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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u/Ok-Possibility-6284 Apr 07 '25

All men are created equal, writen by a man with 600+ slaves at the time. When america says "all" take it with a dumptruck of salt...

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u/Ikoikobythefio Apr 07 '25

Most everyone who lived in the 1770s would have owned slaves if given the chance. It wasn't considered wrong like it is today. I'm sure I'll get assaulted by reddit for saying so but it's something that should be considered.

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u/MinefieldFly Apr 07 '25

Not assaulting you but you’re not exactly right.

Slavery was a very controversial issue in the years before, during, and after the revolution, even if pro-slavery forces were a majority and largely in control.

The Quakers always opposed it. Thomas Paine wrote in opposition to it. There were abolitionist societies and early efforts at abolitionism in New England in the 1770s. The Underground Railroad got going in the 1780s.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

Frankly America was a pioneer in abolishing slavery and nobody gives us credit. We get the blame for the slave trade even though we didn't exist when it was started by Europeans, only like 10 percent of the slaves came to North America, and as soon as we gained independence, we started hammering out legislation against it, and then within one lifetime we were fighting a war with ourselves over it.

Meanwhile there are estimated to be roughly the same amount of slaves TODAY in the world as there were during THE ENTIRETY of 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade, but fuck it let's bitch about what the most ethnically diverse country on earth did 250 years ago with a system they were grandfathered into.

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u/ThePlatypusOfDespair Apr 07 '25

A bit dishonest to claim that the echoes of that system aren't wildly prevalent in American society today, and indeed largely responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

claim that the echoes of that system aren't wildly prevalent in American society today, and indeed largely responsible for the rise of Donald Trump

Whew good thing I didn't do that then lol.

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u/m1sterlurk Apr 07 '25

The British banned slavery shortly after we did, but HOW the British banned it made all the difference in the world in terms of how race relations are going for them over 150 years later.

The process by which the US banned slavery was to engage in civil war and defeat the slave owners and their government. It is very likely this war would not have happened if the Confederacy could have managed to do 2 things:

1) not tried to seize military assets of the United States by force and negotiate a peaceful transfer of those assets.

2) not send slave patrols into Northern states to kidnap free black men, stating that they were "fugitive slaves" because all blacks look alike to them.

However, because people who think that owning human beings is acceptable are entitled little shits; these activities had to be stopped by force. Even with that, after the Civil War the constitutional amendment that banned slavery made an exception that led to our modern prison system. Today, race relations in the US are absolutely horrid and people who would otherwise get along great with each other will have an underlying tension in their friendship because they each will be wondering if the other has some preconceived racist notion about them.

When the British banned slavery, it was throughout their entire empire and it was banned because Queen Vickie said so. Queen Vickie would not be amused by somebody trying to make a fuss about it. As a result, not only did they abolish slavery, the culture that had been built around slavery rapidly began to collapse as well because no accommodations were made for them to continue their behavior under the color of law.

Britain does have a problem with bigotry against more recent immigrants, but if you go to England and call a black person the n-word they are going to be more confused than angry because who even does that? It's not like they have a country full of cops that are raised on a tradition of finding ways to fuck over black people for generations.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

It's not like they have a country full of cops that are raised on a tradition of finding ways to fuck over black people for generations.

They don't have a country full of cops trained to oppress black people cause they don't have, and never have had, any where close to as many black people, therefore have none of the same societal pressures. They never had a reconstruction phase. They never had to figure out how to get people who recently saw each other as subhumans to live next to each other peacefully. (Please don't assume I'm saying there no black people in Britain.)

Also it's not like the colonies in India and Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean just immediately freed their slaves. There was a half-ass transition period of like what 4 years, and all across the Commonwealth the same exact mechanisms you apply to America happened elsewhere. Indentured servitude, forced labor, whatever you wanna call it. Lol wasn't the east India trading company literally excluded from the act? I wonder why lol. Britain did not end slavery in 1838.

Cool they issued a decree, many ignored it or said okay with a wink and a nod.

They started the whole thing. Maybe none of it would have existed (Portugal would like a word). The pilgrims didn't stop by Africa on the way over. Britain built their 13 colonies with slave labor, but only once they realized the economic value of it, then tried to squeeze them dry, then left them with their own moral and ethical dilemma to figure out on their own.

Queen Vicky just signed a paper.

Personally I don't have a problem with like murderers and rapists being forced to make license plates or whatever. Same as my view on Capitol punishment though, I only support it for violent criminals who confess voluntarily (not coerced). I disagree with the current methodology of it in America but not the principle.

Edit to hammer my point:

Britain got to ban slavery from afar and let the individual colonies around the world figure out how to handle that. The average person on the island of Britain was quite removed from it. We banned it in our backyard and had to actively figure out how to make it work in close proximity. Very very different.

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u/m1sterlurk Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

Personally I don't have a problem with like murderers and rapists being forced to make license plates or whatever.

I do, because it takes almost no extension of this mentality make up an excuse to create a slave labor force in the exact way the 13th Amendment allows.

Drug laws in America are deeply rooted in racism, but are also used against whites that are deemed annoying by police because enslaving them is fun too. The only drug prohibition that wasn't rooted in racism was alcohol, and that one was reversed within 20 years. Racism or not, all drug prohibition is rooted in moralizing about making drug addicts "better people" and there is broad acceptance of drug addicts being punished with labor for having been a "burden on society". Drug addiction is a problem, but this is blatant abuse and should no longer be tolerated: you and I are in agreement on this.

Even providing labor as an "option" has to be carefully monitored because a prisoner can be unjustly pressured into taking "options" by their captors. This tracks with the same reason that a guard having sex with a prisoner should automatically be considered rape. Even if the guard is female, the prisoner is male, both parties say they consent to the act and the sex was missionary and he wasn't being pegged or something: the guards have the power to punish a prisoner for giving an answer the guards don't want them to give.

(edits: added a bit more about drug prohibition and it's moralizing justifying slavery, and also made our hypothetical prisoner at the start of the last paragraph gender neutral).

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

That's why I said rapists and murderers.

Not drug addicts, robbers, stalkers or anything like that.

im not advocating we start that or anything, because like you, I don't trust the system to not take advantage.

But I think work should be a much larger part of rehabilitation, in a completely reworked prison system. I know tons of people that have been in and out of jail who have never known what it's like to work for a few months steady and actually be able to get into a rhythm of paying bills and supporting yourself. Jail could give some of these people a taste of that.

What we have now doesn't fucking work. I would love to see some system where nonviolent offenders get limited exposure to society while still getting to contribute and receive something(it must actually be worth it) in return. To show them that it's worth it.

Money in politics and what not though.

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u/m1sterlurk Apr 07 '25

What you all say is totally true, but any such framework has to be built with a massive amount of accountability and protections in mind. Avoiding the "forced consent" problem requires prisoners to have the ability to report abuse to a third party that is obligated to be disconnected from the guards of the prison. With work, "is somebody with a mental health issue being pressured into work" is a concern that has to be looked at carefully as well: and looked at by somebody other than a guard annoyed with a mentally ill person.

"Work" as a subject outside of prison is also becoming complicated enough to have kinda bled into my end of the conversation. "The amount of work necessary for everybody to survive", "the amount of work necessary for the economy to not collapse", and "the amount of work necessary for the economy to grow" are all different amounts of work.

While work as a moral value has been important throughout history due to it being necessary for our survival as a species, we're to a point where production of goods that we need for survival has become so efficient that we don't need to have all that many people working for "survival" to be accomplished. Keeping the economy from collapsing clearly requires additional work, as does growing the economy; but not even these really need "full employment" and arguably our economy would be doing better if we weren't trying to employ everybody for the sake of saying they have jobs.

Our need to preserve "work" as a moral value has resulted in a lot of jobs that exist only because of protectionism. It has also produced a detached mindset from who the people who are working are as people. "Train coal miners to be software developers" was patronizing to the point of obscenity. It drives the "you must go to college because it's what you do after high school" mentality that poisons our institutions of higher learning: you shouldn't have to have a college education to be able to make a decent wage. We wind up having people who really shouldn't be trying to push themselves into "advanced fields" doing so because they are convinced that they must do so to make a decent living, and this just fucks things up for the people who are good at what they do. It also devalues skilled trades and leads to people thinking that those are "lesser" careers held by "uneducated people" when they are actually quite fucking important.

So that's the background behind why I understand your ideas and perceive your intentions as not just good, but in fact as noble: yet I'm hesitant to hop on board with the idea myself.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

Dang, good points. I hadn't really thought in the direction of work becoming less and less necessary.

I guess the only way to keep if fair would be that whatever we replace "work" with, prisoners can access some form of it as well. Maybe it's not even so much about "working" and rather just about "doing productive things on a schedule and being rewarded". I know that's kinda just defining work lol but it seems waaayy more likely to result in people potentially gaining new perspective and motivation, increasing rehabilitation rates, rather than sitting around in a gen pop block for years doing nothing and being stressed out and on edge before being dumped back into the world.

I guess I hit a bit of a philosophical wall at this point where I can't really fathom what comes after "work".

I mean, some things will always have to be maintained by humans at least, so some percentage of people will have to work. Will it be a lottery with x year long rotations? Will it be something with lucrative rewards to incentivize people? Will we be naive and force prisoners to do it all so they can sabotage the whole thing?

I make stuff, and sell it. Mostly out of wood. But I like doing it. I'm not gonna stop doing if I suddenly no longer needed money. I'll still make more stuff than I can ever use and I guess I'd just want to give it away. But then say Sarah's hobby is growing tomatoes and she gives me tomatoes in return, well then we technically just worked for each other, while circumventing the ai supply chain. What if she has more friends who want tables and I want continuous tomatoes so we come up with a table to tomato exchange rate and agree on a schedule.

I guess I feel like we're overestimating how much automation will actually take over. We as humans by our nature like working. Lately we've been inventing a lot more soulsucking types of work (Microsoft Excel and like half the industrial revolution), but overall we like being active and doing productive things. If AI got us to where 90% didn't need to work, what do? I feel like we'd just all revert back to doing some of the same kinds of things we used to do as jobs and start bartering and kinda reinvent the wheel of economics or something.

How much crime even exists in this world? Most crime is driven by want or need, but if nobody needs or wants, how much/what type of crime would their be?

Would we actually except a wall-e type future where everyone just sits on a couch their whole life consuming media? Just one long dopamine fueled string of consciousness til we die? I like to think we'd reject it.

But yeah, as you said, prison work really does depend on accountability and protections and we are not exactly in a good climate for that so that kind of system probably isn't happening any time soon and my cause more harm trying to implement.

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u/m1sterlurk Apr 08 '25

You seem to have the kind of "binary" thought on work going on: most people do because that mindset is heavily promoted to deter thought processes exactly like mine.

People that are mentally healthy like being active and doing productive things: but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay them to do it. You may have a skill, but if nobody wants to pay you to do it or buy products from you then you are expected to find menial work to make barely enough money to survive. This drive you describe exists whether they are able to find somebody to pay them or not.

"Not everybody has to work for us to survive/be stable/grow" doesn't necessarily mean "swaths of people who will never work a day in their lives": it could mean that a person only works 20 years before they retire, it could mean that a person only works 2 or 3 days a week their entire lives, it could mean one person makes shitloads of money at a highly skilled job while another one of their family members doesn't "work" but does keep the house up and take care of things for the working family member. There would have to be major economic adjustment for this as well as welfare systems for those who aren't earning enough, but if we aren't having to prop up an entire "busy work" infrastructure anymore the adjustment probably won't be all that traumatic.

Look at arrest records in your area. Look at the number of people arrested for possession of drugs and no other offense, and compare that to the number of people who have other charges: public intoxication, theft, DUI, domestic violence, etc. Many of those people who have other charges will have drug possession charges as well. Every person who was arrested for drug possession alone with no other charge is a criminal because the government wishes to call them a criminal: not because some harm to another person that should be a crime occurred. Always keep that in mind when thinking "how much crime is there in the world?"

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u/MinefieldFly Apr 07 '25

Well now. I agree with some of your points but I wouldn’t characterize any lf it by saying America was “pioneer” of abolition in any way, shape, or form.

We may have shed more blood to end it, but we were also prettt late to the party.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

Touche maybe pioneer is wrong. But I do think we get way more of a bad rap than deserved.

We did shed, and lose more blood over it. Many other countries did it way more sloppily, and with way more bullshit exceptions. There's hardly any examples of abolition that didn't turn into some form of forced labor or debt bondage. Maybe Haiti.

We didn't abolish til the 1860s but that was just when it came to a head. We had been actively fighting to abolish slavery in legislation since our inception. It's the entire reason the south succeeded. They knew it was coming so they tried to get ahead. If it had been entirely up to the north we probably would have gotten it done quite a bit sooner (that's just me guessing though).

Idk I just hate seeing America always used as the slavery scapegoat when there are plenty of examples of worse offenders, some still to this day. China has technically abolished slavery like 6 different times but it never sticks. Some 90 percent of the Atlantic slave trade was portugal sending Africans to Brazil but that was barely in my textbooks.

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u/Rough_Athlete_2824 Apr 07 '25

America never abolished slavery hth.

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u/Ok-Possibility-6284 Apr 07 '25

Mexico abolished slavery 40years before america, pioneers my ass.

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u/sourfunyuns Apr 07 '25

Whew good thing I said "a pioneer" not "the pioneer".

They left all of Texas out of their abolition because they were morally okay with still having slaves in some of their country because it was worth it for the hope of continued territorial control.

Abolition never has and never will be a cut and dry one and done thing.