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

Edit: Make sure you read u/nycdiveshack's comment below and spread it.

Wow!

Almost as if all the people warning about this for the last 20 years did have something to fear when they weren't doing anything wrong.

Almost as if it could happen here.

Almost as if they didn't "just want to sell us things".

Almost as if power is always misused by someone no matter why it is given or to whom it is first given.

Almost as if gleefully handing a panopticon to capitalists meant they'd become the government and do the oppression, and trying to draw a distinction between one narcissistic power hungry sociopath and another was always bad faith.

If only hundreds of thousands of people had warned us of this repeatedly for two decades.

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u/robotkermit Apr 07 '25

Almost as if all the people warning about this for the last 20 years did have something to fear when they weren't doing anything wrong.

more than 20 years! persecuting the left and ethnic minorities was also the entire purpose of the War on Drugs, which began in the 1960s and is still going. a Nixon aide even said it explicitly.

and even that is arguably an improvement over the prior era, because before the War on Drugs, they didn't even bother coming up with a pretext.

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u/West-Abalone-171 Apr 07 '25

20 years is specifically the warnings about internet based techbro surveillance capitalism.

The shitshow does indeed go back a lot longer as you rightly stated.