‘We should be worried’: report sheds light on ICE’s booming arsenal of hi-tech surveillance tools
Do Americans really want this crap? I can't believe that we don't hold our governments accountable.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/ice-tech-surveillance-arsenalOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml154
Comments24
In other news (well, from April): https://post.parliament.uk/facial-recognition-technology-in-policing
Reminder that the flock cameras are easily hacked and ICE are as comically insufficient as they are unnecessary.
Is it "hacking" when they are broadcasting on public open internet?
Depends on who you piss off
racist Americans voted for it, but are finding out how much it sucks. the majority of America never wanted any of this
If the "majority of Americans" didn't give enough of a shit to care then they deserve the consequences of their ignorance....
no one deserves this. voting patterns aren't simply "ignorance", they're complex. because you dismiss it so easily, you can't fight it.
All Americans are racist, they are born in a culturally racist society. You have to live outside the US to get it.
structural racism and overt racism exist in America and most other places too.
all Americans grow up in the racist society that exists here, some of them attempt to fight it, many others don't like it but don't find a way to resist. others actively build and support it.
You don't get it. Their racism is even in the little things: asking for someone's ascendency, the obssession with "race" classification (there's only ine race: the human race), the segregation that led to certain ethnic "accents" and so on. All of this shit helps to build up a Geoge Floyd.
American racism is pervasive and there are idiosyncratic ways in which it is expressed here, but Europe and Asia, for example, have their big and small ways of expressing it too. look at how people from Africa or Turkey are treated in Europe, or groups like the Sami, Romani, Uighur, and indigenous peoples everywhere. As another example, Latin America has pervasive colorism, which can also appear in pseudoscientific ways.
none of this is to excuse or minimize American racism. it's one of the nation's core atrocities. I just want people in other places to admit how much of a problem it is where they are too.
Hell, even the fact that the term "African American" was invented because "black" was considered offensive. Judgement was baked right in (or at least assumed to be by enough that this somehow got popular) to using their skin colour as a descriptor.
Which then led to many people being called "African American" despite having no connection to either Africa or America.
This. That Black and Negro are considered offensive is baffling in comparison to White and Brown (this one isn't in the same status than White though so it might be used offensively by some racist mouth shitter).
With voter turn outs like that most didn't know or care.
Edit: you can downvote but I'd rather see you dispute my claim
How does an American hold their government accountable? They vote but what can be done between elections?
Lots of things can happen at the local level.
Example. Municipalities are banning Flock cameras locally. It's small but rapidly gaining ground. The ore momentum it gets, the easier for others to join in. There's even a national bill now b/c so many ppl hate these. Bipartisan support. Aims to block ALPR nationwide except for a few uses like highway tolling. The bill is not perfect. But do not fall into the trap of thinking not perfect means useless.
Most ppl don't want to live in a surveilence state. It feels hopeless but we have ways to push back. It won't happen overnight. But over time we can make a diff.
They don't. In America politicians choose their voters, not the other way around....
Tbh join a couple organizations that address things you care about and they will give you plenty to do e.g. write/call your representative, participate in X community outreach event, donate to Y cause etc.
it shouldn't be different from everywhere else
We can do nothing. Now people are getting 30 year sentences for protesting in Texas. They are clearly sending a message that we will be shot in the streets like Alex Pretti or we will be thrown in jail.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/us/texas-immigration-detention-center-shooting-sentencing
If I see ICE in my neighborhood I'll have my camera out and my pew pew in my belt
Yeah, well, nobody started shooting the fuckers before they could get spooled up
One thing that makes this all difficult is the size and fragmentation of America. American states are the size of European countries and separated by subculture and geography. Organizing a state to hold its state government accountable might be doable in some states, but holding the federal government accountable is fifty times harder at least. Then there’s coordinating messaging and organizing across states. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s no small feat. The will of the American people moves in slower, more inexorable tides.
This is the missing piece most people don't get. If any one European power has access to an entire continent of resources they would be pretty well off. This is American Exceptionalism in a nutshell.
Of course it wasn't actually our continent. We had to engage in a lot of genocide to acquire the land. The strangest part is that there was so much land we could have easily lived in peace. So it really was a conscious decision to go around and exterminate all the tribes.
Between genocide and the slave trade the US was absolutely abysmal when it came to human rights. Something that has never changed. The only reason ithe US was so successful was again because of so much space.
Not only does the size of America make organizing to influence the federal government hard it also acts as a buffer for the decline that is being engineered by the wealthy class. There is plenty to go around, but it is never enough for them. If our country was smaller people would feel these shit policies much quicker and react.