By the time this makes it through the courts people will have forgotten.
What are you referring to?
"According to the TSA, your information is generally deleted shortly after you pass the screening process and is not used for surveillance purposes."
Now using it to target protesters? Meh.
This is one of _many_ reasons why biometrics need to be a personal civil liberty. The individual must have the right to say "no" to _any_ "requirement" for giving up biometric data, unless they are convicted as a criminal (IMO). Because once you deliver that information, you _cannot_ trust any other party _to actually do what they say will do and destroy said data_, and that's not even considering just poor storage of said data.
Once your biometrics are in a database, you're fucked *for life* because it's completely unrealistic to have it destroyed with absolute certainty. This needs to be a *global human right*, as hard as those are to come by still.
Guess who is doing the identifying - CBP and ICE. Guess who runs borders and immigration, which is the use case for PreCheck and Global Entry?
Guess what the stated jurisdictional limits are for CBP? 100 miles from any possible border [https://legalclarity.org/immigration-map-of-us-jurisdictiona...].
Guess who has essentially unlimited jurisdictional limits? ICE.
So they can pretend they are ‘checking for immigration status’ using the existing photos and biometrics, while simultaneously gathering information on who is at what protest.
Then the info gets shared once gathered - with or without plausible deniability - and blam. Bobs your uncle.
To quote a prominent US historian:
In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.
One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.
Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.
Not ICE?
> Guess who has essentially unlimited jurisdictional limits? ICE.
ICE thinks that. The courts are disagreeing.
Unlimited jurisdictional limits - and the courts will enforce this with whose army? As it were.
ICE isn’t allowed to act on citizens either, and yet here we are.
Biometrics are abusable in so many different ways, I probably don't know them all. But here's some thoughts around that.
It's proven that police have for decades planted evidence to falsely incriminate individuals. Placing a gun at the scene of an occurrence is one example. The difference is if biometrics are "planted" they are biologically unique to you, and you have no reasonable way of disproving that "you did it".
And then there's silently denying you. Whether it's a nation's border entity, or perhaps an insurance provider, biometric data can be used to uniquely identify you and connect you to things that *are* legal, but the Administration de jour doesn't "like" (read: LITERALLY RIGHT NOW). Say something to upset the babbis in the white house? Did you give your blood to 23andme? Your fingerprint to a government agency? Yeah, good luck getting in/out of the USA freely.
Biometrics needs to be a *global and universal right to refuse*. In that, IMO you must be always able to say "no" and have it be legally binding to *any* entity saying "give me your XYZ biometrics", except _maybe_ if you're a *convicted* criminal.
This goes far beyond the whole "I never thought about it that way" problems, this is a you're fucked for life if you give away any of it. It's time we make the time to get ahead of this problem that already exists.
Join me.
FTFA: “Protesting isn’t a listed or ‘valid’ reason for having Global Entry revoked, but being arrested at a protest is. Impeding or interfering with the agency is. And being investigated is.”
They’re making analogy to China’s social-credit system. It would be like if Global Entry was held by most Americans and you needed it to get a credit card or board a train.
To the extent it’s a government program with any discretion, yes. In every other respect, no.
There’s always been a pretty clear mantra that GE is a privilege not a right and that it’s always been an arbitrary and capricious system.
In some ways I think maintaining GE is probably as hard or harder than maintaining a low level (ie Secret) security clearance; it seems to be based on similar databases and discretion with less transparency, human touch, or opportunity to appeal.
They are at least (according to the 9th circuit) supposed to disclose why the GE was revoked though: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/05/22/2...
What are you basing this on? This administration is constantly losing in court.
Plus even if the administration loses, why would they care? They aren’t going to jail for those losses.
Which is far from “nearly impossible.”
> even if the administration loses, why would they care? They aren’t going to jail
Neither is someone whose TSA PreCheck is revoked.
The first amendment may be frustratingly silent on fruit trade regulations, but it's 100% not unclear about abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We're now in the Find Out phase of "Let's fuck around with DHS and see if they take us off their club's VIP list".
In which case, it’s up to the Supreme Court to either explicitly (through judgment) or implicitly (through denying a hearing of the case) decide.
> getting to jump the line at the airport is a “material adverse action”
This is rhetorical device of framing. I could just as easily say:
> Pretending to open an online cupcake shop and pretending to be forced to serve gay people isn’t a “material adverse action”
And it would sound equally ridiculous, yet the highest court in the land ruled in that individual’s favor.
Let me give you a good analogy for this particular issue: anti-BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) legislation.
40+ years ago public pressure to mount against apartheid South Africa and it was incredibly successful as a global movement that culminated in toppling the regime.
You know who didn't like BDS? Israel, who interestingly was also a close of South Africa at the time. Why? Because it realized it was susceptible to the same pressure and was (and is) an apartheid state.
So a deep lobbying effort began to pass various bills to ban BDS movements. Roughly 35-38 states have so-called anti-BDS laws. In Texas, for example, you cannot be a public teacher without signing a contract agreeing to never boycott the state of Israel [1].
Is this a clear violation of free speech? Of course it is. Remember that the Fthe First Amendment is a restriction on the government restricting speech and anti-BDS legislation clearly does that.
So why is it still legal? Because courts have essentially decided that anti-BDS laws block commerce not speech and that's not a protected activity. Or rather there's (apparently) no way to determine speech from commerce.
See what I mean when I say the constitution doesn't mean as much as you think it does?
Remember too that this is the same country whose courts ruled that a Colorado law banning discrimination of same sex couples was unconstitutional because it violated the "rights" of someone for a hypothetical cake nobody asked them to make and a hypothetical website business that didn't exist making a hypothetical business nobody asked for.
So how's that relevant here? Because I can easily see the courts ruling this way: Global Entry is travel. Removing you doesn't ban your movement or restrict your speech. You can still travel to and from the country and interstate. You just have to go in the longer TSA line. Therefore it's not a restriction on speech.
[1]: https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/federal-teacher-striking/
It’s clear the constitution is something in their way, not something they respect. By violating it a little bit each day, it’ll lose meaning and half the country will be primed to replace it.
But also Global Entry isn't really a thing, it's kind of just like a weird privilege some people can get ... because ... ??? It's just a fake-privilege thing. Taking it away doesn't actually prevent anyone from doing anything/going anywhere they would have anyways.
Taking it away can mean a much longer wait returning to the US. And while that certainly isn't an earth-shattering problem that is going to cost people their lives or general freedom, it is absolutely unconstitutional for the government to retaliate against someone for exercising their constitutional rights.
The idea that you can be so dismissive about that concept is a bit chilling, to be honest.
I also find Global Entry, TSA Precheck, and especially Clear to all be problematic, along with the fact that people flying on private jets don't need to go through the same TSA checks that the rest of us do. Hell, I even think it's bad to have different lines at customs for citizens vs. non-citizens. I think the most-privileged of us should use the same public infrastructure as the least-privileged of us.
My comment was a reflection of multiple different opinions on different topics.
This is incredibly scary and violating. It’s not in line with due process and our societal values. But I also wonder if the right realizes that they’ve slowly morphed into the same social credit score authoritarianism that they have criticized for years.
The scary thing is that I think it is in line with the social values of a disturbingly sizeable, growing group of Americans.
Populist right voters however hate socialism but also want the government to keep their hands off their medicare and social security.
Reminder the rise of the far right was pushed by wealthy who wanted to get wealthier. There was no grassroots movement of status anxiety or grievance.
We had safety nets, they were no defense against the right.
Curious that at its current score and comment count it’s no longer on the front page, despite being neither flagged nor marked as dupe.
Edit: guess it’s flipping in between page 1 and 2 per refresh.