[Lonestar1440]

... And what do you think stops them from revoking the passports, today?

Do you think it is Courts and the looming Midterms; or are they just flummoxed by the lack of good surveillance data?

It's really a fantasy and a silly Taboo.

Our Democracy will live or die by politics, not silly rules on data collection at the margins.

[dghlsakjg]

Global entry privileges have been revoked for people present at legal protests based on facial recognition.

Not a fantasy and the taboo has already been broken.

While losing access to global entry without due process isn’t the same thing as revoking a passport, it’s awfully close.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/minnesota...

[macintux]

We’ve never had a central data store that would make it practical to achieve such a feat. Now we have one that could answer questions like this, forever.

Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.

[Lonestar1440]

The FBI has been an IBM customer for a very long time.

Like maybe the "cheap cameras everywhere" part is novel + important, but "central data store" truly is not.

Slippery reasoning like this is how silly taboos get perpetuated.

[dghlsakjg]

While I don't love the FBI's history of data collection, there is a world of difference between warehousing data from government records, and building a graph of warehoused data from all possible sources and selling access to any small town police chief that can convince the city council to pay for it.

Plus, data in FBI custody is nominally subject to laws and oversight in a way that privately held data is not.

[K0balt]

If you think democracy still has a chance in a nation as diverse and expansive as the united states, given that technology empowers despots and poisons democracies that are too big to be held by social bonds, then you are much more optimistic than I am.

At this point, the only way to preserve democracy would be to mostly dissolve the federal system, leaving states as democracies without the heavy hand and massive financial leverage from above.

States are closer to the right size for democracy to be resistant, but I think we’d need city-states of the metropolises, and big states like California would possibly need to subdivide.