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.
By law or policy?
The question you asked, as pointed out, is a non sequitor given the reality of what’s going on.
Not what non sequitur means nor how it’s spelled. And repeating a point in the same comment doesn’t count as pointing it out previously.
To the extent there is non sequitur in this thread, it’s in jumping into a legal discussion halfway to argue the law doesn’t actually matter because you feel like it.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/30/st-peter-police-chi...
Chicago Woman Shot 5 Times By Border Agents Will Testify In Washington Next Week https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/01/29/chicago-woman-shot-5...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBd5qfRe0SY
Thanks go out to tech for enabling these guys.
Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 includes "civil disorder" in its list of acts of "domestic terrorism." Its indicia of "terroristic activities" includes extremely vague language like "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism" and "extremism on migration, race, and gender" and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality".[^1]
I sincerely hope that the engineers responsible for these technologies have fully grasped where things seem headed. This country is teetering on a knife's edge. Maybe more precariously than we know. Nobody can know for sure if we've tipped too far until it's too late.
The economy cannot thrive in a vacuum of normalcy and stability. If things escalate into something akin to The Troubles... I hope that's factored into their cost-benefit analysis.
[^1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
What are you basing this on? This administration is constantly losing in court.
The way this comment ignores that the administration has not been held in contempt by the Supreme 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.
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...
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.”
> “Protesting isn’t a listed or ‘valid’ reason for having Global Entry revoked, but being arrested at a protest is… And being investigated is.”
its no secret they're declaring everything a protest. they are actively and seemingly randomly roaming, demanding ids, and then declaring everything from that moment forward a protest. this isnt imaginary, its happening regularly.
it’s no secret how many people they have arrested and released an hour or two later once they’re "investigated."
it’s also no secret that they’re simply arresting people, who arent at a protest, but who happen to be in the same street they’ve roamed to.
if they roam into my neighborhood, and if i were to be outside walking my dog, they demand my id which i probably wouldnt have because im just walking my dog. so they arrest me. hours later let me go because they’ve "investigated" and oops, just a neighbor out walking his dog..
if they've declared it a protest, this would mean i would have just been arrested and investigated at what they call a protest.
so now in this situation i would barred from global entry because they’ve declared everyone in their eyeline worthy of arrest and then wrongly arrested and investigated me?
what a cluster fuck. we need to get due process back, this is insanity.
not to mention that protesting, just like legally carrying a firearm is absolutely protected by the constitution and not at all a criminal offense. getting arrested at a protest because they dont like protesters is absolutely not a reliable indicator of any kind of illegality.
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.
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.
Is MAC a thing outside mergers?
I love this. You:
1. Declare everyone stop talking until an actual expert can speak and educate us all
2. An Actual Expert™ enters the chat and offers his expert opinion.
3. You decide his opinion is bullshit after all, because it disagrees with what you had in mind, and accuse him of being flippant.
The constitution is not a living document except in a courtroom, and even then it really depends on what the supreme court thinks of you.
Whether or not that was true before this admin, it is clearly the case now.
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.
I've long been skeptical of the US constitution and the supposed checks and balances, and with this wildly partisan supreme court you indeed can't hope that the law will keep the government in check.
I agree with most of what you said, except that a better constitution would be an (almost) magical defense against tyranny, in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
That is not a reminder, that is just, like, your opinion, man. Many countries with robust safety nets in Europe have far right parties rising in popularity significantly or already in the government/ruling coalition (Italy, Sweden, Germany, etc.).
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.