Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)

They are. BIPA is top rate. I looked at the statute, which excludes Illinois state and local government entities, but does not talk of federal bodies. I don't know enough about the supremacy of federal statutes to know how that works, and most discussions note that the statute excludes "the government" which is not totally accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...

Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle.

Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.

In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.

Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava?

New norms go both ways.

The Netherlands has a law that makes it illegal to cover your face. Officially this is to help the police but its also a great tool against religion. Constitution>god

God wants our faces covered?

Some religions say their God wants some people covered, like women.

We now know why people had such weird makeup/facial modification attachments in dystopian sci-fi.

Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.

But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?

It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore. Theres also a bunch of of digital camo, most seem to target IR cameras [1] here's a homebrew version.

[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

[1] https://www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie

> It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.

I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.

That makes sense, the CV dazzle styles for designed for a specific algorithm that went out of use around a decade ago.

There have been some updated styles for CNN based models, but never tried them, the originals did work back in the day

Totally forgot this gem [0].

Done hide. Overwhelm.

[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/hyperface/

Agreed there are definitely a lot of Libertarians and Republicans that definitely object to random use of facial recognition as presented.

As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.

Libertarians and 90s republican are about as politically impotent as the democrats these days.

The Hannity and Infowars fans will be written off as crazy when no longer useful.

I'm assuming the joke is that what remains of them seem to be entirely on board with this.

The people who like mass surveillance also like laws against public face covering.

What about using technology to scan and identify faces of those who oppress?

Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734369

(Not scanning faces, but continuously monitoring yourself to prove innocence. Depressing.)

The supreme court has effectively removed all of the possible mechanisms to sue ICE or DHS and hold them accountable, with the sole exception of having the DOJ prosecute them on your behalf, which is of course never going to happen. The only remaining possibility to hold them accountable for crimes appears to be within the states judicial systems- but most are currently setup to not allow this, deferring to the federal mechanisms which only very recently stopped existing.

This Vox article and the podcast with the same name does a good job of explaining how it is now effectively impossible to hold ICE accountable to the law: https://www.vox.com/politics/464962/supreme-court-ice-no-law

Beyond this, state law may not supersede federal authority. This will likely go to the Supreme Court before it's actually decided, short of congressional action (unlikely).

I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.

While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.

Why would you believe any clarifying statements they'd give?

They'd just tell you they are only going after pedo-terrorists.

What are we going to do? Call them liars? They don't care.

Because it's pay off journalistic integrity to at least try to get and reflect a statement from all parties involved.

Without it I have to look at any reporting as unduly biased and likely from an activist lens.

I have a healthy distrust of both the govt and journalists.

People can look identical, that's the reason we started using finger prints. Faces are not unique.

Also, this app uses photos from a combination of government databases, but there are millions of citizens without photo ID who won't show up in any of them.

Social media datasets are likely in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI

My friend (who has an identical twin) was joking about scanning himself into Cameo mode on Sora and making some goofy videos and saying they were his brother.

There is no scientific proof that fingerprints are unique, either. Like a lot of forensic science, it's just accepted wisdom.

I think the scientific consensus is that they are NOT unique. I seem to recall there’s something like a one in five million chance of collision. (Recalling from memory so please verify, I recall thinking that in a large city there’s likely to be another person who’s fingerprints could be mistaken for yours)

IIRC, someone was accused and arrested for murder who lived across the country and couldn't have possibly committed the crime based on fingerprint match.

A book to read on the history of surveillance technology, starting with "pass papers" for slaves to finger prints:

The Soft Cage - Surveillance in America: From Slavery to the War on Terror, Christian Parenti, 2003

https://archive.org/details/softcagesurveill0000pare

You're making the unreasonable assumption of good faith on the part of the app developers.

It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.

Faces can’t be easily be “faked” in person but they can definitely be misrecognized or recognized correctly against mistagged data. Anything like this needs to be designed with the assumption that errors will be frequent enough that the finding has to be validated before doing something serious.

> This is completely lawless.

They don't give a **.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-rule-of-law-i...

I think ICE is in fact setup / groomed to be ... lawless. Just thugs for the federal government.

Its not just ICE, its clear Trump intent for law enforcement (and not just federal) from even very early on in his first term, where a highlighted priority was terminating then-active federal enforcement actions against state law enforcement agencies for violations of civil rights. Lawless “law enforcement” has been one of the most consistent overt priorities Trump has had.

I think ICE's expansion + their massive legal discretion that goes beyond typical law enforcement is just he perfect place to put thugs. ICE by design is just the spot to have those folks, sadly.

Also they operate in the constitution free zone of 100 miles from a border.

Yes, but ICE has been fast and loose with the law for a long time so they’re starting without something like the military’s culture about lawful orders, appropriate use of force, etc. As in so many areas, past presidents ignoring the problem left it ready for scaled up abuse.

ICE leadership below the top level is currently being purged, and apparently replaced with officials transferred from Border Patrol, because ICE’s approach and culture is more targeted and criminality based, and many of the biggest abuses so far in the immigration crackdown blamed on “ICE” have actually been carried out by Border Patrol (its not a coincidence that much of the current controversy in Chicago centers around thhe regional Border Patrol commander.)

While ICE is being massively scaled up with the intent that you describe, its not unique in kind or even the worst by degree of the agencies involved in terms of either historic or current lawlessness. It's just the one with the public mission most in line with the propaganda cover chosen for Trump's totalitarian efforts.

> the person is an alien

The dehumanizing language is absolutely disgusting and it's use is an important milestone towards genocide.

This particular word has been in official use for ages. I agree that it's disgusting.

Alien has been the legal term since the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

Resurrecting obscure rasistic terminology from 200 years ago isn't much of an excuse.

It is the currently used language of the U.S. government.

It is often the case that a "good" word is used, and then the derogatory secondary meanings grow.

Years ago special needs was a fairly safe term, yet now "speshul" definitely has different tone. I'm sure you know if many other examples (I can think of heaps). I predict that "delayed" will become derogatory.

I think that banning words is literally dumb. I am bit older and went through the Politically Correct putsh. Disclaimer: I'm a lefty.

I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"

At this point, the US is a failed democracy and a facist state. I would definitely advice people from other countries to leave ASAP.

The facist American government is even sending their dissident citizens to detention camps in Africa .

Good luck to Americans that cannot go somewhere else.

Cops be cops: https://denverite.com/2025/10/27/bow-mar-flock-cameras-accus...

In that case it's Bow Mar, a small town in Colorado, relying on flock cameras to issue tickets for petty theft.

We as a society just aren't capable of using these toys right.

I'd say it's nice to see that particular demographic at the business end of this 1984 crap since they're usually the ones pushing it but I don't think the rest of them are smart enough to have the "that could be me" reaction.

A YC investment btw

I'm somewhat morbidly curious how many citizens we're going to deport to random countries. It happened fairly often before this administration.

Can you give me some specific examples of deported citizens?

You can check the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...

Lots of lawsuits forthcoming. Who’s going to pay for them? We are.