The Trump administration is once again going big government and has ICE planning a massive surveillance infrastructure project for social media.
Welcome to Trumps America. An America where masked jackbooted thugs straight up disappear people regardless of citizenship status, where critics are routinely silenced for daring to criticize the king, where political opponents are arrested, where judges are arrested for failing to rule in Trumps failure, where lawyers are threatened for representing political opponents, where the government installs political censors at news outlets to ensure that they are little more than propaganda mills for the president, where the government seizes control of private companies operating in the country, where the government just randomly murders people on a whim while Trump himself spews racist hatred. When I say that what is going on in America is fascism, I don’t say that just because I have great disdain towards the person in the white house. I say it because this is the fascist playbook being played out to the letter and I have a long running habit of calling a spade a spade as opposed to trying to sanewashing and downplaying the serious nature of the state of the US right now.
Of course, as any power hungry fascist dictator would want, the crackdown on basic civil rights and the quest to tighten his grip on power is a never ending quest for more. As the dictator seizes control of more power, that only initiates a lust for even more power over everything else. This, naturally, involves making the government even bigger and more bloated than ever before. One of those efforts involves implementing a massive social media surveillance apparatus where what people say is monitored 24/7, no doubt looking for any kind of speech that upsets the Trump administration at all. This apparently first surfaced back in October, but it was something I had completely missed until now. In an article republished on TechDirt, the scheme appears to, at least for now, target anyone the regime deems to be unworthy of staying in the US and, thus, the target for deportation:
When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.
The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.
The article is definitely worth reading as it goes into great detail of what changes from what already exists and how this program is expanding far beyond what was portrayed by officials. Unsurprisingly, the excuse for the massive expansion in surveillance power is that this is about “modernization”, a term so frequently thrown around by the anti-privacy world to cover up the fact that people’s lives are being further intruded on with measures that are increasingly disconnected from any kind of oversight. It’s as if to say that civil rights is for a time long past and that people must accept that we must live in a police state because we are living in the here and the now. It’s a completely garbage excuse for the erosion of civil rights, but an excuse that is all too common with surveillance debates.
What’s more is that such a system would be ripe for abuse. What’s to stop ICE officials from targeting individuals simply because they shared a meme or a comic strip criticizing Trump? Honestly, I can’t think of anything given the Republican controlled US Supreme Court. I’d say that once these programs have started, then the sky is the limit to where it can expand, but this appears to be a case where this sort of surveillance is already in a state of expansion. So, by the time I caught wind of it, my point was already proven. Either way, America’s slide into fascism is only continuing.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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