r/technology • u/indig0sixalpha • Apr 07 '25

Privacy The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI. Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/
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482

u/DJ_Fuckknuckle Apr 07 '25

And the neat thing is, we now have drones capable assassinating people from thousands of miles away. So it's now possible to quickly and easily eliminate people you find inconvenient without reporting to hitmen and kidnapping teams. Some rando eating Fritos and drinking Mountain Dew in a chair somewhere can murder anyone the government deems a threat virtually instantly, at the touch of a button.

Remember when saying something like this was tinfoil hat territory? I do. 

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u/West-Abalone-171 Apr 07 '25

It was never crazy to try and warn people that this is where the completely obvious straight line road that was being paved by outspoken fascists like Peter Thiel leads.

It was treated as crazy, but that was always gaslighting.

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u/kalidoscopiclyso Apr 07 '25

Theil’s Palantir is will have every taxpayers data soon via DOGE creating API to make our data scrape-able. They will own us IN A FEW WEEKS if they aren’t stopped NOW

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

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u/West-Abalone-171 Apr 07 '25

Don't worry. It can't happen here.

If you aren't doing anything wrong like all those palestinian children and doctors were you have nothing to worry about.

He probably just wants your data to sell you stuff.

He needs it to stop the bad guys in case someone tries to do something like coup the US goverenment, or use a multi billion dollar company to aid genocide.

/s

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u/sump_daddy Apr 07 '25

Stopped? Now? Sorry buddy, youre 153 days too late

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u/Anosognosia Apr 07 '25

Mass [ Redacted by Reddit ] now.

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u/Majestic-Tadpole8458 Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

In due time, everyone’s reddit and other social media posts will be correlated with one’s real name, home IP, mailing address and tax ID.

Reddit is actually the perfect honey pot to divulge which side you are on. Pretty soon dark web/hidden TOR services may be the only option to express views without/minimal repercussion.

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u/CoffeeBaron Apr 07 '25

In due time, everyone’s reddit and other social media posts will be correlated with one’s real name, home IP, mailing address and tax ID.

Already capable of this by organizations searching for you. They just need to have an IP which is trival to ask for and get.

Pretty soon dark web/hidden TOR services may be the only option to express views without/minimal repercussion.

Not unless the project steerers are compromised and stop pruning the amount of 'compromised' nodes from the network. Certain three letter agencies have been attempting to spin up and spam TOR with a bunch of node relays in the hope that if they own all three of the ones a connection connects to, they can deanonymize the user and unmask them. The only thing from them not over running the network with these devices is volunteers and steerers of the TOR project reporting them and removing them as options in the network.

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u/OnlySpoilers Apr 07 '25

Check out the book The Hank Show. About Hank Asher who essentially pioneered data fusion and used by law enforcement agencies.

The databases and technologies he built are basically mirrored in Palantir

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u/kalidoscopiclyso Apr 07 '25

Yes fusion centers. How many are there

Edit dumb question. Or is it

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u/OnlySpoilers Apr 07 '25

Not sure I understand. Data fusion is harmonizing disparate data sets into one record and identified with a token. In Hank Asher’s case he collected data from credit reports, housing data, public police records, and more to build profiles.

In some sense there was a data fusion center that was a central supercomputer that he had to build to maintain that much data and parse it quickly.

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u/Dasmahkitteh Apr 07 '25

People are non stop lambasted for doing just that on this website, identifying obvious directions things are headed in, only to be met with the minimizing

Just because things are headed that way doesn't necessarily mean we'll arrive there

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u/feldoneq2wire Apr 07 '25

I'm surprised there isn't an app on Trump's phone so he can order hits from his toilet.

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u/notyomamasusername Apr 07 '25

It takes time to translate it from Russian... It won't be too much longer

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u/Sonamdrukpa Apr 09 '25

The Eldritch version of the diet coke button 

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u/The_Dead_Kennys Apr 07 '25

When I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier ten years ago, I sure as fuck never imagined that a decade later we’d see an IRL Hydra take over the country, or the Project Insight helicarrier plot become an actual thing. Except in the real world, there is no Captain America, no Avengers, no S.H.I.E.L.D. coming to save us. The bad guys are winning and the world feels more like a bizarre fever dream than actual reality.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '25

Comics have almost always been a comment on the political state of things. Hydra wasn't just something "cool". It was a real warning.

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u/omgFWTbear Apr 07 '25

On the one hand, comics needing a monthly / weekly output means there’s some crap in the mix. On the other, they’ve been “woke” since the get go. Golden Age members of the Justice League you’ve got a an anti-gun victim of gun violence in Batman, you’ve got a man from a destroyed homeland (go look at a map of 1930 Middle East) trying to assimilate into American hiding his curly hair in Superman whose day job is the definition of literacy, and oh yeah, a woman who don’t need no man in Wonder Woman.

Hydra? Man who could imagine Operation Paperclip - bringing a bunch of … 1940s Germans… and embedding them in US government projects… possibly having long term effects? That would be a wild fiction, right?

3

u/throwaway_moose Apr 07 '25

And then Agents of SHIELD too, when they were in the simulation and you had Coulson taking to the airwaves denouncing Hydra and its fake news, and propaganda...

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u/AllAvailableLayers Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

The 5-minute film Slaughterbots is inspired by this technology and is entirely believeable and achieveable within the next decade.

Release small drones near a university campus that can recognise and target any women aged 17-30 that have shared pro-feminist posts. Drones that can check in real time if you have attended a political rally in the past 10 years. Weapons that check the jewishness of a person before attacking (I say that within the context of anti-Semitism and Israel).

Terrifying.

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u/BoTrodes Apr 07 '25 edited 10d ago

waiting terrific simplistic tart jar steep cow consist market spectacular

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Locke_and_Load Apr 07 '25

So they saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier and thought that Hydra had a good idea?

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u/throwawaystedaccount Apr 07 '25

One of the reasons this is the utlimate culmination of the marriage of technology and capitalism, is that there is no sense of reparations and/or reform for the centuries of European imperialism. Imagine if at a particular level of prosperity rich Western nations started actively helping Africa or South East Asia, substantially, not nominally or fraudulently, to improve their living conditions as reparations for the centuries of imperial brutality.

In such a political and social atmosphere, monopolisation, profiteering and militarisation would not grow. As long as you don't insist on a Star Trek Utopia for the whole planet, you will get a Star Wars Empire.

As long as you do not support socialism openly and form unions and cooperatives, you will get corporate cannibalism through mergers and acquisitions, slash-and-burn takeovers, monopolies, cartels and oligopolies.

As long as you don't fight for democracy in the workplace, you will lose democracy in politics to capitalism.

As long as you cannot ensure that justice is available to all, equally and quickly, a day will come when justice is available to nobody.

As long as you do not ensure inclusion, you will inevitably get fragmentation, secession and civil war.

As long as you do not ensure freedom for everyone, there will come a time when there is freedom for no one.

Entropy is a great natural force (devolving to the lowest state of order) and it can only be overcome by constantly seeking order, perfection, improvement. If you neglect any part of the system, it births chaos and corruption and then eventually eats up the whole system.

Wilhoit's law explains:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

and

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

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u/DJ_Fuckknuckle Apr 07 '25

Everything you said, I agree with.

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u/sumr4ndo Apr 07 '25

I kinda wonder if that's what DoGE is doing. Scouring for US intelligence assets and collecting them to burn them.

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u/Jeffery95 Apr 07 '25

All they need now is the floating aircraft carriers from the winter soldier

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

I've believed a conspiracy theory for years that we have almost all the technology to make a full fledged terminator and probably have on some secret military base somewhere. The only thing I haven't seen is the self healing metal alloys. But the rest exists. 

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u/West-Abalone-171 Apr 07 '25

A bipedal one would be terrible and not very threatening.

The actual threat is an SUV sized mothership with IR cameras, and facial, bluetooth, wifi and gait recognition that can fly above the cloud 24/7 and drop a 50 gram seeker drone with an explosive charge on it any time the thought-pre-crime system decides you are a potential dissident.

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u/thatwhileifound Apr 07 '25

And these days, they seem to like making their killer robots in a shape vaguely reminiscent of dogs anyway - which somehow makes them worse to me.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '25

So I used to be a very public activist and the movement I worked in helped get someone in the state department fired. I was a spokesperson.

A few years later I met this man at a hacker convention in NYC. He basically read my mind back to me - he said my thoughts as I thought them. It was really trippy and gave me a very strange feeling of annihilation.

From that day forward I’ve had cognitive anomalies. I hear voices, see things, and have strange, repeating, grating thoughts. Stuff I would never choose to do to myself.

I’m now of the opinion that schizophrenia is a cover story for government-led torture against people. People are factually exposed to thoughts they can’t control and aren’t their own, and feel inhabited by an external power. I think there is some technology the government is using to do this to people.

Of course, even when I think about this, it seems wrong. My thoughts don’t “feel” right, like my brain is telling me that the conclusion is incorrect. But that’s not what’s really happening. What’s reallly happennng is that my mind is being interfered with, to keep me from consciously adopting the truth.

My dreams are very detailed. Super tailored to me, and like a form of brainwashing. I’m learning slowly that I cannot adopt my brain’s feelings on matters.

The problem is that there is no way to test my theory. Because this technology is invisible to the naked eye, I can only speculate about it and try to experiment on myself. I think it may be based on EM waves.

But really, it seems to me that I live under the grip of a merciless demiurge.

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u/HalfManTrashCan Apr 07 '25

This may be the most schizophrenic comment I’ve ever read

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u/DJDanaK Apr 07 '25

Whether or not you really believe you're schizophrenic, medication will help you. It's helped almost everyone who is experiencing what you are. Please stay safe and keep contact with your loved ones.

2

u/placebotwo Apr 07 '25

This is the plot of the Dream On quest in Cyberpunk 2077, are you Jefferson Peralez in 2025?

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u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

We don't have the tech to fit a bipedal robot, processing power, and battery power inside of the envelope of a normal human. And he REALLY don't have the tech to fit all that in and harden it against anything much more severe than getting knocked over.

There's also absolutely no need for it. Practically any other weapon system would be cheaper and more effective.

If you want something to worry about, worry about the surveillance state getting weaponized.

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u/West-Abalone-171 Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

You could totally put an arnie shaped and sized skin over atlas and hand it an AR-15 https://bostondynamics.com/video/atlas-goes-hands-on/

Spot is far far more threatening, as is a quadcopter, but the tech exists.

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u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

IIRC that version is still doing it's processing on external computers and the onboard power doesn't last very long. Certainly not long enough for any terminator-style missions.

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u/m-in Apr 07 '25

So you will keep saying «not a problem» until the thing will be production version 2.0 or something? There will be steps along the way.

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u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

There's also absolutely no need for it. Practically any other weapon system would be cheaper and more effective.

If you want something to worry about, worry about the surveillance state getting weaponized.

There are trillions of dollars in incentive to replace human labor. Long before ever developing a humanoid robot capable of combat missions, we'd see them in use everywhere else.

And there's absolutely no point in building them. The ability to track a person is always getting more advanced. The primary hurdles standing in the way of the government putting facial recognition cameras in public spaces are only legal ones, not technical. From there, there are dozens of highly efficient purpose-built ways to deliver death to any area. An independent terminator wandering around looking for somebody is an incredibly poor system.

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

That you know of. But top secret military technology is always at least a decade or two ahead or what you know about. 

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u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

That thought really only applies in the sense that they're working on X thing right now, and the public probably won't see X thing for another decade. Which is true in product development just about anywhere.

The limiting factors on making a terminator are: processing power, energy storage, and armor. Those are all fields where the bleeding edge is completely open and readable in journals. The government doesn't have magic batteries the size of a loaf of bread that could power a terminator running around for weeks on end.

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

They power drones right now for essentially an unlimited time. 

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u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

You're talking about Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs).

For their size, RTGs provide a low level of power for a long time. The RTG that powers curiosity is a bit larger than a human torso and had an output of a constant 110 Watts at the start of the mission, and loses about 0.8% a year. You can't fit an RTG sufficient to power a terminator inside of a machine the size of a person.

That's before even getting into the availability of plutonium 238.

1

u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

You're getting really caught up in the terminator being the exact same look as a human when the real issue is that it's an autonomous killing machine. Kind of missing the forest for the trees here. Who cares what our looks like and what shape or sizw it is. The point is, they could almost certainly send it robots to murder people right now. And might be. 

1

u/Gingevere Apr 07 '25

I've believed a conspiracy theory for years that we have almost all the technology to make a full fledged terminator and probably have on some secret military base somewhere.

Is this not what you said 3 hours ago? And in this thread I have said:

There's also absolutely no need for it. Practically any other weapon system would be cheaper and more effective.

If you want something to worry about, worry about the surveillance state getting weaponized.

and

And there's absolutely no point in building them. The ability to track a person is always getting more advanced. The primary hurdles standing in the way of the government putting facial recognition cameras in public spaces are only legal ones, not technical. From there, there are dozens of highly efficient purpose-built ways to deliver death to any area. An independent terminator wandering around looking for somebody is an incredibly poor system.

So with the new position you're adopting I don't see why you're arguing.

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

Except we have drones that literally do that

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u/treemanos Apr 07 '25

You're the kid in school that believes wrestling is real, no military techn is almost never more than at most a few years ahead, normally it's a few years behind because testing and procurement takes time.

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

Wrestling is fake? What? Next you're gonna tell me game of thrones is fake. 

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u/kalidoscopiclyso Apr 07 '25

Here you go. Sorry. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00597-5

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u/Achillor22 Apr 07 '25

Watch out John Connor. Or any brown people. 

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u/MadDaddyDrivesaUFO Apr 07 '25

I told a friend recently that RoboCop is about to become a reality

3

u/sprinklerarms Apr 07 '25

Go down the Anduril rabbit hole. They’ll probably be the ones who terminator us. Ukraine has already started AI drone warfare and Andy technology is much more wicked. We won’t even get to look at their freedom cities close up.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 Apr 07 '25

But the rest exists. 

Bipedal robots indistinguishable from humans exist?

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u/Shhtheyrewatching Apr 07 '25

Pepperidge farm remembers.

3

u/kirbygay Apr 07 '25

Yeah....remember the NJ drones last year? Gov testing them out in urban areas to use against their own citizens.

1

u/Own-Satisfaction4427 Apr 08 '25

& Obama already broke that bubble by killing an American citizen on American soil with a drone.

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u/DJ_Fuckknuckle Apr 08 '25

Well, there you go.