citizens to possess, let alone carry. We even decided that the Federal Government should be explicitly banned from creating those forms of ID.
We made these decisions for various reasons, but broadly because the voters felt that US citizenship and lawfullness should be presumptions, rather than something you had to prove in order to enjoy your rights as a citizen.
For an immigration agent, this is really tough. You have to identify unauthorized immigrants in an environment where you can't just require lawful citizens to carry ID or proof of citizenship. You legally can't arrest or (more than briefly) detain a US citizen for failure to carry citizenship documents. You have to walk on eggshells even with actual unauthorized immigrants, to avoid violating the law. And our proof-of-identity document systems are deliberately decentralized and unreliable, so you can't just check a master database. It's a tough problem!
But that's the way the cookie crumbles. We designed our society to make this kind of "papers please" enforcement difficult, which means that immigration enforcement needs to be smarter and more savvy, or else we need to actually change the laws. What ICE and CBP are trying to do now is just to ignore the law, and that doesn't work. Citizens' built this law to protect their rights; you can't just take away those rights because CBP have a tough job.
6,000 supposed papers for a pool of 5 million immigrants seems like an extremely minor problem that doesn't require shooting food bank workers to enforce.
If the paperwork is that easy to duplicate, it's on the government to make it more difficult, not beating in the faces of citizens until they produce documentation they don't have.
I feel like you’re being disingenuous in your argument.
Hundreds of thousands of aliens with fraudulent documents seems like a huge problem to me.
Keep in mind it’s US law for every alien to keep documentation of legal status on their person at all times (US code 8 USC § 1304(e)).
Since we know fraudulent documents are not uncommon, then immigration officials must have some powers to validate a person’s status if uncertainty remains.
It's only a problem if (1) the immigrants in question behaving in a dangerous and criminal fashion, or (2) you need to urgently deport millions of peaceful, non-dangerous immigrants in an extremely short period of time, and you don't care about the harm this does to society.
Obviously in case (1) you can just detain and carefully identify people, since they're actually doing dangerous things and you'll have probable cause to detain them. Note that this was the case that nearly all the 2024 election rhetoric was focused on (i.e., deporting the "rapists and murders".)
In practice we're seeing that the true goal is (2), rapid emergency deportation and arrest of non-criminal immigrants. There is absolutely no emergency that requires this to be done quickly or carelessly, such that there's any risk to US citizens' (or immigrants) civil rights. It can be done carefully, with strong evidence, without violating civil rights. But of course, violating civil rights and creating disorder appears to be the goal.
Why would a country not deport non-criminal illegal aliens? Not being American and having lived in 4 different countries, I’ve never encountered this attitude except in the US.
Controlling who enters and stays in your country is just table stakes for a functioning state. Without it, you don’t even have control over basic things like security.
In every other country I’ve lived in anyone who enters illegally or overstays is promptly removed.
So to answer your question, fraudulent documents is a massive problem. Now not only do you have no control over who enters and stays you have no ability to even determine who these people are even if you do encounter them.
> Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?
Cope with?! These systems and procedures are designed to circumvent the "complex" realities and give cover for deporting citizens and legal residents. So maybe you have a passport, but you've been attending protests, and perhaps even dared to be lippy towards an ICE agent; your passport is going to the shredder, and your ass to Liberia.
I don't know how folk keep assuming DHS/ICE are acting in good faith - a shocking number of people continue to be oblivious until the agents come for them or theirs.
Can someone remind me why this fragmented identity system is preferable to a National ID?
I get that nobody wants to be tracked by the government. But we are already being tracked... just imperfectly to the point where innocent people are being jailed.
The question should be how accurate do we want the government's data on us to be. And how much of our taxpayer money do we want to spend on companies like Palantir to fuzzy match our data across systems when we could simplify this all with a primary key.
This argument rings especially true in the U.S. where there is already a primary key in use every day. The SSN serves as a universal enumerator but without canonical data.
If the U.S. wanted to have a national ID system with rules, a defined scope, and redress procedures when things went wrong, and established it in the open, following a democratic process, I would be much happier.
The system we are getting instead has all the downsides of centralisation, with none of the upsides.
Well, in the 90s through the late 2000s there was a LOT of paranoia from the right, especially the evangelical right, as well as the milieu that is sorta called the "patriot movement" which includes minutemen militias, sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists, separatists etc. regarding Government goons coming for them, "Mark of the Beast" stuff, and New World Order global cabals and what not. They even had magazines.[0] This is the precursor to the Obama FEMA Camp conspiracy theories (Which is ironic, since we are now building camps, just you know, for those people.)
Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane.
It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth reflecting on.
> 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane
... or shop at Home Depot.
> It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act
Ironic, coincidence, or all according to plan?
The so-called right wing has been being led around by the corporate lobbyist agenda for decades now. It's not a terrible stretch to imagine the same corpo political operatives that were behind the ratcheting authoritarian ID requirements are now behind the fascist kidnap squads as they tighten the noose around our society.
I just realized I inverted the sense of what you were saying about opposition to REAL ID. The way I remember it, it was the right wing cheering on the "Patriot" act, "REAL ID", and all those general "homeland security" laws back then. Yes, there was red tribe grassroots opposition in general terms, but that kind of thing always gets brushed aside when "their" team is doing it. See also the 2nd amendment - individual liberty and "from my cold dead hands", but then zero reservations about actively cheering the government agents who summarily executed Breonna Taylor. Or these masked abduction squads currently roaming the streets - blatantly anti-American anti-Constitutional, and if JOEBIDEN had done anything resembling this we would have never heard the end of it. But since it's "their guys" doing it it's just framed as some noble exercise of the government agents' own liberty to cleanse the undesirables.
No, the right wing fielded opposition to the real ID laws. See this 2008 CATO report[0]. There was a bipartisan movement against this at the time.
But yes, far less bothered by stingrays, ALPR national surveillance, etc in more recent times.
I just want to give people their dues on this. For example Rand Paul introduced the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act which would have banned no-knock warrants if it had passed.[1]
> Rand Paul introduced the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act which would have banned no-knock warrants if it had passed
Yes, Rand Paul deserves credit for this. But isn't he basically like an exception that proves the rule?
The 2005 vote on the REAL ID ACT was 218 Yea 9 Nay for Republicans, and 42 Yea 152 Nay for Democrats. Ron Paul was one of those Nays. He deserves credit along with the other 8. But overall, it was still a Republican bill. That's what my original comment was referring to.
And it's great that Republican opposition to REAL ID built. But of course the immediate question is how much of that opposition was due to being bored with Bush, and having a Democratic administration on the horizon? Just like the dishonest appeals to fiscal responsibility during Democratic administrations.
Because while it's important to give credit and look to build pro-freedom coalitions, it's also important to call out the rank hypocrisy. And rank hypocrisy seems to be the entire platform of the Republican party these days. For example, I don't see any of these purported 2nd amendment enthusiasts forming militias to defend their states against the federalized abduction squads.
Yeah I feel ya, but a year into GW bush part 2 isn’t on the horizon of a democrat administration it was a year into the reelection, the weirdos in the Mark of the Beast camp weren’t the party yet.
This is part of the thread that became FEMA camp conspiracies and birtherism after Cambridge Analytica helped make conspiracy theorists the mainstream. What I’m asking is where are the mark of the beast weirdos now?
Well, they’re telling themselves that Domald Turmp was sent by God!
I think this is a valid question. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that multiple conflicting records introduce a doubt about the veracity of those records. So we might be able to consider that there has been a mistake made. Contrast that to a single identification with an error. In that case, there is no way to tell that an error has been made, and very little recourse.
> Can someone remind me why this fragmented identity system is preferable to a National ID?
States prefer having the power to issue ID cards and all of the control that grants them, they do not want to give up those powers, and politically the states have enough political and legal power to keep it this way.
Don’t make the mistake of presuming that this the result of a flawed cooperative system. It isn’t — it’s adversarial.
Just look at how long states fought to stop Real ID legislation.
Because when it is convenient, people like to think state's rights means something and that the federal government is the wrong place for things like this. Giving a national ID cedes power from the states to the fed. Or so discussions go
I'm also thinking about people that could get caught up at the border crossing back and forth on the regular because of this.
If you get captured as part of this Mobile Fortify stuff, it sounds like it's going to merge it with all other CBP records you have (including all border entry interactions). Pulling up at the passport desk or at a land crossing is just begging for the officer to see that an ICE HSI agent pulled you at a protest and scanned your face to pull you in for "secondary screening" for "higher risk factors" going forward and throwing nice glowing red targets on your back.
Kristi Noem says no US citizens have been arrested so it's all OK, right?
If you're white British with an accent from our shores, you don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly inconvenient —- that clearly is happening to British citizens -- but nobody is going to pin you to the ground until you can't breathe. We appear to be getting the benefit of some doubt (unless we have opinions).
And if you are white and have an American accent you're going to be ignored entirely anyway.
Perhaps carry any paperwork you need, definitely carry any medication you'll need for a few days.
As to whether the officer will ignore evidence presented: that is clearly what they are being told to do. There are lawful citizens carrying their papers with them and there's video of an ICE agent mockingly saying "what papers?"
Because on the ground it's not about immigration status really, it's about race and white power and sheer numbers of arrests to meet Stephen Miller's quotas.
> you're white British with an accent from our shores, you don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly inconvenient
This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they are running everyone through every database looking for things that might make you technically deportable that would never have come up under previous administrations:
You used to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right? Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get you out is not a sure thing.
> Kristi Noem says no US citizens have been arrested so it's all OK, right?
They've certainly been held in custody, though.
Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the purpose of a system is what it does."
Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways —- what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent, unthinking consequence of this system is what it was actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality or even the perception that the USA is hostile to foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.
If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this, then you might say the purpose of this system is to desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent expression of presidential power.
But when you combine that with blowing up boats that contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not unconscious subtext.
And Justice Kavanaugh said that even if someone is stopped and question by ICE, all they have to do is prove they're a citizen, and everything will be fine; there's really no inconvenience at all.
They've already been doing that, just not at scale yet. Trump's political enemies like Latisha James and officials who protest ICE or try to show up at ICE facilities to inspect them.
If the computer system says you are not a citizen but you produces then clearly one is wrong.
It’s no different than a US citizen having an arrest warrant but then showing the cop a final disposition from the court showing the charges were dismissed.
Whats next? It’s certainly not the cop just walking away.
You detain the person until the discrepancy can be resolved.
Are some innocent people going to be held in custody? Yes, in both cases. But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works.
Only in extraordinary cases where immigration status can’t be proven. If your document is suspect it’s examined. You can provide additional documents and interviewed about how you obtained your status.
If you are a US citizen they can call your county that holds the birth certificate, take affidavits from parents or other family members.
I mean the fact we haven’t heard of any US citizens detained for months (as you put it) is a good indication it’s not happening because you know the media would blast that story to the top for weeks.
> But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works
How it works now in Trump 2.
Obama, notably, had a better approach, with a faster rate of deportation of illegal migrants, and he did so without absurd threatening intimidating cruelty, or ordering arbitrary kidnappings off the street by violent anonymised paramilitary thugs. There was a really quite high level of voluntary compliance with that system.
The only reason this is all happening is that Stephen Miller wants to beat Obama's number: it consumes him that during Trump 1 they didn't get close to the performance of ICE under Obama 2. And he wants it to be showy, threatening, arbitrary, militarised and for it to overpoweringly favour white people.
It's legitimately crazy to normalise it by framing it in normal terms like you are doing. There is nothing normal about this, nothing essential, procedure-based or unavoidable. It's an attempt to build a white police state.
I’m sorry you’re saying under Obama when the system said someone had a deportation order and the person produced fraudulent documents ICE just threw up their hands and said “oh well!”?
The point is that in Trump 2.0 ICE tactics have changed up from targeted raids (where a few US citizens might have had time to identify themselves as such in the process of an enforcemenr action) to untargeted sweeps where people are being dragged off the street based on their ethnicity and dumped in holding camps in other states by masked goons who are not at all interested in the process because they are literally working to quotas and bonuses.
The rate of US citizens being arrested and held for days has increased exponentially and the process no longer cares about fairness; it cares about detention, intimidation and causing fear.
This change is obvious, marked to anyone paying attention, and not remotely normal.
…are being dragged off the street based on their ethnicity and dumped in holding camps in other states by masked goons..
Do you have any evidence of this? Keep in mind you started calling me names.
The rate of US citizens being arrested and held for days has increased exponentially and the process no longer cares about fairness;
Presumably such cases would be all over the news. Could you point me to a few? Not claiming to be US citizens despite no evidence and a lengthy criminal history.
I’m willing to change my opinion but it’s going to require facts not rumor and conjecture.
Now google "Kavanaugh stop". There has already been a Supreme Court case where ICE was challenged over their use of simple ethnicity to scoop up possible immigrants. Kavanaugh says: that's OK.
And I am done. It's really not my fault if the news you are consuming is not covering what is happening.
When I say don't be an idiot, I mean it in the sense of a useful idiot. Don't be uninformed. Don't be foolish. Don't let them get you to ignore what is happening.
(Mods, I appreciate this breaks the "long list of links" rule, probably. But it is an answer to the question from a wide variety of media sources which have documented what amounts to a slow-motion atrocity)
Is there a specific link about Americans being detained for extended periods?
And please stop the name calling. Not only is it against HN rules, you’re better than that.
I clicked the first link and they were about Steven Miller? Then the second Propublica was about a lawyer having to drive far to see a client.
The first Probulica article has more details but the examples include US citizens fighting with ICE and being detained.
Do you have any data on US citizens detained beyond what the law allows (Propublica says up to 3 days is legal) without extenuating circumstances like aiding illegal immigration, assaulting law enforcement, etc?
The reason I linked to articles about Stephen Miller is a) because I mentioned him in this thread and how central he is to what is going on and b) because those articles explain what is going on and the baseless processes that have been put in place that see people snatched off the street on the basis of ethnicity alone and locked up in immigration centres far from their families and lawyers.
Now if you want to continue sea-lioning, pick someone else.
God help the USA if this eyes-closed standard of avoidance is commonplace.
I have to admit that the name calling and harsh language doesn’t help in convincing me of your argument. If anything it makes me wonder why someone confident of their opinion got so upset at a few basic questions. If you’re not in the mood to debate that’s fine, don’t.
But regardless, the Supreme Court did not allow profiling based on ethnicity alone. “To be clear, apparently ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” is the direct quote from the decision.
What the court did allow are things like ethnicity, type of employment, location to be factors. That was based on the fact that those factors are directly related to job the government is trying to accomplish.
If French Canadians working illegally at tech companies in Boston are not major issue then it makes sense not to stop people that fit those profiles.
I assume you mean your parents naturalized? In which case I think you(r parents) should have been given a certificate of citizenship for you at that point, along with their own certificates of naturalization - was that not the case?
(Not suggesting anything about enforcement practices - just trying to understand what the edge cases are like.)
Nope. I was born abroad to a U.S. citizen who didn’t meet the physical presence criteria to pass on citizenship. I came to the U.S. as a child on an IR-2 green card, then when the CCA became law I automatically became a citizen. My parents applied for a passport for me, and in the process the department of state presumably shredded my green card. I don’t have a certificate of citizenship and I’m not eligible to apply for one, as I no longer live in the U.S.
Unfortunately USCIS doesn’t know anything about this (as it was all handled by the department of state), and presumably thinks I’m an alien who abandoned their status.
Wow, I see. In a sane world, I would assume the passport would be enough, so hopefully this won't cause you issues, but I can certainly imagine things going wrong. That was quite fascinating, thanks for explaining.
The databases you are concerned about are, most likely, not indexed by pictures so how does it matter if your identity is determined by face, fingerprints, passport, or another government identification document?
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